Columbia University Press

Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of EpidemiologyThe media constantly bombard us with news of health hazards lurking in our everyday lives, but many of these hazards turn out to have been greatly overblown. According to author and epidemiologist Geoffrey C. Kabat, this hyping of low-level environmental hazards leads to needless...

The Science and Politics of Dietary AdvicePopularized by Michael Pollan in his best-selling In Defense of Food, Gyorgy Scrinis concept of nutritionism refers to the reductive understanding of nutrients as the key indicators of healthy foodan approach to food that now dominates nutrition science, dietary advice, and food marketing. Scrinis argues...

Epigenetics can potentially revolutionize our understanding of the structure and behavior of biological life on Earth. It explains why mapping an organism's genetic code is not enough to determine how it develops or acts and shows how nurture combines with nature to engineer biological diversity. Surveying the twenty-year history of the field while...

Using evolution as the template to understand growth, The Nature of Value takes a first-principles approach to explore the parallels between economic and ecological systems. Not only does Gogerty show how value is born out of tiny sparks of adaptive innovation, but he also explores the full scope of the economy as a complex network. He borrows...

Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, such...

As long as there have been financial markets, there have been bubbles -- those moments in which asset prices inflate far beyond their intrinsic value, often with ruinous results. Yet economists are slow to agree on the underlying forces behind these events. In this book Jose A. Scheinkman offers new insight into the mystery of bubbles. Noting some...