Steph asks:
What are some good pop non-fiction books? Good pop economics books?
Mary Roach is always fun.
Everyone should read Search for An Abortionist.
Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein is a good one.
The Paradox of Choice is a bit old now, but it is one of my life-changing books.
Your Money or Your Life is a classic.
What Works for Women at Work is extremely good.
I’ve just gotten the No Club, but haven’t read it yet.
I also haven’t read The Voltage Effect, about why interventions don’t scale up and how to make scalable interventions, but the book talk I went to on it was informative.
I greatly enjoyed The Anthropocene Reviewed. Not a fan of John Green fiction. Huge fan of John Green non-fiction.
Speaking of memoirish stuff…
You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacy by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar.
She Memes Well by Quinta Brunson.
Grumpy Nation, what pop non-fiction books have you been enjoying? What should we be reading?
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
June 10, 2022 at 4:14 am
“Stuffed animals and pickled heads” is a fantastic book about natural history museums! (I read it a long time ago but it was memorable.)
“Pure America” by Elizabeth Carter, a recent short work on eugenics and sterilization in Virginia.
“Good to go” – the science of exercise and recovery
June 10, 2022 at 5:22 am
Thumbs up on “Your Money or your Life” (as personal finance). A classic pop-econ book that was really a great read for me (read-aloud to my husband after I finished it, because it was that good) was Galbraith’s The Affluent Society.
Anything by Chip and/or Dan Heath, for pop-psychology/behavior modification (in the same vein as Nudge, but I like theirs even more).
June 10, 2022 at 6:26 am
“Longitude” by Dava Sobel: very readable story about the invention of a clock that could be used in navigation to accurately determine longitude at sea.
“Mutants” by Armand Leroi: this fascinating book uses human mutants to explain developmental biology principles
Both of these are older (1995 and 2003, respectively), but I think would still hold up and are very well-written.
June 10, 2022 at 6:28 am
Previous message from FF–accidentally hit “post” too quickly
June 10, 2022 at 9:34 am
I heard Becca Levy on the radio a few weeks back and put her book on hold at the library– Breaking the Age Code. It’s a very pop-sci read about how beliefs about aging can fuel negative or positive physical outcomes in older age.
It put a framework around something that’s been bothering me in the back of my mind over the last few months. I’ve periodically been hearing casual comments about “can’t [do thing] like I used to,” and “I’m getting older, so I guess [activity or learning new thing] is just getting harder now.” Most of the people who’re saying these things I either know for sure are 5+ years younger than me or are people who I suspect are at least 10 years younger than me. The book serves as a reminder to not buy into that kind of thinking, which is personally useful. Especially since I intend to be a pretty happy and capable elderly person when the time comes.
June 10, 2022 at 10:09 am
Ooh, I should get that.
June 10, 2022 at 2:08 pm
That’s interesting. I feel like everyone I know wants to deny that aging is even happening to us until the effects are just too profound to ignore. Yes, sometimes you’re out of shape because you’ve been sitting in a chair too much instead of playing, and it’s not really about being old. But then you also can, for no reason, strain muscles doing things you’ve always done (like looking over your shoulder, or getting out of bed, or sleeping). Things actually do get less flexible and some things do take longer to heal. So I hope that’s not a book about envisioning yourself as spry to magically make yourself spry. It’s also good to just let yourself have glasses and hearing aids and walking sticks.
That said, I suppose some people could decide they can’t do something without even trying it first. I think I’m only feeling that way about parkour, which seems like it might be a bit stupid to be getting into anything beyond the basics at an age when “falling” is considered a reason to go to the hospital and “breaking a hip” can be very bad news indeed.
June 10, 2022 at 2:16 pm
From the research I’ve seen, a lot of the problem is actually incorrect attribution. The same people will have no decline in memory skills for example but while younger will be enh everyone forgets/guess I didn’t sleep well, when they’re older they overestimate and misattribute. Not that there aren’t aging related changes but there are also even more attribution errors.
June 10, 2022 at 3:41 pm
Misattribution is a big part of her argument, and not trying is another. And a third thing is stereotyping by healthcare providers and by others. Because if someone is dismissed or ignored purely due to aging, it has the same negative effect on them that it would if they were being dismissed or ignored due to their race or gender.
But she’s also making the point that you can apply positive age-related stereotypes/beliefs to yourself and others and make a difference. Whether you yourself are older or younger personally. It’s not about older people being younger– it’s about seeing the good of actual age, and seeing that some of the things that as a culture we in the US believe are “due to old age” aren’t necessarily due to old age.
I do have mental question marks about her studies, and I think that how she wishes people would mobilize socially against ageism isn’t for me… but I also think that there’s something to her argument. Culturally, we’re so accustomed to anti-age talk and beliefs that we often don’t even blink at them. You hit any group with enough negative stereotypes over and over again and it does have an effect, both internally and externally.
June 10, 2022 at 2:27 pm
I enjoyed Work Won’t Love You Back recently, and have immediately checked out The No Club as per the recommendation above! Drop the Ball was impactful but hard to implement for me.
Some time ago I read Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Bunch of Amateurs and enjoyed them all.
I also recently read From Equity Talk to Equity Walk about racial equity practices in Higher Ed and am puzzling over how best to implement the suggestions in my work.
June 10, 2022 at 2:58 pm
Tell me what you think!
My students a couple years ago said the next time I teach a specific elective I need to include Henrietta Lacks.
June 14, 2022 at 10:24 am
Quick book report on “The No Club” – it felt as though it was written specifically for me! The premise is that women tend to take on more service and that the “non-promotable tasks” we do can hold us back at promotion time. They provided a lot of practical advice, both for managing our own portfolio of service tasks and also for steps that managers and organizations can take to prevent women from becoming inequitably overloaded with low value tasks.
June 14, 2022 at 10:47 am
Nice!
June 10, 2022 at 10:12 pm
I really like both Amanda Montell’s books- Cultish: the Language of Fanaticism, and Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language.
I also just read and enjoyed The Secret Lives of Colors which was basically a bunch of 1-2 page vignettes about different color terms/hues through times and the pigments that were used for them
June 11, 2022 at 8:59 am
I’ll add a few more suggestions:
The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel is an interesting history book that makes the case that textiles drove the development of human culture
Factfulness by Hans Rosling (he created https://www.gapminder.org/ which has all kinds of fun data tools) talks about demographics and, for all the doom and gloom, things are better than they used to be for most people
June 16, 2022 at 12:13 pm
I recommended What Works for Women at Work to my yoga class and have been getting positive feedback. It’s a great analysis of real world solutions for professional women (and puts the awful Lean In to shame).
June 16, 2022 at 12:36 pm
I highly, highly recommend 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Particularly for those of us of a certain age, it covers all the things we should have learned about the “New World” but didn’t.