Roundup of spring 2025 university press books (opinion)

Scanning the university press books announced as forthcoming in the new year, I noted a few that overlap in topical or thematic ways. A reader interested in one might also be in another. The following seasonal roundup has been culled and arranged with that possibility in mind.

Quoted passages are taken from material provided by the publishers. One volume noted here was listed in a spring catalog but has already appeared. Otherwise, all books are scheduled for publication in 2025.

Making his way around the continental United States to question fellow citizens about their “markedly different social and political commitments,” Anand Pandian gathered the impressions assembled in Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down (Stanford University Press, May).

“Trying to understand the forces that have hardened our suspicions of others,” Pandian imagines “strategies of mutual aid and communal caretaking” that could foster “a life in common with others.” But the “interlocking walls” of Americans’ “fortified homes and neighborhoods, bulked-up cars and trucks, visions of the body as an armored fortress, and media that shut out contrary views” seem as if designed to keep us fortified against the rest of the human condition.

And yet the walls do come down sometimes. Moments of empathy and generosity can bridge the gaps among strangers, especially during disasters, which would seem like prime occasions for self-serving behavior at its most Hobbesian. Drawing on “cutting-edge research on the sociology and psychology of altruism,” Nicole Karlis’s Your Brain on Altruism: The Power of Connection and Community During Times of Crisis (University of California Press, March) looks to kindness in critical circumstances as a resource for mitigating “the epidemic of loneliness and build[ing] a more compassionate and resilient society.”

Gert Tinggaard Svendsen pursues a similar pro-social agenda in Trust (Hopkins University Press, July). High levels of trust within a society foster “more cooperation and social responsibility, advantages in economic growth and social stability, and happier workplaces.” A population subject to continuous surveillance is likely to experience declining mutual trust and a loss of the associated public benefits. Society would do better, the author proposes, to monitor itself less and direct resources instead to “improve competition, advance research, and nurture innovation.”

Steven Sloman takes up the social impact of stringent moral judgment in The Cost of Conviction: How Our Deepest Values Lead Us Astray (MIT Press, May). Drawing on research into the psychology of decision-making (including studies of “judgment, conscious and unconscious decision-making processes, the roles of emotion, and … habit and addiction”), the author contrasts choices based on achieving optimal outcomes, on the one hand, and those guided by the decider’s “deepest values about which actions are appropriate,” on the other.

Sloman argues that the latter framework—when carried too far in frequency or intensity, at least—has escalating consequences: “We oversimplify, grow disgusted and angry, and act in ways that contribute to social polarization.” It happens a lot.

Three new books explore enigmatic corners of natural history—and offer some relief from the human crisis mode. Science fact can indeed be stranger than science fiction.

I look forward especially to Mindy Weisberger’s Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind-Control (Hopkins University Press, April). Certain fungi and viruses infect some invertebrates, hacking into their neurochemistry and using them to propagate—creating “armies of cicadas, spiders, and other hosts that helplessly follow a zombifier’s commands, living only to serve the parasite’s needs until death’s sweet release (and often beyond).”

Sounding less lurid, perhaps, but still highly intriguing is Karen G. Lloyd’s Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth (Princeton University Press, May). Organisms have evolved that populate the most inhospitable regions on Earth, “from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost,” as well as the “high-altitude volcanoes of the Andes.” These “truly alien” creatures “can exist in boiling water, pure acid, and bleach … living in ways that are totally foreign to us surface dwellers.”

Some of the same organisms may appear in Stacy Alaimo’s The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters With Deep-Sea Life (University of Minnesota Press, May). With advanced technology enabling research at ever deeper levels of the oceans, researchers are discovering thousands of species “typically cast as ‘alien,’” but all too vulnerable to humankind’s environmental impact.

A couple of forthcoming books sound almost like rejoinders to an Onion headline from 2002: “Getting Mom Onto Internet a Sisyphean Ordeal.” Eszter Hargittai and John Palfrey’s Wired Wisdom: How to Age Better Online (University of Chicago Press, July) identifies people 60 and over as “the internet’s fastest-growing demographic”—one “often nimble online and quicker to abandon social media platforms that don’t meet their needs.”

Based on “original interviews and survey results from thousands of people sixty and over in North America and Europe,” the study suggests that “fake news actually fools fewer people over sixty, who have far more experience evaluating sources and detecting propaganda.” (Which does not preclude that under-60s might simply be getting more credulous, of course.)

Cristina Douglas and Andrew Whitehouse, the editors of More-than-Human Aging: Animals, Robots, and Care in Later Life (Rutgers University Press, October 2024) find seniors accompanied by an array of companions, technological and organic. Contributors present “richly descriptive ethnographic accounts” of such relationships, “including moments of connection between seniors and dogs in a long-term care facility, human care for aging laboratory animals, and robotic companionship in later life.”

But we’ve all got to go at some point. Robert Garland’s What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, April) is a travel guide to the undiscovered country. The author compiles advice and admonitions regarding the post-life experience from a number of ancient traditions. Is there food in the afterlife? How about sex? And what will the neighbors be like? It’s good to be prepared, although your afterlife may vary.

And finally, meriting a special award for book titles, we have Edward Tenner’s Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press/University of Pennsylvania Press, April)—the title a nod to “the paradoxes that can result from the inherent contradictions between consumer safety and product marketing.” Making use of “concepts from economics, engineering, psychology, science, and sociology,” the author explores “the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity.”

The title image provides the perfect metaphor for something otherwise hard to communicate. Finding oneself in the smoking lounge on the Hindenburg, dread would be a totally reasonable response, but impossible to think about for very long, since it comes much too late to make any difference. Some people are finding themselves in that lounge quite a bit, actually.