As seasonal storms take many of us by surprise, it’s time to head for the certainty of indoors, and a decent book (or two). We have some really intriguing titles this month, including a profoundly odd-sounding book by a forest that shares author rights with humans, and some terrifying night terrors that may teach us a lot about our brains. Oh, and if you want to stop trying to control everything around you, try surrendering to a higher power – of your choice, naturally.
In a complex world, the pressure to control your life is immense: from removing annoying noises around you to slavishly avoiding missing out on living your best life, to keeping your relationship, children and health on track in every way imaginable. Surely we can’t keep it up? According to Anna Lembke’s new book, _Radical Surrender: Letting go in a world addicted to change_, there is a way out.
The word ”addicted” in the subtitle offers a clue here: this is the author of the bestselling book _Dopamine Nation_, in which she looked at pleasure and pain – and the critical task of finding a delicate balance between them, especially in an age of unprecedented high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli, mostly delivered digitally. In this new book, we are promised tools to help us let go of our desire for control, but we have to follow Lembke’s advice and acknowledge a “power greater than ourselves, however we define it, and give our will over to that power: less mastery and more a return to mystery”. As an addiction medicine psychiatrist and head of Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic in California, this “radical surrender” should be scientifically argued.
Watch out for our review on 5 November. Let’s face it: our every move, from our next Google search to our latest Netflix selection, is utterly dependent on numbers, and AI is now an everyday reality. We have no choice but to face up to the overwhelming presence of mathematics, small, medium – or big.
In _Big Math: The hidden codes that run our world_, Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend (both leading mathematicians at Cornell University, New York) set out to show how relatively familiar concepts such as matrices, vectors, Markov chains, linear algebra and the like lie at the heart of computer science and quantum computing – essential for us all to know, say its publishers, if we’re to “comprehend the changes sweeping the world”. For some while now, we’ve known that the story of invasive species is complex, but just how complex is the stuff of Amy Crawford’s _Undesirable: Invasive species, humans, and where we all belong_. Blundering all over the world, we have accidentally (as well as deliberately) carried species with us on our adventures – and often created great incidental damage to the recipient environments, ranging from destroyed habitats to changes in the climate.
Then there is the accidental introduction of blow-in species over relatively short stretches of water, or those dropped by migrating birds. After hundreds of years, it’s still not entirely clear where the gains or losses to local biodiversity really land. And apparently, the young field of “invasion biology” has been “wracked by controversy and haunted by ethical quandaries as it has sought to destroy some species for the benefit of others”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
