New Book Releases for the Week of July 15, 2025
Featuring new releases from Adam Aleksic, Wendy Johnson, Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore, and Katherine Larson
This week, we're diving into the often unseen forces that rewire our brains. These new releases look into the ways social media changes how we speak in the real world, how our interaction with our delicate ecosystems can transform us,
The Porchlight staff members choosing books each week include Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Gabbi Cisneros, Jasmine Gonzalez, and Dylan Schleicher. As expert booksellers, we browse publisher catalogs and explore new titles from across the book industry to discover what captures our interest, and we're excited to share our findings with readers like you.
Unless otherwise noted, all book descriptions are provided by their respective publishers.
Our Recommended Books This Week
Gabbi's pick: Algospeak : How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic, published by Knopf
From “brainrot” memes and incel slang to the trend of adding “-core” to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We’re entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the invisible forces driving social media algorithms. Thankfully, Algospeak is here to explain.
As a professional linguist, Adam Aleksic understands the gravity of language and the way we use it: he knows the ways it has morphed and changed, how it reflects society, and how, in its everyday usage, we carry centuries of human history on our tongues. As a social media influencer, Aleksic is also intimately familiar with the internet’s reach and how social media impacts the way we engage with one another. New slang emerges and goes viral overnight. Accents are shaped or erased on YouTube. Grammatical rules, loopholes, and patterns surface and transform language as we know it. Our interactions, social norms, and habits—both online and in person—shift into something completely different.
As Aleksic uses original surveys, data, and internet archival research to usher us through this new linguistic landscape, he also illuminates how communication is changing in both familiar and unexpected ways. From our use of emojis to sentence structure to the ways younger generations talk about sex and death (see unalive in English and desvivirse in Spanish), we are in a brand-new world, one shaped by algorithms and technology. Algospeak is an energetic, astonishing journey into language, the internet, and what this intersection means for all of us.
Jasmine's pick: Kinship Medicine: Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves by Wendy Johnson, MD, MPH, published by North Atlantic Books
Our modern way of living is incompatible with our survival. Most of us intuitively know this truth, but almost everything in our society encourages us to ignore it. Dr. Wendy Johnson confronts this undeniable fact and breaks down how we think and act every day in ways that undermine our individual and collective well-being.
The antidotes to many of the causal factors of poor health—loneliness, industrial diets, systemic inequality, fear of death, profit-based healthcare—are relational, with each other and with the living earth. Through evidence from public health, sociology, anthropology, human ecology, and her experience as a family physician, Dr. Wendy Johnson will show you how:
- We must incorporate an “ecosystem” perspective into modern medicine
- What you ingest and where you live can reinforce or upset your body’s delicate balance
- Eliminating one organism in an ecosystem can affect all the others
- Histories of trauma can be passed down for generations
- Rekindling our relationships to non-human life is essential to our well-being
- Being closer to death can release some of its power over us
- Actions of communities will be stronger and more lasting than any individual efforts
You will leave with a clear vision of what a new society might look like, methods to accomplish this transformation, and concrete examples of where it is being done successfully.
Sally's pick: The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact by Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore, published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers
The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact presents a game-changing synthesis of 50 years of leadership research as a comprehensive guide for seasoned and aspiring leaders, and anyone who wants to help their boss become a better leader.
Authors Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore, leadership coaches and leaders of the Institute of Coaching, translate academic research and their extensive experience in leading and coaching into a practical, self-coaching roadmap for your own growth in these times of exponential change and disruption.
This book organizes the science of leadership (15,000+ studies and articles showing what improves individual, team, and organizational performance) into nine capacities which build upon each other. Each capacity is brought to life by real-life stories, a science overview, practices, and ways to deal with overuse. These capacities are organized into three levels with increasing complexity:
Self-Oriented
1. Conscious - See clearly, including myself
2. Authentic - Care
3. Agile - Flex
Other-Oriented
4. Relational - Help
5. Positive - Strengthen
6. Compassionate - Resonate
System-Oriented (team and organization)
7. Shared - Share
8. Servant - Serve
9. Transformational - Transform
Whether you're a C-suite executive, an emerging leader, or a professional coach or consultant, The Science of Leadership delivers the fundamentals you need to know. You will quiet your ego and feel more fulfilled as a leader as your impact grows. Leading will feel more like flying than trudging uphill, with more ease, less strain, and more pleasure.
Dylan's pick: Wedding of the Foxes: Essays by Katherine Larson, published by Milkweed Editions
From celebrated poet and ecologist Katherine Larson, an elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth. Raising two children, coping with pandemic isolation, and grappling with the magnitude of the current extinction crisis, Katherine Larson finds herself in need of an antidote for despair. This is when Larson encounters kintsugi—the art of repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer.
Wedding of the Foxes borrows from this ancient practice to create a new interpretative framework, one that seeks beauty in both breakage and unexpected connections. Here, Larson juxtaposes the elaborate courtship dance of sandhill cranes with scientific reports on diminishing avian populations to shed light on the urgency of climate crisis. She braids the wisdoms of a wonderfully varied range of forebears and predecessors—Gaston Bachelard, Tawada Yōko, Francis Ponge—who share her dream of a liberated consciousness. She weaves Susan Sontag’s examinations of cinematic disaster with the legacy of Godzilla to highlight nature as both savior and destroyer, and she writes letters to Japanese women writers whose work has taught her new ways of being. Each of these disparate parts come together to highlight the beauty in “what falls through the cracks and blurs into other moments.”
Brimming with the dazzling yet fragile relationships we share with each other and with other species, these lush microcosms invite us to embrace resilience and mindfulness—and the illuminating truth of our connections.
Buy these recommended new book releases and more directly from Porchlight Book Company.
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