loading . . . New books for December 2025: Climate Imagination, Invent Ed, Reparative Media, and more ## **Discover some of our most anticipated new releases for December 2025**
This month: A clarion call for visions of vibrant, hopeful climate futures; an essential guidebook on innovation in higher education; a study of how to repair our culture by reimagining how we make media; and more. Explore these books and a selection of our other new and soon-to-be-released titles below.
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### **_Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures_****edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn**
When we think of climate, the stories we tell about the future are often catastrophic: megastorms, crop failures, and heat waves loom over us, sending a signal that the problem is so vast, so complex, that it’s out of our control. That narrative is compelling for some, but leaves others feeling hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned. Even the most ardent champions of decarbonization sometimes focus more on sounding the alarm than on mapping out what success might look like. Without positive climate futures, visions of climate adaptation and resilience that we can work toward, it’s much harder to motivate broad-based efforts for change in the present. Through short speculative fiction, essays, and visual art, _Climate Imagination_ seeks to inspire a wave of narratives about what positive climate futures might look like for communities around the world.
**You might also like**** _Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age_****edited by Joshua Glenn**
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### **_Invent Ed: How an American Tradition of Innovation Can Transform College Today_****by Caroline Field Levander**
_Invent Ed_ is a much-needed contribution to the broad ecosystem of innovation, creativity, and higher education in America. Our country’s many generations of inventors, from Benjamin Franklin to modern visionaries like Steve Jobs, have made important new discoveries by putting existing knowledge into unexpected new combinations. This inventive method has led to the discoveries that have made the nation a global power.
**You might also like**** _Critical Thinking for Medical and Graduate Students_****by Jonathan M. Berman, Troy Camarata and Tony A. Slieman**
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### **_Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture_****by Aymar Jèan Escoffery**
Can producing stories and developing platforms to support people who have been harmed by multiple, intersecting systems heal those systems? In _Reparative Media_ , Aymar Jèan Escoffery argues that this is exactly how we repair our culture and heal harms from racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and religious discrimination: by reconsidering how we make media, how we connect through technology, and how we generate knowledge.
**You might also like**** _Governing Babel: The Debate over Social Media Platforms and Free Speech—and What Comes Next_****by John P. Wihbey**
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### **_The Architect and the Animal_****edited by Kostas Tsiambaos**
In _The Architect and the Animal_ , 26 different architects look at how 26 different animals, from A to Z, have found their way into modern architectural discourse. The animal was typically approached in this discourse not through its various cultural or symbolic identities but as a body examined under a formalistic scientific lens. In this volume, the authors explore a less operative—and more meaningful—understanding of animal references and representations in twentieth-century architecture. Both playful and serious, there is nothing quite like this book.
**You might also like**** _Architecture Follows Fish: An Amphibious History of the North Atlantic_****by André Tavares**
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### **_Deep Change: Creating Space for Meaningful Transformation_****by Kees Dorst**
The nature of the problems we are facing has shifted, becoming more open, complex, dynamic, and networked than ever before. As a consequence, domains across society are finding out the hard way that “business as usual” doesn’t work anymore and that our current modes of innovation fall far short of what is needed. Our current reality truly requires us to change our thinking on a deep level, embrace a different logic, and develop new approaches that go beyond mere problem solving. In _Deep Change_ , Kees Dorst shows how this can be done.
**You might also like**** _Sentido: Finding Sense and Purpose in Design Leadership_****by Alison Rand**
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### **_Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice_****by Tom Williams**
In _Degrees of Freedom_ , Tom Williams explores critical questions at the intersection of robotics and social justice. He considers the ways in which roboticists design their robots’ appearance, how robots think and act, how robots perceive people, and the domains into which robots are deployed. The book highlights not only the ways roboticists tend to reinforce white patriarchal power structures but also how roboticists might instead subvert those power structures by applying theories and methods from a diverse range of fields.
**You might also like**** _How That Robot Made Me Feel_****edited by Ericka Johnson**
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### **_README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines_****by W. Patrick McCray**
In _README_ , historian Patrick McCray argues that in order for computers to become ubiquitous, people first had to become interested in them, learn about them, and take the machines seriously. A powerful catalyst for this transformation was, ironically, one of the oldest information technologies we have: books. The author uses a carefully chosen selection of books, some iconic and others obscure, to describe this technological revolution as it unfolded in the half-century after 1945. The book begins with a fundamental question: How does a new technology become well known and widespread? McCray answers this by using books as a window into significant moments in the history of computing, publishing, and American culture.
**You might also like**** _What Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds_****by Blaise Agüera y Arcas**
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### **_Thresholds of Digital Gameplay_**** __ by Daniel L. Gardner**
Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account logins, controllers, and an assortment of menus, settings, and other peripheral-to-gameplay elements support a range of practical and necessary functions that result from the transformation of gameplay into digital gameplay, as well as broader shifts toward an increasingly networked and data-driven world. The games industry has adopted usability testing on top of play testing to evaluate how these interfaces may influence the accessibility and success of their game software, but how embedding gameplay within webs of software, hardware, and platform infrastructures impacts the medium, players, and production has not yet been fully explored. In _Thresholds of Digital Gameplay_ , Daniel Gardner demonstrates how a series of interfaces and other elements on the periphery of digital gameplay fundamentally alter the phenomena of gaming.
**You might also like**** _The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice_****by Eivind Røssaak**
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