What We Are Reading Today: Prickly Moses

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Updated 16 October 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: Prickly Moses

Author: Simon West 

An uncanny blend of the external and the intimate has been a hallmark of Simon West’s poetry for nearly 20 years.

In this new collection, the Australian poet and Italianist delights in the transforming and endlessly varied powers of naming and speaking.

West’s intensely regional focus stands in dialogue with Europe and antiquity.

Landscapes reveal the tangle of their historical dimensions, as the rivers of both the Goulburn Valley in southeastern Australia and the Po Valley in northern Italy merge and flow into the wider currents of the Southern Ocean.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Doctors by Nature’ by Jaap De Roode

Updated 14 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Doctors by Nature’ by Jaap De Roode

Ages before the dawn of modern medicine, wild animals were harnessing the power of nature’s pharmacy to heal themselves.

“Doctors by Nature” reveals what researchers are now learning about the medical wonders of the animal world. 

Drawing on illuminating interviews with leading scientists from around the globe as well as Jaap de Roode’s own pioneering research on monarch butterflies, he demonstrates how animals of all kinds—from ants to apes, from bees to bears, and from cats to caterpillars—use various forms of medicine to treat their own ailments and those of their relatives.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘So Simple a Beginning’

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Updated 13 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘So Simple a Beginning’

  • A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra

Author: RAGHUVEER PARTHASARATHY

The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree.

A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it.

“So Simple a Beginning” shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Data Analysis for Social Science’

Updated 12 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Data Analysis for Social Science’

Authors: Eleba Llaudet and Kosuke

“Data Analysis for Social Science” provides a friendly introduction to the statistical concepts and programming skills needed to conduct and evaluate social scientific studies.

Assuming no prior knowledge of statistics and coding and only minimal knowledge of math, the book teaches the fundamentals of survey research, predictive models, and causal inference while analyzing data from published studies with the statistical program R. 


What We Are Reading Today: Sparks Like Stars

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Updated 11 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Sparks Like Stars

Author: Nadia Hashimi

If you need a story that is thought-provoking and emotional, give ‘Sparks Like Stars’ a try. Or if you love historical fiction, because it’s about an actual event — a Soviet-backed coup against the president of Afghanistan.

The story starts with getting to know Sitara. She is a privileged 10-year-old whose father is a diplomat and close friend of the country’s president; she spends many days running around the presidential palace. That is until the soldiers kill her entire family, and she sees it all happening, forever changing her.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘NOVEL RELATIONS’

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Updated 10 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘NOVEL RELATIONS’

Author: ALICIA MIRELES CHRISTOFF

‘Novel Relations’ engages 20th-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory.

Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read.

These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures — characters, narrators, authors, and other readers — shape and structure us too.