Professor Alan Kazdin is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University and a former President of the American Psychological Association (2008). He is also a careful scientist who promotes evidence-based treatments for mental health. In his words:- "Our recent research shows worldwide...
Published by Penguin Random House Plastics Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil's Biggest Bet is a compelling new book by American journalist Beth Gardiner that explores Big Oil's role in continuing to extract fossil fuels, which serve as the feedstock for ongoing...
In his new book, Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration (The New Press, 2026), Julian Hattem explores how climate and environmental changes are reshaping patterns of human mobility. He convincingly demonstrates that the scale of these migrations...
In the early years of this century, I met Jason Matheny, an early advocate for cultured meat and the founder of the cultured meat company, New Harvest, in 2004. Matheny asserted that meat cultivated from the cells of cattle, pigs, chickens, and other farmed animals...
These two books deal with the same topic, animal research and testing, in quite different ways. Both describe very personal explorations of the topic, grounded in the two authors' interactions with laboratory animals. Melanie Kaplan, author of Lab Dog and a journalist, adopted a beagle, Hammy,...
The true story, A Street Cat Named Bob, is an international best-seller about twin redemption: that of a homeless tabby street cat and a homeless Englishman who adopt each other and help one another heal, leading to celebrity status for both cat and human. The author,...
In the Pixar movie, WALL-E, set a few hundred years in the future, humans have no direct contact with one another, are relatively helpless, and spend all day interacting only via television. As did many of my friends, I felt that the film got the...
In her 2024 book, Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie (Scottish data scientist and researcher at the University of Oxford) begins by noting surveys that document how pervasively young people today feel that "humanity is doomed" and "the future is frightening." She responds...
A new book by philosopher Jeff Sebo presents a series of arguments for expanding the group of entities regarded as moral patients to include all conscious beings. Sebo contends that consciousness is the key factor distinguishing which entities should be included in a broader moral...
Jonathan Birch is a philosopher at the London School of Economics who has dedicated significant time and effort to studying sentience and how to identify sentient beings or systems reliably. He was the lead author of a report that advised the UK Government on the...
