New Books

From Wharton professor and author of the popular One Useful Thing Substack newsletter Ethan Mollick comes the definitive playbook for working, learning, and living in the new age of AI. Mollick urges us not to turn away from AI, and instead to invite AI tools to the table. He demonstrates how AI can amplify our own capacities, acting in roles from brainstorming partner to cowriter to tutor to coach, and assesses its surprising, positive impact on business and organizations. Marshalling original research from workers and teams who are leading the rest of us in embracing and leveraging AI, Mollick cuts through the hype to make a frank and eye-opening case for the real value of AI tools. Moreover, Mollick argues that the long-term impact of AI will be different from what we expect, advantaging English majors and art history experts more than coders, and impacting knowledge workers more than blue-collar workers. Co-Intelligence shows what it means for individuals and for society to think together with smart machines, and why it's imperative that we all master that skill. Co-Intelligence challenges us to utilize AI's power without losing our identity, learn from it without being misled, and harness its gifts to create a better human future. Thought-provoking, optimistic, and lucid, Co-Intelligence reveals the promise and power of generative AI.

Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences of our actions upon the environment for centuries. The subject was raised wherever history accelerated: by the Conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the nineteenth century, by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until the Second World War.

A vivid, journalistic account of how climate change will make American life as we know it unfeasible.

Walker proposes a new paradigm for understanding what physics encompasses and what we recognize as life. She invites us into a world of maverick scientists working without a map, seeking not just answers but better ways to formulate the biggest questions we have about the universe. The book culminates with the bold proposal of a new theory for identifying and classifying life, one that applies not just to biological life on Earth but to any instance of life in the universe. Rigorous, accessible, and vital, Life as No One Knows It celebrates the mystery of life and the explanatory power of physics.

One of the world's leading astrobiologists takes us on an awe-inspiring journey across the cosmos to investigate some of humanity's most profound questions: Are we alone in the universe? And, how did life on Earth begin? The Secret Life of the Universe is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the search for life, and a dazzling introduction to the latest discoveries. This is an exhilarating journey for anyone who has ever looked up at the stars and wondered what might be out there.

Every egg there has ever been is an emblem of survival. Yet the evolution of the animal egg is the dramatic subplot missing in many accounts of how life on Earth came to be. Quite simply, without this universal biological phenomenon, animals as we know them, including us, could not have evolved and flourished. In Infinite Life, zoology correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on a mind-bending journey from the churning coastlines of the Cambrian Period to Carboniferous coal forests, where insects were stirring, to the end of the age of dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power.

This work is a new, hopeful analysis from the world's top natural scientists that shows us the way to save the endangered species of the world.

From leading zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, a delightful and groundbreaking exploration of animal communication and its true meaning. Following his international bestseller, The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, acclaimed zoologist Arik Kershenbaum draws on extensive original research to reveal how many of the animal kingdom's most seemingly confusing or untranslatable signals are in fact logical and consistent--and not that different from our own.

The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives. What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child-or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother's footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school-were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs.

The pandemic taught us that diseases like Covid disproportionately affect people of color. Here, Liverpool goes a step further to show that this disparity exists for all types of illness and that it is caused by racism. She shares her journey to show how racism, woven into our societies, as well as into the structures of medicine and science, is harmful to our health.

In 2014, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea suffered the worst epidemic of Ebola in history. The brutal virus spread rapidly through a clinical desert where basic health-care facilities were few and far between. Causing severe loss of life and economic disruption, the Ebola crisis was a major tragedy of modern medicine. But why did it happen, and what can we learn from it? Paul Farmer, the internationally renowned doctor and anthropologist, experienced the Ebola outbreak firsthand--Partners in Health, the organization he founded, was among the international responders. In Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, he offers the first substantive account of this frightening, fast-moving episode and its implications. In vibrant prose, Farmer tells the harrowing stories of Ebola victims while showing why the medical response was slow and insufficient. Rebutting misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly, he traces West Africa's chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice.

A fascinating, revelatory memoir recounting the author's struggle to come to terms with her own sociopathy and her drive to shed new light on the often maligned and misunderstood disorder.

On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum. In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

No bond is more sacred than that between a mother and child. And no one is more sympathetic than a mother whose child faces a life-threatening illness. But what if the mother is the cause of the illness? What if the sympathy is the point? Munchausen by proxy (MBP) has fascinated and horrified both professionals and the general public since this disturbing form of child abuse was first identified. But even as the public has been captivated by these tales of abuse and deception, there remains widespread misinformation and confusion about MBP. Are these mothers unfeeling psychopaths, or sick women who need help? And more important, how can we protect the children whose lives are at stake? The Mother Next Door offers a groundbreaking look at MBP from an unlikely duo: a Seattle novelist whose own family was torn apart by it, and the Texas detective who has worked on more medical child abuse cases than anyone in the nation.

The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the new drugs transforming weight loss as we know it-from his personal experience on Ozempic to our ability to heal our society's dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodies.

Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses®, Nineteenth Edition delivers everything you need to administer medications safely across the lifespan--well-organized monographs encompassing hundreds of generic drugs and thousands of trade names.

Nursing associates work in a culturally diverse world and care for people with a variety of backgrounds, identities and beliefs. This book introduces you to the key principles of equity, diversity and inclusion that you need to follow in order to challenge poor practice and provide excellent person-centred care. Covering important topics such as unconscious bias, legal requirements and professional standards, this book guides you through applying what you've learnt and maintaining EDI principles within your career.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it. Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.

With Seek Higher Ground, environmental writer and former land-use planner Tim Palmer explores the legacy of flooding in America with a fresh look that addresses the emerging climatic, economic, and ecological realities of our rivers and communities.

This book features essays from leading experts on the proven ways to resolve the key issues facing the planet in the next very critical 11 or12 years, covering a range of topics from electric aviation and lithium batteries to biodiversity and the circular economy.

Waste is truly our biggest problem, and solving our inherent trashiness can fix our economy, our energy costs, our traffic jams, and help slow climate change--all while making us healthier, happier and more prosperous. This story-driven and in-depth exploration of the pervasive yet hard-to-see wastefulness that permeates our daily lives illuminates the ways in which we've been duped into accepting absolutely insane levels of waste as normal.

In Into the Clear Blue Sky, climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project Rob Jackson explains that we need to redefine our goals. As he argues here, we shouldn't be trying to stabilize the Earth's temperature at some arbitrary value. Instead, we can restore the atmosphere itself in a lifetime-and this should be our moral duty.

The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning, Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology and the economy, Romero provides an intriguing reconceptualization of pesticides that forces readers to rethink assumptions about food, industry, and the relationship between human and nonhuman environments.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster based on fascinating new archival research and in-depth reporting--a riveting history that reads like a thriller.

An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution from scientific mystery to globe-spanning infrastructure, and an essential investigation into how it has remade our entire relationship with food--for better and for worse.

This book uses a quantitative science-based approach to explain where the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions emitted by the fashion industry are generated and it explores what strategies can be deployed to achieve Net Zero by 2050. With GHG emissions currently predicted to triple by the middle of the century, the fashion industry is far off course to reach Net Zero, as set out in the Paris Agreement. With misinformation and greenwashing representing an ever-growing barrier to potential solutions, the book aims to demystify the source of GHG emissions from the industry, breaking down in detail their origin, while identifying the steps that can be taken when designing and sourcing new products.

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.