New Books in Big Ideas

What makes a living body conscious? What is consciousness and are there different types of it? These questions have been studied by Professor Eva Jablonka from the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Much of her early work was on epigenetic inheritance which poses questions such as whether learned behaviour can be passed on from one generation...

Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2020),...

In this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kelly, professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), about his 2021 book Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation (Integral Imprint, 2020). Along with his abiding interest in the work of Jung, Hegel, and Edgar Morin, Kelly’s current research areas include the evol...

The rich inner world of a human being is far more complex than either/or. You can love and hate, want to go and want to stay, feel both joy and sadness. In On Second Thought: How Ambivalence Shapes Your Life (Guilford, 2021), psychologist William Miller--one of the world's leading experts on the science of change--offers a fresh perspective on ambivalence and its transformative potential in this r...

Building on a deep theoretical foundation and drawing on numerous examples, Volden and Shipan examine how policies spread across the American states in Why Bad Policies Spread (and Good Ones Don't) (Cambridge University Press, 2021). The authors argue that for good policies to spread while bad policies are pushed aside, states must learn from one another. The three ingredients for this positive ou...

For fans of computers and comedy alike, an accessible and entertaining look into how we can use artificial intelligence to make smart machines funny. Most robots and smart devices are not known for their joke-telling abilities. And yet, as computer scientist Tony Veale explains in Your Wit Is My Command (MIT Press, 2021), machines are not inherently unfunny; they are just programmed that way. By...

The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree. A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it. So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World (Princeton UP, 2022) shows how th...

There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misu...

If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitar...

Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021). One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time a...

Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children. At some point in the near future, much of the developed world will have at least twenty percent of their national populations over the age of sixty-five. Bradley Schurman calls this the Super Age. Today, Italy, Japan, and Germany have already reached the Super Age, and anothe...

How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps th...

In Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Duke UP, 2021),  Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now...

It is one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of science: the mating calls of insects were mistaken for a “sonic weapon” that led to a major diplomatic row. Since August 2017, the world media has been absorbed in the “attack” on diplomats from the American and Canadian Embassies in Cuba. While physicians treating victims have described it as a novel and perplexing condition that involve...

Why are Americans so angry? American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation (Greenleaf, 2021) explores history to find the answer to a divided America Two disparate Americas have always coexisted. In this thoroughly researched, engaging and story of our nation’s divergent roots, Seth David Radwell clearly links the fascinating history of the two American Enlighten...

Have you ever stopped to think about your local grocery cooperative and what makes it different than, say Safeway or Giant or Whole Foods? That is, if you have a grocery cooperative in your neighborhood – they are neither ubiquitous nor evenly distributed. They do, however, offer perhaps the most visible model of how economic practices can exist outside the central dogma of capitalism. In Practici...

Objects in object-oriented ontology (OOO) are mysterious and inexhaustible entities. But since OOO grants ontological priority to objects, it should have an easy time referring to objects. But this is not the case. In The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Yoran researches the question of how OOO refers to an object’s haecceity, its...

Roger Mac Ginty's book Everyday Peace: How So-Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses on how individuals and communities navigate through, and out of, conflict. Through theory and concept-building, and empirical examples, it investigates the pro-peace tactical agency deployed by individuals and communities in conflict-affected contexts. It examines how compass...

Should we love work? In The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality (U California Press, 2021), Erin Cech, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, demonstrates how having passion for work fosters and reinforces a wide range of social inequalities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and data analysis, the book combines qualitative and qu...

In this episode of Systems and Cybernetics I had the pleasure of spending an hour with Jeremy Lent, talking with him about his newest book The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. Lent is a former Tech CEO, and is founder of The Liology Institute. His previous book The Patterning Instinct prompted The Gaurdian’s George Monbiot to comment tha...

Why do some armies fare better than others on the battlefield? In Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton UP, 2020), Jason Lyall argues that a state's prewar treatment of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned disc...

Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of Britain and other Western societies: thriving cities versus the provinces; the high-skilled elite versus the less educated. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical, reciprocal obligations to others that were crucial to the rise of post-war prosperity — and are inherently aligned with how humans are meant to live: in a friendly, coll...

The concept of revolution marks the ultimate horizon of modern politics. It is instantiated by sites of both hope and horror. Within progressive thought, “revolution” often perpetuates entrenched philosophical problems: a teleological philosophy of history, economic reductionism, and normative paternalism. At a time of resurgent uprisings, how can revolution be re-conceptualized to grasp the dynam...

I recently sat down with Josep M. Coll to discuss his new book Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking: The Natural Path to Sustainable Transformation (Routledge, 2021). This book is the latest and final in a series published by Routledge that includes titles by some brilliant systems thinkers I have had the fortune to interview previously on this podcast (Managing Creativity, Córdoba-Pachón; Systems...

In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space, and it remains the only human-made object to have left the solar system. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth (Zone Books, 2021) ask big questions: Can music live up to its repu...