Open tabs get their own post today. This approach to note taking might become a regular feature. It’s positively cathartic to close tabs this way.

Summer is always a mess. A mess of camps, with their shifting pick-up and drop-off times, of travel and lab and family commitments, and a collapsing republic. But books provide some welcome groundi…

Chelsea Sedoti’s Tell Me What Really Happened is a kinetic high school mystery that hits all the hot issues: Guns, race, class, social media… … and Sasquatch!

Longevity gurus are unavoidable, but Peter Attia and Bill Gifford’s Outlive was better than I expected. Leaving aside the author’s personal failings, it does a good job of explaining co…

Margareta Magnusson’s delightful diptych about growing old and letting go shows that healthy aging is all about attitude… if you’re lucky enough to do it in a robust welfare state.

Have we got aging all wrong? Josh Mitteldorf and Dorion Sagan sure think so! Cracking the Aging Code is a book whose central argument boils down to “aging is good for the species and the plan…

Have we got aging all wrong? Josh Mitteldorf and Dorion Sagan sure think so! Cracking the Aging Code is a book whose central argument boils down to “aging is good for the species and the plan…

Book six of Critical Aging Summer is a cranky polemic about how attempting to do anything for your health is pretty much pointless, because you’ll die no matter what you do. Barbara Ehrenreic…

Steven Austad’s delightful Methuselah’s Zoo is worth reading even if you don’t care about aging or longevity. It’s an engrossing work of natural history, detailing the very …

Super Agers, by Eric Topol (2025, Simon and Schuster, 464p.) In 1 sentence: Worth it for the footnotes. Super Agers left me ambivalent. It’s quite different from the first three books I read for Cr…

Ageless, by Andrew Steele, stumbles a bit out of the gate, but is ultimately a charming exploration of the biology of aging and possible routes to intervention. Worth a read.

There’s optimism about where science can take us, and then there’s Sergey Young’s The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider’s Guide to the Breakthroughs that W…

Modern Biology: Its Conceptual Foundations, a 1967 compendium of thirty landmark papers from the 17th-20th century, shows how the central ideas of biology have been remarkably stable for more than …

The first book of Critical Aging Summer is probably the best, Why We Die, by Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan. An accessible introduction to the biology of aging, with a thoughtful discussion of t…

Reading Tolkien to my daughter, or The Best Book Club Goes Back to Middle Earth.

Did you know that synthetic biology is going to save the world?Or possibly destroy it?Maybe both!Or neither, you know, whatever. It depends. But it’s going to change everything, and you bette…

Okay, the obvious tease here would be to quote from “Octopus’s Garden.” I won’t do that. But here’s a fun book about cephalopod behavior.Other Minds, by Peter Godfrey-…

Hard sci-fi full of big ideas and unpleasant people. Pew! Pew!

Have you seen New York? Well, the book is better. John Dos Passos introduces us to the people and problems of New York City in the present day, a century ago.

In The Age of Living Machines, Susan Hockfield provides an optimistic introduction to the many ways biology could upend multiple industries. The science is explained clearly, and the use cases are …

The journey of Huck and James, as imagined by Samuel and Percival.

Aldous Huxley’s final novel offers readers the utopian alternative to Brave New World they never asked for: His brother Julian’s Transhumanism.

Introducing the world’s best book club to the wonders of Middle Earth…