Connoisseur Andrew Robinson gives ten of his favourite tomes from the year a more expansive review

Prebunking propaganda, and how to live well: 2023’s best of Books in brief

Connoisseur Andrew Robinson gives ten of his favourite tomes from the year a more expansive review

Blue Machine Helen Czerski Torva (2023)

Few scientific subjects are as vast as the ocean. Yet oceans “often seem invisible”, remarks physicist Helen Czerski.

Growing up in Manchester, UK, Czerski had access only to the freezing North Sea to the east and the grey Irish Sea to the west, neither of which much appealed. But why did her three physics degrees omit the ocean, she wonders?

Having finished a PhD in experimental explosive physics and looking for a new subject as a postdoc, she encountered a giant frame in her Californian laboratory that had buoys on the corners and waterproof boxes of sensors in the middle, used by colleagues to make marine measurements. “It was their gateway to another world”, she says, and it soon hooked her, too. She began research on the bubbles created by breaking ocean waves, and their influence on weather and climate across the world.

Czerski’s profound, sparkling book is a global ocean voyage mingling history and culture, animals and people, natural history and geography, in a quest to understand the physics of the “blue machine”: the ocean engine, powered by sunlight, that shunts energy from Equator to poles. “It has components on every scale, from the mighty Gulf Stream gliding across the Atlantic to the tiny bubbles bursting at the top of a breaking wave.”

The Good Life Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz Simon & Schuster (2023)

Isolation imposed by the COVID‑19 pandemic highlighted the link between good relationships and happiness. Scientific evidence for the importance of relationships motivates this engrossing, moving examination, which is grounded in the unique Harvard Study of Adult Development. Established in 1938 to discover attitudinal predictors of healthy ageing, the project has followed the lives of three generations of the same families “from childhood troubles, to first loves, to final days”.

It includes more than 1,300 descendants of its original 724 participants (among them the then-future US president John F. Kennedy), making it “the longest in-depth longitudinal study of human life ever done”, according to its current director, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, and associate director, psychologist Marc Schulz. Their book shows how the ‘good life’ — however defined — is never static, but unfolds as individuals keep striving for it. Nor is it easy. It inevitably includes “turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls”.

The happiest participants have been those, such as Kennedy, who managed to turn the question “What can I do for myself?” into “What can I do for the world beyond me?”, by deliberately creating good relationships with others.

The AI Dilemma Juliette Powell & Art Kleiner Berrett-Koehler (2023)

The benefits and harms of social media are intimately tied to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence (AI). Will AI systems — trained partly on social media — benefit humanity or harm it?

Entrepreneur and technologist Juliette Powell and writer and educator Art Kleiner begin their exploration of this dilemma with the Moral Machine, a hugely popular online platform created in 2016 by the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The platform invited users around the world to test their attitudes by rapidly responding to dilemmas involving self-driving cars operated by AI, in which some passengers, pedestrians and pets must live while others must die. Unsurprisingly, most participants wanted to spare as many lives as possible, and favoured children over adults and humans over pets. Otherwise, their answers revealed no consensus. This “shows that people — especially those in different countries, cultures, and contexts — don’t agree on what we want”, comment the authors. “How, then, can we expect AI to know what priorities to control for?”

In their sometimes alarming analysis, the authors compare humans developing AI systems to first-time parents discovering the challenges of parenthood. They recommend that scientists and governments guide AI systems “as we would a child towards full adulthood”.

The World of Sugar Ulbe Bosma Belknap/Harvard Univ. Press (2023)

Sugar’s societal dominance is surprisingly recent. Granular sugar, manufactured by grinding sugarcane and heating the juice, is mentioned from as long ago as the sixth century bc in India, under the Sanskrit name śarkarā (the origin of French sucre and English ‘sugar’). But refined sugar became widely available in Europe only in the nineteenth century — boosted by mechanical means of production, but also by the transatlantic slave trade. Of the 12.5 million Africans kidnapped, up to two-thirds were enslaved on sugar plantations in the Americas, where labour conditions were much more lethal than on tobacco and coffee plantations.

Today, the average annual consumption of sugar and sweeteners per person is 40 kilograms in Western Europe. If the whole world were to match this level, global production would rise from 180 million tonnes per year to 308 million, entailing “an almost-proportionate gobbling up of land”.

The history of sugar is both a story of agricultural and economic progress and a bittersweet tale of “human exploitation, racism, obesity, and environmental destruction”, writes historian Ulbe Bosma in his authoritative, readable study — the first to be truly global. As he warns the reader, “We have not yet learned how to control it and bring it back to what it once was: a sweet luxury.”

Foolproof Sander van der Linden 4th Estate/W. W. Norton (2023)

In April 2020, Michael Whitty — volunteer for a local charity, operator of an airport parking facility and father of three — set fire to a phone mast near his UK home. At least 50 UK masts have been burnt by others.

Police evidence from Whitty’s phone suggested that information he found online had convinced him that radiation from 5G masts was damaging people’s immune systems, and thus helping to spread the virus SARS-CoV-2. At least 10% of UK inhabitants accepted this debunked conspiracy theory, according to a 2020 survey by social psychologist Sander van der Linden, who first became fascinated by misinformation when he learnt about the Nazis’ propaganda, and their execution of many of his Dutch relations during the Second World War.

Misinformation has become a worldwide ‘infodemic’, according to the World Health Organization, as exemplified by the COVID-19 anti-vaccination movement, which was endorsed by 33% of United States inhabitants in 2020. In this powerful book, van der Linden analyses why everyone is susceptible to misinformation, how falsehoods spread and how to “inoculate” ourselves through “prebunking” — pre-emptively exposing people to a weakened dose of misinformation so that they can learn to “fend off its manipulative tactics”. US President Joe Biden, for instance, made use of pre-bunking in early 2022 when he issued a public warning of a possible Russian propaganda video showing a fake Ukrainian attack on Russian territory.

Wasteland Oliver Franklin-Wallis Simon & Schuster (2023)

“Unlike people, garbage doesn’t lie,” writes journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis in his disturbingly vivid journey through the waste created in various countries. It opens at a British materials-recovery facility, where people in hard hats and high-visibility vests pick through refuse and channel valuable bottles, cardboard and aluminium cans into sorting chutes. Later, he visits a giant landfill near New Delhi, India: 65 metres high, and known to locals as Mount Everest. Here, he meets waste pickers climbing to retrieve valuables to sell, the main occupation of up to 20 million people around the world: “In one man’s trash, another’s treasure.”

Most UK companies refused to show him their landfill sites, which seems strange given that London, New York and San Francisco in California are built partly on garbage. As for plastics, neither manufacturers nor consumers admit the extent of the disposal problem. Instead of discussing ‘plastics’, both groups should understand properties of specific polymers, he recommends, and encourage use of those that are relatively recyclable.

Above all, the book concludes, the key is to “buy less stuff” regardless of advertising: “the three Rs of waste reduction — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — are not just a catchy slogan, but are actually arranged in order of effectiveness.”

Psychonauts Mike Jay Yale Univ. Press (2023)

A satirical caricature of a lecture at London’s Royal Institution, drawn in 1802 by James Gillray, is entitled ‘Scientific Researches! — New Discoveries in Pneumaticks! — or — an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air’. It shows two lecturers administering nitrous oxide to a governor of the institution with the help of a pair of bellows, producing an explosive effect inside his elegant breeches. One of the lecturers is the chemist Humphry Davy. When Davy first ingested nitrous oxide in the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol in 1799 and dubbed it laughing gas, he became a scientific hero. So did psychologist William James, who in the late nineteenth century took drugs to investigate mystical experiences.

In 1949, the term ‘psychonaut’ was invented by the author Ernst Jünger in his novel Heliopolis, to describe a rebel who, like Davy and James, “went on voyages of discovery in the universe of his brain”. The term became popular in the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, but today it connotes a “renegade” unacceptable to institutional science, notes medical historian Mike Jay.

His exploration of psychonauts is a provocative, highly readable meditation on drug use by scientists, philosophers, writers and artists. “All drugs have the potential to heal or to harm,” he concludes.

The Science of Reading Adrian Johns Univ. Chicago Press (2023)

In 1955, Why Johnny Can’t Read — a bestselling book by Rudolf Flesch about the science and pedagogy of reading — provoked controversy when it was published in the United States. The then-fashionable ‘whole word’ method of teaching meant that a child learnt words from their context, like a baby learning to talk. But Flesch claimed that the approach was inferior to the earlier ‘phonics’ method, whereby the child was trained to analyse words’ spelling.

This debate is far from over, “because reading is such a difficult process to understand”, confesses historian of information Adrian Johns. His intriguing analysis discusses the experimental study of reading, beginning in the 1880s.

Johns notes that the field has long been caught in a contradiction. Scientists have used machines such as the tachistoscope (which displays images for short periods of time) and the eye-movement camera to measure almost imperceptible quantities, such as the jumps and momentary pauses of a reader’s eye scanning prose, without being able to explain their psychological significance. Yet “in their grander moments”, they have convinced themselves that “civilization itself depended on those measurements”.

Today, despite the use of scanners to measure brain activity, the reading process remains mostly imponderable.

Viruses Marilyn J. Roossinck Princeton Univ. Press (2023)

Viruses were unknown to Charles Darwin. They were discovered to be a source of infection only after his death, in the 1890s, and were named with the Latin for ‘poison’. Today, in the world of COVID-19, everyone is keenly aware of their impact and many are conscious of their complex structures — yet their definition remains tricky.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a virus as “typically smaller than a bacterium” and consisting of a nucleic acid “surrounded by a protein coat”. But as virus ecologist Marilyn Roossinck stresses, many giant viruses are larger than some bacteria, and not all viruses have a protein coat. Moreover, not all are agents of disease; some benefit their hosts by helping to protect them from other microbes or allowing them to function in new ways. Indeed, one section of Roossinck’s infectiously enthusiastic, irresistibly illustrated analysis is entitled ‘The Good Viruses’.

Throughout, she stresses viral complexity, noting that there is no simple answer to the question “Are viruses alive?” Many arguments have been offered for and against, although seldom by virologists. “In general, virologists find their favourite entities fascinating, and whether they are alive or not has little relevance because they certainly impact the lives of everything on Earth.”

Einstein in Time and Space Samuel Graydon John Murray (2023)

Science journalist Samuel Graydon calls his first book a “mosaic biography”, aiming to piece together Albert Einstein’s life from brief but significant shards.

Mostly arranged in chronological order, there are 99 sections — matching the atomic number of einsteinium — beginning with Einstein’s birth in Germany in 1879 and ending with his death in the United States in 1955. Each focuses on a specific moment or aspect of its subject. Some concern Einstein’s science, others his personality; many integrate the two.

Particularly fascinating are Einstein’s “inexplicable, incompatible, insane motivations”, including his addiction to tobacco. His US doctors discouraged him from smoking, but his former doctor from Germany, a fellow refugee from Nazism who at that time was also in the United States, took pity on Einstein and supplied it. “As long as the tobacco was not technically his, Einstein felt entitled to smoke it.” One of his pipes, complete with a hole he chewed in it while trying to give up, is the most popular object in the modern physics collection of the National Museum of American History, notes Graydon.

Overall, this book is illuminating, despite inevitable omissions given its relative brevity, such as Einstein’s relationship with India, and in particular with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.

Nature 624, 516-518 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-04026-x

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Andrew Robinson