More catalogs from university presses started arriving almost immediately after the last roundup of spring titles appeared—and in going through them, a couple of topical clusters of books struck me as notable. Here is a quick overview. Quoted passages come from material provided by the publishers.
What do ant colonies, online subcultures, the publishing industry and the device you are using to read this all have in common? Each is, in some sense, a network embedded in still wider networks. They, like myriad other phenomena, can be depicted in geometric diagrams in which the components of a system (“vertices”) are connected by lines (“edges”) representing interactions or relationships.
Researchers across many disciplines understand how systems and processes can be conceptualized as networks. The lay public, on the whole, does not. Anthony Bonato’s Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature (Hopkins University Press, May) aims to bring nonspecialist readers up to speed on elements of the network perspective. Everything from “Bitcoin transactions to neural connections” and “political landscapes to climate patterns” can be mapped via dots and lines. The author’s use of demotic labels seems well-advised, given that “Vertices and Edges” seems much less commercially viable as a title.
Some networks make it a priority to remain diagrammable, of course. Isak Ladegaard’s Open Secrecy: How Technology Empowers the Digital Underworld (University of California Press, May) looks into the “military-grade encryption, rerouting software, and cryptocurrencies” enabling “shadowy groups to organize collective action.” Examples include dark-web markets for illegal drugs, the activities of online hate groups and the efforts of Chinese citizens to remain connected to parts of the internet blocked by the Great Firewall. In each case, those running stealth networks “move through cyberspace like digital nomads, often with law enforcement and other powerful actors on their tails.”
Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (University of Minnesota Press, June) offers “a new theory of meaning in language and computation” applicable to the production of texts by artificial intelligence based on large language models.
Generative AI “does not simulate cognition, as widely believed,” he argues, “but rather creates culture” instead of just shuffling together fragments of it. (This is perhaps as good an occasion as any to issue my prediction that 2025 will see the first best-selling novel written by an AI algorithm.)
On an altogether more dire note, Daniel Oberhaus’s The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, February) warns that the use of AI in psychiatry has shown “vanishingly little evidence” of improving patient outcomes. The problem is not one of engineering but of programming: The algorithms incorporate “deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale,” posing “significant risks to vulnerable people.”
In old-school psychodynamic therapy, what’s said during the consultation does not leave the room. The author warns that a “psychiatric surveillance economy” is emerging, one “in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms.”
Doubling down on a strictly defined and vigilantly enforced understanding of sex and gender as binary is high on the MAGA cultural agenda. A few books out this spring insist on the ambiguities and complexities, even so.
Agustín Fuentes offers perhaps the most basic challenge to traditional assumptions with Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary (Princeton University Press, May). Arguing on the basis of recent scientific research, the book “explain[s] why the binary view of the sexes is fundamentally flawed,” with “compelling evidence from the fossil and archaeological record that attests to the diversity of our ancestors’ sexual bonds, gender roles, and family and community structures.”
The ability to survive and thrive in unwelcoming circumstances is a focus of the writings collected in To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers (University Press of Kentucky, April), edited by Rae Garringer. The term “two-spirit” refers to a nonbinary gender category recognized among some Indigenous peoples in North America. Contributors discuss “themes of erasure, environmentalism, violence, kinship, racism, Indigeneity, queer love, and trans liberation” in Appalachia, exploring “the writers’ resilience in reconciling their complex and often contradictory connections to home.”
Transgender philosophy is covered at some length in an entry recently added to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Talia Mae Bettcher, whose work figures prominently in the entry’s bibliography, continues her work in the field with Beyond Personhood (University of Minnesota Press, March), presenting “a theory of intimacy and distance” that proposes “an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity.”
Engineering and programming enter transgender studies’ already interdisciplinary ambit with Oliver L. Haimson’s Trans Technologies (MIT Press, February), which draws on the author’s “in-depth interviews with more than 100 creators of technology” for trans people, showing “how trans people often must rely on community, technology, and the combination of the two to meet their basic needs and challenges.” From the book’s description and the author’s published articles, it seems that the technology in question tends to be digital: social networks, games, extended reality systems (akin to virtual reality but with additional capacities). The book also considers the factors shaping, and in some cases restricting, innovation in trans tech.
To close this list, there’s The Dream of a Common Movement (Duke University Press, April), a collection of writings by and interviews with Urvashi Vaid (1958–2022) edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman. Urvashi Vaid was a feminist and a civil rights advocate whose work “over the course of four decades fundamentally shaped the LGBTQ movement.” Her perspective that “the goal of any liberation movement should be transformation, not assimilation” seems compatible with an older principle, which holds that an injury to one is an injury to all.
Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.
