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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Environment
by Pilita Clark
Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic by Saabira Chaudhuri (Blink Publishing)
We all know about the toll plastic pollution is taking on the health of humans and the planet. Less well known is this story of how big companies spent billions to get us hooked on the stuff, all the better to help them package their food, drink and soap as brands instead of bland commodities.
The Climate Diplomat: A Personal History of the COP Conferences by Peter Betts (Profile Editions)
The late Peter Betts was a respected figure in the labyrinthine annual UN climate summits that produced the 2015 Paris Agreement. His absorbing memoir, completed by his widow after his 2023 death from a brain tumour, is a revealing insider’s guide to how the world goes about solving the great challenge of our time.
Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change — in 50 Questions and Answers by Hannah Ritchie (Chatto & Windus/MIT)
If you have ever wondered if we can afford solar power, or if electric cars are really green, or whether heat pumps actually work, this highly readable book has all the facts you need. From nuclear energy to plant-based burgers, it gives brisk, smart insights into the big climate questions.
Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship with Cars by Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay (Wiley)
Our lust for cars is enormous, even though they have killed as many people as the first and second world wars combined and make our cities more dangerous, polluted and ugly than they need be. This book shows how we can change the car-industrial complex we have unwittingly created.
Climate Obstruction: A Global Assessment edited by J Timmons Roberts, Carlos R S Milani, Jennifer Jacquet and Christian Downie (Oxford)
There is no shortage of explanations for the decades of inadequate action on climate change, from the cost of green energy technologies to simple human nature. The academics behind this scholarly but important book show the effort has also been made far harder by the countries, companies and industries bent on deliberate obstruction.
Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the Climate Crisis by Tim Lenton (Oxford)
The world is edging ever closer to climate tipping points or critical thresholds that, once breached, can trigger potentially disastrous changes in big Earth systems. But this expert in the field says the spread of renewables, electric cars and climate action show that helpful sweeping change is also possible once positive tipping points are passed.
Science
by Clive Cookson
Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain by Masud Husain (Canongate)
Neurologist Husain has written an emotionally powerful medical memoir focusing on seven patients whose symptoms illustrate the workings — and failings — of the human brain. He delves deeply into the nature of human identity and how this relates to our belonging to a supportive social group. A worthy winner of the Royal Society’s 2025 Science Book Prize.
Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity by Eric Topol (Simon & Schuster)
The fast-growing anti-ageing movement is generating a wave of science books about living longer. Topol, an eminent US cardiologist, is in the sensible centre of the movement. He dispenses clear evidence-based advice for people keen to keep mind and body working healthily for as long as possible without indulging in biohacking fantasies.
Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction by Sadiah Qureshi (Allen Lane)
Science historian Qureshi examines the way living species become extinct through a complex interplay of natural environmental change, evolutionary biology and human activity — inadvertent or deliberate. Her rigorously researched tales, often depressing but occasionally uplifting, are told with a fine storytelling touch.
Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity by Marcus du Sautoy (4th Estate/Basic Books)
No one can communicate complex maths to non-mathematicians better than Du Sautoy. Here he illuminates the intricate relationships between numbers, nature and the creative arts, running through key mathematical principles that have inspired painters, architects, writers and musicians, consciously or unconsciously.
Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World by Michael E Mann and Peter J Hotez (Scribe/PublicAffairs)
Distinguished climatologist Mann and vaccinologist Hotez are outspoken opponents of what they see as powerful anti-science forces threatening human civilisation. The vehemence with which they denounce those spreading disinformation about climate change and public health will not appeal to everyone but their book is an important contribution to the current debate about the role of science in political discourse.
Technology
by John Thornhill
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (Allen Lane/Norton)
The Canadian analyst Wang offers a fresh perspective on the struggle for technological supremacy between China and the US. Drawn from his six years’ experience of working in China, Wang highlights the astonishing strengths of the engineering state, as well as its inhuman flaws. The lawyerly society of the US faces ferocious competition.
Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Macmillan/Flatiron)
A damning and intensely readable insider’s account of the careless people who run Facebook (now Meta). Untrammelled by any effective regulation, untroubled by any ethical code, our modern masters of the universe emerge as a disturbing and somewhat creepy bunch.
This Is For Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee (Macmillan/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The wry memoirs of the inventor of the World Wide Web recount the origins and development of one of the most consequential technologies in history and where and how it has gone wrong. This book is also an impassioned and hopeful argument for how the web’s original promise can be restored.
All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:
Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Maria Crawford
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: Critics’ choice
Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley by Jacob Silverman (Bloomsbury)
Some of Silicon Valley’s loudest-mouthed techies have emerged as leading cultural warriors in Donald Trump’s remaking of America. This provocative, if partisan, book explores why Elon Musk and friends have lurched so far to the right. But, as the FT review noted, it remains a mystery why the world’s richest man was so determined to gut the Federal government.
What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI about Evolution, Computing, and Minds by Blaise Agüera y Arcas (MIT)
A thoughtful AI researcher at Google presents a sprawling and absorbing account of the nature of intelligence. Contrary to popular opinion, Agüera y Arcas argues that some predictive AI models are already intelligent. Just as the natural world is inhabited by millions of different biological intelligences, so we should now expect wildly diverse and more powerful electronic intelligences.
Tell us what you think
What are your favourites from this list — and what books have we missed? Tell us in the comments below
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