CityReads | 8 Books to Read in Uncertain Times

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8 Books to Read in Uncertain Times

Recommended Books from the journal Science. 

Valerie Thompson, A reading list for uncertain times, 8 September, 2020.

Source: 

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2020/09/08/fall-reading-2020/

1. A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You by Sean B. Carroll, Princeton University Press, 2020

Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? Does everything happen for a reason or are some things left to chance? Philosophers and theologians have pondered these questions for millennia, but startling scientific discoveries over the past half century are revealing that we live in a world driven by chance. A Series of Fortunate Events tells the story of the awesome power of chance and how it is the surprising source of all the beauty and diversity in the living world.

Like every other species, we humans are here by accident. But it is shocking just how many things—any of which might never have occurred—had to happen in certain ways for any of us to exist. From an extremely improbable asteroid impact, to the wild gyrations of the Ice Age, to invisible accidents in our parents’ gonads, we are all here through an astonishing series of fortunate events. And chance continues to reign every day over the razor-thin line between our life and death.

Carroll begins with one of the most consequential chance events to have occurred in the history of our planet: the Cretaceous-Paleogene asteroid impact on the Yucatán Peninsula that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs and expansion of mammals. Given Earth’s rotational speed, if the asteroid had hit 30 minutes earlier or later, scientists believe it would have made a much less consequential impact, landing in either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. If that had happened, there might still be dinosaurs today, but no humans.

Carroll explains in detail how chance creates the genetic diversity upon which natural selection acts and results in the richness of species on Earth, as well as how random combinations among just 163 gene segments make possible a human immune system that can produce up to 10 billion different antibodies. Readers will likely be particularly interested to learn that their genome is only one of the 70 trillion possibilities that could have been produced by their parents.

2. Lucas Chancel, Malcolm DeBevoise, translator, Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment, Harvard University Press, 2020

Does a hurricane discriminate between the wealthy and the poor? Do earthquakes target specific victims? How does systemic racism influence development goals? In academic explorations of sustainable development and environmental responsibilities, our assumptions about the relationship between income and energy consumption remain largely rooted in the idea that social inequalities decrease as countries develop, thus reducing environmental inequality. No such relationship appears to actually exist.

In his sobering but essential new book, Unsustainable Inequalities, French economist Lucas Chancel explores the intersections of social justice and environmental sustainability and argues relationship between environmental inequalities and economic inequalities resembles a vicious circle. Framing his narrative through the lens of intragenerational economic inequalities, he identifies social inequality as a core driver of environmental unsustainability that leads to a vicious circle wherein the rich consume more and the poor lose access to environmental resources and become increasingly vulnerable to environmental shocks.

3. Justin Reich, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education, Harvard University Press, 2020

Proponents of large-scale learning have boldly promised that technology can disrupt traditional approaches to schooling, radically accelerating learning and democratizing education. Much-publicized experiments, often underwritten by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been launched at elite universities and in elementary schools in the poorest neighborhoods. Such was the excitement that, in 2012, the New York Times declared the “year of the MOOC.” Less than a decade later, that pronouncement seems premature.

As the pandemic forces so many school systems and learning institutions to move online, the desire to educate students well using online tools and platforms is more pressing than ever. But as Justin Reich illustrates in his new book, Failure to Disrupt, there are no easy solutions or one-size-fits-all tools that can aid in this transition, and many recent technologies that were expected to radically change schooling have instead been used in ways that perpetuate existing systems and their attendant inequalities. Learning technologies—even those that are free to access—often provide the greatest benefit to affluent students and do little to combat growing inequality in education. And institutions and investors often favor programs that scale up quickly, but at the expense of true innovation. It turns out that technology cannot by itself disrupt education or provide shortcuts past the hard road of institutional change.

The first half of the book discusses the brief histories, limited successes, and challenges of three types of large-scale technology-driven learning environments: instructor-guided, such as lectures taught through massive open online courses (MOOCs); algorithm-guided (e.g., Khan Academy); and peer-guided (e.g., the online coding community known as Scratch). Reich gives a solid accounting of the conditions needed for success with these models, the difficulties and limitations involved in adopting them in K–12 schooling, and the challenges that arise when we attempt to compare different approaches to one another. He argues that although we might think that the availability of a technology is its biggest limiter, the truth is that educational systems are simply not constructed to allow for experimentation and new ways of learning.

The second part of the book expands on the challenges of implementing educational technologies. Reich’s main argument here is that educational systems are inherently conservative and that change will happen, albeit slowly and incrementally, only if technology designers, teachers, and administrators work in partnership to understand the desired learning goals and the parameters that define and constrain the learning environments.

Technology does have a crucial role to play in the future of education, Reich concludes. We still need new teaching tools, and classroom experimentation should be encouraged. But successful reform efforts will focus on incremental improvements, not the next killer app.

4. Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

In Blockchain Chicken Farm, Xiaowei Wang reveals the myriad ways that technology is transforming our lives. They unveil, for example, the unexpected connections that exist between industrial oyster farming in rural China, livestream-fueled multilevel marketing schemes in the United States, and the app-enabled gig economy in which Chinese influencers participate. Following the threads of places and people woven together by new technologies, Wang helps readers trace the patterns emerging in the tapestry of our tech-infused world.

Each chapter provides a view into not just how we use technology but why and to what end. Most of Wang’s vignettes relate to Chinese agriculture. The titular example takes readers to the GoGo Chicken farm in Sanqiao, a “dreamlike” village that sits in one of the poorest regions in China. Here, Wang introduces the straw-hatted “Farmer Jiang,” who has partnered with his village government and a blockchain company to sell free-range chickens via an e-commerce site. Jiang’s chickens sell for RMB 300 (~$35) each, an amount equal to 6% of the average annual household income in that part of China. Wang explains that high-profile failures of regulatory oversight have left many Chinese with a deep distrust of the food supply chain and that upper-class Chinese urbanites will pay a premium for reassurance about food safety, which, in this case, takes the form of a vacuum-sealed chicken that comes with a QR code revealing blockchain-logged details of its life on the farm.

Wang suggests that Americans, driven by concerns over animal welfare, may desire similar reassurance about their food’s provenance. In both China and America, they observe, technology allows the upper class to buy its way around governmental and societal shortcomings at prices that are out of reach for most people. Technology does not correct the intrinsic problems, and most cannot reap the benefits of the technological “solutions.”

5. Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press, 2020

The U.S. police system is experiencing a reckoning. Protesters across the country (and around the world) have taken to the streets, arguing that police brutality disproportionately harms minority communities, and the current value of policing is being debated by city councils, lawmakers, and members of the news media. Into this tumultuous context enters Sarah Brayne’s book, Predict & Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing.

In Predict and Surveil, sociologist Sarah Brayne offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world-the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations, Brayne examines the causes and consequences of algorithmic control. She reveals how the police use predictive analytics to deploy resources, identify suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-intensive practices. Although big data analytics holds potential to reduce bias and increase efficiency, Brayne argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of social inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.

A groundbreaking examination of the growing role of the private sector in public policing, this book challenges the way we think about the data-heavy supervision law enforcement increasingly imposes upon civilians in the name of objectivity, efficiency, and public safety.

6. Paul Murdin, The Secret Lives of Planets: Order, Chaos, and Uniqueness in the Solar System, Pegasus, 2020

Do you know that Saturn’s moon, Titan, boasts lakes which contain liquid methane surrounded by soaring hills and valleys, exactly as the earth did before life evolved on our fragile planet? Or that Mercury is the shyest planet? Or, that Mars’s biggest volcano is one hundred times the size of Earth’s, or that its biggest canyon is ten times the depth of the Grand Canyon, or that it wasn’t always red, but blue?

An insider’s guide to astronomy reveals everything you need to know about the planets, their satellites, and our place in the solar system.

7. Sheila Williams, ed. Entanglements: Tomorrow's Lovers, Families, and Friends, MIT Press, 2020

In quantum physics, entanglement is a property wherein two particles are inextricably linked. Put another way, entangled particles are never truly independent of each other, no matter the distance between them. It is fitting then that Entanglements is an anthology of short stories about inextricably linked people and the impact of emerging technologies on their relationships. A talented set of authors, with deft editing by Sheila Williams, explore the full spectrum of intimacy and technology to great effect. As an added visual treat, illustrations by Tatiana Plakhova punctuate each story with a blend of science, mathematics, and art that complements the subject matter.

In a future world dominated by the technological, people will still be entangled in relationships—in romances, friendships, and families. This volume in the Twelve Tomorrows series considers the effects that scientific and technological discoveries will have on the emotional bonds that hold us together. The strange new worlds in these stories feature AI family therapy, floating fungitecture, and a futuristic love potion. A co-op of mothers attempts to raise a child together, lovers try to resolve their differences by employing a therapeutic sexbot, and a robot helps a woman dealing with Parkinson's disease.

8. Jennet Conant, The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster That Launched the War on Cancer, Norton, 2020

The gripping story of a chemical weapons catastrophe, the cover-up, and how one American Army doctor’s discovery led to the development of the first drug to combat cancer, known today as chemotherapy.

On the night of December 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking seventeen ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship carrying a top-secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if the Germans resorted to gas warfare.

When one young sailor after another began suddenly dying of mysterious symptoms, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a doctor and chemical weapons expert, was dispatched to investigate. He quickly diagnosed mustard gas exposure, but was overruled by British officials determined to cover up the presence of poison gas in the devastating naval disaster, which the press dubbed "little Pearl Harbor." Prime Minister Winston Churchill and General Dwight D. Eisenhower acted in concert to suppress the truth, insisting the censorship was necessitated by military security.

Alexander defied British port officials and heroically persevered in his investigation. His final report on the Bari casualties was immediately classified, but not before his breakthrough observations about the toxic effects of mustard on white blood cells caught the attention of Colonel Cornelius P. Rhoads—a pioneering physician and research scientist as brilliant as he was arrogant and self-destructive—who recognized that the poison was both a killer and a cure, and ushered in a new era of cancer research led by the Sloan Kettering Institute. Meanwhile, the Bari incident remained cloaked in military secrecy, resulting in lost records, misinformation, and considerable confusion about how a deadly chemical weapon came to be tamed for medical use.

Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Great Secret is the remarkable story of how horrific tragedy gave birth to medical triumph.

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