The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1995 and was reissued with an afterword in 2023. This is a BIG book not necessarily in length (around 412 pages) but in the story it documents and the scientific mysteries it unfolds. …
Continue reading The Mysteries of Life: from Darwin to the Genome Project
Culpability by Bruce Holsinger reminds me of nothing so much as Harvard Law Professor Michael Sandel’s course on justice and making ethical decisions, especially when choosing between two, equally problematic alternatives. Holsinger’s novel is set in the era of artificial intelligence. Attorney Noah Cassidy and his wife, Lorelei Shaw, a prominent leader in the field …
Continue reading A novel look at Moral Responsibility in the world of A.I.
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi is the remarkable memoir of an Albanian girl, told in the first person starting when she was just seven years old. Ypi sees the world and her homeland through the perspective of her very complicated family. Her grandmother, Nini, who lives with them, …
Continue reading Authoritarianism versus liberalism: a political memoir
Marjorie Arons-Barron 