What I love most about Fall is that it allows me to cozy up and read without the guilt of "I should be enjoying summer". Here then, to kick off this season, are a few recent releases that I'm looking forward to reading. These especially caught my attention because the topics appeared in recent news stories making them not just fun reads but also immediately relevant. Best enjoyed with a cup of hot coffee on a weekend afternoon.
The Car That Knew Too Much : Can A Machine Be Moral? By Jean-Francois Bonnefon
The inside story of the groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think about the life-and-death dilemmas posed by driverless cars.
Human drivers don't find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road? Human brains aren't fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to make such a decision--to do whatever humans have programmed it to do. But what should that be? This book investigates how people want driverless cars to decide matters of life and death.
In The Car That Knew Too Much, psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon reports on a groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think cars should do in situations where not everyone can be saved. Sacrifice the passengers for pedestrians? Save children rather than adults? Kill one person so many can live? Bonnefon and his collaborators Iyad Rahwan and Azim Shariff designed the largest experiment in moral psychology ever: the Moral Machine, an interactive website that has allowed people --eventually, millions of them, from 233 countries and territories--to make choices within detailed accident scenarios. Bonnefon discusses the responses (reporting, among other things, that babies, children, and pregnant women were most likely to be saved), the media frenzy over news of the experiment, and scholarly responses to it.
Boosters for driverless cars argue that they will be in fewer accidents than human-driven cars. It's up to humans to decide how many fatal accidents we will allow these cars to have.
In the News: Who better exemplifies the self-driving car phenomenon than Tesla? This recent story highlights the types of issues they are dealing with as they advance their self-driving technology.
Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook For Our Clean Energy Future By Saul Griffith
An optimistic—but realistic and feasible—action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything.
Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now—but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith's plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future.
Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest "climate loans." Griffith's plan doesn't rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs—up to twenty-five million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We can change politics along with everything else.
In The News: Do you think the US government may find some ideas in this book on where and how to invest those billions they plan to throw at the climate change problem?
On Animals By Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean—the beloved New Yorker staff writer hailed as "a national treasure" by The Washington Post and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Library Book—gathers a lifetime of musings, meditations, and in-depth profiles about animals.
"How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages," writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she's been drawn to stories about how we live with animals, and how they abide by us. Now, in On Animals, she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career.
These stories consider a range of creatures—the household pets we dote on, the animals we raise to end up as meat on our plates, the creatures who could eat us for dinner, the various tamed and untamed animals we share our planet with who are central to human life. In her own backyard, Orlean discovers the delights of keeping chickens. In a different backyard, in New Jersey, she meets a woman who has twenty-three pet tigers—something none of her neighbors knew about until one of the tigers escapes. In Iceland, the world's most famous whale resists the efforts to set him free; in Morocco, the world's hardest-working donkeys find respite at a special clinic. We meet a show dog and a lost dog and a pigeon who knows exactly how to get home.
Equal parts delightful and profound, enriched by Orlean's stylish prose and precise research, these stories celebrate the meaningful cross-species connections that grace our collective existence.
In The News: As we take up more and more of the spaces that once were animal domains, it is instructive to see how some of those animals react.
To Know A Starry Night By Paul Bogard(Author), Beau Rogers(Photographer)
No matter where we live, what language we speak, or what culture shapes our worldview, there is always the night. The darkness is a reminder of the ebb and flow, of an opportunity to recharge, of the movement of time. But how many of us have taken the time to truly know a starry night? To really know it.
Combining the lyrical writing of Paul Bogard with the stunning night-sky photography of Beau Rogers, To Know a Starry Night explores the powerful experience of being outside under a natural starry sky - how important it is to human life, and how so many people don't know this experience. As the night sky increasingly becomes flooded with artificial-light pollution, this poignant work helps us reconnect with the natural darkness of night, an experience that now, in our time, is fading from our lives.
This book has a local connection - Paul Bogard is a native Minnesotan. Bogard is now an associate professor of English at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches writing and environmental literature.
In The News: The breakneck speed with which some companies are launching mega satellite constellations makes you wonder how much longer we will have these starry nights to enjoy? The good news is SpaceX, at least, is talking to astronomers to reduce the impact of their satellites.
The Last Cuentista By Donna Barba Higuera
For my final selection a story for the young and young at heart alike, to take us out of the here and now and into the realm of the imagination.
There lived a girl named Petra Peña, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita.
But Petra's world is ending. Earth has been destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children - among them Petra and her family - have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race.
Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet - and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth. A sinister Collective has taken over the ship during its journey, bent on erasing the sins of humanity's past. They have systematically purged the memories of all aboard - or purged them altogether.
Petra alone now carries the stories of our past, and with them, any hope for our future. Can she make them live again?
From Pura Belpré Honor-winner Donna Barba Higuera--a brilliant journey through the stars, to the very heart of what makes us human.
And where there is humanity, there is hope, which is what I like best about science fiction stories like these.
In the News: How cool is it to live in a world where sci-fi meets science and a once imaginary journey, at least partially, comes to life?
Find all of these and more on our Bookshop page. The physical store is getting closer every day. Look for an update on the progress soon. Until then, keep reading!