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Book Review · Section 08 of 08
Spring 2026
Books, considered slowly.
Long reads on long books — fiction, science, and the patient nonfiction that does not make the news.
Read & reviewed
2 reviews
Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality
★★★★★
A Nobel Prize-winning biologist turns his eye on the science of ageing — why we age, why we die, and whether biology might one day change the answer. Clear-eyed, rigorous, and unexpectedly moving.
Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI
★★★★★
A rigorous but accessible tour of the mathematics that makes AI work — from gradient descent and backpropagation to transformers — written for curious readers who want to understand not just what AI does but why it works.