Oswald Schmitz

Oswald Schmitz is Professor of Population and Community Ecology at Yale University.

His new book is The New Ecology: Rethinking a Science for the Anthropocene.

From Schmitz's Q&A with Jessica Ganga at the Princeton University Press blog:

The term Anthropocene is cropping up a lot nowadays in discussions about the environment. What does this term refer to?

OS: The Anthropocene essentially means the Age of Humans. Science has characterized the history of the Earth in terms of major events that have either shaped its geological formations or have given rise to certain dominant life forms that have shaped the world. For example, the Mesozoic is known as the Age of the Dinosaurs, the Cenozoic includes the Age of Flowering Plants, Age of Insects, Age of Mammals and Birds. The Anthropocene characterizes our modern times because humans have become the dominant life form shaping the world.

You’ve written several books about ecology. What’s different about this one?

OS: My goal is to communicate the exciting scientific developments and insights of ecology to a broad readership. I hope to inspire readers to think more deeply about humankind’s role as part of nature, not separate from it, and consider the bigger picture implications of humankind’s values and choices for the sustainability of Earth. As such, the intended audience is altogether different than my previous books. My previous books were technical science books written specifically for ecologists or aspiring ecologists.

What inspired you to write this particular book?

OS: The ecological scientific community has done...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane Alison

Jane Alison is the author of the new book Nine Island. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You said in an interview with UVA Today that you've "grown impatient with so-called distinctions among genres that, in truth, overlap so much," and you've defined Nine Island as a nonfiction novel. How does it incorporate elements of each genre?

A: I began writing Nine Island after writing three novels and a memoir, as well as having translated portions of Ovid's poetry. I wanted the new project to have almost as much truth as memoir but also the flexibility and flights of fiction and the music (and even line-breaks) of poetry.

Almost all the incidents in the book, as well as the figures and places, are drawn closely from life. I did compress time, though.

Q: Like you, your protagonist J writes about Ovid. What are some of the connections between Ovid's work and J's life in present-day Miami?

A: J is contemplating life-changes: her mother's declining body, her poor old cat's deafness and blindness, the grounding of a duck, and her own slide into late-ish middle age, with her decision that it might be time to retire from love. That is: gently extinguish her erotic self. She's thinking about...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History. From the transcript of his interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: So in this book, what you say is that, in this area in biology, like in other areas of science, the big news is that we have finally gotten down to the fundamental unit of analysis. Explain what you mean.

MUKHERJEE: Well, the gene is the fundamental unit of analysis in biology, in the same way that the atom is for matter or the bit or the byte is for computing. We've known genes -- about genes for a long time. But the idea -- I mean, the way that we're understanding, the depths and the clarity with which we're understanding genes today and its influence on our lives, on our social lives, our biological lives, is enormous, just like, you know, the understanding of the atom changed the world of physics and just like the understanding of, you know, digitized information changed the world of computing.

ZAKARIA: So if you look at that analogy, what you're saying is really that, when you are able to go down to the essential element of matter in physics, the atom, you are able to then figure out how to manipulate it, how to read information. When you are able to get down to the fundamental unit of information, the bit or the byte, you are able to move it around. Each of them produced an explosion of knowledge and then of applications.

MUKHERJEE: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Is the same thing happening...

MUKHERJEE: That's happening right now. We are learning to read and write genes, the language of genes, in a way that we hadn't even 10 or 15 years ago. And by that I mean...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephanie Gangi

Stephanie Gangi's new novel is The Next. From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Next and for your character Joanna?

A: The Next was conceived after a convergence of my own upheavals. I’d had some health issues and I’d had a heartbreak – and in my vulnerable state, I realized that my thoughts were more consumed with the details of the lost love, and the narrative I was building in my head, than with my health! Luckily I got my priorities straight, but I was intrigued with the idea of a woman who becomes obsessed with a foolish love on her deathbed.

The universal soundtrack the year I began the novel was Adele’s 21, which played everywhere, and was filled with so much bittersweet lust and loss and need for vengeance. I felt Adele was speaking to – and for – so many women who lose themselves in relationships.

As far as Joanna, I loved the idea of an angry woman hell bent on revenge against an unworthy man, and ranting and wreaking havoc all over contemporary Manhattan. Because I’m not so comfortable with anger and violence myself, I used the ghost concept to add some other-worldly distance to Joanna’s fury.

Also, importantly, I was a woman in my late 50s, suddenly single. My visibility factor in the world had changed, noticeably. I thought having my protagonist be...[read on]

Visit Stephanie Gangi's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Stephanie Gangi & Enzo.

My Book, The Movie: The Next.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert E. Lerner

Robert E. Lerner is the author of Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life. From his Q&A with Debra Liese at the Princeton University Press blog:

You have written a number of books on history before, but this is your first biography. What led you in this direction?

RL: My subject, Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963), author of celebrated works in history, was wounded at the battle of Verdun in 1916, fought against red revolutionaries in Munich in 1919, was a prominent member of a bizarre poetic circle in Germany during the Weimar era, spoke publicly in opposition to Nazism in 1933, eluded Gestapo arrest in 1938, lead a fight against a McCarthyite Board of Regents at the University of California in 1949-50, and was a central personality at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Moreover, he was a major intellectual figure of the twentieth century. Is that enough?

But why did you decide to write it now, when previously you have written almost exclusively on medieval topics?

RL: Actually, the project had been taking shape for decades. I met Kantorowicz once when I was a graduate student at Princeton, and he left an unforgettable impression. Later, in 1988, I was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ratika Kapur

Ratika Kapur's new novel is The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for your new novel and for Mrs. Sharma?

A: Like most ideas for novels, this one had clearly been germinating in my head for a while, nourished by the occasional sighting of a face on a metro station platform, at a traffic signal, or at a mall.

Perhaps the fact that my world is adjacent but disjoint from the world of those women who live in Mrs. Sharma's world engendered a curiosity--a yearning almost--to reach out and try and enter that world.

Q: The story is told from Mrs. Sharma’s point of view. Would you describe her as a reliable or unreliable narrator?

A: We are all, in a sense, unreliable narrators of our lives, aren't we? We hide things from each other and from ourselves. I think the notion of the reliable narrator is really just a fantastical notion, like a unicorn or the Yeti; it resembles things that exist in the world but...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis's latest book is The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds. From the transcript of his interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: Michael Lewis is one of the most successful book authors, ever since his debut "Liar's Poker." He has written "Moneyball," "The Blind Side" and "The Big Short," all later turned into movies.

"Moneyball" was about the Oakland As baseball team and its real-life quest to pick the best prospective players. The team figured out how to game the system by, as Lewis says, using better data and better analysis of that data to find market inefficiencies.

Now, there was a review of "Moneyball" by the academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who pointed out that much of what the As were doing was stripping human bias out of the equation of managing a ball team. That kind of analysis had been pioneered, they pointed out, by a pair of Israeli social scientists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who did groundbreaking work on behavioral economics, as Lewis says, a field that focuses on the biases and irrational behavior of human beings.

Lewis had never heard of Kahneman and Tversky, so he dug into the topic and ended up writing a book about the duo, "The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds."

Welcome back, Michael.

LEWIS: Thank you, Fareed. Good to see you.

ZAKARIA: So one of the things that we always talk about nowadays is the way in which people act, sort of, irrationally. And "irrationally" sounds bad, but not in a way that can be predicted easily.

So even in this election, people point out that, you know, people who think they're acting in their economic interests don't act in their economic interests. So there are all these irrational or hidden biases we have. To put it very simply, what is it that Kahneman and Tversky have made us understand about this field?

LEWIS: Generally, what their work was about was showing that the mind is, though roughly well-equipped to, kind of, get us through life and the judgments we have to make, it's not wired to make probabilistic judgments. And so when it's faced with, like, probabilistic situations, it doesn't do statistics; it tells stories. And sometimes -- and those stories are skewed in predictable ways, by memory, by the way we think in stereotypes, by -- I mean, there are a whole range of things that are (inaudible) but in ways that are predictable and -- and systemic.

So if people can be systematically irrational, then markets can be systematically irrational, which is why...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Fernyhough

Charles Fernyhough's new book is The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. His other books include A Box of Birds and Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts.

From Fernyhough's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: In The Voices Within, you write, “Talking to ourselves is a part of human experience that, although by no means universal, seems to play many different roles in our mental lives.” What are some of the roles it plays?

A: We talk to ourselves for all sorts of reasons. When we do it out loud, it’s called private speech; the silent, internal version is called inner speech.

Both versions seem to have a range of different functions. We talk to ourselves to plan what we are about to do, such as when we anticipate a difficult meeting. We use inner speech to motivate ourselves, perhaps to psych ourselves up for a tennis match or scary interview.

We can also use language to tell ourselves off and talk through how we’ll do better next time. Inner speech features in remembering, imagination, creativity, and daydreaming, and in preparing for...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

George Lakoff

George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. His books include The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.

From Lakoff's 2014 Truthout interview with Mark Karlin:

You write, "remember that voters vote their identity and their values, which need not coincide with their self-interest." I remember writing a commentary on a poor congressional district, let's say about 98 percent white, in Kentucky. Most of the residents were on food stamps, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid - or all of them. However, they have voted in recent elections by landslide majorities to re-elect a congressman who opposes food stamps and supports cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Can you elaborate on how this can occur?

A single moral worldview dominates conservative policies in every domain of life - family, personal identity, sex, religion, sports, education, the market, foreign policy and politics - what I’ve called strict father morality. Your moral worldview is central to how you understand your life.

In a strict father family, the father is in charge and is assumed to know right from wrong, to have moral as well as physical authority. He is supposed to protect the family, support the family, set the rules, enforce the rules, maintain respect, govern sexuality and reproduction, and teach his kids right from wrong, that is, to grow up with the same moral system. His word defines what is right and is law; no backtalk. Disobedience is punished, painfully, so that children learn not to disobey. Via physical discipline, they learn internal discipline, which is how they become moral beings. With discipline they can become prosperous.

If you are not prosperous, you are not disciplined enough, not taking enough personal responsibility and deserve your poverty. At the center is the principle of personal responsibility and moral hierarchy: those who are more moral (in this sense of morality) should rule: God over man, man over nature, parents over children, the rich over the poor, Western culture over non-Western culture, America over other countries, men over women, straights over gays, Christians over non-Christians, etc.

On conservative religion, God is a strict father; in sports, coaches are strict with their athletes; in classrooms, teachers should be strict with students; in business, employers rule over employees; in the market, the market should decide - the market itself is the strict father, deciding that those who have financial discipline deserve their wealth, and others deserve their poverty; and in politics, this moral system itself should rule.

Conservatives can be poor, but they can still be kings in their own castles - strict fathers at home, in their personal identity: in their religion, in their sex lives, in the sports they love. Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Scott Cooper

Andrew Scott Cooper is the author of The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran. From his Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You begin the book with a scene from 2015 featuring Farah Pahlavi and [former Egyptian first lady] Jehan Sadat in Cairo. Why did you choose to start here?

A: I started the book at the end. What I mean is that the story of the Pahlavi family is coming full circle with the revival of interest inside Iran for the monarchy and a resurgence of sympathy for the last King, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and also for his wife, Queen Farah and their children.

Many Iranians, especially since the 2009 crackdown, and the 2011 Arab Spring convulsions, now regard the Pahlavi era as one of remarkable peace and prosperity. There is a lot of guilt expressed about the revolution and sending the family into exile after all they did to build and modernize Iran.

Q: You write, "Today Americans, if they remember the Shah at all, are likely to associate him with massive human rights violations and state-sanctioned repression." What are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about the Shah of Iran?

A: The first misconception is that the Shah was an American puppet. This thesis no longer holds water, thanks in large part to the release of U.S. government declassified documents that tell a very different story. Behind the scenes, we now know that ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue