While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on—the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase—"the control of nature"—seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite

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In this landmark book, Ackerman confronts the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and meddlesome creature, Homo sapiens, is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth and takes her readers on an exhilarating journey through this new reality, introducing many of the people and ideas now creating -- perhaps saving -- our future and that of our fellow creatures.

"The Most Human Human" is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. Its starting point is the annual Turing Test, which pits artificial intelligence programs against people to determine if computers can "think.

Essays that explore what it means to be a human being draw upon the author's personal experiences; thoughts on memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the visual arts.

Presents a narrative nonfiction that examines the human impact upon the earth and how it would respond without the pressure of human presence.

"The security consultant "Jane Smith" receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, was a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spiral beyond her control. Soon, Jane and her family are...

So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. One way to look at human civilization, she says, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. He she explores the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. From the Mojave to Iceland and Australia, she examines how the very sorts of interventions...