Another year has ended, another year in which I drafted a miles-long list of the new books I hoped to read and then failed spectacularly to read more than a meager handful of them. As meager handfuls go, though, it was thoroughly satisfying. Below are my favorite nonfiction releases of 2025, in no particular order.
Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton
An earlier book by Roy Scranton bears what may be the most perfect title ever: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. (Note: Not only is this book an essential read, but if the cover is kept visible it makes for highly effective small talk repellent during extended stays in public settings, i.e., airport layovers.) Impasse builds on the thesis that Scranton sketched out in Learning to Die, namely, that any honest assessment of our contemporary ecological predicament – marked by climate change, yes, but also air and water pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, and the biodiversity loss incurred by mass extinction – is bound to land on the conclusion that we are unlikely to MacGyver our way out of this one. Scranton challenges the Western “myth of progress” that holds that our human future must be bright, because mankind is brilliant, judging this storyline a gateway drug into delusional optimism. Optimism can be positive and productive, but when unmoored from reality, it rapidly deteriorates into denial, paralysis, escapism, and that vague, prickling anxiety we feel wafting up from the plaques of repressed dread gradually congealed to sludge within our collective nervous system. Rose-colored glasses are out, Scranton declares. Instead he advocates for the cultivation of “ethical pessimism,” a philosophy based in the acceptance of suffering, loss, and limitation as realities to meet with lucidity and grace, rather than glitches to correct. In the tradition of writers like Simone Weil and James Baldwin, Scranton views this acceptance as a portal into the deeply felt compassion at the heart of moral living, integral to altruism and solidarity. Impasse asks us to decide what kind of creatures we will be when our world ends. It is a painful question, but an urgent one.
The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates
Key to the “myth of progress” discussed above is the conviction that technological innovation will solve all our problems, that once technology is sufficiently advanced, every lofty social ambition will roll smoothly towards realization: justice and equity, prosperity, happiness for all. Underlying this confidence is the presumption that badness is some primordial element, a brutish anachronism destined for purging by the purifying blaze of modernity’s forward march. The more one reads of Laura Bates’ The New Age of Sexism, the harder it becomes to cling to this belief. Bates exposes the sexist ideology programmed into the most vaunted new tech, hardwired biases that have given rise to cutting-edge methods of abuse and exploitation. Meanwhile, the utopian future remains elusive. What we are witnessing instead is the dawn of a brave new world custom-built almost wholly by and for men, populated with all the cyber-brothels and uncomfortably youthful chatbot girlfriends one would expect of such a realm. This virtual reality we’re being shepherded into promises to be no haven for female inhabitants, if the Metaverse sexual assaults that Bates describes are any indication. Of course, the author is eager to reassure readers that she is not anti-tech; she calls for regulation as the remedy rather than a cease-and-desist. This is a reasonable, moderate, judicious, entirely predictable stance for her to take. For myself, though, faith in such safeguards is difficult to muster, and the implication that there could be a chatbot worth celebrating infinitely perplexing. Why can’t we chat with real live people? Or dogs, or plants? Why not just go outside?
The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life by Rob Dunn
The honeyguide, biologist Rob Dunn tells us, is an African bird whose taste for beeswax is stymied by its inability to infiltrate the hive. But the honeyguide is no quitter: long ago it learned that if it sang out to signal the location of a beehive, humans would come along and break open the hive in pursuit of honey—thereby granting the bird access to the coveted wax. Today, this mutualism – the scientific term for a beneficial relationship between species – has lapsed. “The birds no longer call because the humans no longer listen,” Dunn writes. Within industrialized societies, humans have grown isolated from the natural world, an ever-larger slice of our days spent indoors and online, logged in but disconnected, and ultimately alone. We hear a lot of lamenting about the loneliness epidemic, but what if, even more than our estrangement from one another, it is our alienation from the rest of creation that immiserates us? Dunn reminds readers that as one species among many we are not, and never have been, outside the weave of interdependence that defines life on earth. Even as individual organisms we are not discrete but composite beings, comprised of swarms of microbes in continuous interplay with the cells we call our own. The vision Dunn paints, of the biosphere flourishing through multi-species mutual aid, is not the naïve daydream of some wistful tree hugger. Dunn is a scientist and his vision reflects the real world. The trouble is that we have lost sight of it, because we have been turned away from it. Yet return is possible, if only we can salvage our species from systemic desolation.
Other Contenders:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad
Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd
Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime by Sarah Weinman
The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession with Medical Labels is Making Us Sicker by Suzanne O’Sullivan
