A Forest Joins the Author List, and Other November Science Books
Something unusual has happened to the author byline. A book aimed at readers aged five and up about a cloud forest in the Intac valley of northwestern Ecuador lists, alongside nature writer Robert Macfarlane and other experts, the forest itself: Los Cedros Cloud Forest. As the publishers point out, this is the first time a forest has been included in the creation of a book. [1] The book, Song of the Cedars, marks the anniversary of a court decision recognizing Los Cedros’s right to exist and flourish in the future. The publishers describe the project as “more than a book,” arguing that in making it “we are recognizing the forest’s moral rights as the co-creator of a literary work.” [1] Open the pages and the flora, fauna and fungi of the cloud forest jump out in a panoramic scene, which can be read or displayed as the owner wishes. Royalties from sales go toward protecting Los Cedros.
The book’s own form already answers, in miniature, the question of which fields meet here. Rights of nature are a legal argument; authorship is a literary convention; royalties are an economic instrument. Los Cedros sits at the junction of all three.
The Case Against Mastering Everything
A second November title takes the opposite posture toward control. Anna Lembke, an addiction medicine psychiatrist and head of Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic in California, publishes Radical Surrender: Letting go in a world addicted to change. The subtitle’s word “addicted” is the hinge. Lembke wrote the bestselling Dopamine Nation, which examined pleasure and pain and the delicate balance between them in an age of high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli delivered mostly digitally.
The new book promises tools for releasing the desire to control. The advice is explicit: 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.” [1] Addiction medicine is the obvious beneficiary, but the pressure Lembke describes is not confined to patients. It runs through parenting, relationships, health, and the low-grade irritation of a noisy room.
Numbers Underneath Everything, and Ghosts at the Edge of Sleep
Two further titles share a method: take something everyone uses and show the machinery beneath it. In Big Math: The hidden codes that run our world, Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend, both leading mathematicians at Cornell University in New York, argue that familiar concepts — matrices, vectors, Markov chains, linear algebra — sit at the heart of computer science and quantum computing. Every Google search and every streaming selection rests on them, the publishers argue. The publishers call this knowledge essential if we are to “comprehend the changes sweeping the world.” The sleep researcher Baland Jalal works a different borderland. In The Phantom Mind: Insights from the borderlands of sleep, he describes waking gripped by terror as a teenager: a demon on the bed, grabbing his legs and tossing them, crushing his chest, squeezing his neck. While being strangled, he could somehow telepathically read the monster’s mind. It had one agenda: to destroy him. That no man’s land between REM sleep and wakefulness became his research territory for roughly a decade.
The book’s most consequential story concerns Jalal’s mentor, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who appears to Jalal as a sleep-paralysis ghost and sets him on a new line of thought about how those figures are formed. The borderlands of sleep, it turns out, are a rich seam to mine for those hoping to discover more about the waking mind. An interview with Jalal is scheduled for the 14 November issue of New Scientist.
Insect Day: A story of 24 hours and 24 hexapod lives by Erica McAlister, a curator at London’s Natural History Museum who studies flies. It is an hourly guide through insects hunting food, mates, or safety. Midnight in Africa belongs to a female Anopheles gambiae mosquito seeking the blood of an unwitting sleeper, and possibly transferring malaria; the males, notably, have no taste for blood. By 7am the scene moves to the Arctic Circle, where a queen of Bombus polaris, the Arctic bumblebee, basks in Arctic poppy flowers and can keep warm simply by vibrating. The day passes through the yellow-legged saddle casemaker, the blue-winged helicopter, the Peruvian shield mantis, the ferocious water bug, and Grote’s bertholdia. The closing punch is a number: there may be as many as 30 million more insects yet to describe.