It’s a war on three fronts: Replace some of our single-use plastics with truly compostable materials. Replace another chunk with reusable containers, like metal or glass. And, finally, tweak the economic incentives so plastic recycling actually works. This isn’t my battle plan; it’s a theme I heard over and over as I spent the past year talking to scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and policy folk.
None of these ploys is a slam dunk. They’ll need not only innovation but also binders full of smart government incentives and regulation—all of which, of course, will be resisted by petroleum firms. But if you add up all these unplastic developments, you’ll find grounds for cautious optimism: We’ve got a path to a world less littered with deathless plastic waste.
Throughout “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” Evan Friss emphasizes that the most successful bookshops do more than sell novels, nonfiction and children’s literature. They thrive when they become community gathering places. As he writes about the early days of New York’s Gotham Book Mart: “It was a museum, art gallery, therapist’s couch, disheveled English professor’s office, grandmother’s living room, and Parisian cafe, all wrapped in one.”
As our species developed its language skills, “we became entirely dependent on words for every aspect of our lives,” Mithen writes. “To maintain such dependency, evolution not only gave us the joy of words but made language the life force of being human.” Mithen’s book is engaging, detailed, and incredibly thorough — and brings a fresh and welcome perspective to a longstanding puzzle.
In the ultra-entertaining and informative “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982,” Nashawaty makes the case that the octet of flicks altered the trajectory, not only of the auteurs at the helm, but of Hollywood filmmaking.
There is no better way to introduce Jonathan’s book than his own words: “My goal in writing this book is to provide readers with a mental toolkit to better understand filter coffee brewing and how we can affect it,” he says in the introduction, adding that the book was not written to suggest the best brewing method or kettle, which is too subjective. Rather, he wanted to help readers explore the possibilities of coffee brewing (particularly percolation methods, the first type of brewing that Jonathan began to explore) more efficiently.