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Here are this week’s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus .

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1. The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W.W. Norton)

2. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed)

3. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (W.W. Norton)

4. A Resistance History of the United States by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)

5. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon (Liveright)

6. The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail by Eric Jay Dolin (Liveright)

7. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben (Greystone Books)

8. Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) by Eve Babitz (NYRB)

9. The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government by Barbara McQuade (Seven Stories Press)

10. A Queer History of the United States: Revised And Expanded (ReVisioning History) by Michael Bronski

11. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade (Verso)

12. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn (W. W. Norton)

13. The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket Books)

14. A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros, John Howe (Transl.) (Verso)

15. Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life by Alex Mayyasi, Hosts of NPR’s Planet Money (W. W. Norton)

16. These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore (W. W. Norton)

17. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Beacon Press)

18. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore (Liveright)

19. Building Great Businesses: Create Momentum, Overcome Setbacks, and Scale with Confidence by Scott Becker (Forefront Books)

20. Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard (University of Chicago Press)

21. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Oregon State University Press)

22. The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis by Devin Thomas O’Shea (Haymarket Books)

23. The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary by Terry Tempest Williams (Grove Press)

24. How to Relax (Mindfulness Essentials #5) by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press)

25. Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe (Oni Press)

26. Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Spiegel & Grau)

27. A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps by Jonn Elledge (The Experiment)

28. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats by Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America)

29. How to Love (Mindfulness Essentials #3) by Thich Nhat Hanh, Jason DeAntonis (Illus.) (Parallax Press)

30. How Queer Bookshops Changed the World by A.J. West (Oneworld Publications)

31. Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America by Russell Shorto (W. W. Norton)

32. S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (Liveright)

33. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (Grove Press)

34. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (Liveright)

35. On Democracy by Walt Whitman (Library of America)

36. Elledge’s Nontrivial Trivia: The Seriously Enlightening Stories Behind Supposedly Simple Facts by John Elledge (The Experiment)

37. Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape by Manchán Magan (Chelsea Green)

38. Constitution of the United States by Founding Fathers (Applewood Books)

39. How to Focus (Mindfulness Essentials #9) by Thich Nhat Hanh, Jason DeAntonis (Illus.) (Parallax Press)

40. The Shortest History of Soccer: From Ancient Kicking Games to the World’s Most Popular Sport (The Shortest History Series) by Brian D. Bunk (The Experiment)

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A United Nations report on AI warns the technology is moving faster than governments can keep up, and the window of opportunity to establish effective global governance of it will not be open forever. The Preliminary Report from the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence presents AI as something of a mixed blessing. It says that the potential benefits of AI are enormous. If deployed and applied thoughtfully, the technology could support progress towards sustainable development goals, among other gains. On the other hand, a rapid, unchecked deployment of the technology at scale presents risks such as harm to the mental health of users, potential use as a destructive tool, and adverse impact on social, economic, and environmental systems. Obtaining the benefits from AI while minimizing those risks requires effective governance, the report says. With complementary investments in skills and labor market regulation, AI will likely create new jobs. Without them, AI risks wider inequality, displacing workers, and shifting wealth from labor to capital – those who own and control the AI. AI is, of course, an all-encompassing term that covers everything from algorithms that try to predict the word you are typing to large language models (LLMs). The UN report seems most concerned about agentic AI, which refers to systems that are allowed to make their own decisions and act on them. There is no guarantee that such AI agents will not violate their instructions, and the UN report claims there is clear evidence of cases where they have already disregarded them. Such behavior may pose challenges to evaluation and oversight methods, as some leading AI systems have been shown to recognize testing environments and produce misleading evaluation results. Agentic systems make AI harder to measure and govern, it says, as emerging multi-agent risks cannot be detected through single-agent evaluation, and reliable methods for maintaining control over highly autonomous systems remain underdeveloped. The report also notes that policymakers aiming to draw up effective governance face a dilemma: they need evidence to make informed decisions, but by the time sufficient evidence exists, harmful systems may already be widely deployed. AI capabilities are also unevenly distributed. Most nations, including many advanced economies, lack the technical expertise to assess the most capable "frontier" models or to participate meaningfully in their governance, the UN claims. The US and China account for 90 percent of the compute power behind the leading AI models, leaving developing countries dependent on technology they cannot build or adapt to their own societies. This could reinforce existing global inequality rather than reducing it. But the report acknowledges the Scientific Panel's own lack of visibility into certain areas. Evidence is limited as to whether task-level AI productivity gains will aggregate to economy-wide gains, it says. As The Register has previously reported, many companies are failing to increase revenue or reduce operating costs through their AI projects, and that was before AI vendors drove up costs by shifting to consumption-based pricing, meaning there is a lack of evidence that AI will ever be cost-effective. Forecasts diverge significantly due to different assumptions about adoption and new task creation, according to the UN. The panel concludes that AI is neither inherently good nor bad, but its impact will depend on the choices that governments, companies, and societies make today. Given that the US government is already hostile to anything resembling regulation of AI companies, and that the industry is already copying techniques used by tobacco firms, big pharma, and oil companies to subvert regulation, the outlook isn't encouraging. ®