New Books in Big Ideas

“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins.In Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things (Basic Books, 2020), England presents, for the first time for a general audience, his groundbreaking theory of dissipative adaptation. Described simply, in any disordered system, matter clumps together and breaks apart mostly randomly. But some of the clumps that form momentarily dissipate more energy, and these structures are less likely to fall apart. Over time, they become better at both withstanding the disorder surrounding them and creating copies of themselves. From this deep insight, grounded in thermodynamics, England isolates the emergence of the first life-like behaviors. As he shows, rather than being a stroke of miraculous luck, life-like fine-tuning can emerge in matter under a variety of fairly generic experimental conditions.In this fascinating account, England walks readers through a range of different concepts in physics and biology to sketch out his novel description of how life might emerge. One of the beauties of his approach is the way it matches recognizably with the messy complexity of the everyday world, from the way sleet slides down a windshield in cold rain to how salt and pepper grains dance together in a pan of heated oil.But that is not the whole story. While the difference between being alive or not may seem as obvious as night and day, physics does not in fact make a clear distinction. That, as England argues, is a matter of perspective, and throughout the book he describes what he sees as the remarkable synergy between the account of life’s origins given by physics, and the account given in the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, England reckons with what, if anything, science can really tell us about life’s great mysteries.Full of scientific and philosophical insight, Every Life is on Fire is a singular book from one of the most exciting physicists of his generation.Jeremy England is senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, and is the former Thomas D. & Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a Hertz Fellow, and was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Rising Stars in Science. He lives in Brookline, MA.Galina Limorenko is a post-doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Is there a consensus on the best response to global warming? Not even close. Left and right both bring their own tools, math, and, most notably, agendas--climate related and non-climate related--to their policy prescriptions.Economist Robert Pollin has teamed up with Noam Chomsky to produce a manifesto for the New Green Deal in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso). Their plan attempts to keep the planet from heating up too much while simultaneously redressing the economic wrongs that they blame substantially on unfettered capitalism.Not everyone will agree that eco-socialism is the answer to global warming, but all participants in the debate will want to understand the wide range of policy proposals that are being brought to the table.Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics and founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

In his book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (MIT Press), evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning.Natural selection is a process without purpose, yet gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. Haig proposes that the key to this is the origin of mutable “texts” that preserve a record of what has worked in the world, in other words: genes. These texts become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living beings.Haig draws on a wide range of sources to make his argument, from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to the work of Jacques Derrida to the latest findings on gene transmission, duplication, and expression.Genes and their effects, he explains, are like eggs and chickens. Eggs exist for the sake of becoming chickens and chickens for the sake of laying eggs. A gene's effects have a causal role in determining which genes are copied. The gene persists if its lineage has been consistently associated with survival and reproduction. Organisms can be understood as interpreters that link information from the environment to meaningful action in the environment.Meaning, Haig argues, is the output of a process of interpretation; there is a continuum from the very simplest forms of interpretation, found in single RNA molecules near the origins of life, to the most sophisticated, like those found in human beings. Life is interpretation—the use of information in choice.David Haig is George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Because he is a theorist, his research is wide and varied, working on everything from maternal-fetal conflict in human pregnancy to the evolution of plant life cycles. He has a particular interest in genetic conflicts within individual organisms, as exemplified by genomic imprinting.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

What would actually make America great? More people.If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (Portfolio) is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing.Vox founder Matthew Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must.Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion Americans issues a radical but undeniable challenge: Why not do it all, and stay on top forever?Matthew Yglesias is a founder of Vox, a host of the podcast The Weeds, and the author of the book The Rent is Too Damn High (Simon & Schuster, 2012). He lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter. Website.Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—that is, careful consideration of not only what is seen but what is unseen. David assembles wide-ranging examples, from the histories of science and finance to his own research and consultancy, to show how this perspective can shed new light on concepts as classical as random sampling and survey design and as cutting-edge as machine learning and the measurement of honesty. I expect the book to inspire the same enjoyment and reflection in general readers as it is sure to in statisticians and other data analysts.Suggested companion work: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy emerge in northwestern Europe at some point in the 17th or 18th century but not in the Middle East? After all, for centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe – on both technological and economic terms.Jared Rubin argues that the religion itself is not to blame; the importance of religious legitimacy in Middle Eastern politics was the primary factor. In much of the Muslim world, religious authorities were given an important seat at the political bargaining table, which they used to block important advancements such as the printing press and usury. In Europe, however, the Church played a weaker role in legitimizing rule, especially where Protestantism spread (indeed, the Reformation was successful due to the spread of printing, which was blocked in the Middle East). It was precisely in those Protestant nations, especially England and the Dutch Republic, where the modern economy was born.In this interview, Jared shares with us his opinions on a wide range of topics – from the work of Jared Diamond and the theories of Max Weber, to his serendipitous journey in academia that led him to write his first book.Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

In The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Christopher Newfield diagnoses what he sees as a crisis in American public higher education.He argues that since roughly the 1980s, American public universities have entered into a devolutionary cycle of defunding brought about by privatization. The influence of private sector practices on public higher education, Newfield argues, has fundamentally shifted the view of higher education in American society from a public good to a private good.Despite this bleak assessment, Newfield’s book provides a roadmap for how to fix this crisis in public higher education. A central component of his plan is recognizing the university as a public good by acknowledging its wide range of benefits to society and democracy more generally.Newfield’s book will interest scholars from many disciplines, including higher education, U.S. political history, and the history of inequality in America.Christopher Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

A democracy should reflect the views of its citizens and offer a direct connection between government and those it serves. So why, more than ever, does it seem as if our government exists in its own bubble, detached from us?In reality, our democracy is not performing as it should, which has left us fed up with a system we no longer trust. Moreover, we lack a mechanism to fix what’s broken, because there is no incentive for politicians and civil servants to make government more accountable, efficient, and representative.Saqib Iqbal Qureshi is calling on his fellow citizens to assert their voice in the dialogue of democracy. In The Broken Contract: Making Our Democracies Accountable, Representative, and Less Wasteful (Lioncrest Publishing, 2020), he puts forth solutions—many involving easy-to-implement technologies. It’s up to us to turn the ship around. If you’re looking for the best way to start a conversation with your elected and unelected officials, this is the book you need.Saqib Iqbal Qureshi is a Fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he completed his undergraduate and PhD degrees.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a decent and stable society possible is that we uphold standards of conduct. We call out bad behavior, blame wrongdoers, and praise those who do the right things. We apologize and forgive in public ways. In short, we hold one another responsible.  Again, this is all necessary. However, we are all familiar with the ways in which the acts associated with upholding morality can go wrong. For instance, blame can be excessive, apologies can be patronizing, and so on. Another way in which things can go wrong is when people wield morality opportunistically – for self-aggrandizement, or to elevate themselves in the eyes of others.In Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford University Press, 2020), Brandon Warmke and Justin Tosi call this broad type of moral breakdown grandstanding. Their book examines the different kinds of grandstanding, demonstrates why grandstanding is morally bad, and proposes some tips for avoiding it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

We sit at the beginning of what could be “both a truly terrifying and a golden era in humanity.” In The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (HarperOne, 2020), leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”­–Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face.This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed in the face of the coming calamities. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to reaffirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas