58 Scientific American, June 2022
RECOMMENDED
Edited by Amy Brady
Illustration by London LaddIN BRIEF
What Your Food Ate: How to Heal
Our Land and Reclaim Our Health
by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé.
W. W. Norton, 2022 ($30)Seeking to improve our health through nutrition,
we might count carbs, go keto or become vegan. But
other drivers of nourishment go deeper. In this timely
investigation, geologist David R. Mont-
gomery and biologist Anne Biklé dig
into the earth to determine how we are
not just what we eat but also the land
our food comes from. They call out
agricultural challenges, such as microbial deficien-
cies in soil, which affect both crops and livestock.
And they detail trans form a tive farming tactics,
both functional and economic, because “we still
have time to choose the regenerative path for our
soils, our planet, and ourselves.” — Mandana ChaffaLapvona: A Novel
by Ottessa Moshfegh. Penguin Press, 2022 ($27)Ottessa Moshfegh brings her trademark brutality
to the Middle Ages in this allegorical pandemic
novel. In the fictional Eastern European village of
Lapvona, a boy named Marek
befriends a proto-scientist named
Ina, whose experimental tinctures
with herbs and flowers bring relief
to a community suffering through
plagues, droughts and famines. Meanwhile Lord
Villiam stays isolated in his luxurious home, weap-
onizing religious faith to keep the dying masses
angry with one another instead of him. Moshfegh
puts Marek and Ina on a thrilling collision course
with Villiam to take over the village, while interro-
gating the role faith plays in social and environ-
mental abuses of power. — Adam MorganBitch: On the Female of the Species
by Lucy Cooke. Basic Books, 2022 ($30)
In this effervescent exposé, British zoologist Lucy
Cooke documents the “scientific phallocracy” that
has warped our perceptions of biological sex in the
animal kingdom. Cooke reveals how sexist cultural
and historical influences, particularly
those of the Victorian era, led scientists
to misinterpret, undervalue and ignore
the female of the species. Her playful,
enlightening tour of the vanguard of
evolutionary biology not only highlights animals
that disrupt our assumptions about biological sex
and its “natural” behaviors (lesbian albatrosses,
jezebel bluebirds, infanticidal meerkat matriarchs,
orgasmic female macaques), it also celebrates the
underappreciated scholars whose research is shifting
this reductive paradigm. — Dana Dunham
The
Playbook:
How to Deny
Science, Sell
Lies, and Make
a Killing in
the Corporate
World
by Jennifer
Jacquet.
Pantheon,
2022 ($28)Trusting the scientific process is undeni-
ably the right thing to do when trying to
make good decisions in a complicated
world. But it can also be no fun. Many
of the truths science reveals—that burning
fossil fuels harms the environment, that
smoking cigarettes causes cancer—are
real bummers. Wouldn’t it be fun to side
against the scientific consensus for once?
If you feel exhausted from constantly
taking the high road, The Playbook offers
an enticing alternative. Author Jennifer Jac-
quet, an associate professor of environmen-
tal studies at New York University, indulges
a reader’s fantasy of acting as a company
executive for whom science is simply anoth-
er facet of corporate propaganda. Present-
ed as a how-to guide for co-opting or cover-
ing up science in the name of Business, the
narration never breaks character.
I wondered more than once if a bad
actor could take the book at its word
and thrive in the corporate world by, for
instance, conducting industry-sponsored
studies and burying undesirable results or
pointing fingers at others when legitimate
issues with a company’s practices arise.
The Playbook is loaded with “success” sto-
ries of spun science, from retro classics
of oil, cigarette and Big Pharma giants to
modern-day malfeasance by technology
and vaping companies.
Without Jacquet’s dry humor suffusing
each chapter, the book would have made
for a depressing, exhaustive history of cor-
porations duping consumers, bypassing
regulators and silencing critics. But her
tone is gleeful, mimicking the rhetoric of
a motivational speaker turned corporate
consultant, advising retired professors to
“put your emeritus title to work” shilling
for companies. When a conflict arises be-tween science and your company’s prod-
ucts, she advises deflection: “DDT might
kill birds, but malaria, which DDT helps
prevent, kills people.”
One effect of the book’s tongue-in-
cheek format is a chilling realization that
the villains in The Playbook are extraordi-
narily banal. The tactics that enable their
misconduct have been recycled across
decades. Perhaps a powerful first step
to stopping the misuse of science, then,
is noticing these hackneyed themes—
and calling them out. — Maddie BenderNONFICTION
Selling Denial
What’s it like to ignore science?