I love watching five-star prediction videos on BookTube, partly because we’re often so wrong about what we’re going to like. I can pretty reliably predict which books I’ll give a four-star rating because that’s where the majority of my reading falls: they’re books I enjoyed but haven’t risen to the level of all-time favourites. Five stars is a trickier prospect, though—almost by definition, they need to surprise me. They’re the books that really knock my socks off, and it’s hard to see those coming.

So, today I’m placing my bets on the next book I’ll give five stars. I have five options, ordered from least to most likely. There are two factors here: the first is which book I’m actually going to read soon, and the second is my rating.

Content for All Access members continues below. Membership is $6 a month or $60 a year and gives you access to exclusive content across all 20+ of Book Riot’s newsletters, plus community features.

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.

This story was originally published by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This isn’t what I had in mind when I studied Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory.

Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist perhaps most famous for his description of the “butterfly effect,” which poses that small changes in initial conditions can produce large changes in long-term results. This became evident to him when running numerical weather forecasting models, in which even the rounding of a variable from six digits to three digits would lead to vastly different predicted outcomes in the atmosphere. His work led to great leaps in weather forecasting, and today’s era of ensemble forecasting in which multiple weather predictions are generated from the same set of different yet similar initial meteorological conditions.

The butterfly effect came to mind when I read that upper air weather observations were being temporarily halted by the National Weather Service in parts of Alaska, New York, and Maine due to staffing shortages. The Trump regime’s chaotic approach to so-called efficiency in the federal workforce has wreaked havoc upon civil service, including at NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate who is Palestinian, was detained by the Department of Homeland Security almost one week ago. Since then, Khalil, who is in the United States on a green card, has still not been charged with a crime. And representatives from Columbia University remain markedly silent on his case. On Friday morning, the university said the Trump administration sent ICE agents to raid Columbia dorms. 

BREAKING: The US Justice Department is examining whether student protests at Columbia University over the genocide in Gaza violated federal terrorism laws, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said today.

Blanche’s department previously said the investigation is also looking… pic.twitter.com/sLuUs8dgjQ

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) March 14, 2025

Amid the crackdown, the arrest has sparked large protests—both for Khalil’s individual freedom, and for the Palestinian cause he publicly championed on Columbia’s campus.

“He has no connections to Hamas whatsoever. His one and only goal was to get Columbia University to divest from its complicity in Israeli government crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.” 

This week, Tulsi Gabbard had her first brush with controversy as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, when it became known that she had picked as her deputy a right-wing podcaster named Daniel Davis, who had regularly assailed the Israeli government and its war in Gaza, accusing Israel of “pursuing ethnic cleansing” and criticizing US support for what he called “Netanyahu’s war.” Within hours of Jewish Insider breaking this story on Wednesday, which sparked immediate criticism, Gabbard reversed course on appointing Davis, a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Defense Priorities think tank, to this powerful position that oversees the compiling of the President’s Daily Brief, the collection of intelligence assessments that goes to the White House and top policymakers.

Davis’ fervent opposition to Israel’s war—rooted in the non-interventionist tradition of the far right—was too much to bear for senators and Trump administration officials. He became a victim of the never-ending campaign mounted by pro-Israel hawks to keep such critical voices far from positions of power. But the focus on Davis’ stance on Israel distracted from a truly scandalous aspect of this near-appointment: By picking Davis, a former Army lieutenant colonel with no intelligence community experience, Gabbard sought to hire for this important and highly sensitive position a prolific disseminator of pro-Russia messaging, who himself has been embraced by state-controlled Russian media outlets for the positions he espouses and platforms. Yet Davis’ extensive amplification of pro-Putin talking points received little, if any, attention in the media coverage of this hullabaloo.

Davis posts episodes of his YouTube Deep Dive podcast daily; sometimes he produces multiple episodes a day. In recent months, most shows have focused on the Russia-Ukraine war, with Davis and his guests usually pounding on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and criticizing US assistance for Ukraine. There is not much, if any, criticism of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, his launching of the war, or the atrocities committed by his forces.

In a January episode typical of the show, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor called on Trump to walk away from Ukraine: “The win for us is extricating us from this tar baby, get out, say good bye move on… Announce we’re leaving, we’re out, we’re not going to do this anymore.” He noted that the United States should not even try to craft a negotiated end to the conflict. Davis agreed and said, “This is what makes sense.” He then cited a key Kremlin talking point, asserting that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has no interest in moving against other European nations and is only “focused on protecting the ethnic Russians in the eastern part of what was Ukraine.”

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

24 New York Times-Recommended Fiction Books for Spring

Spring is right around the corner! Time to make some decisions about which books you’re going to take outside while you breathe in that fresh, verdant air. If you need an assist with your seasonal TBR, The Times has a list of 24 novels to look forward to. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, is bound to be a bestseller, I’m looking forward to reading Tilt by Emma Pattee (full disclosure, I know her, but as you can see I’m not the only one excited about this book), The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is also on this horror fan’s list, as are Ocean Vuong’s much-anticipated The Emperor of Gladness, and Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory. This list is a great reminder that we’re set up for a sensational season of reading.

We Need Diverse Books Inaugural Reading Day!

Well this is the fun and uplifting news I needed at the end of an exhausting week. The esteemed and hardworking team over at We Need Diverse Books is organizing a day to celebrate diverse books and reading. Readers are encouraged to pick up books by people from marginalized communities on April 3rd. As many voices from the WNDB team, including Dhonielle Clayton (Blackout) and Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist), message, it’s important to make sure diverse books are on those shelves because everyone stands to benefit from reading books that represent the underrepresented. WNDB will be posting resources on how to find diverse books and will provide a diverse book to an underresourced school for every $10 donated. Schools and readers could use all the help they can get these days. Check out this article for more information on why diverse books are important and how you can participate.

Charlotte Beradt began having strange dreams after Hitler took power in Germany in 1933. She was a Jewish journalist based in Berlin and, while banned from working, she began asking people about their dreams. After fleeing the country in 1939 and eventually settling in New York, she published some of these dreams in a book in 1966. Below, in a new translation from Damion Searls, are some of the dreams that she recorded.

 

Three days after Hitler seized power, Mr. S., about sixty years old, the owner of a midsize factory, had a dream in which no one touched him physically and yet he was broken. This short dream depicted the nature and effects of totalitarian domination as numerous studies by political scientists, sociologists, and doctors would later define them, and did so more subtly and precisely than Mr. S. would ever have been able to do while awake. This was his dream:

Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation or displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised. The only way I was physically able to keep standing there was by fixing my eyes on his clubfoot as he limped out. I stood like that until I woke up.

The legendary musician tells Katty Kay about the collaborative spirit of jazz

More people are tuned in to what’s happening in public libraries and public schools than ever before. This is a good thing and it is also long overdue. Many have been shouting about this from the rooftops and from the streets for years.

This tuning in means that the continuing onslaught of awful library bills being proposed across various U.S. states is getting more attention. Again, a great and beyond necessary thing. But with the kind of reception and blasting that librarian criminalization bills are seeing on social media and in the broader media, it’s worth noting that none of these bills are new. Are they connected to what was laid out in Project 2025? Absolutely. However, these bills began long before Project 2025 was spelled out because we, as Americans, have been living the Project 2025 playbook since at least 2021.

Here’s the thing: there is not obscenity in these institutions. Obscenity is defined by the three-part Miller Test:

whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; andwhether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Key phrase repeated twice in the Miller Test is “as a whole.”