What We Are Reading Today: ‘Living Matter’ by Alex J. Levine

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Updated 13 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Living Matter’ by Alex J. Levine

The frontiers of physics can seem impossibly remote — located in the invisible quantum realm or the farthest reaches of the cosmos. But one of physics’ most exciting frontiers lies much closer than we realize: within our own bodies and other living organisms, which display astonishingly intricate structural patterns and dynamic processes that we don’t yet understand.

In “Living Matter,” leading biophysicist Alex Levine explains why unraveling the mysteries of life may ultimately demand a new physics — one that takes full account of the fundamental differences between living and nonliving matter.


What We Are Reading Today: Pico Iyer’s essay ‘The Joy of Quiet’

Updated 21 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Pico Iyer’s essay ‘The Joy of Quiet’

Pico Iyer’s essay “The Joy of Quiet” dissects modern life’s paradox: the louder our world grows, the more we crave silence. The essay was first published in 2012 in The New York Times.

With the precision of a cultural surgeon, Iyer — a travel writer famed for his meditative prose — exposes how digital noise erodes human connection, leaving us drowning in a sea of notifications yet thirsting for meaning.

But this isn’t a diatribe against technology; it’s a forensic examination of our collective burnout.

He maps a silent counterrevolution emerging in the unlikeliest corners: Silicon Valley CEOs fleeing to Himalayan monasteries, Amish-inspired “digital sabbaths” trending among younger generations, executives paying to lock away their phones and nations like Bhutan trading gross domestic product for “Gross National Happiness” as radical acts of cultural defiance.

Iyer’s genius lies in reframing silence as an insurgent act of self-preservation. A Kyoto temple’s rock garden becomes a “vacuum of stillness” where fractured minds heal; a tech mogul’s secret retreats — funded by the same wealth that built addictive apps — mock his own industry’s promises of liberation.

The essay’s sharpest insight? Our devices aren’t just distractions but “weapons of mass distraction,” systematically severing us from presence, empathy and the sacred monotony of undivided attention.

Critics might argue Iyer romanticizes privilege (not everyone can jet to a Balinese silent retreat), yet his message transcends class: in an age of algorithmic overload, solitude becomes not a luxury but psychic armor.

He anticipates today’s “attention economy” battleground, where mindfulness apps monetize the very serenity they promise to provide.

His closing warning: “We’ve gone from exalting timesaving devices to fleeing them,” feels prophetic in 2025, as AI chatbots colonize conversation and virtual reality headsets replace eye contact.

Less self-flagellating than Orwell’s colonial reckonings, “The Joy of Quiet” offers no easy answers.

Instead, it dares readers to ask: When every ping demands obedience, what revolution begins with a silenced phone? What if reclaiming our humanity starts not with consuming more but with the radical courage to disappear?


What We Are Reading Today: ‘In Asian Waters’ by Eric Taliacozzo

Updated 21 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘In Asian Waters’ by Eric Taliacozzo

In the centuries leading up to our own, the volume of traffic across Asian sea routes—an area stretching from East Africa and the Middle East to Japan—grew dramatically, eventually making them the busiest in the world.

The result was a massive circulation of people, commodities, religion, culture, technology, and ideas.

In this book, Eric Tagliacozzo chronicles how the seas and oceans of Asia have shaped the history of the largest continent for the past half millennium, leaving an indelible mark on the modern world in the process.


Book Review: ‘Hope in the Dark’ by Rebecca Solnit

Updated 21 May 2025
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Book Review: ‘Hope in the Dark’ by Rebecca Solnit

In an era of climate collapse and political upheaval, Rebecca Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark,” first published in 2004 and later updated in 2016, redefines hope not as naivete, but as a radical act of defiance.

Part manifesto, part historical corrective, the book resurrects forgotten victories to prove that progress is often invisible, nonlinear, and collective.

Solnit, a historian and activist, dismantles the myth of powerlessness by spotlighting movements that reshaped history despite seeming futile in their moment.

The Zapatista uprising of 1994, she argues, redefined revolution not as a single explosive event but as a “slow conversation” across generations. The fall of the Berlin Wall — unforeseen by experts — she wrote exposes the fragility of oppressive systems when met with sustained dissent.

Her 2016 update weaves in Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock protests, framing them as modern iterations of this “subversive hope.”

Central to Solnit’s thesis is the metaphor of darkness, rejecting apocalyptic fatalism: “The future is dark … like the darkness of the womb.”

Hope, for her, is the audacity to act without guarantees, a lesson drawn from anti-nuclear campaigns of the 1980s and post-Katrina mutual-aid efforts like the Common Ground Collective.

Stylistically, Solnit merges lyrical prose with critical urgency. She chastises media narratives that equate activism with failure if immediate victories are not won, noting that the eight-hour workday and abolition of slavery were once deemed impossible.

Her chapters unfold as interconnected essays, blending memoir (her 1980s anti-nuke protests) with global dispatches (Chile’s democratic revival, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution).

Critics may crave more policy prescriptions, but Solnit’s goal is philosophical: to reframe activism as a practice of storytelling, where every protest rewrites the dominant narrative.

The book is not a roadmap but a compass, guiding readers through despair with historical proof that “the impossible is inevitable.”


What We Are Reading Today: ‘How Birds Evolve’ by Douglas Futuyma

Updated 20 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘How Birds Evolve’ by Douglas Futuyma

“How Birds Evolve” explores how evolution has shaped the distinctive characteristics and behaviors we observe in birds today. Douglas Futuyma describes how evolutionary science illuminates the wonders of birds, ranging over topics such as the meaning and origin of species, the evolutionary history of bird diversity, and the evolution of avian reproductive behaviors, plumage ornaments, and social behaviors.

In this multifaceted book, Futuyma examines how birds evolved from nonavian dinosaurs and reveals what we can learn from the “family tree” of birds.


What We Are Reading Today: The Great Escape by Angus Deaton

Updated 19 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Great Escape by Angus Deaton

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations.

In The book tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress.