Humans
Surekha Davies Univ. California Press (2025)
The Nazis who organized the Holocaust in the 1940s were human monsters. They join numerous fictional part-human, part-monster characters — such as William Shakespeare’s Caliban, Mary Shelley’s creature created by Victor Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) xenomorph, which incubates its young in humans — in Surekha Davies’s engaging book, which she calls “a history through monsters”, not “of monsters”. As the historian of science, art and ideas concludes: “Monsters are portals. Monsters are us. Let’s get to work.”
The Silicon Shrink
Daniel Oberhaus MIT Press (2025)
Around one-twelfth of US children use psychiatric drugs — yet, in the past decade, the adolescent suicide rate has increased by nearly 50%. This is how science writer Daniel Oberhaus tragically lost his sister, who left a note after years of psychiatric diagnoses: “No one knows what this is.” In his disturbing, eloquent book, Oberhaus argues that artificial intelligence cannot be used for patient therapy, because psychiatrists “do not understand mental disorders well enough to reliably group them into valid diagnostic categories”.
The Uncanny Muse
David Hadju W. W. Norton (2025)
In ancient China, one emperor enjoyed a mechanical orchestra. In ancient Egypt, wooden human figures imitated ploughing and kneading. In the nineteenth century, automata controlled by unseen operators fooled audiences with art performances. By the 1960s, the Moog synthesizer could generate music electronically. Today, artificial intelligence can create complex art and music. Surveying this history, art and cultural critic David Hadju remarks that using such machinery does not threaten “the authenticity of the work”.
In Praise of Floods
James C. Scott Yale Univ. Press (2025)
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