By Adeline Johns-Putra/The Conversation

Every day brings fresh and ever more alarming news about the state of the global environment. To speak of mere “climate change” is inadequate now, for we are in a “climate emergency.” It seems as though we are tripping over more tipping points than we knew existed.
But our awareness is at last catching up with the planet’s climate catastrophes. Climate anxiety, climate trauma, and climate strikes are now all part of many people’s mental landscape and daily lives. This is almost four decades after scientists first began to warn of accelerated global warming from carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere.
And so, unsurprisingly, climate fiction, climate change fiction, “cli-fi” – whatever you want to call it – has emerged as a literary trend that’s gained astonishing traction over the past 10 years.

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Posted on December 17, 2019

By NASA

Earth has many stories to tell, even in the dark of night. Earth at Night, NASA’s new 200-page e-book, is now available online and includes more than 150 images of our planet in darkness as captured from space by Earth-observing satellites and astronauts on the International Space Station over the past 25 years.
The images reveal how human activity and natural phenomena light up the darkness around the world, depicting the intricate structure of cities, wildfires and volcanoes raging, auroras dancing across the polar skies, moonlight reflecting off snow and deserts, and other dramatic earthly scenes.

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Posted on December 11, 2019

By Bobby Duffy/The Conversation

The world is often better and getting better than people think. Murder rates, deaths from terrorism and extreme poverty are all down. Life expectancy, health and education levels are up. But, as I explore in my book Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything, people mostly think things are worse than they are and going downhill fast because of the natural tendency of humans to focus on negative stories and forget how bad the past was.
But there is one vital, even existential, exception: People still don’t realize how bad the world’s climate and natural environment have become. Misperceptions about climate change and the ecological crisis are all too clear from a new survey of Americans that tested their understanding of how far the problem has progressed in their lifetimes.

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Posted on December 9, 2019

By SIU Press

Editor’s Note: I use SIU Press materials quite often here in the Books section. I love the SIU Press. I find their output quite interesting; it makes for great Beachwood content. So I have no problem – at nobody’s behest but mine – giving them a little promotion here. As far as I’m concerned, this is editorial content. Consider it part of the Beachwood Holiday Guide, because I think you can find some great gifts here. – Steve Rhodes
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Posted on December 5, 2019

By Christie Aschwanden/Undark

Standing in a powerful pose increases your testosterone levels. Ten thousand hours of practice leads to mastery and high achievement. Eating out of large bowls encourages overeating. These are just a few examples of big ideas that have formed the basis of popular science books, only to be overturned by further research or a closer reading of the evidence.
“Pop psychology is sort of built on this idea of the one true thing,” says Amanda Cook, executive editor at Crown who has worked on many science books. “Good scientists treat the truth as provisional. They know that science is dynamic and the scientific method is going to lead them to new truths or a refinement of truth, but readers want the one true thing, and in pop psych that means the one true thing that will change their lives.”
It’s a tension that Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki attempts to address in his recent book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. The book is written in the breezy, accessible style typical of pop science bestsellers, but Zaki concludes it with a twist: an appendix that rates the robustness of the claims he makes. The numerical rating system is his attempt to acknowledge that some ideas have more evidence to back them than others, and that some of them might turn out to be wrong. Zaki hopes his system might provide a model for other authors who want to avoid trading in hype.

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Posted on December 4, 2019

By SIU Press

“A vital lifeline to home during the Civil War, the letters of soldiers to their families and friends remain a treasure for those seeking to connect with and understand the most turbulent period of American history.
“Rather than focus on the experiences of a few witnesses, this impressively researched book documents 165 Illinois Civil War soldiers’ and sailors’ lives through the lens of their personal letters.
“Editor Mark Flotow chose a variety of letter writers who hailed from counties throughout the state, served in different branches of the military at different ranks, and represented the gamut of social experiences and war outcomes.

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Posted on November 29, 2019

Powerful, Iconic

“The National Geographic team has gone through their archives to choose 450 iconic images to show women of all backgrounds. Susan Goldberg stopped by Sway In The Morning to elaborate on the process of determining what was included in the book.”

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Posted on November 25, 2019

By Andy Warcrime

https://t.co/NPDMTKyRF7 selected the best 50 nonfiction books of the last 25 years. I picked another ten from my creaky bookshelves (apologies for bias toward older titles). 1/x

— Andy Warcrime (@andywarcrime) November 21, 2019

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Posted on November 20, 2019

By Ramin Skibba/Undark

Religion, and Christianity in particular, appears to be becoming less important among younger Americans, declining dramatically in the past two decades, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll.
So where can people turn to share a common culture and community?
For Sasha Sagan, the author of For Small Creatures Such as We, even a dinner party tradition or a shared song can generate the camaraderie people may be missing.
Aimed primarily at atheist and agnostic readers, her book is both a memoir of growing up as the daughter of astronomer Carl Sagan and writer Ann Druyan in Ithaca, New York, where her father was a professor at Cornell University, as well as an exploration of connections and universal themes among religions, cultures and secular communities around the world.

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Posted on November 19, 2019

By Dan Falk/Undark

At the moment, you’re reading these words and, presumably, thinking about what the words and sentences mean. Or perhaps your mind has wandered, and you’re thinking about dinner, or looking forward to bingeing the latest season of The Good Place. But you’re definitely experiencing something.
How is that possible? Every part of you, including your brain, is made of atoms, and each atom is as lifeless as the next. Your atoms certainly don’t know or feel or experience anything, and yet you – a conglomeration of such atoms – have a rich mental life in which a parade of experiences unfolds one after another.

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Posted on November 13, 2019