A recent review from the New Yorker—and more about the book here.
“The wings of the pterosaur take us to the Wright Brothers, the pinhole eyes of the nautilus to the invention of the daguerreotype. In fact, the linkage is pointed: it’s not nature’s story or ours but both together. Divorcing human achievements from their relations in natural life means that Homo sapiens, too, is only ‘barely imagined.’”
. . .
Barbara J. King is having quite a week—at least in terms of traversing brave new (pop-cultural) frontiers for the scholarly pursuits of animal intelligence and emotion. First came an excerpt from King’s latest book How Animals Grieve in a recent edition of the New York Post—noteworthy enough; so noteworthy, in fact, that it led to a mention of the book and King’s work on an episode of Howard Stern’s syndicated SIRIUS radio show (Stern, who along with his wife, is an animal rights advocate, experienced the traumatic loss of his English bulldog Bianca just a year ago; he even gave the book a plug via his Twitter feed). As if all this weren’t enough to render a tear in academic publishing’s space-time continuum, King herself made an appearance on Stern’s show, evidencing some of the ideas surrounding animal mourning that her book draws upon.
In How Animals Grieve, King considers a recent shift in anthropological attention to our companion species, which recognizes our long-chided tendency to anthropomorphize animal emotions might instead hold grains of truth. She tells of elephants surrounding their matriarch as she weakens and dies, and, in the following days, attending to her corpse as if holding a vigil. . . .
As Adam Rome’s new history of Earth Day–recently reviewed in the New Yorker–reminds us: Earth Day has been around for a long, long time now. And while progress certainly has been made, from the big (the establishment of the EPA) to the small (the fact that when Don Draper casually chucks a beer can into the park in Mad Men, it feels as old-timey as anything in the whole series), the overall project–of conservation, preservation, and restoration–is never done.
Given the strength of our list in science and conservation, it’s no surprise that we’re big Earth Day fans over here–we’d be fans of Earth Year, Earth Millennium, or even Universe Eternity if it could be worked. But you start with what you know, so here we are for Earth Day, with a reminder about some of our best recent conservation photography books, perfect for inspiring and educating people about the importance of biodiversity and conservation.
The best way to appreciate David Liitschwager’s A World in One Cubic Foot is to check out the slideshow at National Geographic‘s site. There you’ll see Liittschwager’s breathtaking portraits of the stunning variety (and quantity) of living things that passed through a single cubic . . .
“Longer than a tweet and shorter than A River Runs Through It—”
INTRODUCING CHICAGO SHORTS
The University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce the launch of Chicago Shorts—distinguished selections, including never-before-published material, off-the-radar reads culled from the University of Chicago Press’s commanding archive, and the best of our newest books, all priced for impulse buying and presented exclusively in DRM-free e-book format.
Aimed at the general reader and running the gamut from the latest in contemporary scholarship to can’t-miss chapters from classic publications, Chicago Shorts turn the page on the twenty-first-century reading experience.
Among the inaugural batch of nine Shorts, you’ll find:
What Every Novelist Needs to Know about Narrators by Wayne C. Booth Ebert’s Bests by Roger Ebert Nixon and the Silver Screen by Mark Feeney A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography? by Susie Linfield Custer’s Last Stand: The Unfinished Manuscript by Norman Maclean Shylock on Trial: The Appellate Briefs by Richard Posner and Charles Fried Erika and Klaus Mann in New York: Escape from the Magic Mountain by Andrea Weiss Bill Veeck’s Crosstown Classic by Bill Veeck with Ed Linn Rabbits with Horns and Other Astounding . . .
Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is an internationally acknowledged expert on animal behavior and cognition. In 2009, the University of Chicago Press published Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, a book he coauthored with Jessica Pierce, which uses cutting-edge developments in psychology, biology, and cognitive science to demonstrate the broad repertoire of moral behaviors and nuanced emotions exhibited by animals.
Recently, Bekoff was a guest on ABC News with Diane Sawyer, where he contributed to a feature about service veterans reuniting with their companion animals. The juxtaposition of Bekoff’s commentary, which was fed into the segment via video chat, with the documentary footage of dogs greeting their returning owners in backyards, airports, and living rooms, illustrated another angle of Bekoff’s research: animals are sentient, social beings, capable of developing deep bonds—the experience of which clearly transcends even technological mediation.
Bekoff recently commented on Pierce’s forthcoming book The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives, which combines wrenching personal narratives and scientific research to consider a wide range of questions about animal aging, end-of-life care, and death. “Decisions about how to treat an animal . . .
From Promotions Director Levi Stahl:
We don’t have a staff member whose sole job is to keep up with what scientist, journalist, blogger, radio personality, and Press author Carl Zimmer is up to, but I’m beginning to suspect we should. This week, Carl’s been all over the place: first, on The Loom, his Discover magazine blog, he announced the launch of Download the Universe, a new collaborative venture from fifteen scientists and writers to cover science e-books. Carl explains:
We are fifteen writers and scientists who want to explore this new form. On a regular basis, we’ll be delivering new reviews of ebooks about technology, medicine, natural history, neuroscience, astronomy, and anything else that fits under the comfortably large rubric of science. We also define ebooks generously—everything from a plain-vanilla pdf on an author’s web site to a Kindle Single to an elaborate iPad app.
And since that apparently wasn’t enough to keep Carl busy, he also had the cover story in this week’s issue of Time: The Surprising Science of Animal Friendships.
Which is all the excuse we need to post cute photos of our cats!
So are these cats, all snuggled up together, really friends? To find . . .
Natalie Angier is a science journalist—and an outspoken athiest—with a thirst for. . . . fairness? At least that’s the case in her recent piece for the New York Times, in which she explores the wealth gap that’s helped spur our worst economic crisis since the Great Depression in light of research on human nature and the evolution of human social organization. Interesting to point out that another NYT study bills the average top executive’s salary at ten million dollars and rising twelve percent per year.
And just who’s fair?
Angier spells it out for us:
Darwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match.
In The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice, Peter Corning draws on evidence similar to what Angier cites in her article: the evolutionary record, along with the latest findings from the behavioral and biological sciences. The result? A . . .
Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We’re delighted to continue this month’s Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer. This week Zimmer welcomes MIT scientist Timothy Lu to talk about the quest to use viruses to cure infectious diseases.
Timothy Lu is assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT, where he heads the Synthetic Biology Group. Carl wrote a profile of Lu last year in Technology Review.
All About Phage TherapyDear Carl:
Bacteriophages are the most abundant biological particles on earth, but due to their size, and perhaps ubiquity, most of us don’t think of them very often. Phages are essentially just bacterial viruses. When it comes to viruses, the popular notion is that they are bad entities that are responsible for disease and suffering. The truth is, however, that phages are very different from human viruses. Phages do not infect human cells and are not responsible for the viral diseases that plague mankind, such as AIDS, herpes, cervical cancer, and the common cold. Furthermore, phages have had a tremendous impact . . .
Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We’re delighted to continue this month’s Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer. This week Zimmer welcomes Richard Preston, New Yorker contributor and bestselling author, for a conversation on smallpox and the possible eradication of other viruses.
Richard Preston is the author of seven books, including The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event, and The Demon in the Freezer. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and his awards include the American Institute of Physics Award and the National Magazine Award. Preston also the only person who isn’t a medical doctor ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention Award for public health.
Should Smallpox Be Put To Death?Dear Carl:
There’s a debate in the scientific community about what to do with the remaining stocks of smallpox virus on the planet. Should the virus be preserved so that it can be studied? Or should the virus be destroyed, so that—in theory at least—it would become extinct and would not threaten the human . . .
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TRAFFIC: Carl Zimmer and Penny Chisholm
Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We’ll be ending a month of Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer, with one final conversation about ocean-borne viruses with Penny Chisholm.
Sallie W. “Penny” Chisholm is the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and professor of biology at MIT. Her research lab seeks to advance our understanding of the ecology and evolution of microbes in the oceans, and how they influence global biochemical cycles. In January 2010, she was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal, for “pioneering studies of the dominant photosynthetic organisms in the sea and for integrating her results into a new understanding of the global ocean.”
A Billion Viruses in the SeaDear Carl,
Thank you for giving viruses the recognition they deserve. As you point out, the discovery of viruses in the oceans is relatively recent. It seems that about once every decade there are similar major discoveries in oceanography that change the way we think about ocean ecosystems. One of these—a discovery by the late John Martin—was that iron . . .
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