Podcasts by New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Technology, AI, Political Economy, and Economic Development from 2023-11-14T15:59:10

Simon Johnson (MIT Sloan Economics Professor and Former IMF Chief Economist) joins the podcast to discuss his new book "Power and Progress", co-authored with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu, on th...

Public Thinking: Social Media and the New 'Public Intellectual' from 2023-01-30T09:00

We have usually relied on public intellectuals to provide facts, ideas, and cultural leadership--though not all have lived up to the ideal of “speaking truth to power.” Today, however, online netwo...

Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 2) from 2023-01-28T09:00

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents ...

Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 1) from 2023-01-27T09:00

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents ...

Virtually Violent: Are Online Attacks "Violence?" from 2023-01-26T09:00

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, vulnerable communities have been hit especially hard by disruptive online attacks. But calling these attacks "violent" could jeopardize the future of disruptiv...

Spiritual Machines: Transhumanism and Religion from 2023-01-19T09:00

Ever since early scientists began experimenting with immortality elixirs in the middle ages, religion has been influencing transhumanism. Now, we’re beginning to see transhumanism influencing relig...

Mirror Image: New Technologies and the Self from 2023-01-07T09:00

16th-century glass mirrors and 21st-century camera phones actually share a lot in common; they both are technologies that shaped new forms of the self. GuestsIan Mortimer, historian and author of M...

Mirror Image: New Technologies and the Self from 2023-01-07T09:00

16th-century glass mirrors and 21st-century camera phones actually share a lot in common; they both are technologies that shaped new forms of the self. GuestsIan Mortimer, historian and author of M...

On H. G. Well's "The Time Machine" from 2022-11-15T09:00

When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invent...

Disintermediation from 2022-07-14T20:00

Mark McGurl talks about disintermediation, a key term for internet commerce, and his new book about fiction in the age of digital self-publication. The fantasy of disintermediation lies at the hear...

Teletherapy from 2022-06-30T08:00

Hannah Zeavin talks about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. If therapy is always mediated, teletherapy is any form of therapy in which that mediation is more cl...

Drone Life from 2022-06-22T08:00

Amy Gaeta uses the relationship between humans and technology, non-military use of drones being a prime example, to rethink concepts of passivity and how it can bring about change. She makes an int...

Experimental Life from 2022-06-03T08:00

Travis Chi Wing Lau talks about the notion that one can experiment on the fundamental conditions and nature of life in order to perfect them. He looks at this idea in diverse literary, scientific, ...

Eugenics from 2022-05-09T08:00

Kim talks with Mercedes Trigos about eugenics. Mercedes references Francis Galton, who coined the term, preimplantation genetic profiling, and the failures of our ordinary progress narratives.If yo...

Anthony Ryan Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs. In this interview, Anthony Ryan Hatch discusses the need to think deeply about mass incarceration, pharmaceut...

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, “The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line” (Prometheus Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line (Prometheus Books, 2016) goes considerably beyond what its modest title would suggest. The cir...

Mary Augusta Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mass Vaccination. Citizens' Bodies and State Powe...

Lina del Castillo, "Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lina del Castillo’s book explores scientific, geographic, and historiographic inventions in nineteenth-century Colombia. In this fascinating book, well-known figures of Colombia’s history (such as ...

Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is the scientific value of objectivity in conflict with the social justice commitment to diversity? In her latest book, Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry (University of C...

Scott Soames, "The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How has philosophy transformed human knowledge and the world we live in? Philosophical investigation is the root of all human knowledge. Developing new concepts, reinterpreting old truths, and reco...

Diana Pasulka, "American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. In American ...

William Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the...

Nick Morgan, "Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World" (HBRP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is communicating virtually Is like eating Pringles forever? Find out as I talk to Nick Morgan about his new book Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World (Harvard Business...

Greta LaFleur, "The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Greta LaFleur invites readers to consider a different body. The book effectively historicizes categories...

James Rodger Fleming, “Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is a book about the future – the historical future as three interconnected generations of atmospheric researchers experienced it and envisioned it in the first part of the twentieth century. ...

Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (Universi...

Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Hum...

Simanti Dasgupta, “BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India” (Temple UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoli...

Anna Rose Alexander, "City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Anna Rose Alexander’s City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks at fire as an active agent of c...

Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: E...

David Beer, “The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception“ (Sage, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the social role of data? In The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception (Sage, 2019), David Beer, a professor of sociology at the University of York, considers this question by introduc...

Peter Wade, et. al. “Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the past quarter-century, scientists have been mapping and exploring the human genome to locate the genetic basis of disease and track the histories of populations across time and space. As pa...

Daniel Nemser, "Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spati...

Benjamin Peters, “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Something we might think of as the Soviet internet once existed, according to Benjamin Peters‘ new book, and its failure was neither natural nor inevitable. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy ...

Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition, is now out with Uni...

Vanessa Ogle, “The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreform...

Amy Lippert, "Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth...

Phaedra Daipha, “Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Phaedra Daipha’s thoughtful new book uses a careful sociological study of a particular community of weather forecasters to develop a sociology of decision making. Based on fieldwork conducted over ...

Matthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its History" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and spac...

Noriko Manabe, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Noriko Manabe’s new book is a compelling analysis of the content, performance style, and role of music in social movements in contemporary Japan. Paying special attention to the constraints that li...

Paul Ramírez, "Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico.  Mor...

Ronald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machi...

David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but...

Sabine Arnaud, “On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 an...

Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality" (Vintage, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Too often keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping them as they approach death. Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped t...

Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning public health, safety, risk, and immunity. But ad...

Camisha Russell, "The Assisted Reproduction of Race" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have been critically examined within philosophy, particularly by feminists and bioethicists, but the role of r...

Samuel Morris Brown, “Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human” (Oxford University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and per...

Jeannette Eileen Jones, "Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936" (U Georgia Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When President Trump talked of Africa as a continent of “shithole countries” where people lived in huts, he was drawing on a set of ideas made popular in the 19th century. “Darkest Africa” became a...

Greg Jenner, “A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from Stone Age to Phone Age” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Greg Jenner’s A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from Stone Age to Phone Age (St. Martins Press, 2016), explores the history of the modern material world through the lens ...

Heidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In our current moment marred by media monopolies and disinformation campaigns, it is easy to get caught up in the dizzying temporality of the news cycle and think these are new phenomena. Heidi Two...

Saul J. Weiner and Alan Schwartz, “Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care” (Oxford University Press 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a riveting a...

Terence Keel, "Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We often think of scientific racism as a pseudo-science of a bygone age, yet in both academic population genetics and popular ancestry testing, the specter of race continues to inflect our senses o...

Gabriel Mendes, “Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry” (Cornell University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his 1948 essay, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks after the Great Migration as leaving “even the m...

Thomas Dodman, "What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Feelings have a history and nostalgia has its own. In What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion(University of Chicago Press, 2018) Thomas Dodman explores the history of nost...

Michael F. Robinson, “The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael F. Robinson‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if j...

Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fac...

Katie Gentile, ed., “The Business of Being Made” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appea...

Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, "#Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation" (U Michigan Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the new book #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019), Abigail De Kosnik and Keith Feldman bring together a broad array of chapters that di...

Rebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less t...

Scott Wallace, "The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes" (Broadway Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Journalist Scott Wallace talks about a 2002 FUNAI expedition to find the Arrow People, one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world. Wallace is a writer and photojournalist who covered the wars ...

Mark Carrigan, “Social Media for Academics” (Sage, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can academics respond to the rise of social media? Or should they respond at all? In Social Media for Academics (Sage, 2016), Mark Carrigan, from the Centre for Social Ontology, offers an infor...

Kerim Yasar, "Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that...

David J. Meltzer, “The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past” (U Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David J. Meltzer‘s new book is a meticulous study of the controversy over human antiquity in America, a dispute that transformed North American archaeology as a practice and discipline, tracing it ...

Gökçe Günel, "Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science...

David Grazian, “American Zoo: A Sociological Safari” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Urban zoos are both popular and imperiled. They are sites of contestation, but what are those contests about? In his new book, American Zoo: A Sociological Safari(Princeton, 2015), ethnographer Dav...

Martin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s easy to take for granted that one can pick up a cell phone and call someone on the other side of the planet. But, until very recently, this had been a mere dream. Martin Collins’ A Telephone f...

Eben Kirksey, “Emergent Ecologies” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eben Kirksey new book asks and explores a series of timely, important, and fascinating questions: How do certain plants, animals, and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances, and f...

Ray Ison, "Systems Practice: How to Act In Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Change World" (Springer, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While various systems theories have received rigorous treatments across the literature of the field, reliable and robust advice for systems practice can be somewhat harder to come by. Ray Ison has ...

Heike Bauer, "The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture" (Temple UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender peopl...

Alfie Bown, “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism” (Zero Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is enjoyment and what can contemporary critical theory tell us about it? In Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2015), Alfie Bown, a lecturer at Hang Seng Management College a...

Xiaowei Wang, "Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside" (FSG Originals, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of our discussions about how “technology will change the world” focus on the global cities that drive the world economy. Even when we talk about China, we focus on its major cities: Beijing, S...

Matthew Hersch, "Inventing the American Astronaut" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems logical that would NASA select military test pilots to be the first astronauts, right? They were used to risk. They were good with machines. They already explored extreme environments. But...

Sigrid Schmalzer, “Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China” (University of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (Uni...

Amalia Leguizamón, "Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1996 Argentina adopted genetically modified (GM) soybeans as a central part of its national development strategy. Today, Argentina is the third largest global grower and exporter of GM crops. It...

F. Grillo and R. Nanetti, "Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I spoke with Francesco Grillo (co-authored with Raffaella Nanetti) about his latest book, Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy (Palgrave Macmillan,...

Benjamin Castleman, “The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve ...

Soraya de Chadarevian, "Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What are chromosomes? And what does it mean to treat them as visual objects?” asks Soraya de Chadarevian in her new book, Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Geno...

Doug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping" (U London Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the...

David Bissell, "Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (M...

Adam Kucharski, “The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling” (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adam Kucharski, who won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, has delivered another winner in an area rife with both winners and losers. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking th...

Dale Kedwards, "The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland" (D. S. Brewer, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, s...

M. Newhart and W. Dolphin, "The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medical marijuana laws have spread across the U.S. to all but a handful of states. Yet, eighty years of social stigma and federal prohibition creates dilemmas for patients who participate in state ...

Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American ...

Jonathan Donner, “After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thanks to mobile phones, getting online is easier and cheaper than ever. In After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet (MIT Press, 2015), Jonathan Donner challenges the optimi...

Rosamond Rhodes, "The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Common morality has been the touchstone of medical ethics since the publication of Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics in 1979. Rosamond Rhodes challenges this dominant view b...

Diane Tober, "Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The development of a whole suite of new reproductive technologies in recent decades has contributed to broad cultural conversations and controversies over the meaning of family in the United States...

Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Gut Feminism” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth A. Wilson‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of science studies and feminist theory. In its introduction, Gut Feminism (Duke University Press, 2015) lays ...

K. C. Smith and C. Mariscal, "Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (Oxford University Press, 2020) focuses on the emerging scientific discipline of astrobiology, exploring many of the humanistic issues this multidiscipl...

Raul Espejo, "Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Regular listeners of this podcast will, no doubt, be familiar with the name of Raul Espejo, former Director of Operations of Stafford Beer’s famed Cybersyn Project under the Chilean government of S...

Justin E. H. Smith, “Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in ...

Khary O. Polk, "Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Khary Oronde Polk is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Con...

Sharon T. Strocchia, "Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopk...

Karin Rosemblatt, "The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Karin Rosemblatt’s new book, The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), traces how U.S.- and Mexican-trained intellectua...

Jeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts that metadata powers our digital socie...

C. Besteman and H. Gusterson, "Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can we understand computerization as a social process? Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a timely and welcome edited volume in ...

Marisa Anne Bass, "Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative ...

Clayton Whisnant, "Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945" (Harrington Park Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magaz...

Carin Berkowitz, “Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philo...

Katie Day Good, "Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global citizenship, connecting students across border...

Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon...

Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medicine has lost its humanity. Doctors no longer have the time to make personal connections with their patients. In his new book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Huma...

Paul R. Josephson, “Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul R. Josephson‘s new book explores everyday technologies – fish sticks, sports bras, sugar, bananas, aluminum cans, potatoes, fructose, and more – as technological systems that embody vast socia...

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, "The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (MIT Press), by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, demonstrates that this technology – which is mostly associated with covert surveillance and re...

Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were w...

Peter Daou, "Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace" (Melville House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Democratic political adviser Peter Daou has long toggled between the world of presidential campaigns and online activism. He worked for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary ...

Dale Jamieson, “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale J...

Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many ...

Nikolai Krementsov, "With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia" (Open Book Publishers, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Open Book Publishers, 2018), Professor Nikolai Krementsov’s recent history of Russian eugenics, reflects on a broad p...

Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, “Enjoying Machines” (MIT 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we consider the television, we think not only about how it’s used, but also it’s impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in the West in the late 1940s and early 1...

Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science" (Lexington, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism? We speak with Robert M. Geraci about his research into religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering...

Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked with Chris Bernhardt about his book Quantum Computing for Everyone (MIT Press, 2019). This is a book that involves a lot of mathematics, but most of it is accessible to anyone who su...

Peter J. Gloviczki, “Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Humans have coped with tragedy using ritual and memorials since the Neolithic era. Doka called a memorial a space invested with meaning, “set aside to commemorate an event such as a tragedy.” Memor...

Yves Citton, "Mediarchy" (Polity Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social a...

Crystal Abidin, "Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online" (Emerald Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does it mean to be famous on the Internet? How do people become Internet celebrities, and what can that celebrity be used to do? Dr. Crystal Abidin offers anthropological insight into these qu...

Nathan Altice, “I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer-Entertainment System Platform” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The genre of “platform studies” offers both researchers and readers more than an examination of the technical machinations of a computing system. Instead, the family of methodologies presents a hum...

M. Nestle and K. Trueman, "Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marion Nestle describes her new book as “a small, quick and dirty reader for the general audience” summarizing some of her biggest and most influential works. Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Kno...

James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million people every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in Africa. In The Long Struggle against Malaria in ...

Natasha Myers, “Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After reading Natasha Myers’s new book, the world begins to dance in new ways. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is a sensory ethnograph...

Rob DeSalle, "A Natural History of Color: The Science Behind What We See and How We See it" (Pegasus Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is color a phenomenon of science or a thing of art? Over the years, color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see, embraced through the experimental palettes of painting, the advent o...

Christof Spieler, "Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit" (Island Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christof Spieler, PE, LEED AP, is a Vice President and Director of Planning at Huitt-Zollars and a lecturer in Architecture and Engineering at Rice University. He was a member of the board of direc...

Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it becom...

Kyle Johannsen, "Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many sentient (or possibly sentient) wild animals follow a reproductive strategy whereby they have large numbers of offspring, the vast majority of which suffer and die quickly or suffer and die sl...

Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manu...

Anna L. Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-No...

Snezana Lawrence, "A New Year's Present from a Mathematician" (CRC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It would be simple enough to say that mathematics is being done, and that those who do it are mathematicians. Yet, the history and culture of the mathematical community immediately complicate these...

Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene ...

Stephen Macekura, “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time? Stephen Macekura’s new book, Of Limits and Growth...

Michael Fisch, "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network" (U of Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's C...

Paulo Drinot, "The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paulo Drinot’s The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the interplay of sexuality, society, and the state in Peru in the nine...

Emily Dawson, "Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Da...

Nick Hopwood, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Hopwood‘s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the question of how images succeed or fail. Hopwood ...

Daniel Oberhaus, "Extraterrestrial Languages" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Extraterrestrial Languages (MIT Press 2020), Daniel Oberhaus tells the history of human efforts to talk to aliens, but in doing so, the book reflects on the relationship between communication an...

Philip Butler, "Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Philip Butler explores what might happen if Black people in the United States merged techn...

Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge UP, 2...

Jorg Matthias Determann, “Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jorg Matthias Determann‘s new book looks at the history of modern biology in the Arab Gulf monarchies, focusing on the treatment of evolution and related concepts in the publications of biologists ...

Daniel A. Barber, "Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate a...

Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of Civic Media at MIT, builds the case for designers and resea...

Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil.  In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreen...

Dan Bouk, “How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who made life risky? In his dynamic new book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historian Dan Bouk argues that start...

Robert Baker, "The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex lo...

Andrew Kettler, "The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Andrew Kettler charts the impact that smell had on the making of race and just...

Tom Wheeler, "From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future" (Brookings, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of co...

Megan Prelinger, “Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age” (Norton, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can be extrapolated from a close look at th...

Jennifer Burek Pierce, "Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media" (U Iowa Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nerdfighteria started over a decade ago by brothers Hank and John Green who decided to provide literacy themed programming on their website and YouTube channel. With almost three million members, N...

Sandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity (Island Press), Sandra Postel acknowledges society’s past mishaps with managing water and emphasizes our future is contingent upon rehabilit...

Tina Sikka, "Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can feminist theory help address the climate crisis? In Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (Springer Verlag, 2019), Tina Sikka, a lecturer in media and cu...

Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed ...

Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale University Press, 2020), Arleen Tuchman, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, describes the history of how the perception of ...

Jonathan Sadowsky, "The Empire of Depression: A New History" (Polity, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When is sorrow sickness? That is the question that this book asks, exploring how our understandings of sadness, melancholy, depression, mania and anxiety have changed over time, and how societies h...

Marc Zimmer, "The State of Science" (Prometheus Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

New research and innovations in the field of science are leading to life-changing and world-altering discoveries like never before. What does the horizon of science look like? Who are the scientist...

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

Peter A. Shulman, “Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter A. Shulman‘s new book is a fascinating history of the emergence of a connection between energy (in the form of coal), national interests, and security in nineteenth century America. Coal and ...

Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on? In Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science (Penguin Books, 2020), Stuart Ritchie, a profess...

Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with...

Can we Bring Extinct Species Back?: A Conversation with Beth Shapiro from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Could extinct species, like mammoths and passenger pigeons, be brought back to life? The science says yes. In How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton UP, 2020), Beth Shapiro...

Will Rollason, "Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets" (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Will Rollason is senior lecturer of anthropology at Brunel University London. He’s written a fascinating book titled Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets (Lexington Books, 2020)....

Michael C. Desch, "Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many have read and debated “How Political Science became Irrelevant” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of that piece is Michael C. Desch and much it comes from his recent book Cult o...

Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead...

Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, Hodgson believes we need to reintroduce the hum...

Charles R. Acland, "American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ben-Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture for decades. In American Blockbuster: Movies, Technol...

Philip Reid, "The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To the average landlubber, the merchant ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1800 seem little different from their counterparts two centuries beforehand. By detailing how these ships were built...

Gregory Dawes, "Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science" (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Open conflict between religion and science may not be inevitable, but a germ of discord resides in some of the fundamental commitments of both; in this sense, war is always, potentially, just aroun...

Colin Milburn, “Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Colin Milburn’s wonderful new book looks carefully and imaginatively at the relationship between nanotechnology and play. Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter (Duke University P...

Daniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall" (UBC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Water and diplomatic historian Dan MacFarlane has written a fascinating book on a fundamental debate in environmental history: What is a natural landscape? Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy...

Elizabeth Catte, "Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia" (Belt, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America:...

Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Commu...

Kartik Hosanagar, "A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives" (Viking, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our guest today is Kartik Hosanagar, the author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control(Viking, 2019). This is one of those r...

Eugene Raikhel, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr, “Somatosphere.net” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Somatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.” Founded in July 2008, So...

Alyson K. Spurgas, "Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity Into the Twenty-First Century" (Ohio State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), Alyson K. Spurgas, Ph.D. examines the “new science of female sexuality” from...

Eugenia Lean, "Vernacular Industrialism in China"(Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkere...

Kate Ervine, "Carbon" (Polity, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The crisis of global warming overwhelms the imagination with its urgency, yet more than ever we need patient, clear-sighted. and careful assessments of the possibilities for transforming the global...

James E. Strick, “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments i...

Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling th...

Mark Anderson, "From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Anderson’s From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology (Stanford University Press) is at once a story about US anthropology and US liberalism from the 1930s to the 1...

David Colander and Craig Freedman, "Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you are reading this, you have probably run into the "Chicago" model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finance, macro or micro economics, or any other arena wh...

Joseph M. Reagle, “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to mat...

Eben Kirksey, "The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans" (St. Martin's Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans (St. Martin's Press, 2020), anthropologist Eben Kirksey visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask:...

Luz María Hernández Sáenz, "Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Luz María Hernández Sáenz follows the trajectory of physicians in their quest for the profess...

Emily Baum, "The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 as part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Inst...

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, “Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is an assistant professo...

Jeff Levin, "Religion and Medicine: A History of the Encounter Between Humanity's Two Greatest Institutions" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though the current political climate might lead one to suspect that religion and medicine make for uncomfortable bedfellows, the two institutions have a long history of alliance. From religious hea...

Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to ...

Rick Van Noy, "Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As climate change politics abound, Dr. Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (University of Georgia Press, 2019) cuts through it all to get to the core. Wha...

Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee, “Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms ...

Alicia Puglionesi, "Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a n...

Fay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, public health experts in the U.S. and U.K. were warning of the epidemic of loneliness. Loneliness steals more years of life than obesity. Loneliness ...

James Schwoch, "Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier" (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's been called the first Internet. In the nineteenth century, the telegraph spun a world wide web of cables and poles, carrying electronic signals with unprecedented speed. In order to connect th...

Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan” (U of Chicago, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan ...

Richard Ovenden, "Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Living in an age awash with information can sometimes obscure its extraordinary fragility. Indeed, as Richard Ovenden demonstrates in Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of K...

Matto Mildenberger, "Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not? In his new book Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Pre...

Thomas F. Gieryn, "Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe" (U Chicago, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is the existence of truth coming to a screeching halt? Does truth still exist? In Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. Thomas F. Gieryn takes time to...

Dana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and...

S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, "The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Meteorites, mega-volcanoes, and plate tectonics--the old forces of nature--have transformed Earth for millions of years. They are now joined by a new geological force--humans. Our actions have driv...

Lizzie O’Shea, "Future Histories" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach ...

Michael Ruse, "The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What accounts for the antagonism between Christianity and Darwinism? For Michael Ruse, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, the answer is simple: Darwin...

Kristin Peterson, “Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristin Peterson‘s new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. ...

Jeremy Black, "Tank Warfare" (Indiana UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare (Indiana UP, 2020), prom...

David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past and future of science. As a historian, he studi...

Trent MacNamara, "Birth Control and American Modernity: A History of Popular Ideas" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Birth control, and the access to it, has continued to be a divisive issue in American political and social life. While birth control has almost become shorthand for “the pill,” a wide range of birt...

Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sandra Harding‘s new book Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (University of Chicago Press, 2015) raises new questions about two central concepts in STS – objectivity a...

Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Butterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies. And yet their populations are decl...

Philip M. Plotch, "Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever since New York City built one of the world’s great subway systems, no promise has been more tantalizing than the proposal to build a new subway line under Second Avenue in Manhattan. Yet the S...

Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of ...

Liz McFall, “Devising Consumption Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The role of financial services in individuals’ and communities’ everyday lives is more important than ever. In Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending (Routledge,...

Christopher M. Kelty, "The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participa...

Sabine Hildebrandt, "The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich" (Berghahn, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws d...

Joy Lisi Rankin, "A People’s History of Computing in the United States" (Harvard UP, 2018). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers from the get-go; rather, earlier efforts to expa...

Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Luthera...

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, ...

Rachel Mundy, "Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening" (Wesleyan UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy?” So asks—and answers—Rachel Mundy, who is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University–Newark. In h...

Jieun Baek, "North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society" (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a con...

Shellen Wu, “Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920” (Stanford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Ord...

Jose Sanchez, "Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms (Routledge, 2020) dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organ...

Greg Mitchell, "The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (The New Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

dSoon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dra...

Peter Hotez, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The a...

Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University P...

Trevor Pearce, "Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an eno...

Ruth Leys, "The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique" (University of Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Ruth Leys (she/hers), Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, on The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Criti...

Adrienne Mayor, "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 year...

Stefan Ecks, “Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Drugs exist that are meant to help people feel better. The doctors who prescribe them might believe that they work, while their patients do not. In explaining the drugs to their patients, should th...

Erica Fretwell, "Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We so often take our senses as natural, but perhaps we should understand them as historically situated. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press...

Allison Bigelow, "Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World" (UNC Press 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was created for and founded upon the mining and coining o...

Matthew Longo, "The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach ...

Candis Callison, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Candis Callison‘s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious groups, economic collectives, and others shape an...

Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are joined by Dr. Andrea Ballestero, associate Professor of Anthropology and Director Ethnography Studio, at Rice University. We will be talking about her book A Future History of Water, publish...

Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We sit at the beginning of what could be “both a truly terrifying and a golden era in humanity.” In The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (HarperOne, 2020), l...

John Torpey, "The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental" (Rutgers UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since its initial postulation by Karl Jaspers, the concept of an “axial age” in the development of human thought and religion has exerted enormous influence in the fields of history and sociology. ...

Alexandra Minna Stern, “Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Due in part to lobbying efforts on behalf of the human genome project, human genes tend to be thought of in light of the present–genetic components of human disease and differential risks associate...

James L. Nolan, Jr., "Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grand...

Edward Wilson-Lee, "The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library" (Scribner, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edward Wilson-Lee's book A Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scribner, 2018) details the life of Hernando Colón as ...

Ainissa Ramirez, "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview, I talk to Dr. Ainissa Ramirez about her new book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (MIT Press, 2020) Dr. Ramirez examines eight inventions?clocks,...

Jan English-Lueck, "Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition" (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Silicon Valley is understood to be one of the most fast-paced regions on earth, where innovation and upheaval are part and parcel of daily life. Imagine the challenge, then, when it’s your job to d...

Janet Vertesi, “Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janet Vertesi‘s fascinating new book is an ethnography of the Mars Rover mission that takes readers into the practices involved in working with the two robotic explorers Spirit and Opportunity. Bas...

Gemma Milne, "Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It" (Robinson, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bombastic headlines about science and technology are nothing new. To cut through the constant stream of information and misinformation on social media, or grab the attention of investors, or convin...

Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it something more? In The Scientific Attitude: Defe...

Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geograph...

Eva Hemmungs Wirten, “Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information” (U of Chicago, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we study the history of a famous scientific figure – especially one that has gone on to become a cultural icon – we are dealing not just with a person, but also with an identity or series of i...

Virginia Postrel, "The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (Basic Books, 2020), Virginia Postrel describes how humans coevolved with textiles. The story begins with our distant ancestors who used s...

Alejandra Bronfman, "Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas. In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, ...

Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, "The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms" (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our evolutionary success, according to co-authors Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, lies in our ability to acquire cultural wisdom and teach it to the next generation. Today, we follow social media...

Raf De Bont, “Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this overs...

O. Carter Snead, "What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At first glance, the term “expressive individualism” seems benign enough. After all, people throughout the Western world value their personal freedom and the liberty to make crucial life decisions ...

Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991 (V & R Unipress, 2017), Julia Obertreis explores the infrastructural, technical, and environmental aspects of the...

Julian Gill-Peterson, "Histories of the Transgender Child" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field o...

Jonathan Coopersmith, “Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Coopersmith‘s new book takes readers through the century-and-a-half-long history of the fax machine and the technologies that shaped and were shaped by it, from Alexander Bain’s 1843 paten...

Abigail A. Dumes, "Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While many doctors claim that Lyme disease--a tick-borne bacterial infection--is easily diagnosed and treated, other doctors and the patients they care for argue that it can persist beyond standard...

Mariann Hardey, "The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" (Emerald, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the culture of the tech industry? In The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Emerald, 2019), Mariann Hardey, an Associate Professor in Marketing at Durham University, s...

Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how information infrastructures shape the ways that surviv...

Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredi...

Colleen Plumb, "Thirty Times a Minute" (Radius Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Captive elephants exhibit what biologists refer to as stereotypy, which includes rhythmic rocking, head bobbing, stepping back and forth, and pacing. Colleen Plumb traveled to over seventy zoos in ...

Henry M. Cowles, "The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made ...

Lindsey Fitzharris, "The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine" (Scientific American, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Lister changed the world of medicine. In her book The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Scientific American, 2017), Dr. Lindsey Fitzh...

James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books...

Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, "Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It" (FSG Originals, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (FSG Originals, 2020), the celebrated writers and Logic cofounders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff take an unpreceden...

Nathan G. Alexander, "Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is modern racism a product of secularization and the decline of Christian universalism? The debate has raged for decades, but up to now, the actual racial views of historical atheists and freethink...

Paul A. Offit, "Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural" (Harper, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is alternative medicine quackery? In the book Do You Believe in Magic? Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural: A Look Behind the Curtain (Harper, 2014) (Harper Paperbacks, 2014),Paul A. Offi...

Jonathan Eig, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” (Norton, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jonathan Eig is a New York Times best-selling author of four books and former journalist for the Wall Street Journal. His book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched ...

James D. Stein, "The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive" (World Scientific, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can we correctly predict the flip of a fair coin more than half the time -- or the decay of a single radioactive atom? Our intuition, based on a lifetime of experience, tells us that we cannot, as ...

David R. Grimes, "The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are some of the prevalent ways in which we lie to ourselves and limit our flexibility? Today I discussed this and other questions with David R. Grimes, the author of The Irrational Ape: Why F...

Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Audra J. Wolfe, is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor and historian. Her book Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) examines the...

M. Alper Yalcinkaya, “Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science? In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. Alper Yalcinkaya‘s new book Learned Patriots: D...

Nicolas Petit, "Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Consumers may love their products and services but, among politicians and activists, the big-technology companies are fast developing a reputation as the Robber Barons of the 21st century. Google r...

Jonathan Gelber, "Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow" (Skyhorse, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Dr Jonathan Gelber, author of the book Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow: Injuries and Tragedies That Transformed Careers, Sports and Society (Skyhorse Publishing, 20...

Pamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across dis...

Jenifer Van Vleck, “Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

[Re-posted with permission from Who Makes Cents?] Today’s guest discusses the history of aviation and how this provides a lens to interpret the history of capitalism and U.S. foreign relations acro...

A. Espay and B. Stecher, "Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

An estimated 80 million people live with a neurodegenerative disease, with this number expected to double by 2050. Despite decades of research and billions in funding, there are no medications that...

A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 1: Man into Wolf from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, we discuss how I discovered Robert Eisler’s Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy and unpack the book’s argument that modern humans...

Perrin Selcer, "The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Having been born into a world in which people knew about anthropogenic global warming, I grew up in the “global environment.” Although the category “global environment” seems normal, if not natural...

Nick Sousanis, “Unflattening” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, ...

Peter Singer, "Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically" (Liveright, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Even before the publication of his seminal Animal Liberation in 1975, Peter Singer, one of the greatest moral philosophers of our time, unflinchingly challenged the ethics of eating animals. Now, i...

Kurt Braddock, "Weaponized Words" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kurt Braddock's new book Weaponized Words: The Strategic Role of Persuasion in Violent Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020) applies existing theories of pers...

Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of ra...

Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “ethical choreography” of the consolidation of human...

Maile Arvin, "Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans saw Polynesians as almost racially white, and speculated that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan des...

Glenn Sauer, "Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth" (Orbis Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a scientist and practicing Catholic, Dr. Sauer brings a unique perspective to several of the important issues related to finding a space for dialogue between the at times opposing fields of scie...

Jay Timothy Dolmage, "Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race" (OSU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Jay Timothy Dolmage of the University of Waterloo on the new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Constru...

Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Co...

John Sharp, “Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

That games, particularly video games, could be viewed as art should come as no surprise. And yet, a debate exists over what is and should be considered art with respect to games. In his new book, W...

Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally loc...

Harmony Bench, "Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harmony Bench's Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Minnesota UP, 2020) traces the changing ways dance is distributed and created on the internet from the heady early interne...

Sam Han, "(Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In modern times, death is understood to have undergone a transformation not unlike religion. Whereas in the past it was out in the open, it now resides mostly in specialized spaces of sequestration...

Mark Rice, "Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Speaking at a 1913 National Geographic Society gala, Hiram Bingham III, the American explorer celebrated for finding the “lost city” of the Andes two years earlier, suggested that Machu Picchu “is ...

Greg Siegel, “Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Greg Siegel‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging and meticulously researched account of a dual tendency in modern technological life: treating forensic knowledge of accident causation as a key to s...

Jeffrey J. Kripal, "The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge" (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (Belle...

Jeremy Snyder, "Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us--and Makes Us Vulnerable" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations who are preyed upon by someone offering promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned in terms of "exploiti...

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlighte...

Jon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

That privacy in the digital age is an important concept to be discussed is axiomatic. Cameras in mobile phones make it easy to record events and post them on the web. Consumers post an enormous amo...

Nadia Eghbal, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" (Stripe Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Open source is the once-radical idea that code should be freely available to everyone. Open-source software was once an optimistic model for public collaboration, but is now a near-universal standa...

Anna Weltman, "Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set ...

Donald Stevens, "Mexico in the Time of Cholera" (U New Mexico Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donald F. Stevens offers us a portrait of early republican life in his new book, Mexico in the Time of Cholera, published in 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press. Although Stevens uses the 18...

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad ...

Mack Hagood, "Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How have we used twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound technologies to carve out sonic space out of the hustle and bustle of contemporary life? In search for an answer, in this episode I speak ...

Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This book provides an ethnographic ...

Anthony Valerio, "Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor" (Zantedeschi Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though his advice has saved the lives of millions of people, the name Ignaz Semmelweis is not one commonly known today. In his book Anthony Valerio’s Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor (Zantedeschi Boo...

Alireza Doostdar, "The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University P...

Myles W. Jackson, “The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happens when you allow human materials to become property? More specifically, how does granting monopoly rights over genetic material affect the potential for innovation and research on treatm...

Danielle Giffort, "Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decade...

Jinee Lokaneeta, "The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India" (U Michigan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, scienc...

Elinor Carmi, "Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media" (Peter Lang, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is spam? In Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media, Dr Elinor Carmi, a postdoctoral research associate in digital culture and society at the Uni...

Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global...

Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others collaborate to create objects and experiences of gr...

Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urba...

Govind Gopakumar, "Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets, once crowded with pedest...

Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question Americ...

Lu Zhang, “Inside China’s Automobile Factories” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

China’s automobile industry has grown considerably over the past two decades. Massive foreign investment and an increased scale and concentration of work spurred the creation of a new generation of...

Nick Prior, "Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society" (SAGE, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Prior—Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Edinburgh—discusses his new book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society (SAGE Publications, 2018). The book explores the soci...

Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of ...

Timothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society (Pluto Press, 2015). The book aims to co...

Kory Olson, "The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris" (Liverpool UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When is the last time you looked at/consulted a paper map? Perhaps you have one hanging on a wall at home or work, framed or not. Or maybe you have some old road maps in a stack somewhere, as I do,...

Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy takes us through a thirty year history of...

Naomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both visual and text. But it is not necessari...

Paul Harkins, "Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does technology shape music? In Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies (Routledge, 2019), Paul Harkins, a lecturer in music at Edinburgh Napier University, looks at the rela...

Steven Shaviro, “Discognition” (Repeater Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it lik...

Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and p...

Robert Sroufe et al, "The Power of Existing Buildings" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Your building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition...

Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, “A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If the universe was even slightly different in some of its fundamental physical properties, life could not exist – such is the claim of ‘fine tuning’ of the universe for life. The topic of fine tun...

Christine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the practices that surround its collection, is all the ra...

David Moon, "The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They brought plants, in particular grain and fodder crops,...

John R. Gallagher, "Update Culture and the Afterlife of Writing" (Utah State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they interviews John R. Gallagher of University of Illinois about Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing (Utah State University Press, 2020) a dynamic ...

David P. Barash, “Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. B...

Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Ed...

Amelia Moore, "Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite being a minor contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, like many other small island nations, The Bahamas’s ecology and society are especially vulnerable to current and expected chang...

Ayala Fader, "Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known? Dr. Ayala Fader explores this question ...

Andrew C. A. Elliott, “Is That a Big Number?” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew C. A. Elliott‘s Is That a Big Number? (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a book that those of us who feast on numbers will absolutely adore, but will also tease the palates of those for whom...

Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) ...

J. Kim and E. Maloney, "Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education and The Low-Density University" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite stereotypes of colleges and universities still stuck in the age of the blackboard and sage-on-stage lectures, a quiet revolution has been taking place on America’s campuses led by a diverse...

Laurence Monnais, "The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health traces the life of pharmaceuticals in Vietnam ...

Anindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader” (Academic Studies Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2018) offers a compelling investigation of the genre whose development was significantly reshaped in the se...

Casey O’Donnell, “Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (MIT Press, 2014), Casey O’Donnell, an assistant professor in the department of Media and Information in the College of ...

Andre Brock, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram m...

Raymond Boyle, “The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways” (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of commu...

A. Mark Smith, “From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) sugg...

Lee Vinsel, "Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cars are among our most ubiquitous technologies; one could say that the cultural lore of the postwar United States is written in tire marks. But as much as they have been a vehicle for liberation a...

Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the s...

Orit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book traces the emergence of the “communicative objec...

Patrick M. Condon, "Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global...

Mike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time o...

Lisa Stevenson, “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa Stevenson‘s new book opens with two throat-singing women and one listening king. Whether we hear them sitting down to a normal night’s dinner (as the women) or stalking the pages of a short st...

Jathan Sadowski, "Too Smart" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The ubiquity of technology that collects massive volumes of all kinds of data lends itself to one overarching question: “What?” As in what is the purpose(s) of this collection? What are the benefit...

J. Obert, A. Poe, A. Sarat, eds., “The Lives of Guns” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert‘s and Andrew Poe‘s, and Austin Sarat‘s unique collection of...

Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in ...

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, “Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics” (Naval Institute Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining milit...

Kristina Kleutghen, “Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces” (U of Washington Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in ...

Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity?but we d...

Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ...

Ann C. Pizzorusso, “Tweeting Da Vinci” (Da Vinci Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can...

N. M. Sambaluk, “The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security” (Naval Institute Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit.  This event prompted the ...

Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electrom...

Lloyd B. Minor, "Discovering Precision Health" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is scientist, surgeon, and dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Lloyd B. Minor. Previously he served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Th...

Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and...

Nicolas Rasmussen, “Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterpris...

Jodi Hilty, "Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation, 2nd Edition (Island Press, 2019), Dr. Jodi Hilty and her co-authors expand on concepts and practices im...

Lee Humphreys, “The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Physical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike social media posting, this analog memorializing o...

Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, “Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain‘s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. Life on Display: Revolutionizing U....

Wenfei Tong, "Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wenfei Tong's Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds (Princeton University Press, 2020) looks at the extraordinary range of mating systems in the avian world, exploring all the stages from courtship a...

Wade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future. Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short ...

Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promotion of information, etc. These complex formulas...

Carlo Caduff, "The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger" (U California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry into pandemic anxieties in the mid-2000s when su...

Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tok...

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The words of “technology” and “innovation” ar...

Thor Magnusson, "Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Thor Magnusson—musician, Professor of Future Music, and member of the Experimental Music T...

Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view ...

Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology.Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014) simultaneously...

Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi, "Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi's book Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (Routledge, 2019) paints t...

Rachel Z. Arndt, “Beyond Measure” (Sarabande Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize ev...

Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of...

Brian A. Stauffer, "Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion" (U New Mexico Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of ...

Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of a...

Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Colo...

Amy Koerber, “From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History" (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of New Books in Language, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Amy Koerber (she/hers), Professor at Texas Tech University, on the groundbreaking book From Hysteria to Hormones: ...

Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and...

Janet K. Shim, “Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease” (NYU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other things) in health and illness. Heart-Sick: The Polit...

Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020), by Paul Nahin, is a book that is meant for s...

Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry...

William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Turkel‘s new book traces the emergence and inhabiting...

Arthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. ...

Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India’s attempts to feed itsel...

Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., an...

Owen Whooley, "On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. Bu...

Peter Harries-Jones, “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference” (Fordham UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the humani...

Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as never before. However, as Ethan Zucker...

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

Byron Reese, “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity” (Simon & Schuster, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that t...

Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century develo...

Daniel Deudney, "Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. The Trump Administration has created a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expens...

Neil Selwyn, "What is Digital Sociology?" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an appro...

Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explor...

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret...

Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidenc...

P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, outlines the history of social media platforms and their use in popular culture...

Kara W. Swanson, “Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today?...

Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Ins...

Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However, at its heart Forgott...

Hugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. But the changes that we are seeing are far from...

Joseph Reagle, "Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces a...

 Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American science and empire have a long mutual history. In American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Megan Raby takes us to Caribbean...

Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers thro...

Maurice Finocchiaro, "On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows that there were (and are) really two Galileo “af...

Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by ...

Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, the...

Great Books: Julie Carlson on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen years old on a bet. The novel spawned two centuries of creatures that turn against their makers...

Rebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narra...

Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-Eur...

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "Übermensch: Plädoyer Für Einen Nietzscheanischen Transhumanismus" (Schwabe, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode I talk Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Stefan teaches philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome. He is director and co-founder of the Beyond Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for E...

Megan Ward, “Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character” (OSU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of...

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Scie...

Melissa Kravetz, "Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity" (U Toronto Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Melissa Kravetz examines how German women physicians ...

N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs, eds., “Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical M...

John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of o...

Nancy Appelbaum, "Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Chorographic Commission of Colombia, an ambitious geographical expedition, set out to define and map a nascent and still unstable republic. The commission’s purpo...

G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a pain...

Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a ...

Jacob Turner, "Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Jacob Turner explains why AI is unique, what legal and ethical problems it could cause, and how we can ad...

Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic bo...

Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Co...

Adrian Wisnicki, "Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adrian Wisnicki talks about the British expeditionary literature of the late 1800s. Reading between the lines of Victorian travel accounts, Wisnicki sees outlines of a bigger story — local peoples,...

Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm o...

David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin a...

Jerome Whitington, "Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jerome Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the dynamics and discourses centered around the development of hy...

Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to ensure the technological security of this importa...

William E. Connolly, “The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bill Connolly‘s new book proposes a way to think about the world as a gathering of self-organizing systems or ecologies, and from there explores the ramifications and possibilities of this notion ...

Kate Devlin, "Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of the seductive sex robot is the stuff of myth, legend and science fiction. From the ancient Greeks to twenty-first century movies, robots in human form have captured our imagination, our...

Yves Citton, “The Ecology of Attention” (Polity Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a result. But how is this happenin...

Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as thi...

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "Data Feminism" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power surrounding and undergirding data. The impacts of...

Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infection, disease, and pandemic they have helped shap...

Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of Califo...

Michael Rechtenwald, "Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom" (New English Review, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Michael Rectenwald begins and ends his Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (New English R...

Casey Walsh, “Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico” (U California Press, 2018). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how ev...

Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Based on a close reading of a staggering array of pr...

David J. Gunkel, "Robot Rights" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality?self-d...

Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th...

Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), Amit Prasad, an associate professor of sociology at the Universit...

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiric...

Lisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…” From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelman‘s new book, the reader is introduced to a way of thi...

Sarah Fawn Montgomery, "Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir" (Mad Creek Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you live in America, chances are good you’ve heard the term “mental health crisis” bandied about in the media. While true that anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders seem to be on the ris...

Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic” (UNC Press, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritua...

Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nat...

Amy Shira Teitel, "Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA" (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the creator of the YouTube Channel, Vintage Space. Sh...

David Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social Change” (Chelsea Green, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also true that the vast majority of the popular literat...

Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fa...

Virginia Eubanks, "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (St. Martin's, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years?because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In L...

Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of w...

Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumption...

Angela Jones, "Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry (NYU Press, 2020), Dr. Angela Jones engages readers in a five-year mixed-methods study she conducted on the erotic webc...

Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 2018) is THE book that explains what that connect...

David Nemer, “Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology” (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Inherently problematic in most mainstream discussions of the impact of technology is the dominant western or global northern perspective. In this way, the impact of technology on societies in devel...

Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that woul...

Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperat...

Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the ...

Francesca Minerva, "The Ethics of Cryonics: Is It Immoral to be Immortal" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cryonics?also known as cryopreservation or cryosuspension?is the preservation of legally dead individuals at ultra-low temperatures. Those who undergo this procedure hope that future technology wil...

Ari Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body” (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese ...

Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to save information remotely and access that information fro...

Germaine R. Halegoua, "The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place (NYU Press, 2019), Germaine R. Halegoua rethinks everyday interactions that humans have with digital infrastructures, nav...

Gary Bruce, “Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the University of Waterloo, provides the first English-langu...

Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cent...

Gil Eyal, "The Crisis of Expertise" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many ...

Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of N...

Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies” (Ballentine, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (Ballentine Books, 2014), Lawrence Goldstone recounts the discovery and mastery of aviation at the turn of the tw...

Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Univers...

Christopher G. White, “Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose ...

Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the ...

Shannon Vallor, "Technology and the Virtues" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that manage our most important relationships, ordinary ...

Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and G...

danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, educators, and legislators concerned with issue...

Kyle Devine, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the human and environmental cost of music? In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019),Kyle Devine, an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the Univers...

Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records” (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and...

Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold War American politics, education, and society. The ...

Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting internet service providers from discriminating bet...

Joy Rohde, “Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, acade...

Robert Mitchell, “Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of ...

Li Zhang, "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound...

Catherine Newell, "Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Catherine Newell talks about the religious roots of the final frontier, focusing on the collaboration of artist Chesley Bonestell, science writer Willy Ley, and the NASA rocket engineer Wernher von...

Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the contexts, programs, and eth...

Paul-Brian McInerney, “From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul-Brian McInerney is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is the author of From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolu...

Michael E. McCullough, "The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why Give a Damn About Strangers? In his book The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code (Basic Books, 2020), Michael E. McCullough explains. McCullough is a professor of...

Allison Ochs, "Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?" (Amsterdam UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new books, Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?: A Modern Guide to Parenting Digital Teens, Derived from Lessons of the Past (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Allison Ochs combines experie...

Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France...

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madaga...

D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s 'Atalanta fugiens' (1618)" (U Virginia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engag...

Alexis Elder, "Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But ...

Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art” (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Pe...

David Kaiser, “How the Hippies Saved Physics” (W.W. Norton, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Kaiser‘s recent book is one of the most enjoyable and informative books on the history of science that you’ll read, full-stop. The deservedly award-winning How the Hippies Saved Physics: Scie...

Dan Royles, "To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the begi...

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the con...

Andrew L. Russell, “Open Standards in the Digital Age” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possible because of standards. In his book Open Stan...

Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Bey...

Christopher J. Phillips, "Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The so-called Sabermetrics revolution in baseball that began in the 1970s, popularized by the book—and later Hollywood film—Moneyball, was supposed to represent a triumph of observation over intuit...

Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, takes a data-based approach to examine ho...

Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experiment...

Kristina M. Lyons, "Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Colombia, decades of social and armed conflict and the US-led war on drugs have created a seemingly untenable situation for scientists and rural communities as they attempt to care for forests a...

Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys?an ugly death awaiting social deviants?neither scientifically nor clin...

Larry Cuban, “The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning” (Harvard Education Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital techn...

Sarah Franklin, “Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship” (Duke University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: I...

Neil Maher, "Apollo in the Age of Aquarius" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neil Maher talks about the social forces that shaped NASA in the 1960s and 70s, connecting the space race with the radical upheavals of the counterculture. Maher is a professor of history at the Ne...

Hala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut” (Brill, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Pr...

Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So much of Science Studies, of STS as a field or a point of engagement, is deeply concerned with objects. We create sociologies and networks of and with objects, we study them as actors or agents o...

Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family" (Doubleday, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became ...

Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting human...

Kyla Schuller, “The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. However, by contrasting Black lives with White fee...

Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as ...

Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deplo...

Safi Bahcall, "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries" (St. Martins, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Safi Bahcall's Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St. Martin's Press, 2019) reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteri...

Eden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics.  In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist presid...

Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, drea...

Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ing...

J. L. Anderson, "Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with J. L. Anderson about the 2019 book Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America published by West Virginia University Press. Anderson provi...

Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. ...

Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the bi...

Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades hav...

Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible draw...

Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in l...

Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected...

Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of? Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt ...

Daniel Kennefick, "No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar ecl...

Jörg Matthias Determann, “Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories, and Nationalism in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating i...

Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” M...

Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and co...

James Schwartz, "The Ethics of Space Exploration" (Springer, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Ethics of Space Exploration (Springer, 2016), edited by James S. J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan, aims to contribute significantly to the understanding of issues of value (including the ultimate ...

Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz...

Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science a...

Gerald Posner, "Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America" (Simon and Schuster, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s guest is investigative journalist and author, Gerald Posner. His new book, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (Simon and Schuster), explores the fascinating and complex histo...

Jessica Lynne Pearson, "The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

International organizations throw up several obstacles—their immense scale, their dry bureaucratic language—to the historian trying to piece together their past. In her book, The Colonial Politics ...

Mark A. McCutcheon, “The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology” (Athabasca UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The M...

Conevery Bolton Valencius, “The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story begins with Davy Crockett and his hunting dogs chasing a bear in 1826. The bear gets caught in an earthquake crack, an effect of the great Mississippi Valley earthquakes of 1811-1812 that...

Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets" (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A life shared with pets brings many emotions. We feel love for our companions, certainly, and happiness at the thought that we’re providing them with a safe, healthy life. But there’s another emoti...

Rachel Louise Moran, "Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the modern, American body come into being? According to Rachel Louise Moran this is a story to be told through the lens of the advisory state. In her book, Governing Bodies: American Politi...

B.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Back” (Curious Reads, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Governments...

Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Before the beginning of the ...

Angèle Christin, "Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are algorithms changing journalism? In Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press), Angèle Christin, an assistant professor in the Departmen...

Alice Hill, "Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow,...

Sam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” (Little, Brown and Co., 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim...

Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, eds., “Addiction Trajectories” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Addiction has recently emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry. In a wonderful, focused volume of ethnographies of addiction in a wide range of contexts, Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott...

S. J. Potter, "Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote understanding across national boundaries. ...

Neil McArthur, "Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications" (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sexbots are coming. Given the pace of technological advances, it is inevitable that realistic robots specifically designed for people's sexual gratification will be developed in the not-too-distant...

Aimi Hamraie, “Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. I...

Todd H. Weir, “Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview” (Palgrave, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, you may be a monist too and not even know it. Do yo...

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, "NeuroScience Fiction" (Benbella Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technol...

Robert Rozehnal, "Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience" (OneWorld, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happens when the digital world meets Sufism? This is the question raised in the exciting new book Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (OneWorld Academic, 2019) b...

David J. Silverman, “Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), David J. Silverman argues that Indian societies adopted firearm te...

Kim TallBear, “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all i...

David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (MIT Press), evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave ris...

Lydia Barnett, "After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of ...

Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (UMass Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put their skills at the service of the people and ag...

Thomas Bey William Bailey, “Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society” (Belsona Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on ...

Emily Anthes, "The Great Indoors" (Scientific American, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modern humans are an indoor species. We spend 90 percent of our time inside, shuttling between homes and offices, schools and stores, restaurants and gyms. And yet, in many ways, the indoor world r...

Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Award winning activist and researcher Raj Patel has teamed up with innovative environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore to produce an accessible book which provides historica...

Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after ...

Ian Jared Miller, “The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tok...

Sandra Young, "The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge" (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the...

Joe Miller, "US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Alcoholism" (Chicago Review Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the aftermath of Prohibition, America’s top scientists joined forces with members of a new group, called Alcoholics Anonymous, and put their clout behind a campaign to convince the nation that a...

George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, “Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies” (Georgetown UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies (Georgetown University Press, 2017), edited by George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, uses analogies to conventional warfare and previous technological inn...

Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht tra...

David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know ...

Leor Halevi, "Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did Muslims respond to foreign goods in an age characterized by global exchange and European imperial expansion? What sort of legal reasoning did scholars apply in order to appropriate – or rej...

Susan M. Squier, “Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017)  is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, grap...

William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does conducting fieldwork on another planet, using a robot as a mobile laboratory, change what it means to be a scientist? In Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Expl...

Matthew D. O'Hara, "The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Latin America – especially colonial Latin America – is not particularly known for futurism. For popular audiences, the region’s history likely evokes images of book burning, the Inquisition, and ot...

Thomas Morris, “The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations” (Thomas Dunne, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics...

Sienna R. Craig, “Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is efficacy determined, and what is at stake in those ...

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, "Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World" (Stanford UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late 1500s, the mines of Potosí –a mountain in southern Bolivia — produced 60% of the world’s silver. It was a place of great wealth and terrible suffering. It is also a place, Jorge Canizar...

Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformat...

Ian Bogost, “Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing” (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Particle Man”, Charles Bukowski, Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Atari, Ace of Cakes, aliens, tiny ontology, Bruno Latour, ontography, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the Bossa-Nova, Scribblenauts, Ben Ma...

Susan Schulten, "A History of American in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book A History of American in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press 2018), historian Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European ...

Stephen Monteiro, “The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sewing, knitting, quilting, the crafts related to fabric making, are usually not what we think about when we consider our digital communications devices. Yet, many of the activities that we find ou...

Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford University...

Mark Bartholomew, "Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing" (Stanford Law Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Advertising is everywhere. By some estimates, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements each day. Whether we realize it or not, "adcreep"?modern marketing's march to create a wor...

Hanna Engelmeier, “Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900” (Bohlau, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The relationship between humans and apes has been discussed for centuries. That discussion took a new turn with the publication and reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natura...

Marga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emo...

John Danaher, "Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to...

Alex Wade, “Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Alex Wade examines the culture of bedroom coding, arcades, and format wars in 1980s Britain. Wade intervie...

Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned rea...

Paul Offit, "Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far" (HarperCollins, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why Do Unnecessary and Often Counter-Productive Medical Interventions Happen So Often? Today I talked to Paul Offit about his book Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (HarperCollins, 2020)...

E. Wakild and M. K. Berry, "A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry have written a practical, informative, and inspiring guide to teaching environmental history. It also happens to be fun. A Primer for Teaching Environmental Histo...

Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of...

John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. In Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, ...

M. del Pilar Blanco and J. Page, "Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America" (U Florida Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (University of Florida Press 2020), a collection edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page is a wonderful and imaginative ...

Joshua Specht, "Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that ...

Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religio...

Ian Samson, “Paper: An Elegy” (Harper Collins, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches. Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from the internet than from newspapers. But how irrel...

M. Schneider-Mayerson and B. R. Bellamy, "An Ecotopian Lexicon" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By choice or not, the catastrophes of global warming and mass extinction task young generations with reorienting human relationships with the earth’s systems, resources, and lifeforms. The extracta...

Anthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given...

Tim Maudlin, “Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tim Maudlin‘s Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press, 2012) is a clear, approachable, and engaging introduction to the philosophy of physics that focuses on fundamental n...

Angelina Callahan, "NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Angelina Callahan talks about the Naval Research Laboratory’s Vanguard Project. While the launch of Vanguard 1 in 1958 was part of the Cold War “Space Race,” it also represented something more: a s...

Christopher J. Lee, “Jet Lag” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the local time. For him, it’s always whatever time i...

Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of prof...

Ajantha Subramanian, "The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is merit? How is it claimed? In her much-awaited book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), Ajantha Subramanian addresses the pertinent question ...

Molly Wright Steenson, “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of wha...

Rachel Prentice, “Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education” (Duke UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rachel Prentice‘s new book blends methodological approaches from science studies and anthropology to produce a riveting account of anatomical and surgical education in twenty-first century North Am...

Benjamin Breen, "The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade" (U Penn Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Benjamin Breen's The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), we are transported back to a time when there was no such thing as "recreation...

Jennifer Hart, “Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our guest today was Dr. Jennifer Hart who talked to us about her recently published book Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press, 2016). In th...

Hannah S. Decker, “The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States ...

Evan Friss, "On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evan Friss, an associate professor of history at James Madison University, historicizes the bicycle’s place in New York City’s social, economic, infrastructural and cultural politics. On Bicycles: ...

Michael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even e...

David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do you measure a star? In the middle of the 20thcentury, an interdisciplinary and international community of scientists began using radio waves to measure heavenly bodies and transformed astro...

Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics? Phoebe Moore's The...

Howard I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso,...

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, eds., “Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes have produced a volume that will change the way we learn about and teach the history of health and healing in China and beyond. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An I...

Darius Sollohub, "Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession" (U Texas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosiv...

James Delbourgo, “Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane” (Allen Lane, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose colle...

Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing m...

Xiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of cour...

Andrew Keen, “How To Fix The Future” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on...

Nathaniel Comfort, “The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history...

Steve Fuller, "The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska's The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) debates the concept of transforming human nature, including such thorny t...

Nick Montfort, “The Future” (MIT, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. I...

Nicco Mele, “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicco Mele is the author of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). He is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Cent...

Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in eac...

Leo Coleman, “A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi” (Cornell UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We take electricity for granted. But the material grids and wires that bring light to homes and connect places are also objects of moral concern, political freedoms and national advancement, sugges...

Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in ...

Joshua Sperber, "Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace" (Lexington, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Lexington Books, 2019), Joshua Sperber analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which cu...

Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from th...

Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble i...

Laura Cabrera, "Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Laura Cabrera discusses three possible human enhancement paradigms and explores how each in...

Liss C. Werner, “Cybernetics: State of the Art” (Tech Uni of Berlin Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible ...

Dominic Pettman, “Human Error” (UMinnesota, 2011)/”Look at the Bunny” (Zero Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“The humans are dead.” Whether or not you recognize the epigram from Flight of the Conchords (and if not, there are worse ways to spend a few minutes than by looking here, and I recommend sticking...

Thomas Yarrow, "Architects: Portraits of a Practice" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal qu...

Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas ...

Joseph November, “Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are pigeons, cats, and Martians here. There are CT scanners, dentures, computers large enough to fill rooms, war games, and neural networks. In Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the Un...

E. Jones-Imhotep and T. Adcock, "Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History" (UBC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. The book I’m looking...

Chelsea Schelly, “Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America” (Rutgers UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Technology is a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use social processes of interpretation and negotia...

Paul Barrett, “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” (Broadway, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History is in many respects the story of humanity’s quest for transcendence: to control life and death, time and space, loss and memory. When inventors or companies effectively tap into these needs...

Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Never have so many possessed the means to be so lethal. The diffusion of modern technology (robotics, cyber weapons, 3-D printing, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence) to ordinary peopl...

Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial tran...

Alexandra Hui, “The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics an...

Jason Smith, "To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jason Smith discusses the US Navy’s role in exploring and charting the ocean world. Smith is an assistant professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University. He’s the author of To Master...

Jason Josephson-Storm, “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” (U. Chicago, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to think of ourselves—our modern selves–as disenchanted. We have traded magic, myth, and spirits for science, reason, and logic. But this is false. Jason Josephson-Storm, in his exciting ne...

Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World an...

Chet Van Duzer, "Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chet Van Duzer's new book Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), presents the first detailed study of one of the most important...

Alfie Bown, “The Playstation Dreamworld” (Polity, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong, explores...

Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for...

Michael R. Boswell, "Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities (Island Press, 2019) is designed to help planners, municipal staff and officials, citizens and others working at local...

Zek Valkyrie, “Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline” (Praeger, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zek Valkyrie teaches at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. His new book, Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline (Praeger, 2017), takes readers into the w...

Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers t...

Deborah Lupton, "The Quantified Self" (Polity, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to p...

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Personal Stereo” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman, taking ...

Matthew Wisnioski, “Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his compelling and fascinating account of how engineers navigated new landscapes of technology and its discontents in 1960s America, Matthew Wisnioski takes us into the personal and professional...

Lundy Braun, "Breathing Race into the Machine" (U Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“We cannot get answers to questions that cannot be asked.” Lundy Braun’s influential book, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (Univ...

Andrew S. Tompkins, “Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of th...

E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in ...

Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

They were throwing garbage in the streets. Rosalind Fredericks makes sense of the garbage-scape of Dakar, Senegal in the wake of the 2007 trash “revolts” against the city and country’s uneven and f...

Michelle Murphy, “The Economization of Life” (Duke University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle Murphy pulls apart the late modern concept of “population” to show the lives this concept has produced and continues to produce,...

Deborah R. Coen, “The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Deborah R. Coen‘s new book chronicles how the earthquake emerged and receded as a scientific object through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Half of the chapters in The Earthquake Observers:...

Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

Douglas Hunter, “The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (UNC, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Douglas Hunter examines the history of meanings, affinities, and petrogl...

Audra J. Wolfe, “Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America” (Johns Hopkins, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Audra Wolfe‘s new book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press, 2013) offers a synthetic account of American science durin...

John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteract...

Michael Wintroub, “The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledg...

Joel Isaac, “Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagine the academic world as a beach. The grains of sand making up the beach are the departments, institutes, and other bodies and related gatherings that make up the officially sanctioned parts ...

Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing...

Vincent J. Intondi, “African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement” (Stanford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press, 2015) tells the compelling story of those black acti...

Christopher I. Beckwith, “Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012), Christopher I. Beckwith gives us a rare window into the global movements...

Nir Eyal, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A former advisor to tech companies on how to make their products habit-forming, Nir Eyal found that his own smartphone use was adversely affecting his family life. He took a deep dive into research...

Brian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives” (Icon Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly beco...

Michael D. Gordin, “The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist.” From the very first sentence, Michael D. Gordin’s new book introduces readers to the characters, plotlines, and ...

Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. In Race Aft...

Allison Perlman, “Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television” (Rutgers UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since its infancy, television has played an important role in shaping U.S. values and the American sense of self. Social activists recognized this power immediately and, consequently, set about try...

Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of th...

Helen Rozwadowski, "Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans" (Reaktion Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Aver...

Iwan Rhys Morus, ed.,”The Oxford Illustrated History of Science” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is science? A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilliant scholar of Victorian science, Iwan Rhys Mor...

Janice Neri, “The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts.  Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to ...

Jonathan Rees, "Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frederic Tudor was the “Ice King” of early nineteenth-century America. It was Tudor who realized that ice, harvested from New England ponds and rivers could be shipped to the Caribbean. Shipping wa...

Nicholas C. Kawa, “Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, and Forests” (U. Texas Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the...

Signe Rousseau, “Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet” (AltaMira Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The other day I found myself in a cooking situation that’s fairly common: I had a few odd ingredients–some oxidized strips of bacon, a withered red pepper, a bunch of half-wilted parsley–and needed...

Margaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks,...

Ron Edwards, “The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have ...

Sally Smith Hughes, “Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (University of Chicago Press, 2011) tells many stories of many things. It is the story of a handful of people who figured out how to make recombinant DNA techno...

J. Yates and C. N. Murphy, "Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Standards are crucial to the way we live—just look around you. A no. 2 pencil, perhaps? That arrived in an 8x8.5x20 shipping container? Standards allow your computer and smart phone to connect seam...

Eric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book Th...

Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images. In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichma...

Claire Edington, "Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Both colonies and insane asylums are well known institutions of power. But what of asylums in Europe’s early 20th-century colonial empires? How did they operate? Who was confined in them? Who worke...

David Beer, “Metric Power” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do metrics rule the social world? In Metric Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) David Beer, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, outlines the rise of the metric and the role of metrics i...

David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline” (University of Chicago, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 1012), David Sepkoski tells a story that explains the many ways that paleontol...

Wendy Wickwire, "At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging" (UBC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of anthropology remembers James Teit as a field assistant and man-on-the spot for Franz Boas. But in At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging (University of British Co...

Claire D. Clark, “The Recovery Revolution” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had something that looked a lot like a disease or mental il...

Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600” (Oregon State University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600....

Michael E. Mann, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars : Dispatches from the Front Lines" (2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We talk with Michael E. Mann, a Nobel Prize winner and Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, about his journey through the climate wars over the past two decades and the rol...

Simone Muller, “Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb account of the laying of submarine telegraph cables in ...

Catherine Jami, “The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722)” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Challenging conventional modes of understanding China and the circulation of knowledge within the history of science, Catherine Jami‘s new book looks closely at the imperial science of the reign of...

Cara New Daggett, "Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke UP, 2019), Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the face of climate cha...

Melvin R. Adams, “Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation” (Washington State University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cle...

Minsoo Kang, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011) offers readers a...

Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

Thomas Hazlett, “The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What better way to explore the history of media regulation than to go on a journey with the former chief economist of the FCC? Prior to introduction of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, the rad...

Laura Stark, “Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura Stark‘s lucid and engaging new book explores the making and enacting of the rules that govern human subjects research in the US. Using a thoughtfully conceived combination of ethnographic and...

Russell Potter, "Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-year Search" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1845, two British naval ships left England with 129 men in search of the Northwest Passage. They were never heard from again. The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition shocked the world. Doze...

Brian Clegg, “The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe” (Icon Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Clegg is one of England’s most prolific and popular writers on science. His latest work, The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe (Icon Books, 2017), covers Einstein’s Theo...

Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were...

Jamie L. Pietruska, "Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A fortune teller, cotton prophet, and a weather forecaster walk into a bar—probably a more common occurrence than you might think in the Gilded Age United States! Jamie Pietruska’s Looking Forward:...

Neil M. Maher, “Apollo in the Age of Aquarius” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. A...

Janet Kourany, “Philosophy of Science After Feminism” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Do social values belong in the sciences? Exploring the relationship between science, society, and politics, Philosophy of Science After Feminism (Oxford UP, 2010) provides a map for a more sociall...

Jeremy Black, "Maps of War: Mapping Conflict through the Centuries" (Conway, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is little documented mapping of conflict prior to the Renaissance period, but, from the 17th century onward, military commanders and strategists began to document the wars in which they were ...

Beau Lotto, “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently” (Hatchette Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. In his new book Deviate: The Science of Seeing D...

Helene Mialet, “Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“By error or by chance, I think I have discovered an angel.” First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 201...

Amy Carney, "Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS" (Toronto UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich’s new aristocracy. They utilized the science o...

Britt Rusert, “Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press,...

Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order” (University of California Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Progn...

Andreas Bernard, "Theory of the Hashtag" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his short book, Theory of the Hashtag (Polity, 2019), Andreas Bernard traces the origins and career of the hashtag. Following the history of the # sign through its origins in the Middle Ages and...

Sharrona Pearl, “Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other” (U. Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations...

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, “Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare” (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims t...

J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

Willliam Rankin, “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s...

Avner Ben Zaken, “Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (John...

Ann Elias, "Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility...

Kate Daloz, “We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America” (PublicAffairs, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) ...

Anjan Chakravartty, “A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable” (Cambridge UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Near the opening of his book A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable (Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback 2010), Anjan Chakravartty warns readers: snack before readin...

Binyamin Appelbaum, "The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society" (Little Brown, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Think economics is the "dismal science" with abstract formulas that have no impact on life as it is actually lived? Think again.  In The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Frac...

Sophia Roosth, “Synthetic: How Life Got Made” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on ma...

P. Kyle Stanford, “Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives” (Oxford UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Should we really believe what our best scientific theories tell us about the world, especially about parts of the world that we can’t see? This question informs a long history of debates over scie...

Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Valerie Olson talks about why the idea of outer space as a “frontier” is giving way to one that frames it as a cosmic ecosystem. Olson is an associate professor of anthropology at University of Cal...

Tara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his fou...

Hanna Rose Shell, “Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance” (Zone Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagine a world wherein the people who wrote history books were artists, the books occasionally read like poetry, and the stories in them ranged from Monty Python skits to the natural history of ch...

Theodore Dalrymple, "False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine" (Encounter Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired physician in Great Britain, who has written an account of his year’s-worth of reading the New England Journal of Medicine. In his new book False Positive: A Year of ...

Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural in...

David A. Kirby, “Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

First things first: this was probably the most fun I’ve had working through an STS monograph. (Really: Who doesn’t like reading about Jurassic Park and King Kong?) In addition to being full of wond...

David Lindsay Roberts, "Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The institutional history of mathematics in the United States comprises several entangled traditions—military, civil, academic, industrial—each of which merits its own treatment. David Lindsay Robe...

Lisa Messeri, “Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds” (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps...

Sherine Hamdy, “Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt” (University of California Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the best things about co-hosting New Books in STS is the opportunity to discover books like this one. Sherine Hamdy has given us something special in Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transpla...

David D. Vail, "Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945" (U Alabama Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) scolded the agricultural industry for its profligate spread of “poison” and pesticides “indiscriminately from the skies.” Now, in Chemical...

J. C. McKeown, “A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393