News Archive

This year we welcome back John Dupuis and Joanne Manaster for another conversation about what we loved reading this year. This is a companion blog to the November 30 episode Nerd Gift Extravaganza: below is a list of the science books discussed during our discussion. Enjoy!

Joanne Manaster

• The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
• Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
• How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
• Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson
• Mr Shaha's Recipes for Wonder: adventures in science round the kitchen table Illustrated by Emily Robertson &ampl written by Alom Shaha
• Star Wars Maker Lab: 20 Craft and Science Projects by Liz Lee Heinecke & Cole Horton
• Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality by Ben Orlin
• Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

Not metioned, but also recommended:

• The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth's Ultimate Trophy by Paige Williams
• The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook &ndashl; What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce Perry & Maia Szalavitz
• The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World by Steve Brusatte
• The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum
• The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen
• The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them) by Lucy Jones
• The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin
• New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers by Martin Doyle
• Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry
• Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome by Venki Ramakrishnan

John Dupuis

• Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder
• Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu
• Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It by Chris Clearfield & András Tilcsik
• Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks
• Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
• Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan
• Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang
• The Tantrum that Saved the World by Megan Herbert & Michael Mann
• How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North
• Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael Leinbach & Jonathan Ward
• Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet by Will Hunt

Not metioned, but also recommended:

• How to Fix the Future by Andrew Keen
• Totally Random: Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics (A Serious Comic on Entanglement) by Tanya Bub & Jeffrey Bub
• The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe by Clifford Johnson
• Pipe Dreams: The Fight for Canada's Energy Future by Jacques Poitras
• World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig Symonds
• Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil deGrasse Tyson & Avis Lang
• Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire Evans
• Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry
• The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller
• Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Kathryn Harkup
• Monday Mourning by Kathy Reichs
• Infinity Gauntlet written by Jim Starlin, illustrated by George Perez & Ron Lim
• Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science by Audra Wolfe
• Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World by Bruce Schneier

Rachelle Saunders

• Swearing is Good For You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language by Emma Byrne
• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil
• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker