8 Science Books to Read (or Gift) This Winter
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This has been a strange year. Well, the year has been a lot of things—infuriating, exhausting, heartbreaking—but it’s also been pretty freaking weird. We’ve been in the same place with the same people for a very long time. Adult children back with their parents, parents with their small children all day. Everyone staring at the same walls and screens morning until night. And while the strangeness of the situation has left us missing things like gathering with friends, going to bars, seeing live music, and even commuting to an office, it’s also made us think about (and, on good days, maybe even appreciate) the things we overlooked when life felt faster and fuller, like the comforts of home and a restorative walk. Perhaps that kind of perspective shift also explains the types of books we gravitated toward this year: ones that hold a magnifying glass to the parts of our world we had never really contemplated, or challenge us to reconsider things we thought we understood. Like, for example, the actual definition of a penis, which it turns out can be super weird. Only fitting for a year like this one. —Ricki Harris
by Emily Willingham
Intromittum. That’s science writer Emily Willingham’s neologism for “the organ that animals use to transmit sperm or eggs to each other.” Why the new word? Well, that’s the point of the book—that nature’s wild diversity in how it builds those organs goes way beyond mere penises. Willingham traces those paths across the animal kingdom, from daisy chains of 20 hermaphroditic slugs oriented male side-to-female side, to the 11-inch penis bone of the elephant seal (though the actual penis is, Willingham writes, “pink and unarmored, in a shape that should be relatively familiar”). Not so the bulging intromittum of the Phallomedusa snail, which looks like a tree that the Lorax would speak for.
Amid all the awe—exploding sperm packages, prehensile penises, pheromone war—Willingham makes a big point (sorry): All this diversity means that the way we humans often see intromitta as symbols of masculinity, of strength, of worthiness, are (sorry again) bollux. It’s an organ. We use it to do a thing, and because of weird dangling cultural baggage (sort of sorry) the human penis has come (sorry!) to stand (sorry!) for sexism and oppression. But it doesn’t have to, and Willingham here means to liberate it—entertainingly, smartly, and expertly. The best part? She manages to avoid, in all the ways I have not, every obvious pun. —Adam Rogers
COURTESY OF SIMON & SCHUSTERby Lulu Miller
Lulu Miller is being escorted through the guarded gates of the Smithsonian’s national collection. Now, into the palm of her hand, a government scientist is placing a tiny, gilled dragon dripping ethanol. Now she is touching the century-old thread that ties a name tag to its scaly flesh: Specimen #51444, Agonomalus jordani. The man the fish is named for, the man who discovered it in the deep seas off the coast of Japan, the man Miller once hoped might reel her out of her own dark depths, is David Starr Jordan. A renowned collector and namer of fish, Jordan served as Stanford University’s first president. It was on that campus where his life’s work was shattered, in an instant, when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shook more than a thousand of his discoveries from their shelves. Not one to cave to despair, he rushed to recruit colleagues and students to hold hoses day and night, flooding his laboratory to keep the specimens wet while he sifted through them. Any he could salvage, he did, sewing their names to their pickled bodies before returning them to an infinite ethanol sleep.
It was this image that Miller, an NPR reporter and cocreator of the podcast Invisibilia, kept turning over in her mind in the weeks and months after a drunken night on a moonlit beach sent her once neatly ordered life unraveling. How could this walrus mustached-man—with his legacy literally rotting at his feet—still have believed himself a force capable of overcoming the chaos of the universe? The answer is this beautiful book. Part biography, part memoir, it is a deeply reported tale of scientific adventure you don’t have to be a taxonomy nerd to be swept up in. As Miller sifts through Jordan’s past, searching for clues to his unbounded optimism, she unearths instead his central role in one of the darkest chapters in America’s history. One whose violent legacy still reverberates today. Told in a voice brimming with lyricism and penetrating wit, Why Fish Don’t Exist delights even as it deflates any cozy notions you might harbor about the nature of existence. —Megan Molteni
COURTESY OF MINOTAUR BOOKSby Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt
Design is perhaps not the first subject you’d think amenable to the audio-only world of podcasts. But then, you are not Roman Mars and his crew at 99% Invisible, podcasting on the built environment from beautiful downtown Oakland to the beat of Mars’ dulce-de-leche voice. Since 2010 they’ve managed to not just evoke but explain the reasons everything around us looks the way it does, the ghost world behind the built environment. (The episode on city flags is particularly great; full disclosure, I’ve been a guest on the show—in an episode on an ultrablack pigment called Vantablack—and yes, that is me bragging.)
Writing with 99PI’s digital director Kurt Kohlstedt, Mars doesn’t attempt to retell the deep stories of the podcast so much as provide, in sketches of just a few pages, the kind of information you’d find on the historical marker plaques that Mars is always telling people to be sure and read. One chapter unpacks the cryptic symbology of the bright yellow signs that movie and TV production companies use to guide cast and crew to location shoots; another dissects the ways tax policies shaped familiar architectural styles—Dutch canal houses, taxed based on frontage, got tall, thin, and long while a British tax on bricks in the late 1700s made them bigger and bigger. I particularly like the one on “remnant relays,” odd crown-shaped tops on skyscrapers built to transmit and receive phone calls via microwave. The secrets the book reveals are all literally hidden in plain sight, but it takes people with Mars’ and Kohlstedt’s vision to spot them and point them out. And once they do, you never stop seeing them again. —Adam Rogers
by Ed Caesar
If you wanted to scale Mount Everest, how would you go about it? Scratch that. Don’t scale Mount Everest. Too many people try it. They don’t have any experience, they leave trash everywhere—and sometimes their own dead bodies, too. But say it was the early 1930s, and you got it into your head that what you really and truly needed to do was climb to the top of the world’s highest mountain, how would you, in fact, do it? You would form a team. You would get permission. You would have, say, technical climbing experience. Not Maurice Wilson! Nope. He just went. He flew there, actually, or most of the way there, in a Gypsy Moth biplane that had previously been owned by a flying circus.
First he took some aviation lessons, then he started hopping across Europe, down the coast of Italy, skirting Egypt and Gaza, inland to Bagdhad and so forth, several hundred miles at a time. Various authorities tried to stop him along the way, refusing, for example, to allow him to refuel. So he did what anyone would have done: broke into a hanger, took the fuel, and left some cash behind. Once at the foot of the mountain, he started up, unencumbered by crampons or formal climbing training. He did have the help of three very patient Sherpas to get him to base camp, but after that, he was on his own. No companions, no porters, no institutional support, little gear. Just some oatmeal and his inspiring, maddening determination. The Moth and the Mountain is a deeply researched tale, wittily told, of a somewhat tortured man who attempts a stunning conquest armed with little more than cheerful cussed pluck. We should all be so capable. —Sarah Fallon
by Virginia Postrel
If humans hadn’t learned to grow and optimize cotton to make thread, we wouldn’t have modern agriculture. If we hadn’t chased the capacity to make silk, we wouldn’t have modern international trade. No desire for brightly colored dyes? No chemistry. No weaving to make fabric and patterns in that fabric? You can forget about computers. Forget about arithmetic. Textile-making hasn’t gotten enough credit for its own sophistication, and for all the ways it undergirds human technological innovation—an error Virginia Postrel’s erudite and complete book goes a long way toward correcting at last.
Too many cultures see clothes and fabrics as women's work and therefore somehow not tech-y. But let me invert that idea: Three years ago an engineer at Google published online, to acclaim and consternation, a memo arguing that women intrinsically don’t like math, truck toys, and other stereotypically macho stuff. It was nonsense, but telling the story of textiles as a history of “everyday life” rather than of technic and invention is one of the reasons people believe that kind of dumbass pseudoscience. Women have, throughout human history, been on the forefront of textile tech; as Postrel ably describes, they picked and spun the cotton, developed and iterated loom designs to the point that they could store information for wildly complicated patterns, and developed new dyes. They rarely got credit; if you care about this stuff, you’re more likely to know the names of dudes like Jacquard (punch-card pattern memory for looms) or Perkin (synthetic dye). Postrel certainly gives them their due. But her book is a more capacious and more true story of technique and origins, the literal warp and weft of civilization. It’s good that she’s looking so closely at all the strands, and how they intertwine. —Adam Rogers
by Teasel Muir-Harmony
What if President Trump sent US astronauts to the Moon during his first term? Would he have won the 2020 election? Thankfully we will never have to consider that alternate history, but a look at recent history shows that human spaceflight casts a long shadow on the world’s stage. In fact, President Nixon used the moon landing to boost America’s global footprint (and his own approval rating) during a time when America was torn by social unrest and an unpopular war in Vietnam.
In the weeks following the July 1969 landing, Nixon mounted a round-the-world tour celebrating Apollo. During a stop in Eastern Europe, he secretly began making plans to escalate the Vietnam War through a covert bombing campaign in Cambodia. Meanwhile, NASA was sending its Apollo astronauts on well-received publicity tours in Africa and Asia to help in the geopolitical battle of ideas against the former Soviet Union. In Operation Moonglow, curator of the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Teasel-Muir-Harmony combines interviews with NASA veterans, historical documents, and international press clippings to bring this forgotten story to life. She portrays how the space race became a referendum on American values and diplomacy, and how Nixon used the heady afterglow of the Apollo moon missions to boost American diplomacy and prestige—a glow that didn’t quite last that long. —Eric Niiler
by Brennan Spiegel
Between March 2019 and the start of Covid-related lockdowns in the United States one year later, the CDC estimates that more than 75,000 Americans died from drug overdoses. The overwhelming majority of these deaths were caused by opioids like heroin, oxycodone, or fentanyl, and the fatalities are likely to increase due to the strains on individuals and the medical facilities during the pandemic. The opioid epidemic has been raging in the US for more than two decades with no end in sight, but VRx, a new book by Brennan Spiegel, points to an unlikely high-tech solution to this devastating problem: virtual reality.
Spiegel is the director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he oversees one of the largest therapeutic virtual reality programs in the world. Although consumer VR is often described as a technology that overpromises and underdelivers, Spiegel argues that it is already transforming medicine. A growing body of research shows that immersing patients in a virtual world can alleviate severe chronic pain, which lowers their dependency on potentially addictive painkillers like opioids. And it doesn’t stop there. Spiegel takes readers on a tour of the bleeding edge of VR medicine, where patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia literally battle their demons, soldiers relive traumatic experiences in virtual warzones, and the terminally ill confront their own mortality. Today physicians seem to spend more time consulting their computers than their patients, and Spiegel makes a compelling case that VR technologies can humanize medicine by helping doctors empathize with their patients. VRx is a powerful testament to the therapeutic potential of virtual worlds and a fascinating glimpse into the future of medicine. —Daniel Oberhaus
by Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, first published in 2014, told the story of human history as the invention of ever more complex fictions. The product of these fictions—a thing we might call progress—was not necessarily a net benefit for individual humans. It was pulling us away from our happiness and, probably, toward our destruction as a species. That rather bleak reading of history turned Harari from a little-known professor of history into an apostle who illuminates who we were, and who we will become. Harari now has millions of champions, including Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as a handful of follow-up best sellers, and a company that promotes solutions to the challenges his book identified.
Somehow, I had missed out on this phenomenon. OK, not entirely. Once, a few years ago, I tried the audiobook edition of Sapiens on a lengthy drive. I made it about 10 minutes before flipping to Fresh Air. Big History, as Harari’s discipline is often called, was just too grand a scale for this distractible driver. Too many details, too many sweeping themes to ponder.
But here we are again. Sapiens has been rereleased, this time in a bright, highly accessible graphic novel form. It’s the same grand meditation on human knowledge and taxonomy, but more digestible. Fun. Joke-y. Colorful. Harari’s illustrators have taken liberties with their source material, which is a good thing. They use the form to the fullest. It’s full of situational comedy: a courtroom drama, a heckler at an anthropology conference, hunter-gather reality TV. Harari pops in as a charismatic illustrated narrator. And everything about it—the odd situations, the visual aides—makes it possible to be introduced to an idea or concept and ponder it for a moment, to internalize it. There are risks in illustrating a narrative that paints history in broad brushes—that the characters become caricatures, that scientific evidence becomes expediently elided ( a charge already made by many scholars about Harari’s original text). Is this the simple version? Probably. If I had a child, I’d read it to them and challenge them to handle the anatomically correct illustrations of the vast Homo genus. But I don’t have children, and I still had fun. —Gregory Barber
