The Great Accelerator by Paul Virilio, translated by Julie Rose (Polity, £9.99)
Virilio, the French philosopher, has long cultivated a kind of Delphic compression, addictive once you tune in to its cadences. And what could be a better hook for a slim new volume by a "dromologist" (philosopher of speed) than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? It represents, he suggests, a kind of "mono-atheism" devoted to electromagnetic phenomena, "a late form of sun worship", such that "transhuman societies of the animal species are metamorphosing into hybrids of the plant species as they in turn become HELIOTROPICAL and photosensitive". Do you feel a vegetable stirring deep inside?

Virilio suggests provocative parallels between high-energy physics, crash-prone global finance, and a fetishistic futurism that "deconstructs [...] the melody line of history". He asks, in sly innocence: "Has INSTANTANEITY become, for the materialists of the Single Market, what ETERNITY once was for the spiritualists?" The text throws out tasty neologisms: the "NANOCHRONOLOGY" of automated stock-trading systems, the "SECURALISM" of speculators, the "MEGALOSCOPY" of Google Earth, and the "AEROPOLITICS" of air power and virtual networks with global reach. Is science itself "at war with time"? Let me think about that for a moment.

Sparrow by Kim Todd (Reaktion, £9.99)
To describe the sparrow in your very first sentence as "easily crushed" sets a rather melancholy tone (did the author actually try, and succeed?), but Todd's aim in this charming celebration is to enrich our appreciation of the bird named from the Old English for "flutterer". The sparrow is lovable for its "attitude", he argues: it might be "drab, hyperactive and tone deaf, but it doesn't feel bad about it". (Can we be so sure?)

We can here learn to cook a sparrow omelette, why Mao decreed it a great pest, and how we could tinker with modern urban ecology to entice sparrows back, while also considering the sparrow as beloved pet, or icon of Venusian indulgence, and the symbolic sparrow in scripture, augury, painting (a particularly glorious Japanese picture of sparrows in a snowy tree), and literature (the ordained death of Hamlet's chirruper). Even tiny birds can fight back: the trickster sparrow wreaks revenge in myths and fairytales, and the US navy named a missile, the Sea Sparrow, in honour of it  a cute demonstration, I suppose, of AEROPOLITICS.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (Heinemann, £12.99)
An American retailer sends a pregnant woman coupons for baby-related commodities; slot-machine and lottery-ticket designers deliberately design more "near-wins" into the systems to keep gamblers hooked; scientists drill into rats' brains and distract juice-craving monkeys. Welcome to the modern study of habit. In a burnished post-Gladwell manner, Duhigg brings together American football and corporate data-mining, and drops the latest science on us. Willpower is a finite resource that can be depleted; and to break a bad habit you should analyse it into a "cue-routine-reward" structure, and then swap the routine for something better.

The book attempts to scale up such ideas to institutional and social models, with some purple corporate hagiography. It turns out that Aristotle and William James were right all along, which seems to be the payoff of a lot of pop-psychology books these days. One surprising take-away is that, after the Kings Cross fire disaster, the culture of London's Underground has changed beyond all recognition, even as "all the trains still run on time". I'm not a dromologist, but that prompted a hollow laugh.