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Nature & Environment

Under a White Sky

The Nature of the Future

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Human beings have altered rivers, coastlines, climates, and ecosystems on such a scale that further intervention can appear to be the only way to contain the damage. In Under a White Sky, environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert investigates this unsettling predicament through visits to laboratories, waterways, endangered-species habitats, and experimental climate projects. Her subjects include efforts to block invasive carp from the Great Lakes, sustain the exceptionally vulnerable Devils Hole pupfish, help corals survive warmer oceans, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and reduce global temperatures through solar geoengineering. These projects display remarkable scientific ingenuity, but they also expose the risks of treating complex natural systems as manageable machinery. Rather than offering a simple case for or against technology, Kolbert examines the recurring cycle in which one attempted solution creates conditions demanding another. The result is a concise explorat…

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Nature & Environment

The Old Ways

A Journey on Foot

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In The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane travels along ancient routes to investigate how paths connect landscape, history, imagination, and memory. His journeys encompass chalk tracks, holloways, pilgrimage roads, dangerous tidal crossings, mountain routes, and sea paths in Britain and beyond. Rather than treating a path as a line between destinations, Macfarlane reads it as a record made through repeated movement—a place where geology, ecology, language, custom, and personal experience converge. The poet and walker Edward Thomas serves as an important guiding presence, linking physical travel to literary remembrance. Macfarlane also walks with contemporary artists, writers, sailors, and local guides whose knowledge reveals different ways of inhabiting terrain. Blending travel narrative, nature writing, cultural history, biography, and meditation, the book argues that people shape paths while paths, in turn, shape perception, memory, and identity.

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History & Society

How Democracies Die

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How Democracies Die examines how elected leaders can dismantle democratic government without abolishing elections or staging a traditional military coup. Drawing on cases from Europe, Latin America, and the United States, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe a gradual process in which incumbents weaken institutional checks, discredit opponents, intimidate independent organizations, and alter political rules in their own favor. The authors emphasize the gatekeeping responsibility of political parties: established leaders can either block authoritarian figures or help normalize them. They also argue that constitutions cannot protect democracy by themselves. Democratic survival depends on unwritten practices—especially accepting opponents as legitimate and exercising restraint in the use of legal power. The book applies this comparative framework to Donald Trump’s rise and to the longer deterioration of political norms in the United States, presenting democrat…

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