Two New Books Explore Crayfish Farming and Algorithmic Prediction

"The Allure of Crayfish", written by Zhang Zhanhong and Ding Ling and published by Guangdong People's Publishing House in April 2026, traces the journey of the red swamp crayfish, native to Louisiana in the southern United States, through the United States, Japan, and China, and its interactions with local societies. After examining the historical contexts and industrial practices in Louisiana and Hokkaido, Japan, the book turns its focus to China. It argues that crayfish is not a traditional ingredient in Chinese cuisine but rather an "invented tradition".

The development of China's crayfish industry is closely linked to the country's social and cultural changes and urban economic growth over more than four decades. The book examines shifts in agricultural models in Jiangsu, Anhui, and Hubei, offering an in-depth description and analysis of rice-crayfish co-culture and its derivative agricultural production systems. As crayfish farming techniques have advanced, China's crayfish output has continued to rise, leading to structural overcapacity and making exporting crayfish a viable development path.

"The Ambition of Algorithms", written by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore, translated by Li Wensi, and published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in March 2026, recounts the history of the "Dynamo" company, founded on a Long Island beach in the 1960s. The company's researchers believed that through computer simulation and prediction of vast amounts of data, all human behavior could be made controllable. The company's chairman once explained to shareholders that the company name combined the words "simulation" and "automatic".

Lepore discovered the company's documents in the archives of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the book, she leads readers back to the historical scene, interpreting how an era's algorithmic imagination, from code and capital to the game of human choices, shaped today's "data trap" while predicting the future. The book argues that human nature does not follow rules akin to gravity, and that the profit-driven collection and use of human behavioral data without government regulation will bring serious chaos to human society.