Memory Lane
Ciara Greene & Gillian Murphy Princeton Univ. Press (2025)
Molecular biologists examine memory through neurotransmitters such as dopamine; neuroscientists through groups of cells working in concert; and psychologists through organismal activity as a whole. In their universally appealing book, psychologists Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy discuss memory’s role in human behaviour as a neighbourhood, Memory Lane, that is “constantly under construction, with individual buildings being built, remodelled, and even razed to the ground”, not as a place for perfect recall.
Ecocide in Ukraine
Darya Tsymbalyuk Polity (2025)
“I wish the subject of this book and the need to write it had never existed,” writes researcher and artist Darya Tsymbalyuk at the start of her study of the environmental cost of the assault that Russia launched on Ukraine in 2022. For example, the Kakhovka Dam, breached by an explosion in 2023 while under Russian military control, flooded a vast natural habitat as well as villages, towns and agricultural land. Throughout the conflict area, land and water have been contaminated with oil products, debris and mines.
The Gambling Animal
Glenn Harrison & Don Ross Profile (2025)
Elephants rely on “stable, accurate memories” to survive. “Humans traded that off for powerful imaginations,” write economists Glenn Harrison and Don Ross in their “natural history of risk management” from prehistory to today. They discuss their team’s experiments on risk-taking in some 40,000 volunteers from around the world, who had varying levels of wealth, income and education, as well as 6 elephants in South Africa. The human participants were incentivized mostly by cash payments, the elephants by apples and oranges.
How To Think About AI
Richard Susskind Oxford Univ. Press (2025)
