Podd: New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Julien Mailland, "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry" (MIT Press, 2024)

21 december 2024 | 41 min

A guide to the fascinating legal history of the videogame industry, written for nonlawyers.

Why did a judge recall FIFA 15, a nonviolent soccer game, from French shelves in 2014? Why was Vodka Drunkenski, a character in Nintendo-Japan’s Punch-Out!, renamed Soda Popinski in the US and then in Western Europe, where the pun made no sense? Why was a Dutch-American company barred by US courts from distributing a clone of Pac-Man?

Julien Mailland answers all these questions and more in The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry (MIT Press, 2024), an inside look at the legal history that undergirds our favorite videogames. Drawing on a series of case studies as vignettes of the human comedy, Mailland sheds light on why and how the role of lawyers is key for understanding the videogame industry. Each chapter in The Game That Never Ends is a mini-puzzle that pieces together how an important legal issue arose, was resolved, and impacted the industry and the experience of gamers in real time. These chapters are interspersed with shorter chapters called “The Lawyer’s Corner,” opportunities to dive deeper into individual cases. Lightly footnoted, these interludes connect the previous chapters together by providing a conceptual meta-analysis. Offering a comprehensive overview of the global legal history of videogames, The Game That Never Ends will leave readers with a nuanced, in-depth, and more global understanding of the videogame industry.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

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Lindsay Weinberg, "Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

21 december 2024 | 48 min

Ulises Ali Mejias and Nick Couldry, "Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 december 2024 | 63 min

Chelsea Berry, "Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

20 december 2024 | 44 min

By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.

In Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one’s relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities.

Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Dr. Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Nina Edwards, "Weeds" (Reaktion, 2024)

19 december 2024 | 29 min

Luci Pangrazio and Neil Selwyn, "Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data and Everyday Life" (MIT Press, 2023)

19 december 2024 | 40 min

Voices Part 3: Dork-O-Phonics

16 december 2024 | 43 min

Matthew S. Smith, "EverQuest" (Boss Fight Books, 2024)

15 december 2024 | 38 min

Margaret Ziolkowski, "Mega-Dams in World Literature: Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building" (U of Wyoming Press, 2024)

15 december 2024 | 36 min

Margaret Ziolkowski’s Mega-Dams in World Literature: Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building (University of Wyoming Press, 2022) reveals the varied effects of large dams on people and their environments as expressed in literary works, focusing on the shifting attitudes toward large dams that emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Ziolkowski covers the enthusiasm for large-dam construction that took place during the mid-twentieth-century heyday of mega-dams, the increasing number of people displaced by dams, the troubling environmental effects they incur, and the types of destruction and protest to which they may be subject.

Using North American, Native American, Russian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese novels and poems, Ziolkowski explores the supposed progress that these structures bring. The book asks how the human urge to exploit and control waterways has affected our relationships to nature and the environment and argues that the high modernism of the twentieth century, along with its preoccupation with development, casts the hydroelectric dam as a central symbol of domination over nature and the power of the nation state. Beyond examining the exultation of large dams as symbols of progress, Mega-Dams in World Literature takes a broad international and cultural approach that humanizes and personalizes the major issues associated with large dams through nuanced analyses, paying particular attention to issues engendered by high modernism and settler colonialism.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Margaret Ziolkowski about the symbolism of mega-dams, the environmental and social consequences of dam building, as well as the role of literature in critiquing those consequences.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature

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Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman, "Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie®" (MIT Press, 2024)

14 december 2024 | 35 min

The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari’s main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie® (MIT Press, 2024), Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivision’s chips and code, games, marketing and business strategies, organizational and social history, and the cultural and economic context of the early US games industry from the mid-1970s to the great videogame industry crash of 1983. While many remember Atari, Intellivision has largely been forgotten. As such, Intellivision fills a crucial gap in videogame scholarship, telling the story of a console that sold millions and competed aggressively against Atari. Drawing on a wealth of data from both institutional and personal archives and over 150 interviews with programmers, engineers, executives, marketers, and designers, Boellstorff and Soderman examine the relationship between videogames and toys—an under-analyzed aspect of videogame history—and discuss the impact of home computing on the rise of videogames, the gendered implications of play and videogame design at Mattel, and the blurring of work and play in the early games industry.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

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Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)

14 december 2024 | 41 min

Meredith McKittrick, "Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

10 december 2024 | 63 min

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.

Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Meredith McKittrick explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Dr. McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, Dr. McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Jeremy Brecher, "The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

10 december 2024 | 31 min

Reem Hilu, "Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

10 december 2024 | 29 min

Benjamin J. Shestakofsky on How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality

9 december 2024 | 73 min

Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

8 december 2024 | 72 min

Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For many others, however, this coercive gambit failed to work. When does nuclear latency--the technical capacity to build the bomb--enable states to pursue effective coercion?

In Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), Tristan A. Volpe argues that having greater capacity to build weaponry doesn't translate to greater coercive advantage. Volpe finds that there is a trade-off between threatening proliferation and promising nuclear restraint. States need just enough bomb-making capacity to threaten proliferation but not so much that it becomes too difficult for them to offer nonproliferation assurances. The boundaries of this sweet spot align with the capacity to produce the fissile material at the heart of an atomic weapon.

To test this argument, Volpe includes comparative case studies of four countries that leveraged latency against superpowers: Japan, West Germany, North Korea, and Iran.

Volpe identifies a generalizable mechanism--the threat-assurance trade-off--that explains why more power often makes compellence less likely to work.

Volpe proposes a framework that illuminates how technology shapes broader bargaining dynamics and helps to refine policy options for inhibiting the spread of nuclear weapons. As nuclear technology continues to cast a shadow over the global landscape, Leveraging Latency systematically assesses its coercive utility.

Our guest today is Tristan Volpe, an Assistant Professor in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Kerry Smith, "Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

7 december 2024 | 71 min

Bug

7 december 2024 | 18 min

In this episode of High Theory, Marcello Vitali-Rosati tells us about bugs! A bug can be a small insect, an illness, a spy device, or a digital malfunction. The computer bug, the ghost in the machine, derives from an older engineering use of bug as mechanical failure, and the insect, in turn, derives from an earlier sense of bug as specter, an invisible and frightening ghost. Like philosophy itself, the computer bug stops our ordinary workflow and causes us to think, to question the very task we had set out to undertake.

Marcello’s new book, Éloge du bug: être libre à l’époque du numérique (Zones, La Découverte, Paris 2024), sings the praises of computer bugs. By stopping things from working as expected, the bug is a veritable Socratic demon: it enables the emergence of critical thinking and allows the multiplicity of thinking paradigms that characterizes philosophy. Instead of letting ourselves be seduced by a discourse which, promising to free us from all the material tasks of our lives, ends up enslaving us completely to a handful of companies, this book, with its praise of the bug, shows how to bring about a true critical spirit and a literacy capable of setting us free in our digital age. You can read the book online here!

Marcello Vitali-Rosati is a philosopher and specialist in digital publishing. He works as a professor in the Department of French Literatures at the University of Montreal, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities and the Chair of excellence in digital publishing at the Université de Rouen (France). Through the study and practice of code, he analyzes how algorithms, formats, software, and platforms redefine the notions of human, identity, knowledge, and literature. An active contributor to the theory of editorialization, he works on designing new forms of knowledge production and dissemination as well as innovative editorial workflows. He also works as an editor, publishes widely, and leads several digital humanities projects. You can read more about his work on his website, in English, French, or Italian.

The image for this episode shows a drawing of a moth on a purple and black patterned background. It was created by Saronik Bosu by manipulating public domain photograph of the circuitry of IBM 7030 and a drawing from a nineteenth century entomology textbook, also in public domain.

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Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)

5 december 2024 | 79 min

J. Mijin Cha, "A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future" (MIT Press, 2024)

5 december 2024 | 28 min

Yochai Ataria, "Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World" (Magnes Press, 2019)

4 december 2024 | 53 min

Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)

26 november 2024 | 52 min

Megan Rae Blakely, "Technology, Intellectual Property Law, and Culture: The Tangification of Cultural Heritage" (Routledge, 2024)

25 november 2024 | 42 min

Jennifer Denbow, "Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype" (Duke UP, 2024)

24 november 2024 | 59 min

Katherine C. Epstein, "Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

24 november 2024 | 68 min

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated system for gathering data, calculating predictions, and transmitting the results to the gunners. At the heart of their invention was the most advanced analog computer of the day, a technological breakthrough that anticipated the famous Norden bombsight of World War II, the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles, and the networked “smart” systems that dominate combat today. Recognizing the value of Pollen and Isherwood’s invention, the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy pirated it, one after the other. When the inventors sued, both the British and US governments invoked secrecy, citing national security concerns.

Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Katherine C. Epstein analyzes these and related legal battles over naval technology, exploring how national defense tested the two countries’ commitment to individual rights and the free market. Dr. Epstein deftly sets out Pollen’s and Isherwood’s pioneering achievements, the patent questions raised, the geopolitical rivalry between Britain and the United States, and the legal precedents each country developed to control military tools built by private contractors.

Dr. Epstein’s account reveals that long before the US national security state sought to restrict information about atomic energy, it was already embroiled in another contest between innovation and secrecy. The America portrayed in this sweeping and accessible history isn’t yet a global hegemon but a rising superpower ready to acquire foreign technology by fair means or foul—much as it accuses China of doing today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Liliana M. Naydan, "Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

23 november 2024 | 52 min

Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, "Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine" (Basilian Media, 2024)

22 november 2024 | 63 min

Fiona Smyth, "Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century" (Manchester UP, 2024)

22 november 2024 | 35 min

Jordan S. Carroll, "Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

22 november 2024 | 47 min

Thinking Machines: Will Robots Have Rights?

20 november 2024 | 30 min

Victor P. Petrov, "Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain" (MIT Press, 2023)

18 november 2024 | 58 min

Anthony Kwame Harrison on Cassette Tapes and Hip Hop Culture

18 november 2024 | 120 min

Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)

16 november 2024 | 57 min

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China (Princeton, 2024) Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platforms—a process she calls “institutional outsourcing.”

China’s e-commerce boom showcases this digital path to development. In merely two decades, China built from scratch a two-trillion-dollar e-commerce market, with 800 million users, seventy million jobs, and nearly fifty percent of global online retail sales. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, this market boom occurred because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building despite its disruptive nature. Drawing on a plethora of interviews, original surveys, proprietary data, and a field experiment, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China.

Institutional outsourcing nonetheless harbors its own challenges. With inadequate regulation, platforms may abuse market power, while excessive regulation stifles institutional innovation. China’s regulatory oscillations toward platforms—from laissez-faire to crackdown and back to support—underscore the struggle to strike the right balance.

Lizhi Liu is assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government. Her work has been published by American Economic Review: Insights, Studies in Comparative International Development, Minnesota Law Review, Oxford University Press, and Princeton University Press. She was also listed as a Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor of 2021. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD), Statistics (MS), and International Policy Studies (MA) from Stanford University and in International Relations (LLB) from Renmin University of China.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy.

Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s tech sector include Trafficking Data, on how Chinese and American firms exploit user data, The Tao of Alibaba, on Alibaba’s business model and organizational culture, Surveillance State, on China’s digital surveillance, Prototype Nation, on the culture and politics of China’s innovation economy.

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Meta-Practice (on Chinese Medicine)

11 november 2024 | 57 min

Jeremy Black, "Introduction to Global Military History: 1775 to the Present Day" (Routledge, 2018)

9 november 2024 | 48 min

Libuse Hannah Veprek, "At the Edge of AI: Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations" (Transcript, 2024)

8 november 2024 | 25 min

Artur Gruszczak and Sebastian Kaempf, "Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare" (Routledge, 2023)

6 november 2024 | 81 min

This handbook provides a comprehensive, problem-driven and dynamic overview of the future of warfare. The volatilities and uncertainties of the global security environment raise timely and important questions about the future of humanity's oldest occupation: war. Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare (Routledge, 2023) edited by Artur Gruszczak and Sebastian Kaempf addresses these questions through a collection of cutting-edge contributions by leading scholars in the field. Its overall focus is prognostic rather than futuristic, highlighting discernible trends, key developments and themes without downplaying the lessons from the past. By making the past meet the present in order to envision the future, the handbook offers a diversified outlook on the future of warfare which will be indispensable for researchers, students and military practitioners alike. This book will be of great interest to students of strategic studies, defence studies, war and technology, and International Relations.

Artur Gruszczak is Professor of Social Sciences and Chair of National Security at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He is author/editor of three books, including Technology, Ethics and the Protocols of Modern War, co-edited with Pawel Frankowski (Routledge 2018).

Sebastian Kaempf is Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Saving Soldiers or Civilians (Cambridge University Press 2018).

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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David Rowell, "The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music" (Melville House, 2024)

6 november 2024 | 69 min

A veteran music journalist argues that the rise of music streaming and the consolidation of digital platforms is decimating the musical landscape, with dire consequences for the future of our culture ...

In The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music (Melville House, 2024), former Washington Post writer and editor David Rowell lays out how commercial and cultural forces have laid waste to the cultural ecosystems that have produced decades of great American music. From the scorched-earth demonetizing of artist revenue accomplished by Spotify and its ilk to the rise of dead artists "touring" via hologram, Rowell examines how a perfect storm of conditions have drained our shared musical landscape of vitality.

Combining personal memoir, intimate on-the-ground reporting, industry research, and cultural criticism, Rowell's book is a powerful indictment of a music culture gone awry, driven by conformity and subverted by the ways the internet and media influence what we listen to and how we listen to it.

David Rowell grew up in North Carolina and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For nearly 25 years he was an editor at The Washington Post Magazine and has taught literary journalism in the MFA department at American University. He is currently a senior editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His previous books include the novel The Train of Small Mercies, and Wherever the Sound Takes You: Heroics and Heartbreak in Music Making. He lives just outside of Chapel Hill.

David Rowell’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).

Bradley on Twitter.

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Stuart Anderson, "Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

6 november 2024 | 65 min

The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standards for drugs. In 1813 the Royal College of Physicians of London considered a proposal to develop an imperial British pharmacopoeia - at a time when separate official pharmacopoeias existed for England, Scotland, and Ireland. A unified British pharmacopoeia was published in 1864, and by 1914 it was considered suitable for the whole Empire.

Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) by Dr. Stuart Anderson traces the 350-year development of officially sanctioned pharmacopoeias across the British Empire, first from local to national pharmacopoeias, and later to a standardised pharmacopoeia that would apply throughout Britain’s imperial world. The evolution of British pharmacopoeias and the professionalisation of medicine saw developments including a transition from Galenic principles to germ theory, and a shift from plant-based to chemical medicines. While other colonial powers in Europe usually imposed metropolitan pharmacopoeias across their colonies, Britain consulted with practitioners throughout its Empire. As the scope of the pharmacopoeia widened, the process of agreeing upon drug standardisation became more complex and fraught. A wide range of issues was exposed, from bioprospecting and the inclusion of indigenous medicines in pharmacopoeias, to adulteration and demands for the substitution of pharmacopoeial drugs with locally available ones.

Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires uses the evolution of an imperial pharmacopoeia in Britain as a vehicle for exploring the hegemonic power of European colonial powers in the medical field, and the meaning of pharmacopoeia more broadly.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction" (Penguin, 2024)

5 november 2024 | 54 min

Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation

4 november 2024 | 81 min

Brian Groom, "Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World" (Harpernorth, 2024)

2 november 2024 | 28 min

Thinking Machines: The First AI Takeover Story

2 november 2024 | 34 min

Richard Moss, "Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games" (Bitmap Books, 2024)

1 november 2024 | 37 min

Painstakingly researched and written by football-obsessed writer and experienced game journalist, historian, and documentarian Richard Moss – author of Bitmap's own The Secret History of Mac Gaming – A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games stays keenly on the ball as it shares the rich and influential history of video game football – or 'soccer', for our American readers – striving to understand the very best the genre has to offer; and those releases that go a little wide of their target.

A Tale of Two Halves takes you on a fascinating journey from the very first examples of the form all the way through to the genre's 2000s' heyday. It hits the back of the net with expert analysis of over 400 football games, including Sensible Soccer, Kick Off, Match Day, FIFA, Pro Evolution Soccer, This Is Football, Championship Manager, Premier Manager, and both old-school and new-school Football Manager. Gathered together in a single volume, that remarkable spread of releases presents a surprising variety of interpretations of the beautiful game, showcasing one of the medium's most creative, beguiling realms.

A Tale of Two Halves primarily focuses on footy gaming's formative years – meaning from around 1980 to 2010 – and carefully divides the genre into two distinct halves, taking a considered look at each. As such, the first half is dominated by the fast and simple 2D action of icons like Kick Off, International Soccer, and Nintendo’s Soccer. Then, following the half-time whistle, it turns its attention to the increasingly realistic 3D outings defined by icons like FIFA, Pro Evo, and Virtua Striker.

Across its 628 pages, A Tale of Two Halves also features a foreword by legendary commentator Clive Tyldesley, hundreds of meticulously realised screenshots, and 13 interviews with pioneering football game developers. Inside you'll also find a series of illustrations from James Reynolds' 'Unlicensed FC' project – which celebrates Pro Evo's unusual takes on players' real names – as well as perfectly pitched pixel art from the team at 8-Bit Football. Numerous gaming platforms are covered, from the Atari 2600 and C64 to the Collecovison, via the Amiga line, PlayStation 1, Xbox 360, Arcades, and many more.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Titel kulturmagazin, radio host of “Replay Value”, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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When We Prioritize Data and Metrics, What Happens to Human Connections?

31 oktober 2024 | 55 min

Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton University Press, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Dr. Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works. Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.

Our guest is: Dr. Allison Pugh, who is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the 2024-25 Vice President of the American Sociological Association. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New Republic.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Jamie Hakim, "Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

31 oktober 2024 | 56 min

Greg Epstein, "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation" (MIT Press, 2024)

30 oktober 2024 | 90 min

Jia Tan, "Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China" (NYU Press, 2023)

29 oktober 2024 | 57 min

Kostas Kampourakis, "Ancestry Reimagined: Dismantling the Myth of Genetic Ethnicities" (Oxford UP, 2023)

27 oktober 2024 | 42 min

Recent social and political psychological research indicates that increased access to ancestry testing has strengthened the notion of genetic essentialism among some groups, or the idea that our biology ties us to particular ethnic identities. This can boost a sense of cultural pride and prosocial behaviors among communities that are perceived to be similar. In the worst-case scenarios, however, this phenomenon can contribute to deeper social woes like misinformation, anti-science agendas, and even social hatred among those who believe in racial superiority.

Using research from both the social sciences and the genetics literature as support, Ancestry Reimagined: Dismantling the Myth of Genetic Ethnicities (Oxford University Press, 2023) establishes realistic expectations about what we can learn from our DNA as a foundation for examining the psychological impact of ancestry testing, including the differences between how this information is perceived versus its reality. With this book, Dr. Kampourakis flexes his muscles as an esteemed interdisciplinary science educator and author to challenge these traditional social constructs, using the current genetic testing science as a myth busting tool.

Kampourakis argues that DNA ancestry testing cannot reveal a person's true ethnic identity because ethnic groups are socially and culturally constructed. In 10 accessible chapters, he explains the assumptions underlying the scientific study of ancestry, and the resulting paradoxes that are often overlooked. What the study of human DNA mostly shows is that human DNA variation is continuous, and it is not possible to clearly delimit ethnic groups based on DNA data. As a result, we all are members of a huge, extended family, and not of genetically distinct ethnic groups. What ancestry tests can provide are probabilistic estimations of similarities between the test-takers and particular reference populations. This does not devalue the results of these tests, however, because they can indeed provide some valuable information to people who may not know much about their ancestors. In fact, what the tests are very good at doing is finding close relatives, and this is perhaps why the whole enterprise should be rebranded as family, not ancestry, testing. Ultimately, this book reveals that genetic essentialism, biological ethnic identities, racial superiority, and similar social constructs are scientifically unsupported

Kostas Kampourakis is the author and editor of several books about evolution, genetics, philosophy and history of science, as well as the editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Understanding Life. He teaches biology and science education courses at the University of Geneva

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Ian Milligan, "Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

26 oktober 2024 | 49 min

In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age (John Hopkins University Press, December 2024) explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today.

By the mid-1990s, the specter of a "digital dark age" haunted libraries, portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence, deletion, and apathy. People around the world worked to solve this impending problem. In San Francisco, technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit, Internet Archive, filling tape drives with internet content. Elsewhere, in Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, and Stockholm, librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage.

Cataloging worries among librarians, technologists, futurists, and writers from WWII onward, through early practitioners, to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks, Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how the web gained a long-lasting memory. By understanding this history, we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts.

Ian Milligan is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as an associate vice president in the Office of Research. Milligan is the author of The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Dolores Albarracin et al., "Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

24 oktober 2024 | 62 min

Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018)

23 oktober 2024 | 61 min

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 dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2018). But this isn’t your typical historical monograph. One of the latest volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (with illustrations by Liz Clarke), explores the history of modernization, urbanization, and the spread of epidemic disease in the era of “New Imperialism” in an exciting and highly engaging format.

The remaking of Hanoi as a capital of French empire from the end of the nineteenth century had unintended consequences. In the state-of-the-art sewers of the French/white areas of the city, rats found the perfect home. Then came the Third plague pandemic, the disease that travelled with rats and moved from one site to another around the globe…on railroads, ships, the growing networks of trade and empire. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt mobilizes years of research about this episode in the city’s history, illustrating (literally!) the inherent contradictions of imperialism, and the complexities of domination and resistance in a colonial context. Framed as an undergraduate lecture that features the author as a character throughout the narrative, the book is set up with teaching in mind. In addition to the fascinating story of the rat hunt itself (and all the twists and turns involved), the volume includes a rich selection of primary sources and a series of contextual essays that will allow students to explore this history in a range of productive ways. An accessible book that is at once serious and fun, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt was such a pleasure to read and to talk about. I hope listeners will enjoy my conversation with Mike as much as I did!

*Mike is also a host on New Books in History! Be sure to check out his interviews here on the network.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

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Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

23 oktober 2024 | 29 min

Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

23 oktober 2024 | 29 min

Bob Frishman, "Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803" (APS Press, 2024)

23 oktober 2024 | 47 min

Edward Duffield (1730–1803) was a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker, whose elegant brass, mahogany, and walnut timekeepers stand proudly in major American museums and collections. Duffield, unlike other leather-apron ‘mechanics,’ was born rich and owned a country estate, Benfield, and many more properties. He was deeply involved in civic and church affairs during crucial years in American history—his lifelong close friend, Benjamin Franklin, was staying at Duffield’s Benfield estate when Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams first discussed the Declaration of Independence. Sally, Franklin’s daughter, brought her family there for extended periods during the Revolution and Franklin’s wife, Deborah, was best friends for fifty years with Duffield’s mother-in-law. Duffield was even one of three executors of Franklin’s will.

In Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803 (American Philosophical Society Press, 2024), Bob Frishman catalogs and describes seventy-one known Duffield clocks and instruments and reveals how, during the mid-eighteenth century, they largely were not fabricated from scratch by isolated individuals. He contends that Duffield and his fellow clockmakers were not furniture-makers; they were mechanical artisans whose complex metal machines rang the hours and steadily ticked inside wooden cases made by others. Existing books on Philadelphia clocks have focused on these artifacts as furniture, including their woodwork, cabinetmakers, and decorative aspects. However, Frishman, a professional horologist for nearly four decades, brings his vast expertise to bear on this first comprehensive study of Duffield’s life and work.

Far more than a treatise on pre-industrial horological timekeeping, this book tells the compelling stories of a man, a city, and an era, while deepening our appreciation for Duffield’s stately sentinels—often a colonial American family’s most valuable possession—and the times and places in which their makers lived.

Bob Frishman has professionally repaired nearly 8,000 timepieces and sold more than 1,700 vintage clocks and watches. As a scholar of horology, and assisted by a personal library of 900 books on the subject, he has published more than 100 articles and reviews in Maine Antique Digest, Watch & Clock Bulletin, and elsewhere. Learn more at his website.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age

21 oktober 2024 | 76 min

Anto Mohsin, "Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

21 oktober 2024 | 68 min

Emotional Rescue

21 oktober 2024 | 36 min

What can sound technologies tell us about our relationship to media as a whole? This is one of the central questions in the research of Phantom Power‘s host, Mack Hagood. To find its answer, he studies devices that get little attention from media scholars: noise-cancelling headphones, white noise machines, apps that make nature sounds, tinnitus maskers–even musical pillows. The story these media tell is rather different from the standard narrative, in which media are conveyors of information and entertainment. In his book Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, Mack argues that media are the way we control how–and how much–we let the world affect us.

On Phantom Power, Mack has always focused on presenting the ideas of other scholars and sound artists. However, during our summer break we thought we’d share a piece by Mack that appeared in another podcast, the audio edition of Real Life, a razor-sharp magazine on digital culture. “Emotional Rescue” begins with the odd example of pillow-based audio technology to make the point that media are really about something more intimate than information:

The cozy conflation of content and comfort… is not a recent digital development. Nor is it, I would argue, a quirky edge case of media use. In fact, this is what media are: tools for altering how the body feels and what it perceives, controlling our relationship to others and the world, enveloping ourselves, and even disappearing ourselves.

Misunderstanding the true nature of our media use isn’t merely of academic concern–it has had disastrous effects on our politics and social cohesion.

The article was written for the Real Life website, then subsequently dropped in podcast form. Writing for the eye is quite different from writing for the ear, but podcast producer and narrator Britney Gil is amazing at elucidating written prose for the listener. If you listen to nonfiction audiobooks and/or want to hear a great narrator reading insightful takes on digital life, be sure to subscribe to Real Life: Audio Edition.

“Emotional Rescue” by Mack Hagood.

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Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 oktober 2024 | 53 min

News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and coastal communities. The baseline for these measurements—sea level—may seem unremarkable, a long-familiar zero point for altitude. But as Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveals, the history of defining and measuring sea level is intertwined with national ambitions, commercial concerns, and shifting relationships between people and the ocean.

Sea Level: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg provides a detailed and innovative account of how mean sea level was first defined, how it became the prime reference point for surveying and cartography, and how it emerged as a powerful mark of humanity’s impact on the earth. With Dr. Hardenberg as our guide, we traverse the muddy spaces of Venice and Amsterdam, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Panama and Suez canals, and the Himalayan foothills. Born out of Enlightenment studies of physics and quantification, sea level became key to state-sponsored public works, colonial expansion, Cold War development of satellite technologies, and recognizing the climate crisis. Mean sea level, Hardenberg reveals, is not a natural occurrence—it has always been contingent, the product of people, places, politics, and evolving technologies. As global warming transforms the globe, Hardenberg reminds us that a holistic understanding of the ocean and its changes requires a multiplicity of reference points.

A fascinating story that revises our assumptions about land and ocean alike, Sea Level calls for a more nuanced understanding of this baseline, one that allows for new methods and interpretations as we navigate an era of unstable seas.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

17 oktober 2024 | 83 min

William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024)

17 oktober 2024 | 50 min

Alastair Bonnett, "40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World" (Ivy Press, 2024)

16 oktober 2024 | 44 min

Marietje Schaake, "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley" (Princeton UP, 2024)

15 oktober 2024 | 29 min

Wes Marshall, "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion That Science Underlies Our Transportation System" (Island Press, 2024)

12 oktober 2024 | 44 min

In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them in 1899. The numbers are getting worse in recent years, yet we continue to accept these deaths as part of doing business. There has been no examination of why we engineer roads that are literally killing us.

In Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System (Island Press, 2024), civil engineering professor Dr. Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture.

Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, Killed by a Traffic Engineer shows how traffic engineering “research” is outdated and unexamined (at its best) and often steered by an industry and culture considering only how to get from point A to B the fastest way possible, to the detriment of safety, quality of life, equality, and planetary health. Dr. Marshall examines our need for speed and how traffic engineers disconnected it from safety, the focus on capacity and how it influences design, blaming human error, relying on faulty data, how liability drives reporting, measuring road safety outcomes, and the education (and reeducation) of traffic engineers.

Killed by a Traffic Engineer is ultimately hopeful about what is possible once we shift our thinking and demand streets engineered for the safety of people, both outside and inside of cars. It will make you look at your city and streets—and traffic engineers— in a new light and inspire you to take action.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Risa Cromer, "Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics" (NYU Press, 2023)

9 oktober 2024 | 81 min

Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, "Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future" (The New Press, 2024)

9 oktober 2024 | 33 min

Critique, Wonder, and Chinese Anatomy, with Lan A. Li

8 oktober 2024 | 62 min

John Withington, "A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day" (Reaktion, 2024)

8 oktober 2024 | 60 min

Pamela O. Long on the Long, Long, Long History of Technology

7 oktober 2024 | 72 min

Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)

6 oktober 2024 | 53 min

Alan F. Blackwell, "Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI" (MIT Press, 2024)

6 oktober 2024 | 55 min

Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn’t happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional—doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here?

In Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI (MIT Press, 2024), Alan Blackwell argues that there is a fundamental flaw in the research agenda of AI. What humanity needs, Blackwell argues, is better ways to tell computers what we want them to do, with new and better programming languages: More Open Representations, Access to Learning, and Control Over Digital Expression, in other words, MORAL CODE. Blackwell draws on his deep experiences as a programming language designer—which he has been doing since 1983—to unpack fundamental principles of interaction design and explain their technical relationship to ideas of creativity and fairness. Taking aim at software that constrains our conversations with strict word counts or infantilizes human interaction with likes and emojis, Blackwell shows how to design software that is better—not more efficient or more profitable, but better for society and better for all people. Covering recent research and the latest smart tools, Blackwell offers rich design principles for a better kind of software—and a better kind of world.

Alan F. Blackwell is Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge University department of Computer Science and Technology. He is a Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge, cofounder with David Good of the Crucible Network for Research in Interdisciplinary Design, and with David and Lara Allen the Global Challenges strategic research initiative of the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)

5 oktober 2024 | 35 min

When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Gerald Sim, "Screening Big Data: Films That Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy" (Routledge, 2024)

3 oktober 2024 | 68 min

Christian Wolmar, "The Liberation Line: The Untold Story of How American Engineering and Ingenuity Won World War II" (Hachette, 2024)

2 oktober 2024 | 62 min

Paola Bertucci, "In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

1 oktober 2024 | 70 min

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science.

In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola Bertucci's In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) brilliantly reveals the mysteries of Nollet's journey, uncovering a subterranean world of secretive and ambitious intelligence gathering masked as scientific inquiry.

The advent of electricity was a pivotal phenomenon not only in the history of physical experimentation, but also in the cultivation of popular scientific interest. Nollet's journey was supposedly inspired by the need to investigate, and subsequently report on, claims of the use of electrified "medicated tubes" by their Italian inventor Gianfrancesco Pivati. Motivated by economic interests in the silk industry, Nollet's journey was in fact an undercover mission commissioned by the French state to discover the secrets of Italian silk manufacture and possibly supplant its international success. The event that sparked the medical controversy—the unusual cure of a bishop—was a complete fabrication.

Bertucci insightfully contrasts published accounts of the event with private documents and discusses how eighteenth-century scientists published fictional events and results to bolster their careers, ultimately leading to long-lasting misrepresentations of scientific practice and enduring stereotypes. In the Land of Marvels reveals the constellation of historical actors, from reputed physicists to travel writers and electrical amateurs, who manipulated information to gain authority and prestige.

Paola Bertucci (NEW HAVEN, CT) is a professor in the department of history at Yale University. She is the author of the award-winning Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Amos C. Fox, "Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare" (Howgate, 2024)

30 september 2024 | 91 min

If you seek a compelling exploration of contemporary armed conflict, then Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare (Howgate Publishing, 2024) by Amos C. Fox is for you. It delves into the intricate web of causation to unveil five pivotal trends shaping the landscape of war and warfare - urban warfare, sieges, attrition, precision strike strategy, and proxy wars - revealing a stark reality: wars remain far more attritional than anticipated by policymakers, military practitioners, and analysts alike. What’s more, just as attritional wars are becoming quite common, conflict elongation – wars of extended duration – are also becoming the norm. Through insightful analysis and a keen understanding of geopolitical intricacies, Amos Fox navigates the reader through the intricate interplay of these trends, shedding light on their profound implications for global security. This riveting work challenges conventional wisdom, offering readers a thought-provoking perspective on the contemporary nature of armed conflicts, ultimately urging a reconsideration of strategies and policies in the face of an ever-evolving battlefield.

Amos C. Fox, PhD, is a Fellow with Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative. Amos is also a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. He hosts the Revolution in Military Affairs, Soldier Pulse and WarCast podcasts, serves as an editorial board member with the Journal of Military Studies and is a senior editor with Small Wars Journal. Amos is also a retired US Army officer, where he served more than 24 years, retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Jonathan Maskit, "Bicycle" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

29 september 2024 | 77 min

Annette Kehnel, "The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

29 september 2024 | 54 min

Jason Weiss, "Listenings" (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023)

29 september 2024 | 67 min

Listenings (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) is a collection of meditations on the art of experiencing sound. The writings reflect Jason Weiss's passion for illuminating details, momentary experiences, and the most subtle and brief of auditory stimulations to consider their role in thought and emotion. The chapter-sections, each on a particular subtheme, invite us to visit concerts, to analyze music, to interpret sounds far and near, from friends, parents, relatives, and strangers, and to appreciate and esteem them as a key part of the human condition.

Listenings summons readers to reflect but also to consider listening as an artform, a dialogue, and a locus of experiences – to make music by listening. Jason Weiss adroitly argues that to listen is not merely to perceive sound as a stimulus but to interpret, to participate, to reflect, to engage in an activity that can shift from a passive one toward a new creative beginning.

This conversation includes Jason Weiss, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo of the Departamento de Humanidades at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M). They discuss listening as a creative resource; the importance of listening in memory; Weiss’s precise and harmonious approach to linking language, sound and listening; the role of technology how we interpret sound; and the role of listening in the author’s life, experiences and creative process.

This interview, our podcast, and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes were made possible by generous support from the Mellon Foundation.

This is our second episode on Listenings - the first, on New Books Network en español, is available here.

Topics discussed in the interview:

Listening in translingual environments.
Music, performance, concerts.
Travel, distance, and new language contexts.
Technology and sound.
When Jason Weiss met Jorge Luis Borges in Paris.
The circumstances surrounding Roland Barthes’s death.
Jason Weiss’s book The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Literature in Paris and our podcast episode on that title.

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Jordan Minor, "Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977" (Abrams, 2023)

26 september 2024 | 17 min

Pong. The Legend of Zelda. Final Fantasy VII. Rock Band. Fortnite. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For each of the 40 years of video game history, there is a defining game, a game that captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed. Through a series of entertaining, informative, and opinionated critical essays, author and tech journalist Jordan Minor investigates, in chronological order, the most innovative, genre-bending, and earth-shattering games from 1977 through 2022. Exploring development stories, critical reception, and legacy, Minor also looks at how gaming intersects with and eventually influences society at large while reveling in how uniquely and delightfully bizarre even the most famous games tend to be.

From portly plumbers to armor-clad space marines and the speedy rodents in between, Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977 (Abrams, 2023) paints individual portraits that, as a whole, give readers a stronger appreciation for the vibrant variety and long-lasting impact of this fresh, exciting, and massively popular art form. Illustrated throughout with retro-inspired imagery and featuring contributions from dozens of leading industry voices, including New York Times bestselling author Jason Schreier, Max Scoville, Rebekah Valentine, Blessing Adeoye Jr., and Devindra Hardawar, this year-by-year anthology is a loving reflection on the world’s most popular art form.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

26 september 2024 | 50 min

Why do we assume that computers always get it right?

Today’s book is: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press, 2019), in which Professor Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right. Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it's just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can't pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

Our guest is: Professor Meredith Broussard, who is Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of Artificial Unintelligence, and of More Than A Glitch. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Economist, and more. She appears in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias and serves on the advisory board for the Center for

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.

For listeners who want to learn more:

More Than A Glitch

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Ethical Machines: A Conversation with Reid Blackman

25 september 2024 | 53 min

Max Hirsh and Till Mostowlansky, "Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)

24 september 2024 | 65 min

In the twenty-first century, infrastructure has undergone a seismic shift from West to East. Once concentrated in Europe and North America, global infrastructure production today is focused squarely on Asia. Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (U Hawaii Press, 2022) investigates the deeper implications of that pivot to the East. Written by leading international infrastructure experts, it demonstrates how new roads, airports, pipelines, and cables are changing Asian economies, societies, and geopolitics—from the Bosporus to Beijing, and from Indonesia to the Arctic. Ten tightly interwoven case studies powerfully illustrate infrastructure’s leading role in three global paradigm shifts: climate change, digitalization, and China’s emergence as a superpower.

Combining social science methods with mapping techniques from the design professions, Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia establishes a dialogue between academic research on infrastructure and the professional insights of those responsible for infrastructure’s planning, production, and operation. By applying that mixed method to transport, energy, telecommunication, and resource extraction projects across Asia, the book synthesizes research on infrastructure from six academic fields, while making those insights accessible to a wider audience of students, professionals, and the general public.

Max Hirsh is managing director of the Airport City Academy and a research fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds a PhD in urban planning from Harvard and is the author of Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia. Max's research investigates the relationship between air travel and urban form.

Till Mostowlansky is a Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the Principal Investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project “Quiet Aid: Service and Salvation in the Balkans-to-Bengal-Complex”. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Emily M. Bender on AI Hype

23 september 2024 | 72 min

Jason A. Josephson Storm, "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

23 september 2024 | 70 min

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (U Chicago Press, 2017) dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Professor Storm is a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly. At the heart of his work, lies an attempt to challenge conventional narratives in the study of religion and science.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Gergely Gosztonyi, "Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices" (Springer, 2023)

22 september 2024 | 50 min

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression.

For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way.

In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices (Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state’s solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all.

This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media’s content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years.

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Amber Billey et al., "Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches" (ALA Editions, 2024)

22 september 2024 | 39 min

Filling a gap in the literature, Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches (ALA Editions and Core, 2024) provides librarians and catalogers with practical approaches to reparative cataloging as well as a broader understanding of the topic and its place in the technical services landscape. As part of the profession's ongoing EDISJ efforts to redress librarianship’s problematic past, practitioners from across the field are questioning long-held library authorities and standards. They’re undertaking a critical and rigorous re-examination of so-called “best” practices and the decisionmakers behind them, pointing out heretofore unscrutinized injustices within our library systems of organization and making concrete steps towards progressive change. In this conversation, co-editors Billey Albina (Amber Billey), Elizabeth Nelson, and Rebecca Uhl discuss their work to bring together chapters that detail the efforts of librarians who are working to improve our systems and collections, in the process inspiring those who have yet to enact change by demonstrating that this work is scalable, possible, and necessary.

From this book, readers will gain an understanding of the theoretical underpinning for the actions that create our history and be challenged to reconsider their perspectives; learn about the important role of the library catalog in real-world EDISJ initiatives through examples ranging from accessibility metadata and gendered information to inclusive comics cataloging and revising LC call numbers for Black people and Indigenous people; discover more than a dozen case studies drawn from a variety of contexts including archives, academic and public libraries, and research institutions; and see ways to incorporate these ideas into their own work, with a variety of sample policies, “how to” documents, and other helpful tools provided in the text.

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Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 september 2024 | 60 min

Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. In evidence throughout the country, but especially the West, the pattern is a hallmark of American life. One might consider it an administrative convenience—an easy way to divide land and lay down streets—but it is not. The colossal grid carved into the North American continent, argues historian and writer Dr. Amir Alexander, is a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning.

In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it.

From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2024) tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty’s Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Marta Fijak and Artur Ganszyniec, "How and Why We Make Games" (CRC Press, 2024)

18 september 2024 | 33 min

Hey, Robot!

16 september 2024 | 29 min

Whitney Barlow Robles, "Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History" (Yale UP, 2023)

13 september 2024 | 54 min

Matthew C. Ehrlich, "The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

11 september 2024 | 45 min

Greg Eghigian, "After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon" (Oxford UP, 2024)

11 september 2024 | 62 min

Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal.

In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie pan-shaped aircraft traveling in formation at remarkably high speed. Within days, journalists began referring to the objects as "flying saucers." Over the course of that summer, Americans reported seeing them in the skies overhead. News quickly spread, and within a few years, flying saucers were being spotted across the world. The question on everyone's mind was, what were they? Some new super weapon in the Cold War? Strange weather patterns? Optical illusions? Or perhaps it was all a case of mass hysteria? Some, however, concluded they could only be one thing: spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived.

Greg Eghigian tells the story of the world's fascination with UFOs and the prospect that they were the work of visitors from outer space. While accounts of great wonders in the sky date back to antiquity, reports of UFOs took place against the unique backdrop of the Cold War and space age, giving rise to disputed government inquiries, breathtaking news stories, and single-minded sleuths.

After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon (Oxford UP, 2024) traces how a seemingly isolated incident sparked an international drama involving shady figures, questionable evidence, suspicions of conspiracy, hoaxes, new religions, scandals, unsettling alien encounters, debunkers, and celebrities. It examines how descriptions, theories, and debates about unidentified flying objects and alien abduction changed over time and how they appeared in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Russia. And it explores the impact UFOs have had on our understanding of space, science, technology, and ourselves up through the present day.

Replete with stories of the people who have made up the ufology community, the military and defense units that investigate them, the scientists and psychologists who have researched these unexplained encounters, and the many novels, movies, TV shows, and websites that have explored these phenomena, After the Flying Saucers Came speaks to believers and skeptics alike.

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Raquel Velho on Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System

9 september 2024 | 88 min

Michael Gavin, "Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies" (Stanford UP, 2022)

9 september 2024 | 55 min

Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies (Stanford UP, 2022), Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies.

Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.

Michael Gavin is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of The Invention of English Criticism, 1650-1760 (2015)

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2024)

8 september 2024 | 62 min

Jess Whatcott, "Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics" (Duke UP, 2024)

7 september 2024 | 60 min

James M. Scott, "Black Snow: Curtis Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb" (Norton, 2024)

6 september 2024 | 57 min

In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. Scott discusses the principles and personalities involved in the most destructive air attack in history.

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed.

Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight “precision” bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.

Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors, air force archives, and oral histories never before published in English, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account, and his most important and compelling work to date.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

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S4E4 In Defense of Bad Science and the Philosophy of Being

4 september 2024 | 43 min

What role does science play in shaping our laws? How do we distinguish between good science and bad science? Where does science hit its limits due to our human nature? And how do we separate orthodox belief from true knowledge? These are just some of the thought-provoking questions we'll explore in our upcoming philosophical conversation on science and human existence.

Join us as we dive into these topics with Dr. William Allen, a distinguished scholar renowned for his expertise in political philosophy and the philosophy of science. Dr. Allen has been a long-standing participant at The Conference on Science, Statistics, and Public Policy, bringing with him a wealth of knowledge and experience.

Dr. Allen's illustrious career includes serving as the dean of James Madison College and as a professor of political science at Michigan State University. He has also held academic positions at Villanova University, Ashland University, and Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. His academic journey began with a Ph.D. in government from the prestigious Claremont Graduate University.

Beyond academia, Dr. Allen has made significant contributions as a former member and chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is a recipient of the Kellogg National Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and has served on the National Council on the Humanities. His published works include critically acclaimed books like George Washington: America’s First Progressive and Rethinking Uncle Tom: The Political Philosophy of H. B. Stowe. Dr. Allen has also edited influential collections such as George Washington: A Collection and The Essential Antifederalist, alongside numerous scholarly articles on political philosophy and American political thought.

Don't miss this opportunity to engage with one of the foremost thinkers of our time as we navigate the intersection of science, truth, and human existence.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

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Jordan Magnuson, "Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice" (Amherst College Press, 2023)

4 september 2024 | 35 min

John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

4 september 2024 | 60 min

Sarah Malanowski and Nicholas R. Baima, "Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer" (Routledge, 2024)

3 september 2024 | 25 min

Kostas Kampourakis, "Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

3 september 2024 | 45 min

Andy Clarno et al., "Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

3 september 2024 | 79 min

Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to police the poor and suppress struggles for social justice. Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding the city’s highly unequal social order.

Collaboratively authored by the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), Imperial Policing was developed in dialogue with movements on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities. The members of PCRG are Andy Clarno, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran, and Haley Volpintesta. Imperial Policing analyzes the connections between three police “wars”—on crime, terror, and immigrants—focusing on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include high-tech, data-based tools of policing; the racialized archetypes that ground the police wars; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign.

Andy Clarno is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies and coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research examines racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire in the early 21st century, with a focus on racialized policing and struggles for social justice in contexts of extreme inequality.

Michael De Anda Muñiz is an Assistant Professor in the Latina/Latino Studies Department at San Francisco State University. His research interests include culture, art, community engagement, space, and resistance.

Ilā Ravichandran is an assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Dr. Ravichandran’s research interests include science, knowledge, technology, biopolitics, policing, surveillance, counterinsurgency, state, queerness & Black studies.

Timi Koyejo is a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor for the City of Chicago.

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Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021)

2 september 2024 | 52 min

Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)

2 september 2024 | 66 min

Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

2 september 2024 | 53 min

Henry H. Work, "Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels"(Reaktion Books, 2024)

1 september 2024 | 47 min

Mel Stanfill, "Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture" (NYU Press, 2024)

31 augusti 2024 | 48 min

Susan Greenhalgh, "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

31 augusti 2024 | 20 min

Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mould research to meet industry needs. The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.

Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives. Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally.

By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today. Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.

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John V. Pavlik, "Journalism and the Metaverse" (Anthem Press, 2024)

30 augusti 2024 | 41 min

Journalism has been in a state of disruption since the development of the Internet. The Metaverse, or what some describe as the future of the Internet, is likely to fuel even further disruption in journalism. Digital platforms and journalism enterprises are already investing substantial resources into the Metaverse, or its likely components of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality. Although research shows most of the public has little knowledge of the Metaverse, many are keenly interested in what it or its components may bring.

Journalism and the Metaverse (Anthem Press, 2024) by Dr. John Pavlik critically examines the nature of the Metaverse and its implications for journalism. In particular, the book will examine how the advance of a broadband, interactive and immersive Internet called the Metaverse may change the content and format of news, the nature of journalistic work, who or what is a journalist, the nature and structure of the new industry and how it is funded, as well as the fundamental role of journalism in a digital society.

In particular, this book builds on a vision of the Metaverse as an immersive and interactive virtual world, a key development in the next generation of the broadband, publicly accessible Internet. Broadband means high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet connectivity, especially wirelessly. Immersive refers to enveloping, 3D forms of media and communication. Today, we often see immersive media in the form of augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) or other forms of what are labeled extended Reality (XR). Fueled by artificial intelligence, these forms are three dimensional (3D), they have depth and they surround the user in a 360 virtual world visually and aurally (and potentially via other senses, including the haptic). Interactive means both user-to-user engagement (e.g., social media) as well as an exchange between the user and the enveloping content experience of a virtual world. This book examines the implications of the Metaverse for journalism in four broad domains, including content, how journalists work, structural and systemic considerations, and user and public engagement with news.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Tarryn Li-Min Chun, "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024), "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

30 augusti 2024 | 68 min

The Human Advantage: A Conversation with Jay Richards

28 augusti 2024 | 55 min

In this episode, we explore the insights of Jay Richards, author of The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines (Forum, 2019). Richards wrote this book during a time when automation and technology were beginning to redefine the boundaries of human work and creativity. His core argument is that, despite the rise of machines, there are certain uniquely human qualities—such as creativity, moral judgment, and entrepreneurial spirit—that cannot be replicated by technology. These traits, he suggests, are what give us a distinct edge in the face of automation.

As we look at today's world, where artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced at an unprecedented pace, we must ask: Do Richards' ideas still hold true? In an era where AI can perform tasks once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans, from creative endeavors to complex decision-making, is there still a clear-cut human advantage? Richards' book offers a lens through which to examine these questions, urging us to consider how we can harness our inherent strengths to adapt and thrive in this new landscape.

In our conversation, we dive deep into these questions, exploring the relevance of The Human Advantage in today's rapidly evolving technological environment. How can we, as individuals and as a society, ensure that we maintain and even enhance our human edge? What role do creativity, ethics, and entrepreneurship play in a world increasingly driven by algorithms and automation? This episode offers valuable insights for anyone grappling with the implications of modern technology on our work, lives, and future.

Jay Richards is an American analytical philosopher who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

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Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, "Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility" (U Washington Press, 2024)

27 augusti 2024 | 53 min

Joanna Wuest, "Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

27 augusti 2024 | 57 min

Scholars often narrate the legal cases confirming LGBTQ+ rights as a huge success story. While it took 100 years to confirm the rights of Black Americans, it took far less time for courts to recognize marriage and adoption rights or workplace discrimination protections for queer people.

The legal and political success of LGBTQ+ advocates often depended upon presenting sexual and gender identities as innate – or “immutable” to fit legal categories. Conservatives who oppose LGBTQ+ equality often argue that sexual and gender identity is something that can be taught. They use the offensive language of “grooming” and contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children.

In Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Joanna Wuest unpacks how a biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality– based on arguments from the “natural sciences and mental health professions” – became central to American LGBTQ+ advocacy. Her book is both a “celebratory and cautionary” story about the costs of relying on science to win impressive victories for queer rights. The book interrogates the “LGBTQ+ rights movement, the scientific study of human difference, and the biopolitical character of citizenship that formed at the nexus of the two.” As LGBTQ+ advocates brought “science to bear on civil rights struggles,” they transformed American politics and the epistemology of identity politics more broadly.”

Dr. Joanna Wuest is an incoming Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University and a sociolegal scholar specializing in sexual and gender minority rights, health, and political economy. Her book, Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Social Studies of Science's 2024 Rachel Carson Prize and was featured on a recent episode of Radiolab.

During the podcast, we mentioned:

Joanna’s article with Dr. Briana S. Last, “Agents of scientific uncertainty: Conflicts over evidence and expertise in gender-affirming care bans for minors” in Social Science & Medicine.

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Yerkebulan Sairambay, "New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)

26 augusti 2024 | 59 min

Cyrus Mody on the Importance of Square (as in NOT COOL) Scientists and Engineers

26 augusti 2024 | 72 min

Phil Haun, "Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War: Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

25 augusti 2024 | 43 min

Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019)

24 augusti 2024 | 103 min

Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, "Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age" (Columbia UP, 2023)

23 augusti 2024 | 58 min

Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019)

23 augusti 2024 | 59 min

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 declining at an alarming rate, to the extent that even the seemingly ubiquitous Monarch could conceivably go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Many other, more obscure, butterfly species are already perilously close to extinction. For the last 20 years, Nick Haddad has worked to identify and save some of the rarest butterflies on earth, a quest that has taken him to both surprisingly ordinary and extraordinarily inhospitable areas, including a swampy, active artillery range on a military installation in North Carolina. It has also led him to some surprising conclusions about the best ways to protect these increasingly endangered butterflies.

In The Last Butterflies: A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature (Princeton UP, 2019), Haddad profiles five such species – the ones he has determined to be the rarest of all – and takes us into each one’s unique habitat, life cycle, and existential challenges. From the Crystal Skipper, bouncing over sand dunes adjacent to vacation homes on barrier islands, to the Schaus’ Swallowtail, confined to increasingly remote areas of the Florida Keys, Haddad shows how human activities have affected rare butterfly populations. His unexpected conclusion is that leaving them in peace is not a viable option; disturbances, both natural and human-caused, are necessary for the ecosystems that support butterfly populations to thrive. One of the hardest lessons for him to absorb was that to save populations, some individuals have to be killed in the process.

Haddad’s intrepid field work – he describes one of his strengths as “an unusual capacity to tolerate harsh environments - informs the story of each butterfly species. His lab’s effort to collect, quantify, propagate, and ultimately perpetuate, the rarest butterflies has led to increasing awareness of how much more biologists have to learn about their natural histories, and how critical such knowledge is to saving them. In perhaps the most dramatic example of unintended consequences, Haddad’s team discovered that the St. Francis Satyr, a small brown butterfly, was protected by regular artillery fire on the Fort Bragg army installation in southern North Carolina. The resulting fires were one disturbance the St. Francis Satyr needed to sustain viable conditions (dams built by beavers was another). In another twist, it turned out that Haddad’s initial efforts to help the species were having the opposite effect. Yet over time, these discoveries led to lessons that ultimately have helped the St. Francis Satyr and can be applied to other conservation efforts.

The Last Butterflies could be read as a warning, but Haddad’s tone is never dire. The book is infused with enthusiasm for conservation efforts, both now and in the future, and with an admiration for the beauty, fragility, and resilience of butterflies. It is an important book for anyone concerned with biodiversity and conservation issues. It’s also an eye-opening and engaging read for anyone with an interest in butterflies.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. She is a longtime butterfly enthusiast and is working, slowly, on a fictional book for middle-grade readers about butterfly conservation.

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Michele Santamaria and Nicole Pfannenstiel, "Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the Acrl Framework" (ACRL, 2024)

20 augusti 2024 | 58 min

Teaching our students how to become flexible and accurate evaluators of information requires teaching them adaptable processes and not static heuristics. Our conventional information literacy teaching and learning tools are simply not up to tackling the life-long, real-world challenges and transferable applications required by today's evolving information landscape.

Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework (ACRL, 2024) by Michele Santamaria and A. Nicole Pfannenstiel (2024, ACRL) provides librarians and non-librarian practitioners with ways to teach and learn with social media. It addresses how to broadly conceptualize information literacy teaching with social media and allay any student reluctance to using social media for academic purposes. It proposes how to map some of the ACRL threshold concepts onto specific social media platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, while providing general guidance for if and when those platforms change. There are eight concrete, cross-disciplinary lesson plans that factor in design, assessment, and student engagement. Finally, the book considers how up-and-coming platforms might empower students to be critical content creators and encourage librarians and faculty to support and create new information literacy initiatives on their campuses. Information Literacy and Social Media demonstrates how to engage students with and through social media platforms and teach them to embrace their role as information creators through engagement with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This is the step that they must take to truly be metaliterate in the creative and ethical ways that make information literacy an essential college competency.

New Books Network listener can receive 20% off this title through the ALA Store using the promo code: ACRL5456P.

Michele Santamaría is the Learning Design Librarian at Millersville University.

Nicole Pfannenstiel, PhD., is a student-centered faculty member of the English & World Languages department at Millersville University.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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12 Angry Alaskans: Re-Examining the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Case

16 augusti 2024 | 73 min

Noah Heringman, "Deep Time: A Literary History" (Princeton UP, 2023)

14 augusti 2024 | 53 min

Craig Gent, "Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work" (Verso, 2024)

13 augusti 2024 | 56 min

Heather Murray, "Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

13 augusti 2024 | 44 min

Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Dr. Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films.

This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Aimee Louise Middlemiss, "Invisible Labours: The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

12 augusti 2024 | 45 min

Matthew Evangelista, "Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945: Bombing among Friends" (Routledge, 2024)

11 augusti 2024 | 60 min

Neoliberalism and the University, Part 2

9 augusti 2024 | 55 min

This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

Today, our hosts, Anjali DasSarma and Sim Gill, present the second episode in a two-part series on neoliberalism and the state of the university as a deeply powerful structure, along with two incredible scholars: Professor Natalie Fenton and Professor Alison Hearn.

In this episode, we delve into the intricate mechanisms of capitalism, unpacking how metrics, the pressure to "publish or perish," and intellectual extraction shape the academic landscape. From the commodification of knowledge to the erosion of job security, we'll shine a light on some of the systemic forces at play in higher education. We also unpack the rhetoric surrounding Elon Musk and his impact on the age of artificial intelligence, to consider how AI tools like ChatGPT are shifting debates about teaching and student evaluation methods.

Amidst these challenges, we'll also uncover the power of the ideological project of hope. Join us as we engage in a thought-provoking discussion on information, communication, and knowledge production.

In this episode you will hear about:

AI and job security
How metrics, “publishing or perishing,” and intellectual extraction function under capitalism
What the ideological project of hope offers us
Community organizing, resistance, and learning

Guest Biographies:

Natalie Fenton: Natalie is a Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University.

Alison Hearn: Alison is a professor in the Department of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

Host Biographies:

Anjali DasSarma: Anjali DasSarma is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sim Gill: Sim Gill is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and the Center on Digital Culture and Society.

Credits

Interview by: Anjali DasSarma and Sim Gill Produced by: Eszter Zimanyi
Edited by: Anjali DasSarma and Matt Parker
Sound Mixing by: Matt Parker
Music by: Zoe Zhao Blog post written by: Anjali DasSarma and Sim Gill

Keywords: neoliberalism, higher education, artificial intelligence, community organizing

This episode was recorded on November 15th, 2023 at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

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Daniel Kahneman’s Forgotten Legacy: Investigating Exxon-Funded Psychological Research

9 augusti 2024 | 65 min

Alice Mah, "Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation" (Duke UP, 2023)

8 augusti 2024 | 48 min

The GiveWell Method

7 augusti 2024 | 28 min

Andrew Denning, "Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa" (Cornell UP, 2024)

7 augusti 2024 | 73 min

In Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organised colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole.

European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pressures of constructing and maintaining roads rendered colonial administration thin, ineffective, and capricious. Automotive empire emerged as the European solution to the transport problem, but revealed weakness as much as it extended power.

As Automotive Empire reveals, motor vehicles and roads seemed the ideal solution to the colonial transport problem. They were cheaper and quicker to construct than railroads, overcame the environmental limitations of rivers, and did not depend on the recruitment and supervision of African porters. At this pivotal moment of African colonialism, when European powers transitioned from claiming territories to administering and exploiting them, automotive empire defined colonial states and societies, along with the brutal and capricious nature of European colonialism itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Thomas A. Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, "Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change" (Oregon State UP, 2021)

6 augusti 2024 | 52 min

Bringing together philosophy, jurisprudence, and a deep concern for the environment, Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change offers an inspiring and generative way of thinking about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. In particular, Thomas Kearns and Kathleen Dean Moore provide readers with insight into the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal as well as the wide-ranging and deeply-felt impacts of fracking, interspersing legal analysis, excerpts of Tribunal testimony, and reflections by climate writers like Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber. The book's structure even creatively mirrors that of the Tribunal, offering a collage of insight to any reader interested in human rights and environmental issues—it is a work of deep dedication to thinking critically and deeply about how to face not only the environmental degradation caused by fracking, but also other kinds of harms caused by resource extraction and corporate interests. Rather than slip into climate nihilism, Bearing Witness seeks to name, investigate, and claim rights around environmental harms felt by humans and non-humans alike.

In the face of the increasing, globally-felt impacts of climate change, Kearns and Dean Moore provide us with a human-rights centered framework for engaging with and addressing some of the most pressing questions of our time.

Thomas A. Kearns is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at North Seattle College, and is Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory. In 2015, he helped draft the international Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change, and in 2018, co-organized the International Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change, which forms much of the basis for this book. His work is currently centred around facilitating youth climate courts.

Kathleen Dean Moore is a Distinguished Philosophy Professor Emerita at Oregon State University, and longstanding public advocate for climate justice and ecological thriving. Her concern for climate catastrophe led her to leave her academic position to speak and write on environmental crises. Her numerous books and essays—many award-winning—focus on environmental ethics and climate crises, and she has published widely in academic and non-academic fora alike.

Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion.

Further reading and works discussed in this episode:

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking, and Climate Change
Film by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University, Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change
Kathleen Dean Moore and Bob Haverluck, Take Heart (OSU Press)
Youth Climate Courts website

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Edward Shanks, "The People of the Ruins" (MIT Press, 2024)

6 augusti 2024 | 61 min

Mark Walker, "Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

5 augusti 2024 | 61 min

Jeremy Black, "Histories of War" (Pen & Sword Military, 2024)

4 augusti 2024 | 36 min

Edward Kaplan, "The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age" (Cornell UP, 2022)

2 augusti 2024 | 66 min

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022).

The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC).

From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States.

Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC’s reports offered the best estimates of the butcher’s bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.

Taken with the intelligence community’s assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC’s work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

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Mitchel P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz, "Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

2 augusti 2024 | 43 min

Monica Berger, "Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications" (ACRL, 2024)

31 juli 2024 | 58 min

Predatory publishing is a complex problem that harms a broad array of stakeholders and concerns across the scholarly communications system. It shines a light on the inadequacies of scholarly assessment and related rewards systems, contributes to the marginalization of scholarship from less developed countries, and negatively impacts the acceptance of open access. To fix what is broken in scholarly communications, academic librarians must act as both teachers and advocates and partner with other stakeholders who have the agency to change how scholarship is produced, assessed, and rewarded.

Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications (ACRL, 2024) by Monica Berger is a unique and comprehensive exploration of predatory publishing in four parts: Background; Characteristics and Research; The Geopolitics of Scholarly Publishing; and Responses and Solutions. It examines the history of predatory publishing and basics of scholarly assessment; identifies types of research misconduct and unethical scholarly behaviors; provides critical context to predatory publishing and scholarly communications beyond the Global North; and offers structural and pedagogical solutions and teaching materials for librarians to use in their work with authors, students, faculty, and other stakeholders. Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications gives powerful insight into predatory publishing across the world, inside and outside of the library community, and provides tools for understanding and teaching its impact and contributing to its improvement.

Monica Berger is the Instruction and Scholarly Communications Librarian and Professor at the New York City College of Technology, City University of New York.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Kate McDonald on Asian Mobility History as Labor History

29 juli 2024 | 74 min

Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels, "Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

26 juli 2024 | 74 min

War in the 21st century will remain a chameleon that takes on different forms and guises. Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War (Oxford University Press, 2024) edited by Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels offers the first comprehensive update and revision of ideas about the future of war since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the war has fundamentally shifted our perspective on the nature and character of future war, but also cautions against marginalising many other parallel trends, types of war, and ways of waging them.

World-renowned international experts from the War Studies field consider the impact of the war in Ukraine on the broader social phenomenon of war: they analyse visions of future war; examine the impact of technological innovation on its conduct; assess our ability to anticipate its future; and consider lessons learned for leaders, soldiers, strategists, scholars and concerned citizens.

Beyond Ukraine features contributions from Azar Gat, Beatrice Heuser, Antulio Echevarria, Audrey Cronin, T.X. Hammes, Kenneth Payne, Frank Hoffman, David Betz, Jan Willem Honig, and many other pre-eminent thinkers on the past, present and future of war—including an afterword by the late Christopher Coker.

Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands’ War Studies Research Centre of the Netherlands Defence Academy.

Jeffrey H. Michaels PhD is the IEN Senior Fellow in American Foreign Policy and International Security at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media" (Duke UP, 2023)

26 juli 2024 | 53 min

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

In this episode, Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh joins our host, Zehra Husain, to discuss her latest book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP, 2023).

Over the course of the interview, you’ll learn about:

The origins of the book and how Ghosh became interested in the body as a material medium
The importance of conceptualizing global epidemics in multiscalar ways
What Ghosh means by multispecies relationality and “lively media”
The distinctions between the “global” and the “planetary”
Ghosh’s research process for the book and her thoughts on using an ethnographic mode
The media archive Ghosh assembled while conducting research for the book
How and why Ghosh conceptualizes blood as media in the book
The expansive sites, scales, and temporalities that Ghosh tracks across The Virus Touch

…and much more!

About the book

“In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.” Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website!

Guest Biography

Bishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies.

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Quantifying the American Mind: George Gallup, and the Promise of Political Polling

24 juli 2024 | 76 min

Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, "Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

24 juli 2024 | 62 min

Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable.

In Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Kirsten Moore-Sheeley untangles the complicated history of insecticide-treated nets as it unfolded transnationally and in Kenya specifically—a key site of insecticide-treated net research—to reveal how the development of this intervention was deeply enmeshed with the emergence of the contemporary global health enterprise.

While public health workers initially conceived of nets as a stopgap measure that could be tailored to impoverished, rural health systems in the early 1980s, nets became standardised market goods with the potential to save lives and promote economic development globally. This shift attracted donor resources for malaria control amid the rise of neoliberal regimes in international development, but it also perpetuated a paradigm of fighting malaria and poverty at the level of individual consumers. Africans' experiences with insecticide-treated nets illustrate the limitations of this paradigm and provide a warning for the precariousness of malaria control efforts today.

Drawing on archival, published, and oral historical evidence from three continents, Dr. Moore-Sheeley reveals the important role Africans have played in shaping global health science and technology. In placing both insecticide-treated nets and Africa at the center of global health history, this book sheds new light on how and why commodity-based health interventions have become so entrenched as solutions to global disease control as well as the challenges these interventions pose for at-risk populations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Anton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2020)

22 juli 2024 | 71 min

David Badre, "On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done" (Princeton UP, 2020)

21 juli 2024 | 42 min

On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives.

Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done?

In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being. Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do. A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior.

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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Sören Schoppmeier, "Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture" (De Gruyter, 2023)

19 juli 2024 | 25 min

Özge Çelikaslan, "Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma" (DPR Barcelona, 2024)

19 juli 2024 | 40 min

Thomas Zeller, "Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

17 juli 2024 | 76 min

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.

For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century.

Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers―landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners―sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.

Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?”

Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria. His publications include:

"Making Austria German Again: Austrofascist ‘Home Guards’ against ‘Austrian Legionaries’, 1933-1934," Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2024
"Borderland Brothers: Austrofascist Competition and Cooperation with National Socialists, 1936–1938," Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023, Winner of Austrian Studies Association’s Max Kade Prize, 2024
"Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019
"Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017.

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Paula Bialski on Middletech, Software Work, and the Culture of Good Enough

15 juli 2024 | 72 min

Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020)

15 juli 2024 | 49 min

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 locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study?

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are.

Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health.

Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Carl Öhman, "The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

14 juli 2024 | 41 min

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die.

These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to “interact” with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own—and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity—the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyone—past, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, Öhman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains.

As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change, The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care (U Chicago Press, 2024) will be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past—before it is too late.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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AI and Music: The Future is Here (featuring "There I Ruined It")

13 juli 2024 | 61 min

Tea Krulos, "American Madness: The Story of the Phantom Patriot and How Conspiracy Theories Hijacked American Consciousness" (Feral House, 2020)

12 juli 2024 | 58 min

The mainstream news media struggles to understand the power of social media. In contrast, conspiracy advocates, malicious political movements, and even foreign governments have long understood how to harness the power of fear and the fear of power into lucrative outlets for outrage and money. But what happens when the messengers of “inside knowledge” go too far?

Author Tea Krulos tells the story of one man, Richard McCaslin, whose fractured thinking made him the ideal consumer of even the most arcane of conspiracy theories. Acting on the daily rants of Alex Jones and his ilk, McCaslin takes matters into his own hands to stop the unseen powers behind the world’s disasters who congregate at conspiracy world’s Mecca—The Bohemian Grove. It all goes wrong with terrible consequences for the man who styled himself The Phantom Patriot.

McCaslin is not alone, as conspiracy-driven political action has bubbled its way up from the margins of society to the White House. It’s no longer a lone deranged kook convinced of getting secret messages from a cereal box; now, it’s slick videos and well-funded outrage campaigns ready to peddle the latest innuendos and lies in hopes of harnessing the chaos for political gain. What is the long-term effect on people who believe these barely believable stories? Who benefits, and who pays the price?

In American Madness: The Story of the Phantom Patriot and How Conspiracy Theories Hijacked American Consciousness (Feral House, 2020), Krulos investigates and explains the power of conspiracy, and the shared madness it brings on the American psyche.

Tea Krulos is a freelance journalist and author from Milwaukee, WI. Some of his favorite subjects to explore include subcultures and social movements, weird news, the paranormal, and strange personalities. He also writes about local art and entertainment, lifestyle, and food/drink for publications like Milwaukee Magazine, Shepherd Express, and Milwaukee Record. His five non-fiction books are American Madness, Wisconsin Legends & Lore, Apocalypse Any Day Now, Monster Hunters, and Heroes in the Night. He’s also been published in places like Atlas Obscura, Fortean Times, and Scandinavian Traveler and writes a weekly column called “Tea’s Weird Week” at teakrulos.com.

Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos.

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Shannon Vallor, "The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking" (Oxford UP, 2024)

10 juli 2024 | 67 min

Monika Krause, "Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

10 juli 2024 | 34 min

Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert, "The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2024)

10 juli 2024 | 39 min

David Alff, "The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

9 juli 2024 | 46 min

Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020)

8 juli 2024 | 24 min

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In Contraception: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2020), Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily.

Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access

Dr. Donna Drucker leads the English as the Language for Instruction Project, which helps faculty, administrative staff, scientific staff, and students at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany) improve their English abilities for teaching and learning.

Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.

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David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020)

8 juli 2024 | 78 min

Sandra Hirsh, "Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

7 juli 2024 | 57 min

Building on the success and impact of Library 2020: Today’s Leading Visionaries Describe Tomorrow’s Library by Joseph Janes, Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) edited by Sandra Hirshupdates, expands upon, and broadens the discussions on the future of libraries and the ways in which they transform information services to best serve their communities. Library 2035 explores the lessons learned over the past decade and forecasts the opportunities, strengths, and challenges for libraries in the future. Contributors including R. David Lankes, Kelvin Watson, Annie Norman, Miguel Figueroa, and Nicole Cooke, along with 25 other library leaders, were asked to describe the “library of 2035” in whatever way they wanted. Their responses to this question will inspire, provoke, challenge, and expand our thinking about the role and importance of libraries in the future. Library leaders, LIS students and faculty will find this book particularly meaningful and useful as we grapple with what the future of libraries and the profession will be.

Dr. Sandra Hirsh hosts the Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries Webcast with contributors to this work

Dr. Sandra Hirsh is the Associate Dean for Academics in the College of Professional and Global Education at San José State University (SJSU). She previously served as professor and director of the SJSU School of Information and worked at HP Labs, Microsoft, and LinkedIn. She is past president of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) and the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T).

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Jeremy Black, "A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today" (Amberley Publishing, 2023)

6 juli 2024 | 22 min

Tara Ward, "Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram" (U California Press, 2024)

5 juli 2024 | 42 min

Pierre Sokolsky, "Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star" (Columbia UP, 2024)

5 juli 2024 | 29 min

Firuzeh Shokooh Valle, "In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics from the Global South" (Stanford UP, 2023)

4 juli 2024 | 63 min

Including women in the global South as users, producers, consumers, designers, and developers of technology has become a mantra against inequality, prompting movements to train individuals in information and communication technologies and foster the participation and retention of women in science and technology fields.

In In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics from the Global South (Stanford UP, 2023), Firuzeh Shokooh Valle argues that these efforts have given rise to an idealized, female economic figure that combines technological dexterity and keen entrepreneurial instinct with gendered stereotypes of care and selflessness. Narratives about the "equalizing" potential of digital technologies spotlight these women's capacity to overcome inequality using said technologies, ignoring the barriers and circumstances that create such inequality in the first place as well as the potentially violent role of technology in their lives. In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure examines how women in the Global South experience and resist the coopting and depoliticizing nature of these scripts. Drawing on fieldwork in Costa Rica and a transnational feminist digital organization, Shokooh Valle explores the ways that feminist activists, using digital technologies as well as a collective politics that prioritize solidarity and pleasure, advance a new feminist technopolitics.

Firuzeh Shokooh Valle is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Franklin and Marshall College. Previously, she was a journalist in Puerto Rico covering violence against women, the LGBTQI+ community, migration, racism, and social movements, and earned numerous national awards for her investigative work.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Eve Herold, "Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

4 juli 2024 | 51 min

The latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence and a preview of the coming decades, based on research and interviews with the world's foremost experts. If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible.

This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots (St. Martin's Press, 2024). Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image. Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future.

Sophia the Robot Tries to Convince the Experts

Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Pandemics Perspectives 15: The Dynamic Nature of Science

2 juli 2024 | 77 min

Jason Hannan, "Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media" (Oxford UP, 2023)

2 juli 2024 | 47 min

We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?

This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling.

Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Travis B. Williams et al., "The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture" (Brill, 2023)

1 juli 2024 | 88 min

Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

30 juni 2024 | 53 min

Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders.

The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Joshua Schuster, "What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals" (Fordham UP, 2023)

28 juni 2024 | 57 min

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.

Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.

What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present.

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk.

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Barbara Klinger, "Immortal Films: 'Casablanca' and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic" (U California Press, 2022)

27 juni 2024 | 65 min

Peter Hill, "Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East" (Oneworld Academic, 2024)

26 juni 2024 | 39 min

Today I talked to Peter Hill about his new book Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East (Oneworld Academic, 2024).

In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith – Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together.

By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.

Peter Hill is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. His research focusses on political thought and practice, the politics of religion, and translation and intercultural exchanges. He also has a strong interest in comparative and global history.

Before joining Northumbria University in 2019, Peter was Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He has taught and designed modules in the history of the Middle East and global history, and the history of capitalism. In 2023 he was the winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.

Peter's first book, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He has published several articles on translation, political thought and popular politics in the Middle East, in journals such as Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History.

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Living with Digital Surveillance in China

24 juni 2024 | 33 min

Trish Kahle on the Labor History of Energy Systems

24 juni 2024 | 61 min

Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard, "Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools" (MIT Press, 2024)

24 juni 2024 | 62 min

A probing examination of the dynamic history of predictive methods and values in science and engineering that helps us better understand today's cultures of prediction.

The ability to make reliable predictions based on robust and replicable methods is a defining feature of the scientific endeavor, allowing engineers to determine whether a building will stand up or where a cannonball will strike. Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools (MIT Press, 2024), which bridges history and philosophy, uncovers the dynamic history of prediction in science and engineering over four centuries. Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard identify four different cultures, or modes, of prediction in the history of science and engineering: rational, empirical, iterative-numerical, and exploratory-iterative. They show how all four develop together and interact with one another while emphasizing that mathematization is not a single unitary process but one that has taken many forms.

The story is not one of the triumph of abstract mathematics or technology but of how different modes of prediction, complementary concepts of mathematization, and technology coevolved, building what the authors call “cultures of prediction.” The first part of the book examines prediction from early modernity up to the computer age. The second part probes computer-related cultures of prediction, which focus on making things and testing their performance, often in computer simulations. This new orientation challenges basic tenets of the philosophy of science, in which scientific theories and models are predominantly seen as explanatory rather than predictive. It also influences the types of research projects that scientists and engineers undertake, as well as which ones receive support from funding agencies.

Nikki Stevens, PhD is a critical technology researcher and software engineer. Find more of their work here.

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M. Girard Dorsey, "Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II" (Cornell UP, 2023)

21 juni 2024 | 57 min

In Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II (Cornell UP, 2023), M. Girard Dorsey uncovers just how close Britain, the United States, and Canada came to crossing the red line that restrained poison gas during World War II.

Unlike in World War I, belligerents did not release poison gas regularly during the Second World War. Yet, the looming threat of chemical warfare significantly affected the actions and attitudes of these three nations as they prepared their populations for war, mediated their diplomatic and military alliances, and attempted to defend their national identities and sovereignty.

The story of chemical weapons and World War II begins in the interwar period as politicians and citizens alike advocated to ban, to resist, and eventually to prepare for gas use in the next war. Molly Dorsey reveals, through extensive research in multinational archives and historical literature, that although poison gas was rarely released on the battlefield in World War II, experts as well as lay people dedicated significant time and energy to the weapon's potential use; they did not view chemical warfare as obsolete or taboo.

Poison gas was an influential weapon in World War II, even if not deployed in a traditional way, and arms control, for various reasons, worked. Thus, what did not happen is just as important as what did. Holding Their Breath provides insight into these potentialities by untangling World War II diplomacy and chemical weapons use in a new way.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at [email protected] or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024)

21 juni 2024 | 52 min

Paulina Rowinska, "Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers" (Pan Macmillan, 2024)

19 juni 2024 | 57 min

danah boyd on Digital Technology and Everyday Life

17 juni 2024 | 76 min

Lisa M. P. Munoz, "Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity" (Columbia UP, 2023)

16 juni 2024 | 37 min

Carlos M. N. Eire, "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" (Yale UP, 2023)

16 juni 2024 | 54 min

Allison J. Pugh, "The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

15 juni 2024 | 33 min

Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, "At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans" (Columbia UP, 2024)

14 juni 2024 | 53 min

More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech

13 juni 2024 | 47 min

Today’s book is: More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2024), by Meredith Broussard. When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch—it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery? What if they're coded into the system itself?

Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More Than a Glitch how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable. Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences. Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.

Our guest is: Meredith Broussard, who is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, and Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting and ethical AI, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support the show by downloading, sharing, posting about, or assigning any of our 200+ episodes.

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Julia Wojnowska-Radzińska, "Implications of Pre-Emptive Data Surveillance for Fundamental Rights in the European Union" (Brill Nijhoff, 2023)

12 juni 2024 | 37 min

Carl Elliott, "The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No" (Norton, 2024)

12 juni 2024 | 51 min

Duana Fullwiley, "Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science" (U California Press, 2024)

12 juni 2024 | 76 min

John Blaxland and Clare Birgin, "Revealing Secrets: An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence and the Advent of Cyber" (UNSW Press, 2023)

11 juni 2024 | 66 min

Cameron J. Buckner, "From Deep Learning to Rational Machines" (Oxford UP, 2023)

10 juni 2024 | 71 min

Pandemic Perspectives 13: The Need for Genuine Communication

9 juni 2024 | 48 min

Sharrona Pearl, "Do I Know You?: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

8 juni 2024 | 40 min

In Do I Know You? From Faceblindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Sharrona Pearl explores the fascinating category of face recognition and the "the face recognition spectrum," which ranges from face blindness at one end to super recognition at the other. Super recognizers can recall faces from only the briefest exposure, while face blind people lack the capacity to recognize faces at all, including those of their closest loved ones. Informed by archival research, the latest neurological studies, and testimonials from people at both ends of the spectrum, Dr. Pearl tells a nuanced story of how we relate to each other through our faces.

The category of face recognition is relatively new despite the importance of faces in how we build relationships and understand our own humanity. Dr. Pearl shows how this most tacit of knowledge came to enter the scientific and diagnostic field despite difficulties with identifying it. She offers a grounded framework for how we evaluate others and draw conclusions about them, with significant implications for race, gender, class, and disability. Dr. Pearl explores the shifting ideas around the face-recognition spectrum, explaining the effects of these diagnoses on real people alongside implications for how facial recognition is studied and understood. Face blindness is framed as a disability, while super recognition is framed as a superpower with no meaningful disadvantages. This superhero rhetoric is tied to the use of super recognizers in criminal detection, prosecution, and other forms of state surveillance. Do I Know You? demonstrates a humanistic approach to the study of the brain, one that offers an entirely new method for examining this fundamental aspect of human interaction.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Aaron Eddens, "Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa" (U California Press, 2024)

6 juni 2024 | 54 min

AI and the Humanities: Nina Beguš DIscusses "Artificial Humanities"

3 juni 2024 | 49 min

Gretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)

1 juni 2024 | 52 min

Robert Phillip Kolker and Marsha Gordon, "Film, Form, and Culture" (Routledge, 2024)

30 maj 2024 | 59 min

This fifth edition of Film, Form, and Culture (Routledge, 2024) offers a lively introduction to both the formal and cultural aspects of film.

With extensive analysis of films past and present, this textbook explores how films are constructed from part to whole: from the smallest unit of the shot to the way shots are edited together to create narrative. Robert P. Kolker and Marsha Gordon demystify the technical aspects of filmmaking and demonstrate how fiction and nonfiction films engage with culture. Over 265 images provide a visual index to the films and issues being discussed. This new edition includes: an expanded examination of digital filmmaking and distribution in the age of streaming; attention to superhero films throughout; a significantly longer chapter on global cinema with new or enlarged sections on a variety of national cinemas (including cinema from Nigeria, Senegal, Burkina Faso, South Korea, Japan, India, Belgium, and Iran); new or expanded discussions of directors, including Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Oscar Micheaux, Agnès Varda, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Jafar Panahi, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and Penny Lane; and new, in-depth explorations of films, including Within Our Gates (1919), Black Girl (1966), Creed (2015), Moonlight (2016), Wonder Woman (2017), Get Out (2017), Black Panther (2018), Parasite (2019), Da 5 Bloods (2020), The French Dispatch (2021), The Power of the Dog (2021), RRR (2022), and Tár (2022).

Robert P. Kolker is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is the author/editor of several books on film including The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies (2008), A Cinema of Loneliness, 4th edition (2011), The Cultures of American Film (2014), The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema (2016), Politics Goes to the Movies (2018), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (2019), and, with Nathan Abrams, Kubrick: An Odyssey (2024).

Marsha Gordon is Professor and Director of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, USA. She is the author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (2023), Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (2017), and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (2008), and co-editor of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (2019) and Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012).

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (2016), he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His work also appears on Pages and Frames.

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Edwin McRae, "Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds" (Narrative, 2024)

28 maj 2024 | 28 min

Joanna Guldi, "The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

28 maj 2024 | 68 min

Chris Haufe, "Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

28 maj 2024 | 65 min

There is in certain circles a widely held belief that the only proper kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge. This belief often runs parallel to the notion that legitimate knowledge is obtained when a scientist follows a rigorous investigative procedure called the 'scientific method'.

In Do the Humanities Create Knowledge? (Cambridge UP, 2023), Chris Haufe challenges this idea. He shows that what we know about the so-called scientific method rests fundamentally on the use of finely tuned human judgments directed toward certain questions about the natural world. He suggests that this dependence on judgment in fact reveals deep affinities between scientific knowledge and another, equally important, sort of comprehension: that of humanistic creative endeavour. His wide-ranging and stimulating new book uncovers the unexpected unity underlying all our efforts – whether scientific or arts-based – to understand human experience. In so doing, it makes a vital contribution to broader conversation about the value of the humanities in an increasingly STEM-saturated educational culture.

If it is agreed that the humanities are valuable and essential, are there better and worse ways in which to generate humanistic knowledge? This book offers compelling answers.

Chris Haufe is the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of How Knowledge Grows (2022) and Fruitfulness (2024).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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American Innovation, American Vitality: A Conversation with Chris Buskirk

22 maj 2024 | 63 min

Rob Drew, "Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable" (Duke UP, 2023)

20 maj 2024 | 45 min

Daniel P. Ott, "Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

20 maj 2024 | 64 min

Raven Simone Maragh-Lloyd, "Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2024)

19 maj 2024 | 57 min

Mona Simion, "Resistance to Evidence" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

19 maj 2024 | 57 min

Constantin Ardeleanu, "Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860" (CEU Press, 2024)

18 maj 2024 | 72 min

Priya Satia, "Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

18 maj 2024 | 54 min

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural and artisanal economy to one dominated by industry, ushering in unprecedented growth in technology and trade and putting the country at the center of the global economy. But the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution, anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses, overlooks the true root of economic and industrial expansion: the lucrative military contracting that enabled the country's near-constant state of war in the eighteenth century. Demand for the guns and other war materiel that allowed British armies, navies, mercenaries, traders, settlers, and adventurers to conquer an immense share of the globe in turn drove the rise of innumerable associated industries, from metalworking to banking.

Bookended by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2019) traces the social and material life of British guns over a century of near-constant war and violence at home and abroad. Priya Satia develops this story through the life of prominent British gun-maker and Quaker Samuel Galton Jr., who was asked to answer for the moral defensibility of producing guns as new uses like anonymous mass violence rose. Reconciling the pacifist tenet of his faith with his perception of the economic realities of the time, Galton argued that war was driving the industrial economy, making everyone inescapably complicit in it. Through his story, Satia illuminates Britain's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the government's role in economic development, and the origins of our own era's debates over gun control and military contracting.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of British History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (2009), and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, the Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Catherine D'Ignazio, "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" (MIT Press, 2024)

17 maj 2024 | 54 min

Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia, "The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice" (MIT Press, 2024)

15 maj 2024 | 53 min

Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a “normative” learner does. In The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice (MIT Press, 2024, open access at this link), educational researchers Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia start from a different assumption—that outliers are, and must be treated as, valued individuals. Berland and Garcia argue that the aim of analytics should not be about enforcing and entrenching norms but about using data science to break new ground and enable play and creativity. From this speculative vantage point, they ask how we can go about living alongside data in a better way, in a more just way, while also building on the existing technologies and our knowledge of the present.

The Left Hand of Data explores the many ways in which we use data to shape the possible futures of young people—in schools, in informal learning environments, in colleges, in libraries, and with educational games. It considers the processes by which students are sorted, labeled, categorized, and intervened upon using the bevy of data extracted and collected from individuals and groups, anonymously or identifiably. When, how, and with what biases are these data collected and utilized? What decisions must educational researchers make around data in an era of high-stakes assessment, surveillance, and rising inequities tied to race, class, gender, and other intersectional factors? How are these complex considerations around data changing in the rapidly evolving world of machine learning, AI, and emerging fields of educational data science? The surprising answers the authors discover in their research make clear that we do not need to wait for a hazy tomorrow to do better today.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Douglas L. Reside, "Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory" (Oxford UP, 2023)

15 maj 2024 | 56 min

Dancing Parkinson's and Queering Science with John Noel Viaña

14 maj 2024 | 34 min

Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023)

12 maj 2024 | 24 min

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to discuss their new book with CEU Press entitled, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (CEU Press, 2023).

The book is available Open Access, click here to download.

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.

The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure.

Per and Achim’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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"Did You Miss My Comment or What?": Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

11 maj 2024 | 63 min

Gina Sipley, "Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice" (Bristol UP, 2024)

11 maj 2024 | 57 min

We all sometimes ‘lurk’ in online spaces without posting or engaging, just reading the posts and comments. But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts. In fact, readers of social media are making decisions and taking grassroots actions on multiple dimensions. Unpacking this understudied phenomenon, Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice (Bristol UP, 2024) by Gina Sipley challenges the conventional perspective of what counts as participatory online culture. Presenting lurking as a communication and literacy practice that resists dominant power structures, it offers an innovative approach to digital qualitative methods. Unique and original in its subject, this is a call for internet researchers to broaden their methods to include lurkers’ participation and presence.

Just Here for the Comments will be released on May 28th by Bristol University Press. Pre-orders are now open here. Readers can also get a 25% discount on ALL Bristol University Press and Policy Press books by signing up to their newsletter.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will benefit The Children’s Greenhouse, which provides high-quality, low-cost childcare to the children of SUNY Nassau Community College students, faculty, and staff. The Greenhouse is the reason many of our student parents persist and graduate with their degrees. Many of these students are first generation, too. You can learn more about this organization and how to donate, here.

Dr. Gina Sipley is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College. Dr Sipley is in the process of developing with Bristol University Press free resources for academics, K-12 teachers, and book clubs interested in teaching and researching the social and economic effects of lurker literacies. Anyone interested in receiving these materials when they become available can hit subscribe on her website.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)

10 maj 2024 | 36 min

Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trere, "Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power" (MIT Press, 2024)

10 maj 2024 | 40 min

The Scientific Attitude

7 maj 2024 | 48 min

Matteo Pangallo and Emily B. Todd, "Teaching the History of the Book" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

7 maj 2024 | 48 min

MC Forelle on Cars, Chipification, and Repair

6 maj 2024 | 74 min

Dead Air

6 maj 2024 | 39 min

Tanisha M. Fazal, "Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

5 maj 2024 | 57 min

Decisions to go to war are often framed in cost-benefit terms, and typically such assessments do not factor in longer term costs. However, recent dramatic improvements in American military medicine have had an unanticipated effect: saving more soldiers' lives has vastly increased long-term, downstream costs of war with profound consequences for global politics in an era of heightened great power competition.

In Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War (Oxford UP, 2024), Tanisha Fazal traces the modern history of medical treatment and casualty rates in American conflicts from the Civil War to the more recent counterinsurgency wars. As she shows, wars became increasingly survivable for wounded troops, to the point now where a large majority of wounded soldiers survive.

Yet the human and financial implications of this steep increase in the wounded-to-killed ratio are dramatic, and her powerful analysis of this shift provides a necessary corrective to how we understand the costs of war. For each major conflict, Fazal analyzes the weapons used, injuries sustained, and policies put in place for veterans' care and pensions. As she argues, these improvements have significant financial and deeply personal implications for the returned wounded and their families, as well as the US government and its citizenry. Fazal's analysis highlights the significance of policymakers underestimating the costs of war, which in turn makes it easier both to initiate and continue military action abroad, contributing to Americas' penchant for engaging in so-called "endless wars."

Tanisha Fazal is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict. In addition to her new book, she is the author of two award-winning books and numerous articles in academic and policy journals. From 2021-2023, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected]

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John Powers, "Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture" (Oxford UP, 2023)

4 maj 2024 | 55 min

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. John Powers examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture.

By reasserting the physicality of the body in making time-lapse and kinesthetic sequences with the Bolex, filmmakers conversed with other art forms and integrated broader spheres of humanistic and scientific inquiry into their artistic process. Drawing from the photographic qualities of stocks such as Tri-X and Kodachrome, they discovered pliant metaphors that allowed them to connect their artistic practice to metaphysics, spiritualism, and Hollywood excess. By framing film labs as mystical or adversarial, they cultivated an oppositionality that valorized control over the artistic process. And by using the optical printer as a tool for excavating latent meaning out of found footage, they posited the reworking of images as fundamental to the exploration of personal and cultural identity.

Providing a wealth of new detail about the making of canonised avant-garde classics by such luminaries as Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage, as well as rediscovering works from overlooked artists such as Chick Strand, Amy Halpern, and Gunvor Nelson, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John J. Berger, "Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth" (Seven Stories Press, 2023)

3 maj 2024 | 48 min

The Contagion of Covid Policy: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on Freedom of Speech

3 maj 2024 | 57 min

John L. Sullivan, "Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

27 april 2024 | 38 min

Leigh Gilmore, "The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women" (Columbia UP, 2023)

27 april 2024 | 52 min

Natalia Grincheva and Elizabeth Stainforth, "Geopolitics of Digital Heritage" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

27 april 2024 | 57 min

Social media’s business model is changing democracy, and not for the better

24 april 2024 | 41 min

Anu Bradford, "Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

24 april 2024 | 20 min

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come.

Across the globe, people dependent on digital technologies have become increasingly alarmed that their rapid adoption and transformation have ushered in an exceedingly concentrated economy where a few powerful companies control vast economic wealth and political power, undermine data privacy, and widen the gap between economic winners and losers. In response, world leaders are variously embracing the idea of reining in the most dominant tech companies. Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches―the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model―and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear.

Digital societies are at an inflection point. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Asif Siddiqi on Rockets, Prisons, Pop Songs, and So Much More

22 april 2024 | 68 min

Héctor Beltrán, "Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands" (Princeton UP, 2023)

21 april 2024 | 30 min

In Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands (Princeton UP, 2023), Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders’ personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions—at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. Merging ethnographic analysis with systems thinking, he draws on his eight years of research in México and the United States—during which he participated in and observed hackathons, hacker schools, and tech entrepreneurship conferences—to unpack the conundrums faced by workers in a tech economy that stretches from villages in rural México to Silicon Valley.

Beltrán chronicles the tension between the transformative promise of hacking—the idea that coding will reconfigure the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and gender—and the reality of a neoliberal capitalist economy divided and structured by the US/México border. Young hackers, many of whom approach coding in a spirit of playfulness and exploration, are encouraged to appropriate the discourses of flexibility and self-management even as they remain outside formal employment. Beltrán explores the ways that “innovative culture” is seen as central in curing México’s social ills, showing that when innovation is linked to technological development, other kinds of development are neglected. Beltrán’s highly original, wide-ranging analysis uniquely connects technology studies, the anthropology of capitalism, and Latinx and Latin American studies.

Mentioned in this episode, among others:

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Hong, G. K., & Ferguson, R. A. (Eds.). (2011). Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Duke University Press.
Coleman, E. G. (2012). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press.

Héctor Beltrán is Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT, where he teaches “Cultures of Computing,” “Hacking from the South,” and “Latin American Migrations.”

Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

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Heather Parry, "Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism" (404 Ink, 2024)

20 april 2024 | 39 min

Coreen McGuire, "Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period" (Manchester UP, 2020)

20 april 2024 | 29 min

Stephen Morillo, "War and Conflict in the Middle Ages" (Polity Press, 2022)

20 april 2024 | 67 min

Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, "Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

15 april 2024 | 85 min

Miriam Piilonen, "Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human" (Oxford UP, 2024)

15 april 2024 | 78 min

What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research?

Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human (Oxford UP, 2024) is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Darwin and Spencer. Author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in light of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought.

In this book, Piilonen delves into how historical evolutionists, in particular Darwin and Spencer, developed and applied a concept of music that served as a boundary-drawing device, used to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. She takes as primary texts the early evolutionary treatises that double as theoretical accounts of music's origins. For Darwin, music served as a kind of proto-language common to humans and animals alike; he heard the songs of birds and the chirps of mice as musical, as articulated in texts such as The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Spencer, on the other hand, viewed music as a specifically human stage of evolutionary advance, beyond language acquisition, as outlined in his essay, "The Origin and Function of Music" (1857). These competing views established radically different perspectives on the origin and function of music in human cultural expression, while at the same time being mutually constitutive of one another.

A ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, Theorizing Music Evolution turns to music evolution with an eye toward disrupting and intervening in these questions as they recur in the present.”

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University ([email protected]).

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Kevin Lambert, "Symbols and Things: Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

15 april 2024 | 80 min

The stereotype of the solitary mathematician is widespread, but practicing users and producers of mathematics know well that our work depends heavily on our historical and contemporary fellow travelers. Yet we may not appreciate how our work also extends beyond us into our physical and societal environments.

Kevin Lambert takes what might be a first crack at this perspective in his book Symbols and Things: Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). An historian of science, Dr. Lambert has shifted in his view of mathematics as a language of science to one as a material practice. Expanding on ideas from historians, archeologists, philosophers, and other scholars of human activity, and through several interweaving vignettes of mathematical work during a technologically dynamic period in British history, he argues that mathematical practice, communication, and even thought occur to a large degree outside the bodies of the persons performing them.

In this interview, we explore Kevin's journal to and through this book project. We discuss how such ideas as Andy Clark's extended mind informed his approach, and we review several of the lively stories—the co-creation of the long-distance mathematical community with the research journal, Peacock's museological argument for the adoption of symbolic algebra, and the foundational entanglement of electromagnetism, quaternions, and the philosophy of space, among others—he drew out of historical and archival sources. (Here i cannot resist mentioning Tait's collection of his intensive correspondence with Hamilton that transformed how quaternions were applied in physics and even conceptualized as mathematical objects.) We close with some thoughts on our own materially extended cognitive work and where Kevin's interests are currently driving him.

Suggested companion works:

• ChatGPT, as a cutting-edge extension of human thought

• work by Courtney Ann Roby, including the forthcoming The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria: Strategies of Reading from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

• Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000, edited by Morgan G. Ames and Massimo Mazzotti

• work by Emily Miller Bonney, for example "A Reconsideration of Depositional Practices in Early Bronze Age Crete"

Kevin Lambert is a historian of science and mathematics in the early modern and modern periods and professor in the liberal studies department at California State University, Fullerton. His recent book Symbols and Things explores mathematics as a way of thinking outside the body and through the material environment. He also recently published a chapter in the volume Algorithmic Modernity that traces the genealogy of algorithmic practices. He is now working on the problem of writing longue durée histories of science. He is close to completing a paper called “Malthus in the Landscape” that investigates the temporalities of global histories. He is also exploring the problem of writing a global history of the early modern sciences without the prism of the so called “Scientific Revolution.” His work can be found on ResearchGate.

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Rasmus Winther, "Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

14 april 2024 | 69 min

Darren Wershler et al,, "The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

14 april 2024 | 49 min

Sharrona Pearl, "Mask" (Bloombury, 2024)

14 april 2024 | 31 min

Stewart Lawrence Sinclair, "Space Rover" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

13 april 2024 | 44 min

David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts, "Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine" (Harper, 2023)

12 april 2024 | 35 min

In this deep and incisive study, General David Petraeus, who commanded the US-led coalitions in both Iraq, during the Surge, and Afghanistan and former CIA director, and the prize-winning historian Andrew Roberts, explore over 70 years of conflict, drawing significant lessons and insights from their fresh analysis of the past. Drawing on their different perspectives and areas of expertise, Petraeus and Roberts show how often critical mistakes have been repeated time and again, and the challenge, for statesmen and generals alike, of learning to adapt to various new weapon systems, theories and strategies. Among the conflicts examined are the Arab-Israeli wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the two Gulf Wars, the Balkan wars in the former Yugoslavia, and both the Soviet and Coalition wars in Afghanistan, as well as guerilla conflicts in Africa and South America.

Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine (Harper, 2023) culminates with a bracing look at Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, yet another case study in the tragic results when leaders refuse to learn from history, and an assessment of the nature of future warfare. Filled with sharp insight and the wisdom of experience, Conflict is not only a critical assessment of our recent past, but also an essential primer of modern warfare that provides crucial knowledge for waging battle today as well as for understanding what the decades ahead will bring.

General David Petraeus is a retired United States Army general and widely respected as a leading warrior intellectual. He graduated with distinction from the US Military Academy and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He served for 37 years in the US Army, culminating his time in uniform with 6 consecutive commands as a general officer, 5 of which were in combat, including Command of the Surge in Iraq, US Central Command, and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. He then served as Director of the CIA. He has held academic appointments at six universities and currently is a Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Yale. He is a prominent commentator on contemporary security issues, military developments, and global affairs. He is currently a Partner in a major investment firm and chairs that firm’s Global Institute.

Sam Canter is a strategic planner, a PhD candidate in Politics and International Relations, and an Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated.

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Grazia Ingravalle, "Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

12 april 2024 | 71 min

100 Years of Radio in South Africa: Then and Now

11 april 2024 | 54 min

Today’s book is: 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), edited by Dr. Sisanda Nkoala (with Gilbert Motsaathebe). The book focuses on South African radio stations and broadcasters in the past and present. It brings together media scholars and practitioners to deliberate on the role and influence of radio broadcasting in South Africa over the past 100 years. One of few books to consider radio broadcasting in South Africa, this volume provides a historical account of the development of the sector, theoretical frameworks, an in-depth look at key people and institutions that have shaped the sector, a critique of the medium’s role in community-building and culture making, and includes the voices of media practitioners reflecting on the importance of this medium.

Our guest is: Dr. Sisanda Nkoala who is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape. She won the NIHSS Digital Humanities: Best Visualisation or Infographic award; the Western Cape Cultural Affairs Award for Best Researcher Contributing to Archival Heritage; the HERS-SA Young Women Leader in Higher Education award; and Vodacom Journalist of the Year: Western Cape Radio Features category. She serves as vice-chair of the IAMCR’s media education research section, the African Journalism Educators Network secretary-general, as an associate editor for the Journal of Communication Technology, a public representative on the South African Press Council, a member of the Film & Publication Board’s Appeals Tribunal, and as the vice-president of the South African Communication Association. She is published in journals and in The Conversation. She is the editor of 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now, and Community Radio, Digital Radio and the Future of Radio in South Africa. Before joining academia, she was a radio journalist.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also like:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.

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Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media" (Duke UP, 2023)

10 april 2024 | 52 min

In The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP. 2023), Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.

Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches at the Department of English and Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She studies global media cultures, environmental media and critical health studies. Her early research includes two monographs When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, while the co-edited volume exemplifies her current research, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk.

Priyam Sinha is a doctoral candidate in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached here.

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Sean Vanatta on Credit Cards

8 april 2024 | 79 min

Tina Sikka, "Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

5 april 2024 | 19 min

Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)

3 april 2024 | 55 min

Dominic Boyer, "No More Fossils" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

3 april 2024 | 59 min

Guru Madhavan on Wicked Problems and Engineering a Better World

2 april 2024 | 69 min

Max Bennett, "A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains" (Mariner Books, 2023)

1 april 2024 | 69 min

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement learning algorithm trying to mimic neural networks.

Max Bennett is an AI entrepreneur and neuroscience researcher. His work combines insights from evolutionary neuroscience, comparative psychology, and AI. As each chapter describes how a skill evolved, it also explains whether(!) and how an AI system has managed to implement something similar. A recurring theme is how human brains and neural circuits have influenced AI architecture. The other side of this bi-directional connection is also intriguing. AI has often served as a litmus test, giving a clue how a not well understood neurobiological phenomenon might work, how plausible a hypothesis is.

The organzining principle of this book is a framework of five breakthroughs, which compares evolution to technological innovation. Like a new technology enables several innovative products, a new brain capability enables several new skills. For example, mammals show several new intelligent behaviors compared to their ancestors: vicarious trial and error, episodic memory, and planning. The foundation of all these novelties, is probably the same capability: simulation.

The five breakthroughs are:

steering in bilaterians
learning from trial and error in vertebrates
simulating in mammals
mentalizing in primates
speaking in humans

This framework guides the readers through a time travel of 600 million years. We learn about the environment in which these capabilities evolved: Who were the first mammals and why did planning benefit them? We see what contemporary animals can and can't do: Fish aren't as dumb as folklore suggests. And we take a look at AI's baffling achievements and limitations: Why can AI write decent essays but not load a dishwasher?

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Claudia de Rham, "The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity" (Princeton UP, 2024)

1 april 2024 | 51 min

Building the Future Buddha: A Discussion with Jundho Cohen

31 mars 2024 | 59 min

Matthew H. Hersch, "Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle" (MIT Press, 2023)

30 mars 2024 | 37 min

Robert Willim, "Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary" (Bristol UP, 2024)

30 mars 2024 | 40 min

Ya-Wen Lei, "The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China" (Princeton UP, 2023)

30 mars 2024 | 55 min

Emma Frances Bloomfield, "Science V. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators" (U California Press, 2024)

30 mars 2024 | 36 min

Thomas S. Mullaney, "The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age" (MIT Press, 2024)

29 mars 2024 | 103 min

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device?

In The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Thomas Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doing so, discovers that the key to this seemingly impossible riddle has given rise to a new epoch in the history of writing—a form of writing he calls “hypography.” Based on fifteen years of research, this pathbreaking history of the Chinese language charts the beginnings of electronic Chinese technology in the wake of World War II up through to its many iterations in the present day. Mullaney takes the reader back through the history and evolution of Chinese language computing technology, showing the development of electronic Chinese input methods—software programs that enable Chinese characters to be produced using alphanumeric symbols—and the profound impact they have had on the way Chinese is written. Along the way, Mullaney introduces a cast of brilliant and eccentric personalities drawn from the ranks of IBM, MIT, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Taiwanese military, and the highest rungs of mainland Chinese establishment, to name a few, and the unexpected roles they played in developing Chinese language computing. Finally, he shows how China and the non-Western world—because of the hypographic technologies they had to invent in order to join the personal computing revolution—“saved” the Western computer from its deep biases, enabling it to achieve a meaningful presence in markets outside of the Americas and Europe. An eminently engaging and artfully told history, The Chinese Computer is a must-read for anyone interested in how culture informs computing and how computing, in turn, shapes culture.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network.

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Ignacio Cofone, "The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

28 mars 2024 | 27 min

Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence" (Oxford UP, 2023)

26 mars 2024 | 35 min

Global adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian states are digitally catching up with their democratic counterparts, and both are showing a growing interest in the use of cyber controls--online censorship and surveillance technologies--that allow governments to exercise control over the Internet. Under what conditions does a digitally connected society actually help states target their enemies? Why do repressive governments sometimes shut down the Internet when faced with uprisings? And how have cyber controls become a dependable tool in the weapons arsenal that states use in civil conflict?

In Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Anita R. Gohdes addresses these questions, and provides an original and in-depth look into the relationship between digital technologies and state violence. Drawing on large-scale analyses of fine-grained data on the Syrian conflict, qualitative case evidence from Iran, and the first global comparative analysis on Internet outages and state repression, Dr. Gohdes makes the case that digital infrastructure supports security forces in their use of violent state repression. More specifically, she argues that mass access to the Internet presents governments who fear for their political survival with a set of response options. When faced with a political threat, they can either temporarily restrict or block online public access or they can expand mass access to online information and monitor it to their own advantage. Surveillance allows security forces to target opponents of the state more selectively, while extreme forms of censorship or shutdowns of the Internet occur in conjunction with larger and more indiscriminate repression. As digital communication has become a bedrock of modern opposition and protest movements, Repression in the Digital Age breaks new ground in examining state repression in the information age.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John Warner on Teaching Writing in the Age of Generative AI

25 mars 2024 | 86 min

How Can We Reach International Consensus on AI Regulation?

25 mars 2024 | 43 min

George S. Takach, "Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America" (Pegasus Book, 2024)

24 mars 2024 | 68 min

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War.

So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”

George S. Takach’s incisive and meticulously researched new volume, Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America (Pegasus Book, 2024), is the book we need to thoroughly understand these frightening and perilous times. In the geopolitical sphere, there are no more pressing issues than the appalling mechanizations of a surveillance state in China, Russia’s brazen attempt to assert its autocratic model in Ukraine, and China’s increasingly likely plans to do the same in Taiwan. But the key here, Takach argues, is that our new Cold War is not only ideological but technological: the side that prevails in Cold War 2.0 will be the one that bests the other in mastering the greatest innovations of our time. Artificial intelligence sits in our pockets every day—but what about AI that coordinates military operations and missile defense systems? Or the highly sophisticated semiconductor chips and quantum computers that power those missiles and a host of other weapons? And, where recently we have seen remarkable feats of bio-engineering to produce vaccines at record speed, shouldn’t we be concerned how catastrophic it would be if bio-engineering were co-opted for nefarious purposes? Takach thoroughly examines how each of these innovations will shape the tension between democracy and autocracy, and how each will play a central role in this second Cold War. Finally, he crafts a precise blueprint for how Western democracies should handle these innovations to respond to the looming threat of autocracy—and ultimately prevail over it.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023)

22 mars 2024 | 59 min

Beth Linker, "Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2024)

21 mars 2024 | 32 min

Jörg Matthias Determann and Shoaib Ahmed Malik, "Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life: New Frontiers in Science and Religion" (I. B. Tauris, 2024)

19 mars 2024 | 68 min

Brandon R. Brown, "Sharing Our Science: How to Write and Speak STEM" (MIT Press, 2023)

18 mars 2024 | 54 min

Once More--What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to be Generative?

16 mars 2024 | 61 min

Lisa Messeri, "In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles" (Duke UP, 2024)

16 mars 2024 | 70 min

Ruth A. Morgan, "Climate Change and International History: Climate Diplomacy in the Global North and South Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

16 mars 2024 | 66 min

Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

15 mars 2024 | 61 min

Peter D. McDonald, "Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer" (MIT Press, 2024)

15 mars 2024 | 22 min

Eleanor Patterson, "Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

12 mars 2024 | 101 min

Zachary Loeb on the History of the End of the World

11 mars 2024 | 91 min

Zachary Loeb on the History of the End of the World

11 mars 2024 | 91 min

Brian Merchant, "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" (LIttle, Brown, 2023)

10 mars 2024 | 103 min

"Luddite" has become an insult and Brain Merchant wants to change that. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (Little, Brown, 2023) tells the story of when machines starting taking human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work--and how it explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech today. Two hundred years ago in rural England, working men and women rose up en masse rather than starve at the hands of the factory owners who were using machines to erase and degrade their livelihoods. Under the banner of a mythical General Loud, they organized guerrilla raids, smashed specific machines, and threatened wealthy machine owners. Luddites won the support of Lord Byron, inspired Mary Shelley, and enraged the louche Prince Regent and his bloodthirsty government. Before it was over, much blood would be spilled--of rich and poor, of the invisible and of the powerful. This deeply misunderstood class struggle nearly brought 19th century England to its knees. Currently many fear that big tech is dominating our lives and machines replacing human labor run high. We worry that technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are ousting workers from factories, and artificial intelligence will soon remove drivers from cars. Saving the movement from what E. P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity", Merchant finds inspiration in Luddism for our current crises.

Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (2017, Little, Brown). His work has appeared in a variety of places including Wired and The Atlantic. He is a founder of VICE’s speculative fiction outlet Terraform and was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times.

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Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

8 mars 2024 | 44 min

Christy Spackman, "The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage" (U California Press, 2023)

8 mars 2024 | 56 min

Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023) explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment processes. By focusing on the relationship between taste and the environment, Christy Spackman shows how efforts to erase unwanted tastes and smells have transformed water into a highly industrialized food product divorced from its origins. The Taste of Water invites readers to question their own assumptions about what water does and should naturally taste like while exposing them to the invisible—but substantial—sensory labor involved in creating tap water.

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor of Art/Science at Arizona State University, where she holds a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. She is also Director of the Sensory Labor(atory), an experimental research collective dedicated to creatively disrupting longstanding sensory hierarchies. Her academic work focuses on how the sensory experiences of making, consuming, and disposing of food influence and are influenced by “technologies of taste,” her term for the oft-overlooked technologies and practices used to manage the sensory aspects of foods during production.

Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explores the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

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Mike Duggan, "All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

7 mars 2024 | 47 min

Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications" (MIT Press, 2020)

7 mars 2024 | 70 min

Infographics and data visualization are ubiquitous in our everyday media diet, particularly in news—in print newspapers, on television news, and online. It has been argued that infographics are changing what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century—and even that they harmonize uniquely with human cognition. In this first serious exploration of the subject, Murray Dick traces the cultural evolution of the infographic, examining its use in news—and resistance to its use—from eighteenth-century print culture to today's data journalism. He identifies six historical phases of infographics in popular culture: the proto-infographic, the classical, the improving, the commercial, the ideological, and the professional.

In The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications (MIT Press, 2020), Dick describes the emergence of infographic forms within a wider history of journalism, culture, and communications, focusing his analysis on the UK. He considers their use in the partisan British journalism of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print media; their later deployment as a vehicle for reform and improvement; their mass-market debut in the twentieth century as a means of explanation (and sometimes propaganda); and their use for both ideological and professional purposes in the post–World War II marketized newspaper culture. Finally, he proposes best practices for news infographics and defends infographics and data visualization against a range of criticism. Dick offers not only a history of how the public has experienced and understood the infographic, but also an account of what data visualization can tell us about the past.

Dr Murray Dick. Senior Lecturer In Multimedia Journalism at Newcastle University

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Joanna Crosby, "Apples and Orchards Since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

5 mars 2024 | 46 min

Robert Charette on Researching the Material World

4 mars 2024 | 74 min

Francesca Sobande, "Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture" (U California Press, 2024)

3 mars 2024 | 35 min

Verity Harding, "AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI's Future and Save Our Own" (Princeton UP, 2024)

1 mars 2024 | 33 min

Carol Beggy, "Pencil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

28 februari 2024 | 58 min

Sara J. Grossman, "Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy" (Duke UP, 2023)

28 februari 2024 | 41 min

The Taste of Water: A Conversation with Christy Spackman

26 februari 2024 | 70 min

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, "Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam" (Duke UP, 2021)

26 februari 2024 | 62 min

Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)

26 februari 2024 | 53 min

Paul Scharre, "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" (Norton, 2023)

24 februari 2024 | 35 min

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry―the struggle to control artificial intelligence.

A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives―and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Norton, 2023) argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Data is a vital resource like coal or oil, but it must be collected and refined. Advanced computer chips are the essence of computing power―control over chip supply chains grants leverage over rivals. Talent is about people: which country attracts the best researchers and most advanced technology companies? The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military.

Scharre’s account surges with futuristic technology. He explores the ways AI systems are already discovering new strategies via millions of war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, tracking billions of people using biometrics, and subtly controlling information with secret algorithms. He visits China’s “National Team” of leading AI companies to show the chilling synergy between China’s government, private sector, and surveillance state. He interviews Pentagon leadership and tours U.S. Defense Department offices in Silicon Valley, revealing deep tensions between the military and tech giants who control data, chips, and talent. Yet he concludes that those tensions, inherent to our democratic system, create resilience and resistance to autocracy in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technology.

Engaging and direct, Four Battlegrounds offers a vivid picture of how AI is transforming warfare, global security, and the future of human freedom―and what it will take for democracies to remain at the forefront of the world order.

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What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to Generate?

24 februari 2024 | 59 min

Jacob Ward, "Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications" (MIT Press, 2024)

23 februari 2024 | 51 min

In Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.

When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales. In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain’s nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.

Jacob Ward is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Science, Technology and Society Studies Research Program at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. He is coeditor of Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain.

Filippo De Chirico is a PhD student in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy).

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Neil Lee, "Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy" (U California Press, 2024)

21 februari 2024 | 37 min

Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15" (FSG, 2023)

20 februari 2024 | 69 min

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.

In American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (FSG, 2023), the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner--the American Kalashnikov--as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America's gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry.

Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia.

Zusha Elinson is a national reporter, writing about guns and violence for the Wall Street Journal. Based in California, he has also written for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times Bay Area section.

Recommended Books:

Robert Caro, The Path to Power
William Shawcross, Sideshow
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
Adam Winkler, Gun Fight
Tim Mak, Misfire
Doug Stanton, Horse Solidiers

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Nate Klemp, "Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World" (Sounds True, 2024)

19 februari 2024 | 57 min

Jenna Ng, "The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)

14 februari 2024 | 53 min

Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate.

Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (University of Amsterdam Press, 2021) by Dr. Jenna Ng develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed. Interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, this open-access book argues that the disappearance of difference reflects shifted conditions of actuality and virtuality in understanding the human condition. These shifts further connect to the current state of politics by way of their distorted truth values, corrupted terms of information, and internalizations of difference.

The Post.Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections thus thinks anew the image’s borders and delineations, evoking the screen boundary as an instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations which do not tell the truth. In the process, a new imagination for images emerges for a gluttony of the virtual; for new conceptualizations of object and representation, materiality and energies, media and histories, real and unreal; for new understandings of appearances, dis-appearances, replacement and re.placement – the post-screen.

This book is available open access here.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Patrick Gamsby, "The Discourse of Scholarly Communication" (Lexington Books, 2023)

14 februari 2024 | 47 min

Christopher Reddy, "Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide" (Routledge, 2023)

13 februari 2024 | 56 min

James S. Damico and Mark C. Baildon, "How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change" (Teachers College Press, 2022)

13 februari 2024 | 68 min

Climate change and climate denial have remained largely off the radar in literacy and social studies education in the United States. How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change (Teachers College Press, 2022) addresses that gap with the design of the Climate Denial Inquiry Model (CDIM) and clear examples of how educators and students can confront two forms of climate denial: science denial and action denial. The CDIM highlights how critical literacies specifically designed for climate denial texts can be used alongside eco-civic practices of deliberation, reflexivity, and counter-narration to help students discern corporate, financial, and politically motivated roots of climate denial and to better understand efforts to misinform the American public, sow doubt and distrust of basic scientific knowledge, and erode support for evidence-based policymaking and collective civic action. With an emphasis on inquiry-based teaching and learning, the book also charts a path from destructive stories-we-live-by that are steeped in climate denial (humans are separate from nature, the primary goal of society is economic growth without limits, nature is a resource to be used and exploited) to ecojustice stories-To-live by that invite teachers and students to consider more just and sustainable futures.

As mentioned in the podcast, From Climate Denial to Ecojustice is the accompanying website.James S. Damico is Professor of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A.

Mark Baildon is an Associate Professor of Foundations of Education and Coordinator of International Collaborations and Partnerships in United Arab Emirates University’s College of Education.

Madden Gilhooly is a public-school teacher and casual academic based on Gadigal land in so-called-Sydney, Australia.

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Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)

12 februari 2024 | 49 min

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.

"Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe, and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.

In The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat (Pegasus Books, 2022), Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. This new book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat.

Rob Percival is Head of Policy at the Soil Association, Britain's leading food and farming charitable organization. He has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize as well as the Thompson Reuters Food Sustainability Media Award.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Markus Krajewski, "The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque" (Yale UP, 2018)

11 februari 2024 | 63 min

The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque (Yale UP, 2018) is a cutting–edge media history on a perennially fascinating topic that attempts to answer the crucial question: Who is in charge, the servant or the master?

Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current–day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants’ relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.

Markus Krajewski is professor of media history at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 and World Projects: Global Information Before World War I, which was awarded the 2007 Prize of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology. He also works as a software developer and maintainer of his bibliography software Synapsen: A Hypertextual Card Index (www.synapsen.ch). Ilinca Iurascu is assistant professor of German at the University of British Columbia, specializing in nineteenth-century cultural studies and media theory.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, "Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

10 februari 2024 | 34 min

Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, "After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

10 februari 2024 | 44 min

Creative storytelling is the beating heart of Darwin's science. All of Darwin's writings drew on information gleaned from a worldwide network of scientific research and correspondence, but they hinge on moments in which Darwin asks his reader to imagine how specific patterns came to be over time, spinning yarns filled with protagonists and antagonists, crises, triumphs, and tragedies. His fictions also forged striking new possibilities for the interpretation of human societies and their relation to natural environments. After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP, 2022) gathers an international roster of scholars to ask what Darwin's writing offers future of literary scholarship and critical theory, as well as allied fields like history, art history, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, the history of race, aesthetics, and ethics. It speaks to anyone interested in the impact of Darwin on the humanities, including literary scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers interested in Darwin's continuing influence.

• Provides an interdisciplinary lens on the philosophy and writing of Charles Darwin

• Emphasizes Darwin as a thinker and a humanist, showing readers Darwin's wider-ranging and ongoing impact in various fields of social, philosophical, and aesthetic thought

• Looks beyond Darwin's theory of natural selection to focus on his contributions to theories of race and gender, aesthetics, ecology, animal studies, environmentalism, and politics

Devin Griffiths is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His book, The Age of Analogy (2016) was a finalist for the BARS, BSLS, and NVSA book prizes. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Victorian Studies, ELH, the History of Humanities, and Book History. He's now working on a study of ecocriticism and the energy humanities.

Deanna Kreisel is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy, and has published articles in PMLA, Representations, ELH, Novel, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and elsewhere. Her current book project is on utopia and sustainability in Victorian culture.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, "The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science" (Cornell UP, 2023)

4 februari 2024 | 50 min

Ismar Volić, "Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation" (Princeton UP, 2024)

1 februari 2024 | 41 min

Lisa Herzog, "Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

1 februari 2024 | 68 min

Eviane Leidig, "The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization" (Columbia UP, 2023)

31 januari 2024 | 41 min

Science Is a Creative Human Enterprise: A Discussion with Natalie Aviles

31 januari 2024 | 61 min

Curtis Fox, "Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict" (30 Press Publishing, 2023)

30 januari 2024 | 92 min

Chen-Pang Yeang, "Transforming Noise. A History of Its Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955" (2023)

30 januari 2024 | 57 min

Today, the concept of noise is employed to characterize random fluctuations in general. Before the twentieth century, however, noise only meant disturbing sounds. In the 1900s-50s, noise underwent a conceptual transformation from unwanted sounds that needed to be domesticated into a synonym for errors and deviations to be now used as all kinds of signals and information. Transforming Noise examines the historical origin of modern attempts to understand, control, and use noise. Its history sheds light on the interactions between physics, mathematics, mechanical technology, electrical engineering, and information and data sciences in the twentieth century.

This book explores the process of engineers and physicists turning noise into an informational concept, starting from the rise of sound reproduction technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio in the 1900s-20s until the theory of Brownian motions for random fluctuations and its application in thermionic tubes of telecommunication systems. These processes produced different theoretical treatments of noise in the 1920s-30s, such as statistical physicists' studies of Brownian fluctuations' temporal evolution, radio engineers' spectral analysis of atmospheric disturbances, and mathematicians' measure-theoretic formulation. Finally, it discusses the period during and after World War II and how researchers have worked on military projects of radar, gunfire control, and secret communications and converted the interwar theoretical studies of noise into tools for statistical detection, estimation, prediction, and information transmission.

To physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, and computer scientists, this book offers a historical perspective on themes highly relevant in today's science and technology, ranging from Wi-Fi and big data to quantum information and self-organization. This book also appeals to environmental and art historians to modern music scholars as the history of noise constitutes a unique angle to study sound and society. Finally, to researchers in media studies and digital cultures, Transforming Noise demonstrates the deep technoscientific historicity of certain notions - information, channel, noise, equivocation - they have invoked to understand modern media and communication.

Interview by Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español Communications officer- Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

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Sandro Galea, "Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

28 januari 2024 | 29 min

Elinor Cleghorn, "Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World" (Dutton, 2022)

28 januari 2024 | 55 min

Lee McIntyre, "On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy" (MIT Press, 2023)

27 januari 2024 | 71 min

The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy (MIT Press, 2023), Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulate a populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth.

McIntyre takes readers through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. Along the way, he also demonstrates how today's "reality denial" follows the same flawed blueprint of the "five steps of science denial" used by climate deniers and anti-vaxxers; shows how Trump has emulated disinformation tactics created by Russian and Soviet intelligence dating back to the 1920s; provides interviews with leading experts on information warfare, counterterrorism, and political extremism; and spells out the need for algorithmic transparency from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens--from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congresspeople to regulate social media--as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take.

Compact, easy-to-read (and then pass on to a friend), and never more urgent, On Disinformation does nothing less than empower us with the tools and knowledge needed to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late.

Emanuel Stoakes is a freelance journalist and researcher. Bylines in a range of international outlets including The NY Times, The Washington Post, NBC digital, The Guardian, The Independent etc. Spinoff and Newsroom in Aotearoa New Zealand. TV production work with Al Jazeera, VICE, ABC Australia, ARD (Germany), ARTE and others.

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Renée Fox, "The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2023)

27 januari 2024 | 35 min

The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present’s desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions “necromantic literature” at a nineteenth-century intersection between sentimental historiography, medical electricity, imperial gothic monsters, and the Irish Literary Revival, contending that these unghostly bodies resist critical assumptions about the always-haunting power of history.

By considering Irish Revival texts within the broader scope of nineteenth-century necromantic works, The Necromantics challenges Victorian studies’ tendency to merge Irish and English national traditions into a single British whole, as well as Irish studies’ postcolonial efforts to cordon off a distinct Irish canon. Fox thus forges new connections between conflicting political, formal, and historical traditions. In doing so, she proposes necromantic literature as a model for a contemporary reparative reading practice that can reanimate nineteenth-century texts with new aesthetic affinities, demonstrating that any effective act of reading will always be an effort of reanimation.

Renee Fox is an Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz where she also serves as the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies and Co-Director of The Center for Monster Studies. She’s co-edited quite a number of works in Irish Studies, Irish literature and monster literature as well writing for journals such as Victorian Studies, the Irish University Review and the New Hibernia Review.

Aidan Beatty teaches in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Paddy Walker and Peter Roberts, "War's Changed Landscape?: A Primer on Conflict's Forms and Norms" (Howgate, 2023)

27 januari 2024 | 90 min

Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, "Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

26 januari 2024 | 50 min

The Future of Images of Human Evolution

20 januari 2024 | 35 min

Hartmut Koenitz, "Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative: Immersive Expressions for a Complex Time" (Routledge, 2023)

19 januari 2024 | 22 min

What Decision Means

19 januari 2024 | 62 min

Cross-Cultural Research on Gaming and “Gaming Disorder”

19 januari 2024 | 29 min

In 1998 the phrase “internet addiction” was first used to describe problematic prolonged internet use, and encompassed a wide range of online activities including reading news, connecting in chat rooms, viewing pornography, and gambling. Since then, particular focus has been placed on internet gaming, and in 2022 the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (11th edition) classified Gaming Disorder as a "mental disorder due to addictive behaviors." But as Dr. Veli-Matti Karhulahti and Dr. Yaewon Jin explain, there is far from universal consensus on what “gaming disorder” exactly is. They share their insights as researchers of the ORE (Ontological Reconstruction of Gaming Disorder), a five-year interdisciplinary project funded by the European Research Council, and discuss the difficulties not only in identifying “gaming disorder” but in categorizing the various kinds of games that are considered. They share their own experiences with computer gaming, from early 1990s Finnish schools to South Korea’s PC bangs (internet cafés). They leave us to contemplate culturally and historically dependent perspectives not only on what constitutes a so-called disorder, but why individuals play games.

This episode is supported by the Otto A. Malm Foundation.

Dr. Veli-Matti Karhulahti is the ORE project’s principle investigator and is an interdisciplinary senior researcher of play, games, and the philosophy of science at the University of Jyväskylä. Dr. Yaewon Jin is a post-doctoral researcher at Jyvaskyla, and focuses on South Korea as part of the project. She is also currently a visiting professor at Yonsei University and principal researcher at the Game-n-Science institute.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

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Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit" ((EF,JP))

18 januari 2024 | 52 min

Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race) privilege–in India, yes, but also in American and other meritocratic democracies as well.

The wide-ranging discussion explored how inequality gets reproduced, passed on and justified. Caste–often framed as a fundamentally “Eastern” form of difference–not only seems to have a lot in common with race, but also shares a history through colonial, plantation-based capitalism. This may explain some of the ways “merit” has also made race (and class) disparities invisible in the United States. This helps explain ways in which dominant groups excoriate the “identity politics” of those seeking greater access to privileged domains, and claim their own independence from “ascriptive” identities--while silently relying on the privilege and other hidden advantages of particular racial or caste-based forms of belonging.

The companion text for this episode--Privilege by Shamus Khan--addresses very similar issues in the elite high school where he was a student, teacher and sociological researcher, St. Paul’s School. Khan traces a shift over the past decades (we argued a bit about the time frame) from a conception of privilege defined by maintaining boundaries, to one based on the privileged person’s capacity to move with ease through all social contexts.

Discussed in this episode:

Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India
Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor : How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test
John Carson, The Measure of Merit
Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn
Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions
Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India

Listen and Read Here

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Paul Gowder, "The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

17 januari 2024 | 67 min

Free to Investigate: Dr. Scott Atlas on the Freedom in the Sciences

16 januari 2024 | 69 min

Can we have science without freedom of speech? Dr. Scott Atlas's professional work and personal experiences bring to light an important and often under-discussed element of speech: freedom of speech in the hard sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a host of new questions and concerns surrounding our medical system and government health agencies: as Special Advisor to the President and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from July to December 2020, Dr. Atlas was at the forefront of such debates. In this conversation, he discusses the importance of debate not only to science itself but also to popular trust in and support of the sciences, which since the pandemic have suffered a steep decline.

Dr. Scott Atlas, MD, is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and the co-director of the Global Liberty Institute. In addition to his role in White House he has served as Senior Advisor for Health Care to several numerous candidates for President, as well as counselled members of the U.S. Congress on health care, testified before Congress, and briefed directors of key federal agencies. Before his appointment at Hoover Institution, he was a Professor and Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center for 14 years, and he received his medical degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine. He is the author of numerous books, most recently A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America.

Here is the Cochrane Library analysis on masking mentioned during the interview.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Christopher Corker, "The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930" (U of York, 2016)

16 januari 2024 | 43 min

Christopher Corker's The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930 (U of York, 2016) focuses on four in-depth case studies of John Brown, Cammell-Laird, Thomas Firth and Hadfields to examine the business and technology of the industry. It builds on the work of Tweedale and Trebilcock on Sheffield and armaments, and advances the argument that during the period of study from 1900 to 1930, the city was one of the most important centres for armaments research and production anywhere in the world. The business of the armaments industry is explored through an examination of the evolving links the industry had with the Government against the backdrop of an uncertain trading environment, and the managerial connections established between the state and private industry. Also explored are the collaborative, collusive and independent defensive measures enacted by the industry to counter uncertainty in the industry, through collaborative business arrangements and various approaches to entering international markets for armaments. An examination of the business of the armaments industry also highlights the value of the technological investment made by the industry. At the centre of exploring the technology of the armaments industry, a reconstruction of its technological history is undertaken using patent and archival records, highlighting the nuances and research dead-ends of development in the industry. Of central importance is the notion of spin-off and the interactions between armaments and metallurgical developments in the creation of a pool of knowledge to be utilised for future research into alloy steels, and the notion of path-dependent technological research. Also advanced is the concept of an innovation system centred on Sheffield, and an exploration of the important national and international links advanced by the industry

This title is available open access here.

Chris is a business historian, and Lecturer in Management at the School for Business and Society at the University of York, where he is a former Director of Undergraduate Programmes. He completed his PhD in 2016, and won the 2017 Coleman Prize from the Association of Business Historians for excellence in new business history research, and an Emerald Literati Prize in 2019. His current research is on innovation and knowledge in industrial clusters, in particular the business and intellectual history of Stainless Steel, which has been supported by a small grant from the Business Archives Council. Outside of academia Chris is an advisor to Sheffield Archives, member of the Joined Up Heritage Sheffield Partnership Board, and former Chair of Portland Works Little Sheffield, a social enterprise housed in a 19th Century cutlery works. His work has also been featured on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking.

Also discussed during the podcast

Chris Corker, ‘Continuity and Change in the Sheffield Armaments Industry 1919-1930’, Journal of Management History, Vol. 24, No.2, pp.174-188, 2018.
Wilson, J.F., Corker, C., and Lane, J.P. (Eds), Industrial Clusters in the UK: Knowledge, Innovation Systems and Sustainability (Routledge, 2022).

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Alexandra Filindra, "Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

15 januari 2024 | 54 min

The United States has more guns than people and more gun violence than any Western democracy. Scholars in diverse fields interrogate why 21st century Americans support gun ownership and valorize vigilantism even as they fear gun violence. Many question how the NRA – National Rifle Association – has successfully lobbied for radical gun laws that most Americans don’t support.

In Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Alexandra Filindra highlights political culture. She argues that the NRA depends upon political narratives that can be traced back to the American Revolution. Rather than focus on the constitution, Lockean liberalism, rule of law, or individual rights, she argues that the American Revolution depended upon classical republican ideals – especially the martial virtue of the citizen-soldier – that became foundational to American democracy. American gun culture fuses the republican citizen-soldier with White male supremacy to create what Filindra calls ascriptive martial republicanism. Her book demonstrates how the militarized understandings of political membership prominent in NRA narratives and embraced by many White Americans fit within this broader revolutionary ideology.

Even as contemporary NRA narratives embrace 18th and 19th century versions of ascriptive martial republicanism, the NRA radically decouples political virtue and military service by associating virtue with the consumer act of purchasing a firearm. Rather than emphasizing military service or preparedness, consumer choice defines the politically virtuous citizen.

White Amerians embrace this combination of civic republicanism and White male supremacy but Filindra’s research shows that they also hold a competing form of republicanism (inclusive republicanism) that includes a commitment to peaceful political engagement, civic forms of voluntarism and participation, and a strong belief in multiculturalism.

In the podcast, Susan mentions previous podcasts on Katherine Franke’s Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition and Drew McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America.

Dr. Alexandra Filindra is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She specializes in American gun politics, immigration policy, race and ethnic politics, public opinion, and political psychology.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman, "Mainstreaming and Game Journalism" (MIT Press, 2023)

15 januari 2024 | 34 min

Why games are still niche and not mainstream, and how journalism can help them gain cultural credibility.

Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023) addresses both the history and current practice of game journalism, along with the roles writers and industry play in conveying that the medium is a “mainstream” form of entertainment. Through interviews with reporters, David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman retrace how the game industry and journalists started a subcultural spiral in the 1980s that continues to this day. Digital play became increasingly exclusionary by appealing to niche audiences, relying on hardcore fans and favoring the male gamer stereotype. At the same time, this culture pushed journalists to the margins, leaving them toiling to find freelance gigs and deeply ambivalent about their profession.

Mainstreaming and Game Journalism also examines the bumpy process of what we think of as “mainstreaming.” The authors argue that it encompasses three overlapping factors. First, for games to become mainstream, they need to become more ubiquitous through broader media coverage. Second, an increase in ludic literacy, or how-to play games, determines whether that greater visibility translates into accessibility. Third, the mainstreaming of games must gain cultural legitimacy. The fact that games are more visible does little if only a few people take them seriously or deem them worthy of attention. Ultimately, Mainstreaming and Game Journalism provocatively questions whether games ever will—or even should—gain widespread cultural acceptance.

This book is available open access here.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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James W. Cortada, "Inside IBM: Lessons of a Corporate Culture in Action" (Columbia Business School, 2023)

14 januari 2024 | 69 min

Can A.I. Mean?

13 januari 2024 | 54 min

Listen to Episode No.4 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is whether A.I. can mean.

The short answer is yes, A.I. can mean... whatever we make it mean.

For instance, ChatGPT does has access to text on certain kinds of subject matter, like, for example, the assembly of explosives or specifications on suicide. This kind of stuff is on the web, so ChatGPT has “read it” these subjects into its corpus. However, human programmers have applied filters telling the A.I. not to speak about these things. Nonetheless, you may be able to get to what it “thinks” about these things with some clever prompts, called “jailbreaks” in the hacker trade.

But does the A.I. really think, as we humans would associate with the act of thinking? Not really, because an A.I. like ChatGPT does not think about bombs or self-destruction. It just has words about these subjects which it doesn’t itself “understand.” And on top of that, its human-programmer masters have told it not to repeat them.

But whose purpose is meant to be served here, the A.I.'s or our own? In our discussion in this instalment of All We Mean, we argue, of course, for the A.I. serving the purposes of us humans. But there the questions immediately arises, which of us humans will be served? It may be that only the big stakeholders in the large Internet companies get served, and who knows what purposes they have. Perhaps they're quite content to see A.I. create the illusion of fact and consciousness, if for no other reason than to increase profits.

We, on the opposite side of that, say that the technology has tremendous potential for everyone, if used in everyone's interests. For example, people who want to learn can use A.I. technologies to improve their own performance, just as people who want to discover can use A.I. technologies to communicate their findings more effectively. These are the sorts of purpose we believe A.I. can be used to accomplish, by anyone, for everyone. But, we wonder, will purposes such as these also count when the technology rests firmly in the hands of the very few, because what if they don't really care what the rest of us want?

Read Bill's and Mary's multimodal grammar of A.I.

And read their work on using A.I. in education.

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Thomas DeGloma, "Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

11 januari 2024 | 61 min

Mark Monmonier, "Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography" (ESRI Press, 2019)

10 januari 2024 | 64 min

Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019)

10 januari 2024 | 47 min

Roland Allen, "The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper" (Profile Books, 2023)

6 januari 2024 | 61 min

We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think?

In The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Profile Books, 2023), Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of mediaeval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine.

On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.

In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive - and happier.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Chinmay Tumbe, "The Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020)

3 januari 2024 | 50 min

Robert R. Janes, "Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat" (Routledge, 2023)

2 januari 2024 | 58 min

Who do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse for which we may be heading?

Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat (Routledge, 2023) proposes an unlikely hero in this narrative. Robert Janes’ text explores the implications of societal collapse from a multidisciplinary perspective and considers the potential museums have to contribute to the reimagining and transitioning of a new society with the threat of collapse.

Arguing that societal collapse is underway, but that total collapse is not inevitable, Janes maintains that museums are well-positioned to mitigate and adapt to the disruptions of societal collapse. As institutions of the commons, belonging to and affecting the public at large, he contends that museums are both responsible and capable of contributing to the durability and well-being of individuals, families, and communities, and enhancing societal resilience in the face of critical issues confronting our species.

The Museum COP at Tate
Museum pressure groups: The Empathetic Museum, Museum as Progress, Museum Human.
The Australian Museum’s mission statement
Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh
Museum of Homelessness
Horniman Museum

Robert R. Janes is an independent scholar whose work draws on his many year’s experience as a museum director. He is the editor emeritus of the Museum Management and Curatoriship journal, a visiting scholar at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and the founder of the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice. He is the author of multiple books on the social role of museums.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019

2 januari 2024 | 53 min

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire.

Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio received her BA in history at the University of Puerto Rico and her PhD in Central/East European history from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her dissertation, “The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and Biopolitics in the Prussian-Polish Provinces, 1840-1914,” was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Award in Polish Studies by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) in 2010.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is the winner of the 2020 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies and honorable mention for the 2020 Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

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Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019)

2 januari 2024 | 31 min

Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

1 januari 2024 | 44 min

Carolyn Birdsall, "Radiophilia" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

31 december 2023 | 46 min

Nicole Seymour, "Glitter" (Bloombury, 2022)

28 december 2023 | 30 min

Jeffrey Whyte, "The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War" (Oxford UP, 2023)

27 december 2023 | 84 min

Jeffrey Whyte's book The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the history, politics, and geography of United States psychological warfare in the 20th century against the backdrop of the contemporary 'post-truth era'. From its origins in the Second World War, to the United States' counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam, Whyte traces how the theory and practice of psychological warfare transformed the relationship between the home front and theatres of war. Whyte interrogates the broader political mythologies that animate popular conceptions of psychological war, such as its claim to make war more humane and less violent.

On the contrary, The Birth of Psychological War demonstrates the role of psychological warfare in expanding the scope and scale of military violence amidst ostensible efforts to 'win hearts and minds'. While casting a critical eye on psychological warfare, Whyte establishes its continued significance for the contemporary student of international relations.

Dr. Whyte earned his Ph.D. with the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia and before that a MA with School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, also in beautiful British Columbia. He is currently Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Ben Jacobsen and David Beer, "Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past" (Bristol UP, 2023)

24 december 2023 | 46 min

André Jansson, "Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition" (Edward Elgar, 2022)

23 december 2023 | 29 min

How are geographies of communication changing with contemporary digital media and data infrastructure? What is ‘geomedia’ and ‘transmedia’? Where are the possibilities for human agency to emerge in the increasingly digitally mediated world? André Jansson, Professor at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden, introduces his latest book, Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition (Edward Elgar, 2022).

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, André speaks about how he uses a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of communication geographies, introducing the framework for understanding ‘geomedia’ as an environmental regime that shapes human subjectivity. The book explores the human condition under digital capitalism, depicting an environment in which digital logistics have taken centre stage in day-to-day life. It argues that human activities are accommodated to sustain the circulation of digital data.

André Jansson is director of the Centre for Geomedia Studies. His research is oriented towards questions of media use, identity and power from an interdisciplinary perspective. His work links various theoretical strands from social phenomenology, human geography and sociology of culture. A particular interest regards the relationship between mediatization processes and the production of social space. He is currently leading the project Hot Desks in Cool Places: Coworking Spaces as Post-Digital Industry and Movement (with Karin Fast), which studies the ‘future of work’ and struggles over this future in relation to so-called coworking spaces in urban settings.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Journalism as an Institution in the Age of AI. She is also an affiliated PhD student with the Graduate School of Asian Studies at Lund University and with the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests center around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or on X @JoanneKuai.

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Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, "Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry" (Oxford UP, 2023)

23 december 2023 | 91 min

Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt tells a new story about the history of the music business and the ten technological advances that disrupted it over the last century.

In recent years, narratives about the music industry tend to hew to a common theme: it was humming along for decades until the Internet and Napster came along and disrupted it. Key Changes shows that this view is incorrect: the industry was actually shaken up not once in the 1990s, but ten times over more than 100 years. These ten disruptions came with the introduction of new formats for enjoying recorded music: starting with the cylinders and discs played on early phonographs; then moving through radio, LPs, tapes, CDs, television, digital downloads, streaming, and streaming video; and then into Artificial Intelligence (AI), which enables a wide range of new capabilities with profound impacts upon the business. This book devotes a chapter to each of these formats, illustrating how such innovations beget shifts in creativity, consumer behavior, economics, and law.

Each of the technological innovations covered in this book not only disrupted the music business, but also fundamentally altered the industry's character. And while the technologies themselves have evolved in unique and varied ways over the decades, the changes within the business follow a clear pattern. Veteran music industry professionals and music technology experts Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt illuminate this pattern through a framework they term "the 6 Cs": cutting edge technology, channels of distribution, creators, consumers, cash, copyright. This framework provides insight into how such disparate innovations similarly disrupted and transformed the music business in each era. Extensively researched and supplemented by interviews with Grammy-winning artists, producers and executives, the book provides an insightful perspective on the ways technology has fundamentally altered the music industry, throughout history and into the present era.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Joanna Zylinska, "The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI" (MIT Press, 2023)

22 december 2023 | 62 min

A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.

We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to AI—The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023) investigates what it means for us to live surrounded by image flows and machine eyes. In an astute and engaging argument, Joanna Zylinska brings together media theory and neuroscience in a Vilém Flusser–Paul Virilio remix. Her “perception machine” names a technical universe of images and their infrastructures. But it also refers to a sociopolitical condition resulting from today's automation of vision, imaging—and imagination.

Written by a theorist-practitioner, the book incorporates Zylinska's own art projects, some of which have been co-created with AI. The photographs, collages, films, and installations available as part of the book (and its companion website) provide a different mode of thinking about our technological futures, at a local as well as a planetary level. Offering provocative concepts such as eco-eco-punk, AUTO-FOTO-KINO, planetary micro-vision, loser images, and sensography, the book outlines an existential philosophy of messy media for a time when our practices of imaging and self-imaging are being radically redesigned. Importantly, it also offers a new vision of our future.

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King's College London. The author of Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press) and many other books on art, technology, and ethics, she is also an artist and curator.

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Vineeta Sinha. "Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia" (Berghahn Books, 2023)

20 december 2023 | 46 min

Vincent Ialenti, "Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now" (MIT Press, 2020)

19 december 2023 | 78 min

Laila Shereen Sakr, "Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives" (Stanford UP, 2023)

18 december 2023 | 33 min

Skylar Bayer and Gabriela Serrato Marks, "Uncharted: How Scientists Navigate Their Own Health, Research, and Experiences of Bias" (Columbia UP, 2023)

18 december 2023 | 39 min

People with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM fields, and all too often, they face isolation and ableism in academia. Uncharted: How Scientists Navigate Their Own Health, Research, and Experiences of Bias (Columbia UP, 2023) is a collection of powerful first-person stories by current and former scientists with disabilities or chronic conditions who have faced changes in their careers, including both successes and challenges, because of their health. It gives voice to common experiences that are frequently overlooked or left unspoken. These deeply personal accounts describe not only health challenges but also the joys, sorrows, humor, and wonder of science and scientists.

With a breadth of perspectives on being disabled or chronically ill, these stories highlight the intersectionality of minoritized identities with the disability community. Uncharted features essays by contributors who are d/Deaf, blind, neurodivergent, wheelchair users, have experienced traumatic brain injuries, have blood sugar disorders, have rare medical diagnoses, or have received psychiatric diagnoses, among many others. In many cases, the scientific field is not fully accessible to them, and they frankly describe struggling as well as thriving alongside their conditions.

Skylar Bayer is a marine ecologist and science communicator. Currently a marine habitat resource specialist in the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences for research on the sex lives of scallops and is a producer for the Story Collider.

Gabi Serrato Marks is a geochemist turned writer. She received her PhD in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and is now a partner at the scientist-focused PR firm Stellate Communications. Her work has been published in Scientific American and Audubon and on the PBS Eons YouTube Channel

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Toward Equity in Science: A Discussion with Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière

16 december 2023 | 38 min

Genealogies of Modernity Episode 7: A Genealogy of Gun Violence

13 december 2023 | 51 min

Nettrice R. Gaskins, "Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom" (MIT Press, 2021)

13 december 2023 | 23 min

Today I talked to Nettrice R. Gaskins about Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom (MIT Press, 2021).

The growing maker movement in education has become an integral part of both STEM and STEAM learning, tapping into the natural DIY inclinations of creative people as well as the educational power of inventing or making things. And yet African American, Latino/a American, and Indigenous people are underrepresented in maker culture and education. In this book, Nettrice Gaskins proposes a novel approach to STEAM learning that engages students from historically marginalized communities in culturally relevant and inclusive maker education. Techno-vernacular creativity (TVC) connects technical literacy, equity, and culture, encompassing creative innovations produced by ethnic groups that are often overlooked.

TVC uses three main modes of activity: reappropriation, remixing, and improvisation. Gaskins looks at each of the three modes in turn, guiding readers from research into practice. Drawing on real-world examples, she shows how TVC creates dynamic learning environments where underrepresented ethnic students feel that they belong. Students who remix computationally, for instance, have larger toolkits of computational skills with which to connect cultural practices to STEAM subjects; reappropriation offers a way to navigate cultural repertoires; improvisation is firmly rooted in cultural and creative practices. Finally, Gaskins explores an equity-oriented approach that makes a distinction between conventional or dominant pedagogical approaches and culturally relevant or responsive making methods and practices. She describes TVC habits of mind and suggests methods of instructions and projects.

Mentioned in this episode:

“Underwater Dreams,” 2014 film directed by Mary Mazzio
Dr. Gaskins’ collages, generative AI portrait of Greg Tate, links to Romare Bearden, and more

Nettrice Gaskins is an African American digital artist, academic, cultural critic and advocate of STEAM fields. She is currently the assistant director of the STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

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Jesse Dart, "Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry" (Lexington Books, 2022)

11 december 2023 | 54 min

Mark Munsterhjelm, "Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

10 december 2023 | 33 min

Forensic genetic technologies are popularly conceptualized and revered as important tools of justice. The research and development of these technologies, however, has been accomplished through the capture of various Indigenous Peoples' genetic material and a subsequent ongoing genetic servitude.

In Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023), Mark Munsterhjelm explores how controversial studies of Indigenous Peoples have been used to develop racializing forensic technologies. Making moral and political claims about defending the public from criminals and terrorists, international networks of scientists, police, and security agencies have developed forensic genetic technologies firmly embedded in hierarchies that target and exploit many Indigenous Peoples without their consent. Collections began under the guise of the highly controversial Human Genome Diversity Project and related efforts, including the 1987 sampling of Brazilian Indigenous Peoples as they recovered from near genocide. After 9/11, War on Terror rhetoric began to be used to justify research on ancestry estimation and physical appearance (phenotyping) markers, and since 2019, international research cooperation networks' use of genetic data from thousands of Uyghurs and other Indigenous Peoples from Xinjiang and Tibet has contributed to a series of controversies.

Munsterhjelm concludes that technologies produced by forensic genetics advance the biopolitical security only of privileged populations, and that this depends on imposing race-based divisions between who lives and who dies. Meticulously researched, Forensic Colonialism adds to growing debates over racial categories, their roots in colonialism, and the political hierarchies inherent to forensic genetics.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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The Future of Predictions: A Discussion with Christopher E. Mason

9 december 2023 | 32 min

This is the Best Statement of the Simulation Hypothesis We've Seen

8 december 2023 | 88 min

Genealogies of Modernity Episode 3: What Is Genealogy

7 december 2023 | 46 min

Using History For User Research (UX): A Discussion with Larry McGrath

7 december 2023 | 46 min

Linda Eckert, "Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

5 december 2023 | 27 min

Andrew C. McKevitt, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America" (UNC Press, 2023)

4 december 2023 | 61 min

The United States has more guns than people – a condition that is “unprecedented in world history.” Scholars often focus on gun culture, the Second Amendment, or the history of gun safety, duties, and rights. Often, people assume that the number of guns is a natural state – the guns were always there. But were the guns always there? What caused the drastic boom in firearms, and when did it happen?

In Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (UNC Press, 2023), Dr. Andrew McKevitt investigates how and when the guns arrived – and why so many people bought them. McKevitt argues that what Americans refer to as “gun culture” in the 21st century “emerged out of the intersections of the Cold War and consumer capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s.” A booming consumer market following World War II coupled with a surplus of cheap firearms readily available for American entrepreneurs to resell to citizens laid the groundwork for rampant firearm distribution in the country. War made the United States into a “gun country” but US gun politics – “interwoven with struggles over race and gender” cannot be detached from consumer politics. Gun safety and gun rights organizations both demand consumer regulation and protection.

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt is the John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. His previous book, Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (2017) was published by the University of North Carolina Press and he received the Stuart L. Bernath Scholarly Article Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Monica Huerta, "The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2023)

4 december 2023 | 74 min

Too Much Communication?

2 december 2023 | 53 min

Jeff Jarvis, "The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

1 december 2023 | 63 min

Daniel Jütte, "Transparency: The Material History of an Idea" (Yale UP, 2023)

1 december 2023 | 63 min

Andrea L. Guzman et al., "The SAGE Handbook of Human–Machine Communication" (SAGE, 2023)

28 november 2023 | 29 min

Peter Bellerby, "The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

27 november 2023 | 40 min

G. H. Bennett, "The War for England's Shores: S-Boats and the Fight Against British Coastal Convoys" (US Naval Institute Press, 2023)

27 november 2023 | 59 min

The War for England's Shores: S-Boats and the Fight Against British Coastal Convoys (US Naval Institute Press, 2023) by Dr. G. H. Bennett examines the Kriegsmarine's S-Boat offensive along the English Channel and the North Sea from 1940 to 1945, together with British and, later, Allied responses to nullify that threat. Very fast, and armed with torpedoes and mines, S-Boats posed a serious threat to the convoys that were forced to run close along the British coast on a daily basis. Despite the significance of this campaign and the real threat to the whole British war economy, it has been, until now, strangely overlooked by historians. Indeed, the book highlights issues around the maritime identity of those states and navies that see themselves in oceanic terms, at the expense of engagement with, and operations in, coastal waters.

Using an array of archival materials from Britain, Germany and the USA, The War for England’s Shores examines why the Germans failed to make the most of this opportunity to disrupt British trade. G. H. Bennett analyses how the British slowly countered the threat by embracing new technologies and developing a system of sea control that gradually forced the German S-Boat arm from the offensive against Britain's coastal convoys, and on to the defensive in the months leading up to the invasion of France. The author also looks at the S-Boat campaign along these convoy routes in the context of present-day interest in littoral warfare, so that the work has a vital and current appeal and offers significant and surprising insights.

The book offers an unparalleled exploration of a key moment in the development of coastal warfare, and will appeal to historians and enthusiasts as well as defence analysts and naval personnel.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Ran Zwigenberg, "Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

27 november 2023 | 66 min

Anne Baillot, "From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis" (Open Book Publishers, 2023)

26 november 2023 | 54 min

How do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future?

In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary significance. Baillot marshals her considerable expertise in the field of digital humanities to establish a philological overview of the changing boundaries of ‘access’ to literary heritage over centuries, deconstructing the western tradition of archiving and how it has led to current digital dissemination practices. Rigorously examining the negative environmental impact of digital publishing and archiving, Baillot proposes an alternative model of preservation and dissemination which reconciles fundamental traditions with the values of social responsibility and sustainability in an era of climate crisis.

Integrating historical, archival and environmental perspectives, From Handwriting to Footprinting illuminates the impact that digitisation has had on the dissemination and preservation of textual heritage and reflects on what its future may hold. It is invaluable reading for anyone interested in textual history from a linguistic or philological perspective, as well as those working on publishing, archival and infrastructure projects that require the storing and long-term preservation of texts, or who want to know how to develop a more mindful attachment to digitised material.

This book is available open access here.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Peter Samsonov, "IS-2: Development, Design, and Production of Stalin's Warhammer" (Military History Group, 2022)

26 november 2023 | 37 min

Dirk Van Laak, "Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure" (MIT Press, 2023)

26 november 2023 | 39 min

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape?

In Lifelines of our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalise infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.

Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Dr. van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfilment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, Dr. van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kat Mustatea, "Voidopolis" (MIT Press, 2023)

25 november 2023 | 42 min

Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, Kat Mustatea's Voidopolis (MIT Press, 2023) is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.

Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante's Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita.

Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec's A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again. At the end of this decay cycle, only the printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains. Each July 1, the date the project first started on Instagram, the book resets again, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing.

A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from a major university press, Voidopolis is a unique and deeply affecting artwork that speaks as much to our existential moment as it does to the fragility of experience, reality, and our connection to one another.

A guide to reading Voidopolis can be found here.

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Tabitha Stanmore, "Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

24 november 2023 | 54 min

Anne Mendelson, "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood" (Columbia UP, 2023)

22 november 2023 | 66 min

Ruth Dalton, "Living in Houses: A Personal History English Domestic Architecture" (Lund Humphries, 2022)

22 november 2023 | 45 min

In Living in Houses: A Personal History of English Domestic Architecture (Lund Humphries, 2022), Dr. Ruth Dalton presents a rich and rewarding history of houses in England through the stories of nine houses, dating from the 1600s to the 1980s, which have been inhabited by the author, an architect and academic. Chronologically ordered, the book covers rural vernacular houses from the 17th Century, Georgian and Victorian townhouses, villas and converted industrial buildings, Edwardian semis and 20th-century council housing and mixed tenure new developments.

Firstly reflecting on the author’s own experience of the house, each chapter then examines its historical context, before making a detailed analysis of the buildings design and layout, usefully illustrated with architectural drawings. Each chapter concludes with a useful discussion of lessons learnt from each house/historic period and compares them with contemporary houses which use similar materials, construction techniques or ideas. It not only details the evolution of the design and construction of houses through the centuries, but also includes concise but highly informative sections on the history of various types of construction and materiality, such as brickmaking and timber and steel frame; sections on conversion and adaptive reuse and what works and what doesn't; the evolution of styles; housing density; ownership; and the three broad waves of council/social housing etc.

On reflecting on her own experiences, the author provides useful insights into how we relate to our homes, how they shape and affect us and the value and meaning of the home.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Joe Lane, "Networks, Innovation, and Knowledge: the North Staffordshire Potteries, 1750-1851" (U of London, 2023)

20 november 2023 | 50 min

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the industrial district of the North Staffordshire Potteries dominated the British earthenware industry, producing local goods that sold in global markets. Over this time the region experienced consistent growth in output, an extreme spatial concentration of physical and human capital, and became home to some of the most famous Master Potters in the world. The Potteries was also characterised by a growing body of useful and practical knowledge about the materials, processes and skills required to produce world-leading earthenware. This thesis exploits this striking example of a highly concentrated and highly skilled craft-based industry during a period of sustained growth and development which offers a rich opportunity to contribute to several strands of economic and business history.

This thesis presents and analyses new empirical evidence based on trade directories to examine the organisational evolution of the district. It reconstructs the district at the firm level, showing that the region’s growth was incredibly dynamic. The spatial concentration of producers and the importance of social and business networks are also explored through a new map of the region in 1802 and social network analysis. As a study of a craft-based, highly skilled industry without a legacy of formal institutions such as guilds to govern and protect access to knowledge, this thesis also offers substantial empirical and historiographical contributions to the study of knowledge and innovation during the period of the Industrial Revolution. It presents a new database of pottery patents alongside a variety of qualitative evidence such as trade literature, exhibition catalogues, advertisements and sales catalogues. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals the low propensity to patent in the North Staffordshire pottery industry, and provides a new typology of knowledge used in the industry. It argues that the types of knowledge being created and disseminated influenced the behaviour of producers substantially, and this typology of knowledge is far more complex than those established tacit/explicit divisions favoured in historical study and the social sciences more broadly. The findings of this thesis allow us to answer numerous outstanding questions concerning the development of the North Staffordshire Potteries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When brought together in such a way, the complementary strands of research and findings presented offer a coherent narrative of an extremely complex and dynamic cluster of production that both challenges and confirms traditional historiographical tradition concerning industrial districts.

This thesis is available open access here.

Dr. Joe Lane is a business historian and lecturer in Strategy at Henley Business School at the University of Reading. He holds a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics, where he subsequently worked before joining Henley in 2019. He is co-director of the centre for economic institutions and international business history at the University of Reading and has two current streams of research, one into patents and innovation over the long run, and a second concerning how industrial clusters as sites of knowledge creation and dissemination.

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Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)

18 november 2023 | 43 min

Jason Puskar, "The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

18 november 2023 | 85 min

Jenny Odell, "Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock" (Random House, 2023)

18 november 2023 | 52 min

Matthew F. Jordan, "Danger Sound Klaxon!: The Horn That Changed History" (U Virginia Press, 2023)

17 november 2023 | 55 min

Stefan Tanaka, "History without Chronology" (Lever Press, 2019)

15 november 2023 | 62 min

In this interview, we talk with Stefan Tanaka, professor emeritus of UCSD and a specialist in modern Japanese history. He is author of two books on modern Japan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993) and New Times in Modern Japan (2004), and his most recent book is History Without Chronology (Lever Press, 2019) which we discuss here! The host, Sarah Kearns, was introduced to Tanaka's work at a Digital History and Theory Conference and became very interested in becoming a "mystic" of scholarly communications and how narrative and comic books could facilitate a different understanding of history and time. The 1884 project is here.

A bit about the book, which is available open access:

Although numerous disciplines recognize multiple ways of conceptualizing time, Stefan Tanaka argues that scholars still overwhelmingly operate on chronological and linear Newtonian or classical time that emerged during the Enlightenment. This short, approachable book implores the humanities and humanistic social sciences to actively embrace the richness of different times that are evident in non-modern societies and have become common in several scientific fields throughout the twentieth century. Tanaka first offers a history of chronology by showing how the social structures built on clocks and calendars gained material expression. Tanaka then proposes that we can move away from this chronology by considering how contemporary scientific understandings of time might be adapted to reconceive the present and pasts. This opens up a conversation that allows for the possibility of other ways to know about and re-present pasts. A multiplicity of times will help us broaden the historical horizon by embracing the heterogeneity of our lives and world via rethinking the complex interaction between stability, repetition, and change. This history without chronology also allows for incorporating the affordances of digital media.

Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely drinking mushroom tea.

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Technology, AI, Political Economy, and Economic Development

14 november 2023 | 38 min

Emily H. C. Chua, "The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

13 november 2023 | 66 min

China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, China, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (U Michigan Press, 2023) brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals.

In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to set out from the preexisting assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its public(s). It also suggests researchers further explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.

Emily Chua is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, working at the intersections of digital technology, media, capital and authoritarian state politics in China and Singapore. Her articles are published in journals including JRAI, Ethnography, Science, Technology and Society, Asian Studies Review, and China Quarterly.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Kai Jun Chen, "Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China" (U Washington Press, 2023)

13 november 2023 | 67 min

A.I. and Practice with Stuart Baldwin

10 november 2023 | 135 min

Can You Fall in Love with ChatGPT?

10 november 2023 | 59 min

Xaq Frohlich, "From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age" (U California Press, 2023)

10 november 2023 | 47 min

Aarathi Prasad, "Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses" (William Collins, 2023)

9 november 2023 | 52 min

Silk—a luxury fabric, a valuable trade good, and a scientific marvel. This material, created by the bombyx mori silkworm, has captivated artisans for centuries—and it captivated science presenter and writer Aarathi Prasad, who was studying the scientific potential of silk for new treatments.

That started Aarathi on a journey to explore the world of silk—not just the traditional silk we use today, but all its different varieties: wild silks, made from less famous moths; sea silks, made from mollusks; and spider silk, strong, yet significantly more difficult to harvest. This all comes together in her latest book, Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses (William Collins, 2023)

In this interview, Aarathi and I explore this world of silk, in all its forms, and why silk may be the hottest new material in biotechnology today.

Aarathi Prasad is a writer, broadcaster, and researcher interested in the intersection of science and technology with cultures, history, health, and the environment. She is also the author of In The Bonesetter’s Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine (Profile Books Limited: 2016) which was about health and disease in modern India, and Like A Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex (Simon and Schuster: 2012), which explored the history and future of reproduction. Aarathi has a PhD in genetics from Imperial College London and is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Silk. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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The Future of Crucial Materials: A Discussion with Ed Conway

9 november 2023 | 49 min

Colin McFarlane, "Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife" (Verso, 2023)

7 november 2023 | 47 min

In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Colin McFarlane, through Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), makes a call to action on one of modern urban life's most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All.

The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre's concept of 'the right to the city', it uses the notion of 'citylife' to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

7 november 2023 | 77 min

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, "Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

6 november 2023 | 64 min

Over the past 40 years, lawmakers in America's two major political parties have taken increasingly extreme positions on ideological issues. Voters from the two parties have become increasingly distinct and hostile to one another along the lines of race, religion, geography, and culture. In Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young illustrates how political leaders and media organizations capitalize on social and cultural identities to separate, enrage, and mobilize people. Because humans are motivated to comprehend, to feel in control, and to be part of a community, they seek information that satisfies these needs – including misinformation that favors their political team. They don’t want to be wrong.

Bringing together tools from political science, communications, and social psychology, Dr. Goldthwaite Young creates a model to explain how public officials, journalists, and social media platforms encourage what she calls identity distillation. Dr. Young both describes the dynamics and provides suggestions for how to disrupt “identity-driven wrongness.” These include journalists abandoning conflict framing in the coverage of politics, social media platforms increasing transparency about their algorithmic content rankings and ad targeting, and individuals cultivating intellectual humility and disrupting performances of political identity to increase the demand for democracy-centered political information.

Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of Communications and Political Science at the University of Delaware. Her areas of expertise include political media effects, media psychology, public opinion, and the psychology of misinformation. I’m delighted to welcome her to the New Books Network.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Peter Nelson, "Computer Games As Landscape Art" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

6 november 2023 | 37 min

Jeremy Howick, "The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

5 november 2023 | 35 min

Should your doctor prescribe a placebo for you, instead of conventional medicine? And if she did, would it work? Is the double-blind placebo-controlled paradigm really the gold standard for medical research?

Placebos are the most widely used treatments in the history of medicine. Thousands of studies show that they can be effective and make us happier and healthier. Yet confusion about what placebos are and how to measure their effects prevents some doctors from using them to help patients. Meanwhile, damage caused by the nocebo effect—the negative effect of expecting something bad—is not widely recognized.

In The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Jeremy Howick provides an interdisciplinary perspective on placebos and nocebos based on more than twenty years of research and data from over 300,000 patients. This book, the culmination of that research, offers practical ways for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to put placebo and nocebo research into practice to improve health outcomes.

In addition to providing an overview of placebos and nocebos and explaining how belief systems and context can create physiological effects in the body, Howick advocates for a number of controversial positions, including why it may be unethical to include placebos in most clinical trials in which there are already established therapies and why physicians should consider using placebos regularly in their practices. Howick also underscores the importance of the therapeutic effects of interactions between health care practitioners and patients, in the context of care. The Power of Placebos dispels the confusion surrounding placebos and paves the way for doctors to help patients by enhancing placebo effects and avoiding the pitfalls of nocebos.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Megan Nutzman, "Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

5 november 2023 | 53 min

Anthony Hodgson, "Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World" (Triarchy Press, 2011)

3 november 2023 | 60 min

Recently I had a chance to sit down for a long overdue chat with Anthony (Tony) Hodgson. When we last spoke it happened to be for my very first episode of Systems and Cybernetics. We talked about his newest book at the time: Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). That was in the summer of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was seemed to be experiencing more turbulence than it ever had.

Fast forward to late 2023. The world, by all accounts—wars, climate chaos, mass shootings, and a lingering virus that will probably never go away—is turbulent beyond the tolerance threshold of the planet itself, not to mention its inhabitants. It seemed a fitting time to talk to Tony about his more recent Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World, 2nd Edition (Triarchy, 2021).

First published a decade ago, Ready for Anything starts by describing a 'global predicament', characterized by reductionist modes of thinking that are increasingly unsuited to what is really going on, and our fixation on short-term results—a pattern often referred to as shifting the burden. Hodgson writes that "complex messes are often the result of interactions between multiple complex adaptive systems, resulting in the emergence of unpredictable behaviours" (p. 18).

In Ready for Anything, Hodgson introduces 'The World System Model'. The model encompasses 12 nodes ranging from Dominant Worldviews, to Wealth and Power, to Climate Change impact, and aims to provide a much-needed platform for a design revolution that harmonizes humanity, ecology and technology by integrating knowledge across disciplines around the major systemic issues confronting our world. Hodgson brought the model to the International Futures Forum (IFF) where it was implemented as the IFF World Game (follow the link for a visual of the model and examples of how it's put to use), which makes the model accessible to any kind of group in a highly participative manner.

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Wendy H. Wong, "We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age" (MIT Press, 2023)

2 november 2023 | 57 min

The Future of Cancelling: A Conversation with Greg Lukianoff

1 november 2023 | 39 min

Michael Serazio, "The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics" (Stanford UP, 2023)

31 oktober 2023 | 75 min

In recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive virality of one hot social media app after another. It characterizes Donald Trump's willful disregard for political correctness (and proofreading) and inspires multinational corporations to stake activist claims in ways that few "woke" brands ever dared before. It buttresses a multibillion-dollar influencer industry of everyday folks shilling their friends with #spon-con and burnishes the street cred of rock stars and rappers alike. But, ironically, authenticity's not actually real: it's as fabricated as it is ubiquitous.

In The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2023) journalist and scholar Michael Serazio combines eye-opening reporting and lively prose to take readers behind the scenes with those who make "reality"—and the ways it tries to influence us. Drawing upon dozens of rare interviews with campaign consultants, advertising executives, tech company leadership, and entertainment industry gatekeepers, the book slyly investigates the professionals and practices that make people, products, and platforms seem "authentic" in today's media, culture, and politics. The result is a spotlight on the power of authenticity in today's media-saturated world and the strategies to satisfy this widespread yearning. In theory, authenticity might represent the central moral framework of our time: allaying anxieties about self and society, culture and commerce, and technology and humanity. It infects and informs our ideals of celebrity, aesthetics, privacy, nostalgia, and populism. And Serazio reveals how these pretenses are crafted, backstage, for audiences, consumers, and voters.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Tom Burbage et al., "F-35: The Inside Story of the Lightning II" (Skyhorse, 2023)

29 oktober 2023 | 74 min

William B. Eimicke et al., "Leveling the Learning Curve: Creating a More Inclusive and Connected University" (Columbia UP, 2023)

26 oktober 2023 | 52 min

Diana Kamin, "Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy" (MIT Press, 2023)

25 oktober 2023 | 57 min

How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (MIT Press, 2023), Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions.

Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public. Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

"Working With the Whitney's Replication Committee," Ben Lerner, The New Yorker, 2016
Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami, Cascadia Art Museum, 2018
Soichi Sunami's manuscript autobiography, Museum of Modern Art Library
The New York Public Library: A Universe of Knowledge, Phyllis Dain (Scala Books and The New York Public Library, 2000)
What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures, eds. Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious (UCL Press, 2022).

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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The Future of Paying Attention: A Discussion with Carolyn Dicey Jennings

24 oktober 2023 | 43 min

Jeremy Nobel, "Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection" (Avery Publishing Group, 2023)

24 oktober 2023 | 50 min

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Vintage, 2006)

21 oktober 2023 | 71 min

Corry Cropper and Seth Whidden, "Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France" (Bucknell UP, 2022)

21 oktober 2023 | 61 min

Today we are joined by Corry Cropper, a Professor of French at Brigham Young University, and one of two authors, alongside Seth Whidden, of Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France (Bucknell University Press, 2023). In our conversation we discussed the origin of the velocipede and how it illuminated the paradoxes of cultural life in Second Empire France.

In Velocipedomania, Cropper and Whidden argue that a close examination of the velocipede and the discourse around it both highlight the complexities of class, gender and modernity in late Second Empire France but also prefigure the links between the Third Republic and the French bicycle craze of the late 19th century. Through a close look at a range of primary sources, mostly drawn from 1868-1869, and carefully translated and reproduced in whole in the text, they demonstrate that the velocipede was more than a passing fad. The velocipede was instead a vital symbol of French modernity and tradition, masculinity and femininity, practicality and fancy, and machine power and body power.

The book contains four major sections. Each correspond to a different primary source or set of primary sources. The most significant of the texts is The Manual of the Velocipede, written by Richard Lesclide and illustrated by Emile Benassit. The Manual contains scientific articles, short stories, instructions on how to learn to ride a velocipede, and dozens of images that provided some of the earliest visual lexicons of bicycle riding. Cropper and Whidden reproduce complete translations of these sections, copies of the images, and unpack them in text and footnotes.

Cropper and Whidden’s text and footnotes provide necessary context and compelling analysis; the sources can also be read alone and excerpted for teaching. Their discussion of the Manual for example focuses on a series of themes: the carnivalesque, the social classes of the Second Empire, gender difference, the erotic, and the modern and the traditional.Readers interested in the gender politics of velocipede riding will discover both the progressive and the retrograde. Cropper and Whidden show how the velocipede fad opened the door to sporting women who were able to use the machine to travel further than ever before but public decorum and sartorial conventions still limited the ways that women were able to ride.

In a section called Note on Monsieur Michaux’s Velocipede, Cropper and Whidden solve a historical mystery. They identify the note’s author: a French naval officer de la Rue and velocipede enthusiast who invented the aquatic velocipede. De la Rue’s Note offered practical explanations for why the French state should invest in velocipedes, including the speed of telegraph delivery and the protection of the borders from smugglers. At the same time, he also emphasized the pleasure he derived from riding his cycle.

In the second chapter, Cropper and Whidden sketch out the history of velocipedes on stage. They show how velocipedes rolled into French opera following the liberalization of the medium during the final years of the Second Empire. Their translated text, Dagobert and his Velocipede, remains a very entertaining read. Their translation is joke dense and readers will need to flip between the text and footnotes to understand their witty and pun filled translation.

A final chapter examines velocipedes and poetry.

Cropper and Whidden’s innovative approach to unpacking the history of the velocipede, which so successfully integrates translated primary sources, should be read by scholars interested in French history and sports history. It will also be very useful in classroom teaching.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history.

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Stephen Robert Miller, "Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature" (Island Press, 2023)

20 oktober 2023 | 40 min

In March 2011, people in a coastal Japanese city stood atop a seawall watching the approach of the tsunami that would kill them. They believed—naively—that the huge concrete barrier would save them. Instead they perished, betrayed by the very thing built to protect them. Erratic weather, blistering drought, rising seas, and ecosystem collapse now affect every inch of the globe. Increasingly, we no longer look to stop climate change, choosing instead to adapt to it.

Never have so many undertaken such a widespread, hurried attempt to remake the world. Predictably, our hubris has led to unintended—and sometimes disastrous—consequences. Academics call it maladaptation; in simple terms, it’s about solutions that backfire. Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature (Island Press, 2023) by Stephen Robert Miller tells us the stories behind these unintended consequences and about the fixes that can do more harm than good. From seawalls in coastal Japan, to the reengineered waters in the Ganges River Delta, to the artificial ribbon of water supporting both farms and urban centres in parched Arizona, Miller traces the histories of engineering marvels that were once deemed too smart and too big to fail. In each he takes us into the land and culture, seeking out locals and experts to better understand how complicated, grandiose schemes led instead to failure, and to find answers to the technologic holes we’ve dug ourselves into.

Over the Seawall urges us to take a hard look at the fortifications we build and how they’ve fared in the past. It embraces humanity’s penchant for problem-solving, but argues that if we are to adapt successfully to climate change, we must recognize that working with nature is not surrender but the only way to assure a secure future.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Christopher Phillips, "Civilian Specialists at War: Britain's Transport Experts and the First World War" (U London Press, 2020)

17 oktober 2023 | 44 min

AI, Post-Truth, and Cultural Transformation

16 oktober 2023 | 42 min

Smith Mehta, "The New Screen Ecology in India: Digital Transformation of Media" (British Film Institute, 2023)

15 oktober 2023 | 65 min

Txt

13 oktober 2023 | 20 min

James J. A. Blair, "Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic" (Cornell UP, 2023)

13 oktober 2023 | 46 min

Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. James J. A. Blair probes the historical roots and current predicaments of a twenty-first century settler colony seeking to control an uncertain future through resource management and environmental science.

Four decades after a violent 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina reestablished British authority over the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas in Spanish), a commercial fishing boom and offshore oil discoveries have intensified the sovereignty dispute over the South Atlantic archipelago. Scholarly literature on the South Atlantic focuses primarily on military history of the 1982 conflict. However, contested claims over natural resources have now made this disputed territory a critical site for examining the wider relationship between imperial sovereignty and environmental governance.

Dr. Blair argues that by claiming self-determination and consenting to British sovereignty, the Falkland Islanders have crafted a settler colonial protectorate to extract resources and extend empire in the South Atlantic. Responding to current debates in environmental anthropology, critical geography, Atlantic history, political ecology, and science and technology studies, Dr. Blair describes how settlers have asserted indigeneity in dynamic relation with the environment. Salvaging Empire uncovers the South Atlantic's outsized importance for understanding the broader implications of resource management and environmental science for the geopolitics of empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Paul A. Thomas, "Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)

11 oktober 2023 | 56 min

Oil Beach - How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life: A Conversation with Christina Dunbar-Hester

9 oktober 2023 | 58 min

Joshua May, "Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

7 oktober 2023 | 58 min

Teaching (and Learning) at a University Online

4 oktober 2023 | 47 min

Taylor Lorenz, "Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

3 oktober 2023 | 60 min

Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet—revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off. For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online.

In her debut book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 2023), she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism. By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.

Taylor Lorenz is a columnist at The Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Previously she was a technology reporter for the New York Times' business section and a technology reporter at the Atlantic and the Daily Beast. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research focused on Instagram and news consumption. She is a former affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and serves on the board of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. And for the purposes of this conversation, I’ll note she has 344.7 thousand followers on Twitter or X or whatever that guy calls his website these days and some 500,000 followers on TikTok.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Twenty Years After “The New Economy”: A Conversation with Doug Henwood

2 oktober 2023 | 69 min

Ben Whaley, "Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

2 oktober 2023 | 47 min

Michael D. Smith, "The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World" (MIT Press, 2023)

29 september 2023 | 63 min

For too long, our system of higher education has been defined by scarcity: scarcity in enrollment, scarcity in instruction, and scarcity in credentials. In addition to failing students professionally, this system has exacerbated social injustice and socioeconomic stratification across the globe. In The Abundant University, Michael D. Smith argues that the only way to create a financially and morally sustainable higher education system is by embracing digital technologies for enrolling, instructing, and credentialing students—the same technologies that we have seen create abundance in access to resources in industry after industry.

The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World (MIT Press, 2023) explains how we got our current system, why it’s such an expensive, inefficient mess, and how a system based on exclusivity cannot foster inclusivity. Smith challenges the resistance to digital technologies that we have already seen among numerous institutions, citing the examples of faculty resistance toward digital learning platforms. While acknowledging the understandable self-preservation instinct of our current system of residential education, Smith makes a case for how technology can engender greater educational opportunity and create changes that will benefit students, employers, and society as a whole.

Smith, the J. Erik Johnson Chaired Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that American higher education is subject to market forces just like any other industry. Forbes says, “With a straightforward, conversational style, Smith succeeds in portraying the current problems bearing down on higher education and offering a set of bold solutions for a future where he envisions a college education becoming ‘more open, flexible, inclusive, and lower-priced.’ The Abundant University is a provocative book that should be read by higher ed insiders as well as those in the general public who care about expanding the reach and the impact of higher education.”

John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, investment management, and corporate strategy. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma.

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Kashmir Hill, "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It" (Random House, 2023)

28 september 2023 | 38 min

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?

In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.

Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It (Random House, 2023) is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Aditi Surie and Ursula Huws, "Platformization and Informality: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

27 september 2023 | 66 min

Michael D. Gordin, "Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2023)

27 september 2023 | 68 min

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella - astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields “pseudo” is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements - both of which display allegations of “pseudoscience” on all sides - there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.

Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?

Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

27 september 2023 | 40 min

Lee Mcguigan, "Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech" (MIT Press, 2023)

26 september 2023 | 59 min

Forty Years of Technology Studies

18 september 2023 | 117 min

Avery Dame-Griff, "The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet" (NYU Press, 2023)

17 september 2023 | 55 min

Avery Dame-Griff's The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender identity and activism from the 1980s to the present. Through extensive archival research and media archeology, Avery Dame-Griff reconstructs the manifold digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who incited the second revolution of the title: the ascendance of “transgender” as an umbrella identity in the mid-1990s.

Dame-Griff argues that digital communications sparked significant momentum within what would become the transgender movement, but also further cemented existing power structures. Covering both a historical period that is largely neglected within the history of computing, and the poorly understood role of technology in queer and trans social movements, The Two Revolutions offers a new understanding of both revolutions—the internet’s early development and the structures of communication that would take us to today’s tipping point of trans visibility politics. Through a history of how trans people online exploited different digital infrastructures in the early days of the internet to build a community, The Two Revolutions tells a crucial part of trans history itself.

Scholars and Works Mentioned in the Episode

Queer Digital History Project
Alladi Venkatesh, Computers and Other Interactive Technologies for the Home (pdf)
Charlton D. McIlwain, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter
Megan Sapnar Ankerson
Avery Dame-Griff, Mapping the Territory: Archiving the Trans Website in an Age of Search

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Daniel Jaffee, "Unbottled: The Fight Against Plastic Water and for Water Justice" (U California Press, 2023)

17 september 2023 | 56 min

Katie J. Wells et al., "Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City" (Princeton UP, 2023)

16 september 2023 | 55 min

Catherine Coveney et al., "Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

14 september 2023 | 33 min

Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) draws on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, literature, and popular culture to highlight how a new technoscientifically mediated and modified phase and form of technosleep is now in the making – in the global north at least; and to discuss the consequences for our relationships to sleep, the values we accord sleep and the very nature and normativities of sleep itself.

The authors discuss how technosleep, at its simplest denotes the ‘coming together’ or ‘entanglements’ of sleep and technology and sensitizes us to various shifts in sleep–technology relations through culture, time and place. In doing so, it pays close attention to the salience and significance of these trends and transformations to date in everyday/night life, their implications for sleep inequalities and the related issues of sleep and social justice they suggest.

Katie Coveney, Ph.D. is a medical sociologist with expertise in social and ethical aspects of medicine and health care. She has particular research interests in the sociology of sleep, medical technology, and disability. Katie is the School of Social Sciences and Humanities Ethics Lead and Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy Lead Admissions officer.

Katie has been a senior lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough since 2018. She was co-convener of the British Sociological Association Medical Sociology Group (2019 – 2021). Before this she worked as a research fellow in the Centre for Reproduction Research at De Montfort University (2017-8), the Centre for Global Health Policy at the University of Sussex (2014-7), the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (2010-2014) and the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy at the University of Nottingham (2009 -2010).

Eric L. Hsu, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Justice & Society Academic Unit at the University of South Australia, where he also serves as a Research Platform Leader at the UniSA Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. With Dr Louis Everuss, Dr Hsu hosts and produces the Sociology of Everything podcast. This podcast aims to stimulate interest in sociological ideas by offering a sideways and engaging look at the wonders of sociology. More information can be found on his website: www.ericlhsu.com.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at emotional labor performed by employees and passengers at airports. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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A Better Way to Buy Books

12 september 2023 | 34 min

Race and Electrical Infrastructure in the Jim Crow South

11 september 2023 | 53 min

Ines Prodöhl, "Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900–1950" (Routledge, 2023)

11 september 2023 | 52 min

Maxim Samson, "Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World" (Profile Books, 2023)

10 september 2023 | 67 min

Marc Bonners, "Open World Structures: Architecture, Urban and Natural landscape in the Computer Game" (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)

7 september 2023 | 49 min

What role do algorithms play in the construction of images and the representation of the world and weather in computer games? How does the design of rooms, levels and topographies influence the decisions and behavior of the players? Is Brutalism the first genuine architectural style of computer games? What is the importance of landscape gardens and national parks in structuring game worlds? How is nature represented in times of climate change?

Particularly in the last 20 years, digital game worlds are adapting features of the physical real world more meticulously than ever before. Through elaborate production processes and complex visualization strategies, the adaptation to the rest of our everyday world is always created in dependence on game mechanics and worldliness. As can be seen at the latest in the example of open-world games, the adoption of certain worldviews and visual traditions leads to ideological implications that go far beyond the narrative conventions transferred from other media formats that have been the focus of research so far.

With his theory of architecture as a medial hinge, Marc Bonner reveals that digital game worlds exhibit media-specific properties that were previously out of reach and awaited exploration. By interweaving concepts from media studies, game studies, philosophy, architectural theory, human geography, landscape theory, and art history, among others, Bonner develops a transdisciplinary theoretical model and, using the analytical methods developed from it, makes it possible for the first time to understand and name the complex structure of today's computer games - from indie games to AAA open worlds.

Open World Structures (Offene-Welt-Strukturen (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)) makes the architectonics of digital game worlds comprehensively accessible.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Stephen Ramsay, "On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

6 september 2023 | 55 min

Stephen Ramsey's On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities. Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media.

Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities. A founding figure in what was once known as “humanities computing,” Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives.

The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the author’s journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist. These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While “digital humanities” may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry.

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Kenneth J. Saltman, "The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers" (MIT Press, 2022)

6 september 2023 | 41 min

Today, conspiracy theories run rampant, attacks on facts have become commonplace, and systemic inequities are on the rise as individual and collective agency unravels. The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers (MIT Press, 2022) explains the educational, technological, and ideological preconditions for these contemporary crises of truth and agency and explores the contradictions and competing visions for the future of education that lie at the center of the problem.

Schools are increasingly reimagined as businesses, and high-stakes standardized testing and curricula, for-profit charter schools, and the rise of educational AI put capital and technology at the center of education. Yet even as our society demands measure, data, and facts, politicians and news outlets regularly make unfounded assertions. How should we make sense of the contradictions between the demand for radical data-driven empiricism and the flight from evidence, argument, or theoretical justification?

In this critical investigation of the new digital directions of educational privatization—AI education, adaptive learning technology, biometrics, the quantification of play and social emotional learning—and the politics of the body, Saltman shows how the false certainty of bodies and numbers replaces deliberative and thoughtful agency in a time of increasing precarity. A distinctive contribution to scholarship on public school privatization and educational technology, politics, policy, pedagogy, and theory, The Alienation of Fact is a spirited call for democratic education that values creating a society of “thinking people” over capitalistic gains.

This book is available open access here.

Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change.

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Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, "After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time" (Verso, 2023)

6 september 2023 | 48 min

Herlinde Koelbl, "Fascination of Science: 60 Encounters with Pioneering Researchers of Our Time" (MIT Press, 2023)

6 september 2023 | 29 min

Gennifer Weisenfeld, "Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

5 september 2023 | 53 min

Gerald O'Brien, "Eugenics, Genetics, and Disability in Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Implications for the Social Work Profession" (Oxford UP, 2023)

5 september 2023 | 30 min

Alexandra Roginski, "Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

4 september 2023 | 76 min

Ari Ezra Waldman, "Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

2 september 2023 | 35 min

The Past and Present of Psychedelic Medicine

1 september 2023 | 71 min

Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn take such an ineffable thing — a tool for personal revelation, cosmic oneness, spiritual enlightenment, whatever people have called it — and make it just another product in late stage capitalism? From something that is potentially radical, to something that is brutally commodified, instrumentalized, hyped, and turned into the next meme stock craze. The venture capitalists and techno-optimist libertarians are certainly trying, but not everyone is happy about that. On this episode, we look at the deep rifts in and around psychedelic medicine, as different camps vie for the future of these drugs.

First, we go back to the beginning. Historian Erika Dyck tells us the little-known story of an earlier period of psychedelic research, led by pioneers in — believe it or not — Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Dyke’s book Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies charts the early days of this medical research, and reveals important lessons for our current tensions. The book shows that deep rifts have always existed in psychedelic research, because the drugs sit uncomfortably in-between many different ways of knowing.

Then, muckracking psychonaut David Nickles is calling out the mainstream commodification of psychedelics, as well as the bullshit and abuse within the underground. Nickles is an underground researcher, harm reduction advocate, and journalist, who is also managing editor of Psymopsia, a psychedelics watchdog group. In 2018, he excoriated the psychedelic research community for playing nice with the emerging VC-backed psychedelic firms, like the Peter Thiel-funded Compass Pathways (Nickles’ talk is summarized here, but the full talk is available on Youtube). Since then, Nickles says things have only gotten worse. He documents much of that in Power Trip, an investigative podcast series on psychedelic therapy, produced by New York Magazine and Psymosia.

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Bonnie Gordon, "Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

31 augusti 2023 | 57 min

Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)

30 augusti 2023 | 42 min

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.

Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership.

Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order. The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent developments in the emerging field of the global history of knowledge—as science, as economy, and as culture. The case studies reveal how notions of knowing and owning emerge because they reciprocally produce and determine each other's limits and possibilities; that is, how we know inevitably affects how we can own what we know; and how we own always impacts how and what we are able to know.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Brooke L. Blower, "Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper" (Oxford UP, 2023)

30 augusti 2023 | 71 min

Donna J. Drucker, "Fertility Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)

29 augusti 2023 | 30 min

Elaine Schattner, "From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer" (Columbia UP, 2023)

28 augusti 2023 | 52 min

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease.

Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor’s office and the public stage.

Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival.

In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease.

Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist.

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Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

27 augusti 2023 | 37 min

The Digital Mind: How Science Is Redefining Humanity

23 augusti 2023 | 17 min

What do computers, cells, and brains have in common? Computers are electronic devices designed by humans; cells are biological entities crafted by evolution; brains are the containers and creators of our minds. But all are, in one way or another, information-processing devices. The power of the human brain is, so far, unequaled by any existing machine or known living being. Over eons of evolution, the brain has enabled us to develop tools and technology to make our lives easier. Our brains have even allowed us to develop computers that are almost as powerful as the human brain itself. In The Digital Mind, Arlindo Oliveira describes how advances in science and technology could enable us to create digital minds.

Exponential growth is a pattern built deep into the scheme of life, but technological change now promises to outstrip even evolutionary change. Oliveira describes technological and scientific advances that range from the discovery of laws that control the behavior of the electromagnetic fields to the development of computers. He calls natural selection the ultimate algorithm, discusses genetics and the evolution of the central nervous system, and describes the role that computer imaging has played in understanding and modeling the brain. Having considered the behavior of the unique system that creates a mind, he turns to an unavoidable question: Is the human brain the only system that can host a mind? If digital minds come into existence—and, Oliveira says, it is difficult to argue that they will not—what are the social, legal, and ethical implications? Will digital minds be our partners, or our rivals?

In this episode Chris Gondek speaks with author Arlindo Oliveira about intelligence in respect to consciousness, and how artificial intelligence has spawned and will grow.

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Stefan Heinrich Simond, "Pixelated Madness: The Construction of Mental Illnesses and Psychiatric Institutions in Video Games" (Hülsbusch, 2023)

23 augusti 2023 | 31 min

The relationship between madness and video games has been notoriously tense. In an abundance of titles, stereotypes and stigmatisations can be found—not only regarding the mentally ill, but also psychiatry as a discipline. Sequences of electroshock therapy come to mind, mutated patients, and homicidal maniacs. But where do we go from here? And what lies beyond the criticism of how mental illnesses are portrayed in video games?

In Pixelated Madness: The Construction of Mental Illnesses and Psychiatric Institutions in Video Games (Hülsbusch, 2023), game studies scholar Stefan Heinrich Simond focuses on a small selection of contemporary video games to present detailed qualitative analyses and ultimately develop a typology of madness in video games that can serve as an instructive basis for further study. The primary goal is thereby not to criticise or evaluate but to describe, understand, and disambiguate. From common tropes such as the horror asylum and the animalised inmate to the sanity meter and subversive means of subjectification, a broad angle on madness in video games is presented.

Aside from the concrete analyses, this dissertation also presents a constructivist understanding of madness. Instead of comparing video game characters to diagnostic manuals or therapeutic means to their actual application, video games are taken for what they are: creative expressions that aim to inspire and entertain. Madness in video games is then not considered a mirror to mental illnesses in real life, but a construction in its own right. Based on the presented observations, a new angle on the status of madness in the media might be well warranted.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform

22 augusti 2023 | 21 min

Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, and the Future of Academic Publishing

22 augusti 2023 | 39 min

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online

21 augusti 2023 | 15 min

Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In Net Smart, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.

Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he teaches us a lesson on networks and network building.

Rheingold points out that there is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.

Howard Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker on social media, is the author ofTools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (both published by the MIT Press), and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

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Outside the Box: The History and Future of Globalization

21 augusti 2023 | 63 min

Ian Convery et al., "Routledge Handbook of Rewilding" (Routledge, 2022)

20 augusti 2023 | 36 min

The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga

20 augusti 2023 | 18 min

Long ago, in 1985, personal computers came in two general categories: the friendly, childish game machine used for fun (exemplified by Atari and Commodore products); and the boring, beige adult box used for business (exemplified by products from IBM). The game machines became fascinating technical and artistic platforms that were of limited real-world utility. The IBM products were all utility, with little emphasis on aesthetics and no emphasis on fun. Into this bifurcated computing environment came the Commodore Amiga 1000. This personal computer featured a palette of 4,096 colors, unprecedented animation capabilities, four-channel stereo sound, the capacity to run multiple applications simultaneously, a graphical user interface, and powerful processing potential. It was, Jimmy Maher writes in The Future Was Here, the world's first true multimedia personal computer.

Maher argues that the Amiga's capacity to store and display color photographs, manipulate video (giving amateurs access to professional tools), and use recordings of real-world sound were the seeds of the digital media future: digital cameras, Photoshop, MP3 players, and even YouTube, Flickr, and the blogosphere. He examines different facets of the platform--from Deluxe Paint to AmigaOS to Cinemaware--in each chapter, creating a portrait of the platform and the communities of practice that surrounded it. Of course, Maher acknowledges, the Amiga was not perfect: the DOS component of the operating systems was clunky and ill-matched, for example, and crashes often accompanied multitasking attempts. And Commodore went bankrupt in 1994. But for a few years, the Amiga's technical qualities were harnessed by engineers, programmers, artists, and others to push back boundaries and transform the culture of computing.

Jimmy Maher is an independent scholar and writer living in Norway.

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Roma Agrawal, "Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way)" (Norton, 2023)

19 augusti 2023 | 44 min

Networked: The New Social Operating System

19 augusti 2023 | 17 min

Academic Publishers Grapple with Advances in AI

19 augusti 2023 | 47 min

Indra’s Net and the Midas Touch: Living Sustainably in a Connected World

18 augusti 2023 | 15 min

Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation

17 augusti 2023 | 18 min

Scott Skinner-Thompson, "Privacy at the Margins" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

16 augusti 2023 | 22 min

Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers

16 augusti 2023 | 20 min

Jieun Kiaer, "Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

16 augusti 2023 | 42 min

Benjamin Y. Fong, "Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge" (Verso, 2023)

15 augusti 2023 | 45 min

Benjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, and the New York Times. Previously, Ben’s work focused on the (usually negative) effects of neoliberal capitalism, writing about NGOs, labor leaders, and health care. Quick Fixes expands this examination into the world of drugs, examining nine different kinds of intoxicants, and five “orienting claims” that place their use within in larger capitalist histories.

A bit about the book...

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics--across the board, consumption has shot up in the 21st century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

Quick Fixes is a look at American society through the lens of its pharmacological crutches. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love and intense hatred for drugs has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century.

Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans' fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, shape the sorts of drugs society chooses.

By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical comforts, the hope is to help answer that ever perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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How Uber Disrupted Washington, D.C.: A Conversation with Katie Wells and Kafui Attoh

14 augusti 2023 | 80 min

Satsuki Takahashi, "Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape" (U Washington Press, 2023)

12 augusti 2023 | 53 min

The Future of Underground/Sea Cables: A Discussion with Henry Farrell

12 augusti 2023 | 52 min

Michael Ruse, "Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017)

11 augusti 2023 | 79 min

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.

Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism.

In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought.

Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Chris Wiggins and Matthew L Jones, "How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms" (Norton, 2023)

10 augusti 2023 | 43 min

From facial recognition―capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents―to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.

In How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (Norton, 2023), Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. They explore how data was created and curated, as well as how new mathematical and computational techniques developed to contend with that data serve to shape people, ideas, society, military operations, and economies. Although technology and mathematics are at its heart, the story of data ultimately concerns an unstable game among states, corporations, and people. How were new technical and scientific capabilities developed; who supported, advanced, or funded these capabilities or transitions; and how did they change who could do what, from what, and to whom?

Wiggins and Jones focus on these questions as they trace data’s historical arc, and look to the future. By understanding the trajectory of data―where it has been and where it might yet go―Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Idolatry and Idle Hands (with Jacob Howland)

10 augusti 2023 | 71 min

Renny Thomas, "Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment" (Routledge, 2022)

10 augusti 2023 | 29 min

Cory Doctorow, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" (Verso, 2023)

9 augusti 2023 | 43 min

Daniel Foliard, "The Violence of Colonial Photography" (Manchester UP, 2022)

8 augusti 2023 | 77 min

Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile

7 augusti 2023 | 40 min

Flora Samuel, "Housing for Hope and Wellbeing" (Routledge, 2022)

7 augusti 2023 | 60 min

Housing and neighborhoods have an important contribution to make to our wellbeing and our sense of our place in the world. Housing for Hope and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2023), written for a lay audience (with policy makers firmly in mind) offers a useful and intelligible overview of our housing system and why it is in ‘crisis’ while acting as an important reminder of how housing contributes to social value, defined as community, health, self development and identity. It argues for a holistic digital map-based planning system that allows for the sensitive balancing of the triple bottom line of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic value. It sets out a vision of what our housing system could look like if we really put the wellbeing of people and planet first, as well as a route map on how to get there.

Written primarily from the point of view of an architect, the account weaves across industry, practice, and academia cross-cutting disciplines to provide an integrated view of the field. The book focuses on the UK housing scene but draws on and provides lessons for housing cultures across the globe. Illustrated throughout with case studies, this is the go-to book for anyone who wants to look at housing in a holistic way.

Flora Samuel is Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. She helped set up the new School of Architecture at the University of Reading and is former Head of the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and the first RIBA Vice President for Research. The author of Why Architects Matter: Evidencing and Communicating the Value of Architects (Routledge, 2018) she has spent the last decade researching the positive impact of good design on people. Her interests are now moving to land use and social justice, both key to addressing climate change. She is well known as an industry advisor on the social value of the design of housing and places and a strong advocate of social value mapping. She is also known for her unorthodox writings on Le Corbusier, about whom she has published extensively. A mother of three daughters, she is based in Wales.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

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Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)

6 augusti 2023 | 53 min

In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ.

The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century.

But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror.

These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (Harper, 2023) explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner.

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The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games

6 augusti 2023 | 16 min

We may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our facial expressions are rarely those of happiness or bliss. Instead, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration as we lose, or die, or fail to advance to the next level. Humans may have a fundamental desire to succeed and feel competent, but game players choose to engage in an activity in which they are nearly certain to fail and feel incompetent. So why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? Juul examines this paradox.

In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Reader or audience reaction to tragedy is often explained as catharsis, as a purging of negative emotions. But, Juul points out, this doesn't seem to be the case for video game players. Games do not purge us of unpleasant emotions; they produce them in the first place. What, then, does failure in video game playing do?

Juul argues that failure in a game is unique in that when you fail in a game, you (not a character) are in some way inadequate. Yet games also motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving skills) is a central enjoyment of games. Games, writes Juul, are the art of failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it.

The Art of Failure is essential reading for anyone interested in video games, whether as entertainment, art, or education.

Jesper Juul is Assistant Professor at the New York University Game Center. He is the author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, both published by the MIT Press.

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The Future of Space Travel: A Discussion with Douglas C. Ligor

5 augusti 2023 | 42 min

Christine Keiner, "Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal" (U Georgia Press, 2020)

5 augusti 2023 | 31 min

The Atlantic-Pacific Central American sea-level canal is generally regarded as a spectacular failure. However, Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal (U Georgia Press, 2020) examines the canal in an alternative context, as an anticipated infrastructure project that captured attention from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Its advocates included naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, physicist Edward Teller, and U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. The waterway did not come to fruition, but as a proposal it served important political and scientific purposes during different eras, especially the years spanning the Cold War and the "environmental decade" of the 1970s.

Historian Christine Keiner shows how the evolving plans for the sea-level ship canal performed distinct kinds of work for diverse historical actors in light of shifting scientific, environmental, and diplomatic values. Dismissing it as a failed scheme prevents us from considering the political, cultural, and epistemological processes that went into constructing the seaway as an innovative diplomatic solution to rising U.S.-Panama tensions, an exciting research opportunity for evolutionary biologists, a superior hydrocarbon highway for the oil industry, or a serious ecological threat to marine biodiversity.

Invoking past dreams and nightmares of peaceful nuclear explosives, invasive sea snakes, and the 1970s energy crisis, Deep Cut uses the Central American seaway proposal to examine the changing roles of environmental diplomacy and state-sponsored environmental impact assessment. More broadly, Keiner amplifies an emerging conversation around the environmental, scientific, and political histories and legacies of unrealized megaprojects.

This book is available open access here.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.

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Robot Futures

4 augusti 2023 | 15 min

Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation

3 augusti 2023 | 18 min

The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us

2 augusti 2023 | 17 min

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.

Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world—our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known.

Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.

Noson S. Yanofsky is Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a coauthor of Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists.

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Kathryn Cramer Brownell, "24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News" (Princeton UP, 2023)

1 augusti 2023 | 32 min

Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program

31 juli 2023 | 19 min

In July 1969, ninety-four percent of American televisions were tuned to coverage of Apollo 11's mission to the moon. How did space exploration, once the purview of rocket scientists, reach a larger audience than My Three Sons? Why did a government program whose standard operating procedure had been secrecy turn its greatest achievement into a communal experience? In Marketing the Moon, David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek tell the story of one of the most successful marketing and public relations campaigns in history: the selling of the Apollo program.

Primed by science fiction, magazine articles, and appearances by Wernher von Braun on the “Tomorrowland” segments of the Disneyland prime time television show, Americans were a receptive audience for NASA's pioneering “brand journalism.” Scott and Jurek describe sophisticated efforts by NASA and its many contractors to market the facts about space travel—through press releases, bylined articles, lavishly detailed background materials, and fully produced radio and television features—rather than push an agenda. American astronauts, who signed exclusive agreements with Life magazine, became the heroic and patriotic faces of the program. And there was some judicious product placement: Hasselblad was the “first camera on the moon”; Sony cassette recorders and supplies of Tang were on board the capsule; and astronauts were equipped with the Exer-Genie personal exerciser. Everyone wanted a place on the bandwagon.

Generously illustrated with vintage photographs, artwork, and advertisements, many never published before, Marketing the Moon shows that when Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, it was a triumph not just for American engineering and rocketry but for American marketing and public relations.

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist and the author of three bestselling books,The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Real-Time Marketing, and Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. He lives in Lexington, Massachuetts.

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Powering American Farms: A Conversation with Richard Hirsh

31 juli 2023 | 74 min

Betty Adamou, "Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success" (Kogan Page, 2018)

31 juli 2023 | 54 min

Games are the most engaging medium of all time: they harness storytelling and heuristics, drive emotion and push the evolution of technology in a way that no other platform has or can. It's no surprise, then, that games and gamification are revolutionizing the market research industry, offering opportunities to reinvigorate the notoriously sluggish engagement levels seen in traditional surveying methods. This not only improves data quality, but offers untapped insights unattainable through traditional methods. Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success (Kogan Page, 2018) shows readers how to design ResearchGames and Gamified Surveys that will intrinsically engage participants and how best to use these methodologies to become, and stay, commercially competitive.

In a world where brands and organizations are increasingly interested in the feelings and contexts that drive consumer choices, Games and Gamification in Market Research gives readers the skills to use the components in games to encourage play and observe consumer behaviours via simulations for predictive modelling. Written by Betty Adamou, the UK's leading research game designer and named as one of seven women shaping the future of market research, it explains the ways in which these methodologies will evolve with technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and how it will shape research careers. Alongside a companion website, this book provides a fully immersive and fascinating overview of game-based research.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Alice E. Marwick, "The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media" (Yale UP, 2023)

30 juli 2023 | 37 min

Jade E. Davis, "The Other Side of Empathy" (Duke UP, 2023)

30 juli 2023 | 49 min

Rob Eschmann,, "When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2023)

29 juli 2023 | 75 min

Jeremy Black, "A History of Artillery" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

28 juli 2023 | 38 min

The Science of Science: A Discussion with Aaron Clauset

26 juli 2023 | 75 min

Nina Lager Vestberg, "Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization" (MIT Press, 2023)

26 juli 2023 | 54 min

Vincanne Adams, "Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move" (Duke UP, 2023)

25 juli 2023 | 57 min

Vincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside our bodies, to within our cells to grapple with what it is to live in such an entangled world.

Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals. Prof. Vincanne Adams, is professor Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine.

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US History in 15 Foods: A Conversation with Anna Zeide

24 juli 2023 | 53 min

Heidi Hausse, "The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany" (Manchester UP, 2023)

21 juli 2023 | 53 min

Usha Raman and Sumana Kasturi, "Childscape, Mediascape: Children and Media in India" (Orient BlackSwan, 2023)

21 juli 2023 | 38 min

Children are considered to be a group of special interest by media scholars and advocates, especially because they are seen as a vulnerable group whose rights must be protected and also because they represent the future of the world, and so their education and socialisation is of particular importance. While there has been global research on children’s media practices, in India, there has been very little critical work in this area.

Usha Raman and Sumana Kasturi’s edited book Childscape, Mediascape: Children and Media in India (Orient BlackSwan, 2023) fills this gap by bringing together, for the first time, a variety of perspectives from media researchers, practitioners and those involved in secondary school education, with a focus on children, childhood and media. Questioning what it means to ‘grow up digital’ in twenty-first century India, this collection explores a variety of themes relating to children and the media landscape. The volume contains twelve essays on relevant topics such as digital media literacy among children and their new media practices; mediated childhood and child rights; children as both consumers and producers of social media; digitality and education; children’s entertainment and leisure practices, and issues of identity, representation and community in a mediated world. The book also contains a comprehensive introduction by the volume editors.

This volume will be of value to scholars of media and communication studies and cultural studies, while also drawing readers from psychology and journalism. The chapters offer critical insights of relevance to parents, teacher training institutes, child-focused NGOs, and others who work with children.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Yi-Tang Lin, "Statistics and the Language of Global Health: Institutions and Experts in China, Taiwan, and the World, 1917-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

21 juli 2023 | 50 min

Aaron A. Reed, "50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon" (2023)

19 juli 2023 | 40 min

Juliet Schor, "After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back" (U California Press, 2021)

17 juli 2023 | 58 min

When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability.

Nevertheless, the basic model--a peer-to-peer structure augmented by digital tech--holds the potential to meet its original promises. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back (U California Press, 2021) dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible.

Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. She is a New York Times bestselling author and the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Better Future Project.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Lin Zhang, "The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the Chinese Digital Economy" (Columbia UP, 2023)

17 juli 2023 | 61 min

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia UP, 2023) by Lin Zhang.

You’ll hear about:

A history of the book and Zhang’s entry into the fieldwork through family stories;
How to understand entrepreneurialism as a dominant ideology in the global neoliberal labor economy and China’s positionality in the world;
Why and how the book is organized based on three types of spaces – rural, urban, and transnational – across China and beyond;
The similarities and differences between the elite and the grassroot entrepreneurs in Beijing;
The e-commerce entrepreneurship as “platformized family production” in rural China and the roles played by government and large tech companies like Alibaba play in shaping the new rural production model;
The limit and possibility of reinvention through “shanzhai” (copycat) e-commerce production;
The gendered inequalities of entrepreneurial labor in rural and transnational spaces;
What is “daigou” (personal shopping agents) in transnational e-commerce and the structural challenges entrepreneurs – especially women – face across national borders and digital platforms;
What conversations in global studies of media and communication this book engages with.

About the book

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. You can find more about the book here by the Columbia University Press.

Author: Lin Zhang is an associate professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Host: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with an affiliation at the Center of the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC).

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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African American Women on the American Railroad: A Conversation with Miriam Thaggert

17 juli 2023 | 57 min

Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

16 juli 2023 | 51 min

Janna Levin, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space" (Princeton UP, 2023)

15 juli 2023 | 29 min

Jenna Grant, "Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh" (U Washington Press, 2022)

15 juli 2023 | 45 min

Tom Mustill, "How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication" (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)

13 juli 2023 | 54 min

What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill—the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty‑ton humpback whale breached onto his kayak—asks this question in his thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication.

“When a whale is in the water, it is like an iceberg: you only see a fraction of it and have no conception of its size.”

On September 12, 2015, Tom Mustill was paddling in a two-person kayak with a friend just off the coast of California. It was cold, but idyllic—until a humpback whale breached, landing on top of them, releasing the energy equivalent of forty hand grenades. He was certain he was about to die, but they both survived, miraculously unscathed. In the interviews that followed the incident, Mustill was left with one question: What could this astonishing encounter teach us?

Drawing from his experience as a naturalist and wildlife filmmaker, Mustill started investigating human–whale interactions around the world when he met two tech entrepreneurs who wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI)—originally designed to translate human languages—to discover patterns in the conversations of animals and decode them. As he embarked on a journey into animal eavesdropping technologies, where big data meets big beasts, Mustill discovered that there is a revolution taking place in biology, as the technologies developed to explore our own languages are turned to nature.

From seventeenth-century Dutch inventors, to the whaling industry of the nineteenth century, to the cutting edge of Silicon Valley, How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication (Grand Central Publishing, 2022) examines how scientists and start-ups around the world are decoding animal communications. Whales, with their giant mammalian brains, virtuoso voices, and long, highly social lives, offer one of the most realistic opportunities for this to happen. But what would the consequences of such human animal interaction be?

Here are some recordings of whale songs:

Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

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Randall Patnode, "The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

12 juli 2023 | 52 min

Palo Alto: A Conversation with Malcolm Harris

10 juli 2023 | 92 min

Quinn Eastman, "The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Sleepiness" (Columbia UP, 2023)

7 juli 2023 | 41 min

Simon N. Whitney, "From Oversight to Overkill: Inside the Broken System That Blocks Medical Breakthroughs--And How We Can Fix It" (Rivertowns Books, 2023)

4 juli 2023 | 34 min

Medical research saves lives-yet all too often, it is thwarted by a review system supposed to safeguard patients that instead creates needless delays and expense. Institutional Review Boards, which exist at every hospital and medical school that conducts medical research, have ended up imposing such complex, draconian conditions that research is frequently damaged, delayed, and distorted. This is why medical miracles like the COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed at warp speed, are far too rare. Instead, medical research in countless areas is kept at a horse-and-buggy pace. The result: unnecessary suffering and avoidable deaths.

From Oversight to Overkill: Inside the Broken System That Blocks Medical Breakthroughs--And How We Can Fix It (Rivertowns Books, 2023) vividly recounts the story behind this crisis, one that remains unknown to the general public. Family physician and ethicist Simon Whitney shows how the IRB system was launched in response to scandals like the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study-and how, in recent decades, this well-intentioned program has become increasingly bureaucratic, convoluted, and stifling.

Readers will learn how vital breakthroughs in treating conditions from kidney stones to heart attacks and premature birth have been delayed by IRB red tape, forcing doctors and patients to settle for less-effective treatments. They'll see how ill-informed demands from Congressional leaders that regulators "get tough" on scientists have caused respected research institutions to be shut down-with no benefit to the public. And they'll learn about a balanced, common-sense approach to reforming the system that can free scientists from pointless wheel-spinning while still protecting the public from the risks of unethical or careless experimentation.

Until now, the debate about the IRB system's failures has been confined to specialty journals in medicine, law, and ethics. From Oversight to Overkill will finally alert citizens about this little-known crisis with America's medical research system-and what can be done about it.

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The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University

1 juli 2023 | 16 min

Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In The War on Learning, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform” higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes—video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads—let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development.

Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor”), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers—and for anyone who cares about education and technology.

Elizabeth Losh directs the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press) and the coauthor of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing.

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The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age

30 juni 2023 | 19 min

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age.

Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures—from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media.

Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated—that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn't signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era's marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere.

James G. Webster is Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University.

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Mary Beltrán, "Latino TV: A History" (NYU Press, 2022)

29 juni 2023 | 48 min

In this episode, our host Lucila Rozas discusses the book Latino TV: A History (2022) by Mary Beltrán.

You’ll hear about:

A brief trajectory of the book and the conversations on global studies of media and communication with which this book engages;
The concept of cultural citizenship and its relevance to study Latino TV;
How the author puts together the traces of the history of Latino TV, especially in the cases when it was difficult to find information about the series that were not preserved/archived;
What has changed in the 2000s-2010s that led to the inclusion of more Latinx people in TV roles in front and behind the camera;
How the diversification of latinidad identities in the TV shows is related to race, class, and gender through specific characters or forms of storytelling;
The importance of Latino(a)(x) representation in the US TV industry and the potential limits of representation and visibility;
The role of Latinx activism in the 1960s and 70s and the legacy of public television on today’s media landscape;
Some recent developments on Latino TV after the publication of the book, particularly given the ongoing writers’ strike in streaming television.

About the book

The first-ever account of Latino/a participation and representation in US English-language television, Latino TV: A History offers a sweeping study of key moments of Chicano/a and Latino/a representation and authorship since the 1950s. Drawing on archival research, interviews with dozens of media professionals who worked on or performed in these series, textual analysis of episodes and promotional materials, and analysis of news media coverage, Mary Beltrán examines Latina/o representation in everything from children’s television Westerns of the 1950s, Chicana/o and Puerto Rican activist-led public affairs series of the 1970s, and sitcoms that spanned half a century, to Latina and Latino-led series in the 2000s and 2010s on broadcast, cable, and streaming outlets, including George Lopez, Ugly Betty, One Day at a Time, and Vida. You can find more about the book here by NYU Press.

Author: Mary Beltrán is the Associate Director and former Founding Director of the Moody College of Communication’s Latino Media Arts & Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in critical studies-driven scholarship at the intersections of film and television studies, Latina/Latino and critical race studies, and gender studies. Informed by her prior careers as a journalist and social worker, Dr. Beltrán writes and teaches on ethnic diversity and the U.S. media industries, U.S. television and film history, mixed race and media culture, and feminist media studies, with emphasis on U.S. Latina and Latino representation and media production.

Host: Lucila Rozas is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a doctoral fellow at Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. She has developed interdisciplinary research in a wide variety of topics, from the strategies of LGBT+ activists to push for the approval of sexual orientation and gender identity policies to the representations of mental health in Peruvian print media. Her most recent academic work focuses on social media and the role it has in identity construction, discourse, activism, and social change.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

Keywords: Latino TV, Latinx identity, Cultural citizenship, Public Television, TV industry, Activism

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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Helle Porsdam, "Science as a Cultural Human Right" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

28 juni 2023 | 46 min

The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone's right to "share in scientific advancement and its benefits" and to "enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field.

The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of "post-truth" societies. "Dual use" and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk.

The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Nicholas Dagen Bloom, "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

27 juni 2023 | 37 min

The Singer Sewing Machine in Spain and Mexico: Multinational Business, Gender, and Technologies

26 juni 2023 | 81 min

Josh Shepperd, "Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

26 juni 2023 | 65 min

Metadata

25 juni 2023 | 19 min

When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was "only" collecting metadata about phone calls--information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location--and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In Metadata, Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadata.

In the era of ubiquitous computing, metadata has become infrastructural, like the electrical grid or the highway system. We interact with it or generate it every day. It is not, Pomerantz tell us, just "data about data." It is a means by which the complexity of an object is represented in a simpler form. For example, the title, the author, and the cover art are metadata about a book. When metadata does its job well, it fades into the background; everyone (except perhaps the NSA) takes it for granted.

Pomerantz explains what metadata is, and why it exists. He distinguishes among different types of metadata--descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, and use--and examines different users and uses of each type. He discusses the technologies that make modern metadata possible, and he speculates about metadata's future. By the end of the book, readers will see metadata everywhere. Because, Pomerantz warns us, it's metadata's world, and we are just living in it.

Jeffrey Pomerantz is an information scientist. He was most recently Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he developed and taught the MOOC “Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information,” and a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington.

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Brian Cummings, "Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022)

25 juni 2023 | 88 min

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back to the origins of writing in ancient Babylon and Egypt, then forwards to the age of Google. It uncovers bibliophobia from the first Chinese emperor to Nazi Germany, alongside parallel stories of bibliomania and bibliolatry in world religions and literatures. Books imply cognitive content embodied in physical form, in which the body cooperates with the brain. At its heart this relationship of body and mind, or letter and spirit, always retains a mystery. Religions are founded on holy books, which are also sites of transgression, so that writing is simultaneously sacred and profane. In secular societies these complex feelings are transferred to concepts of ideology and toleration. In the ambiguous future of the internet, digital immateriality threatens human equilibrium once again.

Bibliophobia is a global history, covering six continents and seven religions, describing written examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different kinds of human script; the development of textual media such as scrolls, codices, printed books, and artificial intelligence; the collection and destruction of libraries; the use of books as holy relics, talismans, or shrines; and the place of literacy in the history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution. It proposes a theory of writing, how it relates to speech, images, and information, or to concepts of mimesis, personhood, and politics. Originating as the Clarendon Lectures in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, the methods of Bibliophobia range across book history; comparative religion; philosophy from Plato to Hegel and Freud; and a range of global literature from ancient to contemporary. Richly illustrated with textual forms, material objects, and art works, its inspiration is the power that books always (and continue to) have in the emotional, spiritual, bodily, and imaginative lives of readers.

Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor at the University of York. Before arriving at York, he was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and then Professor of English at the University of Sussex.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design

24 juni 2023 | 21 min

California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage.

In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation.

Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press).

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Tom Higham, "The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins" (Yale UP, 2021)

24 juni 2023 | 41 min

Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web

23 juni 2023 | 18 min

Andrew Jones, "How Kant Matters for Biology: A Philosophical History" (U Wales Press, 2023)

23 juni 2023 | 63 min

Catherine Carstairs, "The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

22 juni 2023 | 71 min

Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art

22 juni 2023 | 15 min

Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event scores and boxes--to name just a few examples. Over the past fifteen years, the synthesis of art and games has clouded for both artists and gamemakers. Contemporary art has drawn on the tool set of videogames, but has not considered them a cultural form with its own conceptual, formal, and experiential affordances. For their part, game developers and players focus on the innate properties of games and the experiences they provide, giving little attention to what it means to create and evaluate fine art. In Works of Game, John Sharp bridges this gap, offering a formal aesthetics of games that encompasses the commonalities and the differences between games and art.

Sharp describes three communities of practice and offers case studies for each. "Game Art," which includes such artists as Julian Oliver, Cory Arcangel, and JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) treats videogames as a form of popular culture from which can be borrowed subject matter, tools, and processes. "Artgames," created by gamemakers including Jason Rohrer, Brenda Romero, and Jonathan Blow, explore territory usually occupied by poetry, painting, literature, or film. Finally, "Artists' Games"--with artists including Blast Theory, Mary Flanagan, and the collaboration of Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman--represents a more synthetic conception of games as an artistic medium. The work of these gamemakers, Sharp suggests, shows that it is possible to create game-based artworks that satisfy the aesthetic and critical values of both the contemporary art and game communities.

John Sharp is Associate Professor of Games and Learning at Parsons the New School for Design and a member of the game design collective Local No. 12.

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James Hannam, "The Globe: How the Earth Became Round" (Reaktion Books, 2023)

22 juni 2023 | 48 min

Lars de Wildt, "The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

22 juni 2023 | 36 min

John L. Rudolph, "Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should)" (Oxford UP, 2023)

21 juni 2023 | 37 min

The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby

20 juni 2023 | 39 min

The History of the American Shopping Mall and Its Cultures

19 juni 2023 | 68 min

David A. Banks, "The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America" (U California Press, 2023)

19 juni 2023 | 51 min

The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to explore how our cities gentrify by becoming social media influencers—and why it works.

Cities, like the people that live in them, are subject to the attention economy. In The City Authentic, author David A. Banks shows how cities are transforming themselves to appeal to modern desires for authentic urban living through the attention-grabbing tactics of social media influencers and reality-TV stars.

Blending insightful analysis with pop culture, this engaging study of New York State’s Capital Region is an accessible glimpse into the social phenomena that influence contemporary cities. The rising economic fortunes of cities in the Rust Belt, Banks argues, are due in part to the markers of its previous decay—which translate into signs of urban authenticity on the internet. The City Authentic unpacks the odd connection between digital media and derelict buildings, the consequences of how we think about industry and place, and the political processes that have enabled a new paradigm in urban planning. Mixing urban sociology with media and cultural studies, Banks offers a lively account of how urban life and development are changing in the twenty-first century.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place. He is currently conducting research on the branding of cities. I am particularly interested in the similarities and differences in how travel and tourism agencies see a city as compared to how residents and visitors see the same city. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, "The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life" (U California Press, 2023)

18 juni 2023 | 80 min

Chris Manias, "The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development, and Paleontology in the Long Nineteenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)

17 juni 2023 | 54 min

Brett Brehm, "Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature" (Fordham UP, 2023)

16 juni 2023 | 68 min

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Dr. Brett Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies.

Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes.

In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today.

Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting is forthcoming in the 2023 special issue, “Podcasting Disruptive Voices,” of CFC Intersections.

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Chris Impey, "Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity" (MIT Press, 2023)

16 juni 2023 | 33 min

The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home. Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars.

Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity (MIT Press, 2023) is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search for planets with the potential to host life. With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in 1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what’s behind this accelerating progress, what’s next, and what it might mean for humanity’s future. The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the definition of habitability to the changing shape of space exploration—as it expands beyond the interests of government to the pursuits of private industry—Worlds without End shows us the science, on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.

Chris Impey is University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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The Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)

15 juni 2023 | 48 min

Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

14 juni 2023 | 30 min

Peter Baldwin, "Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All" (MIT Press, 2023)

14 juni 2023 | 35 min

The Future of Politicized Narratives: A Discussion with Andreas Krieg

13 juni 2023 | 56 min

Stephen G. Gross, "Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change" (Oxford UP, 2023)

13 juni 2023 | 74 min

Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in solar and wind technology. But this pioneering energy transition has been plagued with problems.

In Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford UP, 2023), Stephen G. Gross explains the deeper origins of the Energiewende--Germany's transition to green energy--and offers the first comprehensive history of German energy and climate policy from World War II to the present. The book follows the Federal Republic as it passed through five energy transitions from the dramatic shift to oil that nearly wiped out the nation's hard coal sector, to the oil shocks and the rise of the Green movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the co-creation of a natural gas infrastructure with Russia, and the transition to renewable power today. He shows how debates over energy profoundly shaped the course of German history and influenced the landmark developments that define modern Europe. As Gross argues, the intense and early politicization of energy led the Federal Republic to diverge from the United States and rethink its fossil economy well before global warming became a public issue, building a green energy system in the name of many social goals. Yet Germany's experience also illustrates the difficulty, the political battles, and the unintended consequences that surround energy transitions.

By combining economy theory with a study of interest groups, ideas, and political mobilization, Energy and Power offers a novel explanation for why energy transitions happen. Further, it provides a powerful lens to move beyond conventional debates on Germany's East-West divide, or its postwar engagement with the Holocaust, to explore how this nation has shaped the contemporary world in other important ways.

Stephen G. Gross is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center of European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University.

Filippo De Chirico, History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy)

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J. P. Daughton, "In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism" (Norton, 2021)

13 juni 2023 | 60 min

J. P. Daughton's In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (W. W. Norton, 2021) examines the complex and violent French construction of a line of railroad in Equatorial Africa from the coast inland. Begun in 1921, the Congo-Océan took 13 years to complete and resulted in the deaths of between 15,000 and 23,000 African lives. Daughton's book is a careful account of the brutality, harrowing labor conditions, and deprivation of these thousands of Africans whose very bodies were abused and destroyed in this iteration of the "civilizing mission" and "modernity" in empire.

Working through a broad range of archives located in France, Switzerland, the U.S., and the Congo, the book's several chapters outline in visceral detail the individuals and structures involved in making the railroad a reality, from the forced enlistment of African labourers, through the challenges of resistant landscape, the suffering of those physically tasked with its conquest, to the justifying rhetoric of those who championed the project and the denunciations of those who sought to reveal its atrocious human cost.

Key individual architects, company, and government representatives appear throughout these pages along with the powerful forces and voices of the French imperial state. Working with and against the presentation of the project in official documents, Daughton seeks to illuminate the experiences and voices of the African workers who made the railroad a reality. Completed by the 1930s, the Congo-Océan was also a large-scale humanitarian failure. Interested in broader questions of colonial violence and how scholars engage with and respond to that violence, Daughton's narrative and analysis will be accessible to wide range of readers. This, despite the difficult and painful subjects and stories it takes on.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Doctor Ex Machina: AI in Medicine and its Pitfalls

13 juni 2023 | 73 min

Red Team Blues and the Social Dimensions of Technology

12 juni 2023 | 70 min

Zhouxiang Lu, "A History of Competitive Gaming" (Routledge, 2022)

12 juni 2023 | 35 min

Payal Arora et al., "Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

12 juni 2023 | 41 min

Brendan Keogh, "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production" (MIT Press, 2023)

11 juni 2023 | 60 min

The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American, European, and East Asian cities. But most videogames today, in fact, are made by small clusters of people working on shoestring budgets, relying on existing, freely available software platforms, and hoping, often in vain, to rise to stardom—in short, people working like artists.

Aiming squarely at this disconnect between perception and reality, Brendan Keogh's book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production (MIT Press, 2023) presents a much more accurate and nuanced picture of how the vast majority of videogame-makers work—a picture that reveals the diverse and precarious communities, identities, and approaches that make videogame production a significant cultural practice.

Drawing on insights provided by over 400 game developers across Australia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Keogh develops a new framework for understanding videogame production as a cultural field in all its complexity. Part-time hobbyists, aspirational students, client-facing contractors, struggling independents, artist collectives, and tightly knit local scenes—all have a place within this model. But proponents of non-commercial game making don't exist in isolation; Keogh shows how they and their commercial counterparts are deeply interconnected and codependent in the field of videogame production.

A cultural intervention, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist challenges core assumptions about videogame production—ideas about creativity, professionalism, labor, diversity, education, globalization, and community. Its in-depth, complex portrayal suggests new ways of seeing, and engaging in, the videogame industry that really does exist.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Drone: Remote Control Warfare

10 juni 2023 | 18 min

Amanda L. Van Lanen, "The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

9 juni 2023 | 49 min

In the nineteenth century, most American farms had a small orchard or at least a few fruit-bearing trees. People grew their own apple trees or purchased apples grown within a few hundred miles of their homes. Nowadays, in contrast, Americans buy mass-produced fruit in supermarkets, and roughly 70 percent of apples come from Washington State. So how did Washington become the leading producer of America’s most popular fruit? In The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture (The University of Oklahoma Press, 2022), Amanda L. Van Lanen offers a comprehensive response to this question by tracing the origins, evolution, and environmental consequences of the state’s apple industry.

Washington’s success in producing apples was not a happy accident of nature, according to Van Lanen. Apples are not native to Washington, any more than potatoes are to Idaho or peaches to Georgia. In fact, Washington apple farmers were late to the game, lagging their eastern competitors. The author outlines the numerous challenges early Washington entrepreneurs faced in such areas as irrigation, transportation, and labor. Eventually, with crucial help from railroads, Washington farmers transformed themselves into “growers” by embracing new technologies and marketing strategies. By the 1920s, the state’s growers managed not only to innovate the industry but to dominate it.

Industrial agriculture has its fair share of problems involving the environment, consumers, and growers themselves. In the quest to create the perfect apple, early growers did not question the long-term environmental effects of chemical sprays. Since the late twentieth century, consumers have increasingly questioned the environmental safety of industrial apple production. Today, as this book reveals, the apple industry continues to evolve in response to shifting consumer demands and accelerating climate change. Yet, through it all, the Washington apple maintains its iconic status as Washington’s most valuable agricultural crop.

Amanda L. Van Lanen, PhD is a Professor of History at Lewis-Clark State College.

Troy A. Hallsell, PhD is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, Montana. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, the United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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Lawrence Freedman, "Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2022)

8 juni 2023 | 48 min

Command in war is about forging effective strategies and implementing them, making sure that orders are appropriate, well-communicated, and then obeyed. But it is also an intensely political process. This is largely because how wars are fought depends to a large extent on how their aims are set. It is also because commanders in one realm must possess the ability to work with other command structures, including those of other branches of the armed forces and allies. In Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2022), Lawrence Freedman explores the importance of political as well as operational considerations in command with a series of eleven vivid case studies, all taken from the period after 1945. Over this period, the risks of nuclear escalation led to a shift away from great power confrontations and towards civil wars, and advances in communication technologies made it easier for higher-level commanders to direct their subordinates.

Freedman covers defeats as well as victories. Pakistani generals tried to avoid surrender as they were losing the eastern part of their country to India in 1971. Iraq's Saddam Hussein turned his defeats into triumphant narratives of victory. Osama bin Laden escaped the Americans in Afghanistan in 2001. The UK struggled as a junior partner to the US in Iraq after 2003. We come across insubordinate generals, such as Israel's Arik Sharon, and those in the French army in Algeria, so frustrated with their political leadership that they twice tried to change it. At the other end of the scale, Che Guevara in Congo in 1966 and Igor Girkin in Ukraine in 2014 both tried to spark local wars to suit their grandiose objectives.

Freedman ends the book with a meditation on the future of command in a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on technologies like artificial intelligence. A wide-ranging and insightful history of the changing nature of command in the postwar era, this will stand as a definitive account of a foundational concept in both military affairs and politics.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Athene Donald, "Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

7 juni 2023 | 37 min

Why are girls discouraged from doing science? Why do so many promising women leave science in early and mid-career? Why do women not prosper in the scientific workforce?

Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science (Oxford UP, 2023) looks back at how society has historically excluded women from the scientific sphere and discourse, what progress has been made, and how more is still needed. Athene Donald, herself a distinguished physicist, explores societal expectations during both childhood and working life using evidence of the systemic disadvantages women operate under, from the developing science of how our brains are―and more importantly aren't―gendered, to social science evidence around attitudes towards girls and women doing science.

It also discusses how science is done in practice, in order to dispel common myths: for example, the perception that science is not creative, or that it is carried out by a lone genius in an ivory tower, myths that can be very off-putting to many sections of the population. A better appreciation of the collaborative, creative, and multi-disciplinary nature of science is likely to lead to its appeal to a far wider swathe of people, especially women. This book examines the modern way of working in scientific research, and how gender bias operates in various ways within it, drawing on the voices of leading women in science describing their feelings and experiences. It argues the moral and business case for greater diversity in modern research, the better to improve science and tackle the great challenges we face today.

Athene Donald is Professor Emerita in Experimental Physics and Master of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Other than four years postdoctoral research in the USA, she has spent her career in Cambridge, specializing in soft matter physics and physics at the interface with biology. She was the University of Cambridge's first Gender Equality Champion, and has been involved in numerous initiatives concerning women in science. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and appointed DBE for services to Physics in 2010.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Erik J. Dahl, "The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough" (Georgetown UP, 2023)

6 juni 2023 | 61 min

Amy Brady, "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)

6 juni 2023 | 36 min

The History of 19th-Century Quarantine Politics: A Conversation with David S. Barnes

5 juni 2023 | 88 min

Jen Ross, "Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies" (Routledge, 2022)

4 juni 2023 | 38 min

Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, "The Smartness Mandate" (MIT Press, 2023)

4 juni 2023 | 56 min

Gender and Equality in Art and Exploration

3 juni 2023 | 14 min

Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023)

2 juni 2023 | 52 min

The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation?

In ¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Reddy surveys this innovation to shed light on what it means to imagine a world where sirens could sound out an ¡alerta sísmica! at any moment—and what it would be like to live in such a world.

Proponents of earthquake early warnings have long held that the technology can save lives and limit economic losses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, Reddy conducts a thorough, qualitative analysis of these claims and considers the requirements and uses of the alert system. She embeds her study in a rich narrative of the engineers who designed the system in conjunction with contingent political and environmental conditions. The result demonstrates how addressing earthquake dangers is no small task: it means trying to change relationships between the environment, society, and technology. Doing so, she critiques universalist and techno-centric approaches to hazard risk mitigation and celebrates the potential of contextually appropriate and broadly supported efforts.

¡Alerta! takes readers on a vivid journey into the world of Mexican earthquake risk mitigation, with critical insights for anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars, as well as specialists in the geosciences, engineering, and emergency management.

Mentioned in this episode:

Donna Riley’s interview with Lee Vinsel on the NBN Peoples & Things series.

Elizabeth Reddy is Assistant Professor of Engineering, Design, & Society at the Colorado School of Mines, with a joint appointment in Geophysics.

Liliana Gil is an anthropologist. She is incoming Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

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Amber Knight and Joshua Miller, "Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice" (Oxford UP, 2023)

1 juni 2023 | 38 min

The routinization of non-invasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) raises urgent questions about disability rights and reproductive justice. Supporters defend NIPT on the grounds that genetic information about the fetus helps would-be parents make better family planning choices. Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice challenges that assessment by exploring how NIPT can actually constrain pregnant women's options. Prospective parents must

balance a complicated array of factors, including the familial, social, and financial support they can reasonably expect to receive if they choose to carry a disabled fetus to term and raise after birth, causing many pregnant women to “choose” termination.

Focusing on the US, the book explores the intent and effects of prenatal screening in connection to women's bodily autonomy and disability rights, addressing themes at the intersection of genetic medicine, policymaking, critical disabilities studies, and political theory. Knight and Miller shift debates about reprogenetics from bioethics to political practice, as well as thoroughly critiquing the neoliberal state and the eugenic technologies that support it. Providing concrete suggestions for reforming medical practice, welfare policy, and cultural norms surrounding disability, this book highlights sites of necessary reform to envision how prospective parents can make truly free choices about prenatal genetic testing and selection abortion.

Amber Knight, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Joshua Miller, Assistant Teaching Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.

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Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, "The 'Third' United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think" (Oxford UP, 2021)

31 maj 2023 | 40 min

Orly Lobel, "The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future" (PublicAffairs, 2022)

31 maj 2023 | 56 min

John D. Aber, "Less Heat, More Light: A Guided Tour of Weather, Climate, and Climate Change" (Yale UP, 2023)

29 maj 2023 | 57 min

Jaime Green, "The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Vision of the Cosmos" (Hanover Square Press, 2023)

29 maj 2023 | 57 min

Lawrence H. White, "Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

28 maj 2023 | 44 min

Kenneth Mondschein, "On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

26 maj 2023 | 49 min

Amanda Parrish Morgan, "Stroller" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

24 maj 2023 | 49 min

Party

24 maj 2023 | 17 min

After the Pill: A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt

23 maj 2023 | 48 min

Natalie Koch, "Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia" (Verso, 2023)

22 maj 2023 | 59 min

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism" (Bristol UP, 2023)

21 maj 2023 | 45 min

James Poskett, "Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science" (Mariner Books, 2022)

21 maj 2023 | 49 min

In Horizons: A Global History of Science (Mariner Books, 2022), James Poskett, Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick, begins by asking, “Where did modern science come from?” Arguing against the traditional narrative focusing on “genius” European men, Poskett invites us to reconsider and expand the geography of the history of modern science. Drawing from a wide range of recent scholarship, Poskett successfully tackles the challenge of presenting a “big picture” history of modern science addressing crucial questions of violence, colonization, resistance, and cultural exchange. This tour de force by Poskett shows that, despite legitimate concerns raised against big picture narratives, it is possible to write compelling, informative, and critical histories of modern science intended to both historians and the general public.

What if a history of modern science began with the Aztecs’ incredible botanical gardens in Mexico, rather than with Galileo Galilei pointing his telescope toward the moons of Jupiter? What if a history of modern science spent more time on the implications of Isaac Newton’s investments in the slave trade than on his famous “annus mirabilis”? Deceiving its readers’ expectations, Horizons focuses on modern science as the product of a global history characterized by cultural exchanges and uneven power relations. Inspiring new ways of making accessible the global history of science without compromising on its most problematic facets, Horizons also gives the opportunity to rethink the responsibilities of historians of science in today’s world.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, "Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

20 maj 2023 | 49 min

In Split & Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, investigates the “underworld” of experimentation and suggests new avenues for telling the history of experimental sciences.

Divided in two parts, respectively titled “Infra-Experimentality” and “Supra-Experimentality,” Split & Splice is an attempt at defining the phenomenological and historical contours of “experimentation as a knowledge-generating procedure.” The first part explores how researchers mix and match a variety of mediums, technological tools, and visualization techniques to produce new opportunities of knowledge-making. From nucleic acid sequence gels to structural models and experiment sheets, the reader is introduced to the contingency of the experimentation process and the series of fragmentation and mediation it requires. It is this realization that motivates the author’s historiographical considerations in the second part of the book. If the experimental process consists in a complex and changing interplay between various mediums, trace-generating techniques, and modes of visualization, then the narratives of the history of experimental sciences ought to be built around more or less extensive ensembles of experimental apparatus, rather than around retrospectively or abstractly-defined “objects” and “fields.”

In this new book, Rheinberger describes and makes visible the different layers and moving parts of the experimentation process in order to provide historians with new threads to follow and new ways of weaving their stories together.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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America & Democracy Ep. 4: George Zarkadakis on Digital Liberalism

19 maj 2023 | 34 min

The Future of the Human Heart: A Discussion with Vincent M. Figueredo

19 maj 2023 | 42 min

America & Democracy Ep. 2: Jonathan M. Berman on Anti-Vaxxers

18 maj 2023 | 40 min

Meredith Broussard, "More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech" (MIT Press, 2023)

18 maj 2023 | 43 min

Misinformed: The Covid Lab Leak Theory and the Politics of Misinformation

17 maj 2023 | 64 min

Michelle R. Warren, "Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet" (Stanford UP, 2022)

16 maj 2023 | 46 min

Medieval books that survive today have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. In Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford UP, 2022), Michelle Warren tells the story of one such manuscript—an Arthurian romance with textual origins in twelfth-century England now diffused across the twenty-first century internet. This trajectory has been propelled by a succession of technologies—from paper manufacture to printing to computers. Together, they have made literary history itself a cultural technology indebted to colonial capitalism.

Bringing to bear media theory, medieval literary studies, and book history, Warren shows how digital infrastructures change texts and books, even very old ones. In the process, she uncovers a practice of "tech medievalism" that weaves through the history of computing since the mid-twentieth century; metaphors indebted to King Arthur and the Holy Grail are integral to some of the technologies that now sustain medieval books on the internet. This infrastructural approach to book history illuminates how the meaning of literature is made by many people besides canonical authors: translators, scribes, patrons, readers, collectors, librarians, cataloguers, editors, photographers, software programmers, and many more. Situated at the intersections of the digital humanities, library sciences, literary history, and book history, Holy Digital Grail offers new ways to conceptualize authorship, canon formation, and the definition of a "book."

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt, "Prison Media: Incarceration and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)

13 maj 2023 | 28 min

Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy, "Secret Cinema and the Immersive Experience Industry" (Manchester UP, 2022)

13 maj 2023 | 49 min

Pharmacological Histories Ep. 1: Nancy D. Campbell on Naloxone

12 maj 2023 | 43 min

Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists; Nancy D. Campbell has drawn together a history of a defining tragedy of contemporary life; the overdose. I ask her about the reality of drug overdoses and one of the tools being used by activists to prevent more deaths--Naloxone.

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 clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD, Nancy Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned--and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and "reversal" after an overdose possible, became a tool for shifting law, policy, clinical medicine, and science toward harm reduction. Liberated from emergency room protocols and distributed in take-home kits to non-medical professionals, it also became a tool of empowerment.

After recounting the prehistory of naloxone--the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of "reanimatology"--Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists--whom she calls the "protagonists" of her story--Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster.

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Mark Carrigan and Lambros Fatsis, "The Public and Their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media" (Bristol UP, 2021)

12 maj 2023 | 38 min

Karen Schrier, "We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics" (Oxford UP, 2021)

11 maj 2023 | 36 min

Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like #PlayApartTogether, games have become increasingly acknowledged as platforms for civic deliberation and value sharing. We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics (Oxford UP, 2021) explores these possibilities by examining how we connect, communicate, analyze, and discover when we play games. Combining research-based perspectives and current examples, this volume shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change.

We the Gamers introduces and explores various educational frameworks through a range of games and interactive experiences including board and card games, online games, virtual reality and augmented reality games, and digital games like Minecraft,Executive Command, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Fortnite, When Rivers Were Trails, Politicraft, Quandary, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The book systematically evaluates the types of skills, concepts, and knowledge needed for civic and ethical engagement, and details how games can foster these skills in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings. We the Gamers also explores the obstacles to learning with games and how to overcome those obstacles by encouraging equity and inclusion, care and compassion, and fairness and justice.

Featuring helpful tips and case studies, We the Gamers shows teachers the strengths and limitations of games in helping students connect with civics and ethics, and imagines how we might repair and remake our world through gaming, together.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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The Politicization of Science: A Conversation with Dorian Abbot, Anna Krylov, David Romps, and Bernhardt Trout

11 maj 2023 | 62 min

Michael Brown, "Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

10 maj 2023 | 76 min

Hasok Chang, "Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge UP, 2022)

10 maj 2023 | 65 min

Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)

9 maj 2023 | 45 min

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed--and in some cases demolished--our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation's most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?

These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin, 2023), Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems--from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster--ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking's cruel yoke.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.

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Barbara Penner et al., "Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects" (Reaktion Books, 2021)

8 maj 2023 | 62 min

Nina Hall, "Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local" (Oxford UP, 2022)

8 maj 2023 | 44 min

Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the role of digital advocacy organizations, a major new addition to the international arena. Organizations such as MoveOn, GetUp, and Campact derive power and influence from their ability to rapidly mobilize members on-line and off-line and are shaping public opinion on many issues including climate change, trade, and refugees. Research in international relations (IR) has highlighted the influence of non-governmental organizations, which wield power through their expertise and long-term, moral commitment to an issue. However, no IR scholars have explored the spread and power of digital advocacy organizations. Nina Hall provides a detailed investigation of how these organizations have harnessed digitally networked power and can quickly respond to the most salient issues of the day, and mobilize large memberships, to put pressure on politicians. She finds that these organizations operate in a globalized world but tackle transnational problems by focusing on national targets. This new generation of activists have formed a strong transnational network, but still see the state as the locus of power.

Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe. Her research explores the role of transnational advocacy and international organizations in international relations. Her first book explored how international organizations have adapted to climate change: Displacement, Development and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? (Routledge, 2016). Nina holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a master's degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

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Jason C. Cash and Craig T. Olsen, "The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays on the Game and Its Legacy" (McFarland, 2023)

7 maj 2023 | 42 min

Sarrah Kassem, "Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization" (Bristol UP, 2023)

6 maj 2023 | 47 min

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

5 maj 2023 | 46 min

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a groundbreaking work by bestselling authors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in which they challenge conventional wisdom about the role of technology in driving prosperity. The authors argue that technology is not a neutral force working in the public interest but is shaped by the interests and beliefs of the powerful. Those who control technology are the ones who benefit from it, leaving the rest of society with the illusion of progress.

The authors provide a historical account of how technological choices have shaped the course of history, from the appropriation of the economic surplus of the Middle Ages by an ecclesiastical elite to the making of vast fortunes from digital technologies today, while millions of people are pushed towards poverty. The authors emphasize that technological progress can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The book presents a manifesto for building a better society by using the tremendous digital advances of the last half century to create useful and empowering tools, rather than marginalizing most people through automated work and political passivity. The authors argue that to achieve the true potential of innovation, we need to ensure that technology is creating new jobs and opportunities for everyone. The book offers a vision to reimagine and reshape the path of technology, ensuring that it leads to true shared prosperity.

Power and Progress offers a fresh perspective on how technology shapes our lives and highlights the need for a more democratic approach to technological progress. The book provides a compelling argument that the path of technology is not predetermined but can be brought under control to ensure that it benefits everyone, not just a few powerful individuals or corporations. The authors provide an insightful analysis of the power dynamics that underlie technological progress, and their manifesto for a better society is a call to action for policymakers, business leaders, and individuals alike.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

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Jack Buffington, "Reinventing the Supply Chain: A 21st-Century Covenant with America" (Georgetown UP, 2023)

5 maj 2023 | 37 min

Eva Haifa Giraud, "What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion" (Duke UP, 2019)

5 maj 2023 | 38 min

Spatial Computing

4 maj 2023 | 33 min

Shashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold, authors of Spatial Computing, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, discuss the reach, risks and importance of spatial computing in confronting COVID-19.

An accessible guide to the ideas and technologies underlying such applications as GPS, Google Maps, Pokémon Go, ride-sharing, driverless cars, and drone surveillance.

Billions of people around the globe use various applications of spatial computing daily--by using a ride-sharing app, GPS, the e911 system, social media check-ins, even Pokémon Go. Scientists and researchers use spatial computing to track diseases, map the bottom of the oceans, chart the behavior of endangered species, and create election maps in real time. Drones and driverless cars use a variety of spatial computing technologies. Spatial computing works by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places. It has changed our lives and infrastructures profoundly, marking a significant shift in how we make our way in the world. This volume in the MIT Essential Knowledge series explains the technologies and ideas behind spatial computing.

The book offers accessible descriptions of GPS and location-based services, including the use of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and RFID for position determination out of satellite range; remote sensing, which uses satellite and aerial platforms to monitor such varied phenomena as global food production, the effects of climate change, and subsurface natural resources on other planets; geographic information systems (GIS), which store, analyze, and visualize spatial data; spatial databases, which store multiple forms of spatial data; and spatial statistics and spatial data science, used to analyze location-related data.

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Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)

4 maj 2023 | 54 min

The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force behind the development and decline of civilizations across the centuries. The author, Peter Frankopan, takes readers on a journey through history, showcasing how natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and solar flare activity have shaped the course of human events. Frankopan's extensive research, coupled with his accessible writing style, makes for an engaging read that reframes our understanding of the world and our place in it.

One of the strengths of The Earth Transformed is the way in which Frankopan connects seemingly disparate events to highlight the far-reaching impact of climate change. For example, he explains how the Vikings emerged as a result of catastrophic crop failure, and how the collapse of cotton prices due to unusual climate patterns led to regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad. Through such connections, Frankopan demonstrates how past empires that failed to act sustainably were met with catastrophe, providing valuable lessons for our current environmental crisis.

Overall, The Earth Transformed is a timely and important book that sheds light on the enduring relationship between humans and the natural world. It challenges readers to reckon with our species' impact on the environment and to consider how we can act sustainably to prevent further harm. Frankopan's interdisciplinary approach, combining historical research with scientific insights, makes for a compelling and thought-provoking read that will leave readers with a new perspective on the world around us.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

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Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson, "Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept" (U Missouri Press, 2022)

3 maj 2023 | 41 min

Journalists around the world agree that autonomy is central to their work, but what exactly is it journalists should be autonomous from, and for what should they use this autonomy? Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson discuss their book Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept (University of Missouri Press, 2022), which traces the genealogy of the idea of journalistic autonomy from the press freedom debates of the 17th century up to the digital, networked world of the 21st century.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, the authors talk about what is ‘autonomy’ and what it means in the context of journalism, and the journey of exploring the concept, using a theoretical framework that draws upon Friedrich Nietzsche, feminist philosophy, theoretical biology, and other disciplines. They reflect on whether the concept could be applied not only in liberal democracies but also in totalitarian regimes, and also discuss their ideals of journalism as an institution and what conditions are needed to facilitate that.

Henrik Örnebring is Professor of Media and Communication in the Department of Geography, Media, and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden. Dr. Örnebring has published widely on journalism, media history, and new media in anthologies and scholarly journals and his most recent book is Newsworkers: Comparing Journalists in Six European Countries. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies.

Michael Karlsson is Professor of Media and Communication in the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden. He has primarily published on issues pertaining to the digitalization of journalism. He is also the author of Transparency and Journalism: A Critical Appraisal of a Disruptive Norm. His is co-editor of Rethinking Research Methods in an Age of Digital Journalism. He is a Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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Jan Recker, "Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide" (Springer, 2021)

3 maj 2023 | 47 min

Michael W. Hankins, "Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia" (Cornell UP, 2021)

2 maj 2023 | 61 min

Extraterrestrials

2 maj 2023 | 16 min

Felix Flicker, "The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

2 maj 2023 | 56 min

If you were to present the feats of modern science to someone from the past, those feats would surely be considered magic. In The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023) theoretical physicist Dr. Felix Flicker proves that they are indeed magic—just familiar magic. The name for this magic is “condensed matter physics.” Most people haven’t heard of the field, yet more than a third of physicists identify as condensed matter researchers, making it the most active area in the subject—with good reason. Condensed matter is the solids, liquids, and gasses that surround us—and the more exotic matters—which dictate every aspect of our present existence, and hold the keys to a brighter future, from quantum computing to real-life invisibility cloaks.

Dr. Flicker teases out the magical threads that run through our daily lives. Condensed matter physics allows you to create anything abiding by the laws of reality—and often, we find that those laws can be bent. Dr. Flicker explains how to create new particles which never existed before, how to make crystals shoot out such intense light they can cut through metal, how to separate the poles of a magnet. And more.

The book’s endearing conceit is that you, the reader, are an aspiring wizard whose ability to cast spells (i.e. to do science) is dependent on your grasp of the fundamentals of our universe. This book contains no equations or charts—instead, it’s full of owls and mountains and infinite libraries, and staffs and wands, and martial arts and mythical islands ruled by sage knot-makers. Part of the book’s magic is that, for all these fanciful trappings, it still feels practical and applicable. The Magick of Physics will open your eyes to the miracles that surround us.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Collaborative Society

1 maj 2023 | 30 min

The History of Contraception

1 maj 2023 | 16 min

An interview with Donna J. Drucker, author of Contraception, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. We discuss reproductive justice, the history of contraceptive technology and how the future of contraception can offer more choice and more freedom for every kind of person.

The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, viewed from the perspective of reproductive justice.

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily.

Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access worldwide.

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Ian Hembrow, "Ralph Edwards: Rare Events--The Inside Story of a Worldwide Quest for Safer Medicines" (Springer, 2023)

30 april 2023 | 32 min

Technologies of the Human Corpse

29 april 2023 | 32 min

In this episode we hear from John Troyer, author of Technologies of the Human Corpse and the Director of The Center for Death and Society at The University of Bath. We discuss the way technology is blurring the distinctions between life and death, the emergence of death studies from the 70s social and political milieu and how his own experiences of bereavement inform his research.

The relationship of the dead body with technology through history, from nineteenth-century embalming machines to the death-prevention technologies of today.

Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways.

Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

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Wendy Lynne Lee, "This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)

28 april 2023 | 40 min

Wendy Lynne Lee's This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction (John Wiley & Sons, 2022) provides students and scholars with a comprehensive introduction to the growing field of environmental philosophy and ethics.

Mitigating the effects of climate change will require global cooperation and lasting commitment. Of the many disciplines addressing the ecological crisis, philosophy is perhaps best suited to develop the conceptual foundations of a viable and sustainable environmental ethic. This is Environmental Ethics provides an expansive overview of the key theories underpinning contemporary discussions of our moral responsibilities to non-human nature and living creatures.

Adopting a critical approach, author Wendy Lynne Lee closely examines major moral theories to discern which ethic provides the compass needed to navigate the social, political, and economic challenges of potentially catastrophic environmental transformation, not only, but especially the climate crisis. Lee argues that the ethic ultimately adopted must make the welfare of non-human animals and plant life a priority in our moral decision-making, recognizing that ecological conditions form the existential conditions of all life on the planet. Throughout the text, detailed yet accessible chapters demonstrate why philosophy is relevant and useful in the face of an uncertain environmental future.

This is Environmental Ethics is essential reading for undergraduate students in courses on philosophy, geography, environmental studies, feminist theory, ecology, human and animal rights, and social justice, as well as an excellent graduate-level introduction to the key theories and thinkers of environmental philosophy.

Wendy Lynne Lee is a professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University. Lee has published about 45 scholarly essays in her areas of expertise—philosophy of language (particularly later Wittgenstein), philosophy of mind/brain, feminist theory, theory of sexual identity, post-Marxian theory, nonhuman animal welfare, ecological aesthetics, aesthetic phenomenology, and philosophy of ecology. Her previous work includes the book Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse (Lexington 2017).

Özlem Yılmaz is a philosopher of science, with a focus on issues related to plant biology.

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Jonathan E. Abel, "The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)

28 april 2023 | 66 min

Computer Graphics

27 april 2023 | 18 min

In this episode of High Theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan talks with us about computer graphics. Emerging from tools for sailing and warmaking, like sea charts and radar, modern computer graphics are technologies of mapping and managing risk. They seem intent on absorbing the human sensorium into the machine.

In the episode Bernard refers to computer graphics as “techniques of addressing,” a term he attributes to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal. He also uses the term “operational images” which comes from the work of Harun Farocki, and talks about SAGE, the US Government’s Cold War era Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense System. Bernard references Paul Edward’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2013). He also mentions the German scholar Christoph Borbach who has written on auditory computer interfaces, and American disability studies scholar Mara Mills, who has written on the Deaf history of computing. He was kind enough to give us an extensive bibliography on this topic, which is posted below.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London. He has a brand new book out on the cybernetic history of French theory, called Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023). Kim met him when he came to give a talk at the Stanford Humanities Center in January 2023. He wore denim and had a slightly manic affect. People came all the way from Berkeley to hear what he had to say, which is quite impressive in the Bay Area.

This week’s image is a radar loop of the December 16 2007 Eastern North America winter storm, found on Wikimedia Commons. The loop runs from Saturday Morning at 7 AM (Dec 15) to Sunday Night at 7 PM (Dec 16). The image is in the public domain because it was made by someone who works for the National Weather Service.

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Elaine H. Ecklund and David R. Johnson, "Varieties of Atheism in Science" (Oxford UP, 2021)

27 april 2023 | 73 min

Not all atheists are New Atheists, but thanks in large part to the prominence and influence of New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism has claimed the pulpit of secularity in Western society. New Atheists have given voice to marginalized nonreligious individuals and underscored the importance of science in society. They have also advanced a derisive view of religion and forcefully argued that science and religion are intrinsically in conflict. Many in the public think that all scientists are atheists and all atheist scientists are New Atheists, militantly against religion and religious people. But what do everyday atheist scientists actually think about religion?

Drawing on a survey of 1,293 atheist scientists in the U.S. and U.K., and 81 follow-up in-depth interviews, Varieties of Atheism in Science (Oxford Academic Press, 2021) by Professors Elaine Howard Ecklund and David R. Johnson, explains the pathways that led to atheism among scientists, the diverse views of religion they hold, their perspectives on the limits of what science can explain, and their views of meaning and morality. The findings reveal a vast gulf between the rhetoric of New Atheism in the public sphere and the reality of atheism in science. The story of the varieties of atheism in science is consequential for scientific and religious communities and points to tools for dialogue between these seemingly disparate groups.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Boniuk Institute at Rice University, Houston TX. Her research examines social and institutional change, especially when individuals leverage aspects of their religious, racial, and gender identities to change institutions. Elaine is the author of seven books, over 100 research articles, and numerous op-eds. She has received grants and awards from multiple organizations.

David R. Johnson is an associate professor of higher education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. His research agenda examines how universities are shaped by changes in their institutional environments, especially as it relates to capitalism, religion, and politics. He has previously published in numerous academic journals, a book with Johns Hopkins University Press, A Fractured Profession: Commercialism and Conflict in Academic Science (2017), and co-authored another book with Elaine Ecklund, Secularity and Science: What Scientists around the World Actually Think, from Oxford University Press (2019). In fact, they joined Carrie Lynn on New Books in Secularism in September 2019 to discuss that book; listen here.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. [email protected] @carrielynnland

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Alan Lightman, "The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science" (Pantheon, 2023)

26 april 2023 | 31 min

Are science and spirituality incompatible? From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to that question...

Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?

According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems?

In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (Pantheon, 2023), Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”—the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution.

What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Paul A. Lombardo, "Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

25 april 2023 | 64 min

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough” were the infamous words U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in 1927. In Buck v. Bell, an almost unanimous Court upheld a Virginia law allowing the sterilization of people the state found to be “socially inadequate” and “feebleminded.” This landmark decision allowed the eugenics movement to take full effect, with multiple states passing similar laws.

In Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Dr. Paul Lombardo unpacks the case of an individual – Carrie Buck – to argue that the case not only represents the collective power of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century but an individual miscarriage of justice. Using extensive archival sources, Dr. Lombardo demonstrates that Carrie Buck was neither a “moral degenerate” or “feeble-minded.” She was a rape victim of sound mind. Her sterilization was based on fraudulent evidence. The powerful eugenics lobby manufactured a case – and a sympathetic court gave them a precedent that justified Carrie Buck’s sterilization – and over 60,000 sterilizations in the following decades.

Three Generations, No Imbeciles frames the history of sterilization as essential to understanding contemporary legal fights over birth control and abortion. Does the constitution’s promise of “liberty” include the right to become pregnant or end a pregnancy? Dr. Lombardo’s epilogue and afterward outlines the connections between Buck and modern cases involving abortion, disability rights, and reparations for those sterilized. Originally published in 2008, the book has been updated in 2022 with a terrific epilogue and afterward with an eye towards contemporary events in reproductive politics.

Dr. Paul A. Lombardo is Regents’ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University. He has published extensively on topics in health law, medico-legal history, and bioethics and is best known for his work on the legal history of the American eugenics movement. His website houses the images and all documents discussed in the podcast including the petition for rehearing created by the National Council of Catholic Men.

Daniela Campos served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Rachel Robison-Greene, "Edibility and in Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations" (Lexington Books, 2022)

24 april 2023 | 50 min

Quantitative Science Studies: A Discussion with Editor-in-Chief Ludo Waltman

23 april 2023 | 17 min

John Lisle, "The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)

22 april 2023 | 63 min

Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin, "Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures: New Approaches for Historicising, Politicising and Imagining the Digital" (Emerald, 2023)

21 april 2023 | 51 min

What is digital politics? What new creative and experimental tools can we use to study digital politics historically and analyse and create future imaginaries of digital politics? Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin about their co-edited book Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures: New Approaches for Historicising, Politicising and Imagining the Digital (2023, Emerald Publishing Limited).

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin speak about how they managed to bring together contributions from junior and experienced scholars in a book that examines digital politics theoretically, methodologically, and ethically, offering interdisciplinary perspectives and innovative pedagogies.

The first part of the book presents research chapters that look at misinformation and reactionary online activism, digital imperialism and capitalism, future internet governance, digital memory, digital waste, and environmental imagination. The second part showcases several creative and experimental tools for studying digital politics historically, and for analysing and creating future imaginaries of digital politics.

Adi Kuntsman is Reader in Digital Politics at the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Adi’s work lies at the intersection of cybercultures/digital and social media; anti-colonial and feminist scholarship; queer theory; and social research on war, nationalism and colonialism. Read more on the Digital Politics blog.

Liu Xin is a senior lecturer at the Center for Gender Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden. Her recent research projects are located at the intersection of feminist theory, environmental humanities, critical race studies, science and technology studies, social theory and digital media research. Find her on Twitter @LiuxinYB.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020)

21 april 2023 | 49 min

How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction

19 april 2023 | 14 min

The Making of "Ways of Hearing"

18 april 2023 | 67 min

Cristina Mejia Visperas, "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" (NYU, 2022)

14 april 2023 | 58 min

Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

11 april 2023 | 41 min

Rajesh Veeraraghavan, "Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Reform in India" (Oxford UP, 2022)

11 april 2023 | 68 min

Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford University Press, 2022) offers the first ethnographically grounded perspective on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005), which was promulgated as a welfare oriented ‘right to work’ scheme by the Indian Parliament at the recommendation of civil society organizations and development economists like Jean Dréze.

The book presents a granular case study of the implementation of the scheme in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, and more specifically, the process of “auditing” that addresses many of the information and technological asymmetries that exist on-the-ground. Veeraraghavan also takes us to Araria, Bihar and his initial research forays in the field (where I first met him as one of the volunteer facilitators of a social audit myself) to show the tensions in the production of these audits, and the difficulty in having marginalized citizens’ voices heard in the face of local elite pressure. Given the complexities that animate the delivery of a scheme from abstract law to tangible results like finished roads and money received by those who performed the labor to finish those roads, success itself is never a guarantee.

In order mitigate these kinds of uncertainties, he argues that these landscapes are navigated by bureaucrats to produce a socio-technical, infrastructural system reliant on the mechanism of ‘patching,’—instantly familiar to anyone who has done any work in software development. Patching, here, implies an iterative and evolving practice of measuring and responding to outcomes. In the process, Veeraraghavan powerfully and persuasively makes the case for playing closer attention to how information technology and politics mix, in rural India—unsettling the narrative of urban spaces as the primary bearers of and responders to technology, and urging a thorough reexamination of development studies and science and technology studies paradigms.

Archit Guha is a PhD researcher in the Duke University History Department.

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The Cooperative Extension System

10 april 2023 | 21 min

In this episode of High Theory, Karl Dudman tells us about the Cooperative Extension System.

Formed in 1914 as an extension of the Land Grant University system in the United States, the Cooperative Extension System is an extraordinarily public model of scientific communication. There is an extension officer in every county of the US. The original goal was to transmit academic scientific knowledge on agriculture to America’s farmers, but the program’s remit has expanded over the past hundred years. And it varies widely from place to place. You might go to an extension office to test the soil of your rose bed, to find a food pantry, or attend a kids exercise class. You might also have a conversation about climate change.

In the full version of our conversation, Karl discussed the National Extension Climate Initiative which aims to unite climate change education and research across the cooperative extension system and Christopher Henke’s book, Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (MIT Press, 2008).

Karl Dudman is doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science Technology and Society. He does qualitative research on climate science in the US. His ongoing fieldwork, hosted by the North Carolina State Climate Office, examines how actors within climate science, coastal management and local politics navigate accelerating sea level rise in the context of widespread ambivalence towards the mainstream climate change narrative. Karl is also a photographer, and through his work explores the politics of competing cultural relationships with landscapes, and their subsequent representation.

This week’s image is a photograph of two men in a field of tall grass taken November 11, 2008 by Dennis Pennington, Bioenergy Educator, Michigan State University Extension.

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Tiger C. Roholt, "Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

10 april 2023 | 60 min

Tiago Forte, "Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential" (Atria Books, 2022)

9 april 2023 | 43 min

Johnny Walker, "Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-92" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

7 april 2023 | 46 min

Nostalgia for the 1980s is in the air. From Stranger Things to the relaunch of 80s franchises like Top Gun, the American entertainment industry casts the period as an age of simpler things, clearer dichotomies, and less technology. Yet not all was simple. The 1980s were the heyday of the Cold War. They were the decade of rapid social change, of deregulation and selfish consumption, of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They were also the decade when a new technology swept the world, setting the stage for our all-too-digital present.

A lot has been written about the rise of video in the United States, the format wars, the impact it had on the entertainment industry, on personal entertainment consumption habits, and new business models. But the rise of video was not a uniquely American phenomenon, nor was the American experience normative. In fact, wherever the new technology arrived, from the US, to the Middle East, to Eastern Europe, it reshaped social and business practices, as well as government responses to it, in ways that reflected the political, social, and economic arrangements of each space.

Johnny Walker’s Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1972-1992 (Edinburgh UP, 2022) tells the story of Britain’s vide boom in the 1980s by focusing on the first video distributors who took chances on a wide range of films, from documentaries, to horror, to kids entertainment, in order to attract consumer interest. The new video shops that mushroomed across Britain turned video rental into a common practice among the public. Soon, despite a crushing recession, more and more industry players started to invest into what media at the time was dismissing as a mere ‘plaything.’ Rewind, Replay chronicles the idiosyncratic ways in which British distributors and store owners navigated various local political and economic pressures including piracy, the infamous video nasties moral panic and the government crackdown on the industry, as well as the corporate expansion of the industry which, by the end of the decade, eliminated independent distributors, and turned the pre-recorded videocassette from morally questionable enterprise into a staple of high street retail.

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is Teaching Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, came out in 2022. Twitter: @OanaGodyKenw. Oana’s webpage.

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Seeing Truth in Physics

6 april 2023 | 32 min

Antero Garcia, "All through the Town: The School Bus as Educational Technology" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

6 april 2023 | 51 min

Joseph Giacomelli, "Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

5 april 2023 | 41 min

Has Peer Review Hit a Point of No Return?

4 april 2023 | 45 min

Ben Shneiderman, "Human-Centered AI" (Oxford UP, 2022)

4 april 2023 | 22 min

Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management

3 april 2023 | 99 min

Rhea Myers, "Proof of Work: Blockchain Provocations 2011-2021" (MIT Press, 2023)

3 april 2023 | 79 min

NFT, BTC, DAO, ETH, WAGMI, HODL. It would have been hard to avoid these acronyms only a year ago. The hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchain art was almost as annoying as the glee with which crypto sceptics welcomed the sudden onset of the crypto winter.

But for all the popularity of Bored Apes and Ponzi scheme stories, there seems to have been little serious engagement with the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the blockchain. The academy appears to have dismissed the crypto world out of hand, citing its financial unviability and the deeply ‘problematic’ philosophical foundations of its technology.

Rhea Myers is a crypto artist, writer, and hacker who searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Her engagement in the technical history and debates in blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy.

Remodelling the tropes of conceptual art and net art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.

Rhea Myers speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about art’s role in mapping and shaping the emergent properties of blockchain technologies, the crypto-libertarian, anarchy-capitalist nexus, and the enduring legacy of the conceptual art movement.

Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks with essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous.

PostScript Viruses, 1993
Portrait of V.I. Lenin with Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock III by Art & Language
Futherfield Gallery, London
Is Art, 2014/15, Art Is, 2014/17
Pierre's essay on the speculative deficit and NFT art
Certificate of Inauthenticity, 2020

Rhea Myers is an artist, writer, and blockchain developer and activist. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers focussed on blockchain tech in 2011, becoming one of the first artists to enter into creative, speculative, and conceptual engagement with ‘the new internet’.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)

2 april 2023 | 65 min

Susan R. Grayzel, "The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

1 april 2023 | 35 min

Karen Frost-Arnold, "Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet" (Oxford UP, 2023)

1 april 2023 | 66 min

Julia H. Lee, "The Racial Railroad" (NYU Press, 2022)

1 april 2023 | 49 min

Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for American national identity, manifest destiny, and imperial ambitions. It’s no surprise, then, that the train continues to endure in depictions across literature, film, ad music.

The Racial Railroad (NYU Press, 2022) highlights the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played―and continues to play―in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Julia H. Lee argues that the train is frequently used as the setting for stories of race because it operates across multiple registers and scales of experience and meaning, both as an invocation of and a depository for all manner of social, historical, and political narratives.

Lee demonstrates how, through legacies of racialized labor and disenfranchisement―from the Chinese American construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and the depictions of Native Americans in landscape and advertising, to the underground railroad and Jim Crow segregation―the train becomes one of the exemplary spaces through which American cultural works explore questions of racial subjectivity, community, and conflict. By considering the train through various lenses, The Racial Railroad tracks how racial formations and conflicts are constituted in significant and contradictory ways by the spaces in which they occur.

Julia H. Lee is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California at Irvine and author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 and Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Elizabeth M. Renieris, "Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse" (MIT Press, 2023)

31 mars 2023 | 22 min

Why laws focused on data cannot effectively protect people—and how an approach centered on human rights offers the best hope for preserving human dignity and autonomy in a cyberphysical world.

Ever-pervasive technology poses a clear and present danger to human dignity and autonomy, as many have pointed out. And yet, for the past fifty years, we have been so busy protecting data that we have failed to protect people. In Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Renieris argues that laws focused on data protection, data privacy, data security and data ownership have unintentionally failed to protect core human values, including privacy. And, as our collective obsession with data has grown, we have, to our peril, lost sight of what’s truly at stake in relation to technological development—our dignity and autonomy as people.

Far from being inevitable, our fixation on data has been codified through decades of flawed policy. Renieris provides a comprehensive history of how both laws and corporate policies enacted in the name of data privacy have been fundamentally incapable of protecting humans. Her research identifies the inherent deficiency of making data a rallying point in itself—data is not an objective truth, and what’s more, its “entirely contextual and dynamic” status makes it an unstable foundation for organizing. In proposing a human rights–based framework that would center human dignity and autonomy rather than technological abstractions, Renieris delivers a clear-eyed and radically imaginative vision of the future.

At once a thorough application of legal theory to technology and a rousing call to action, Beyond Data boldly reaffirms the value of human dignity and autonomy amid widespread disregard by private enterprise at the dawn of the metaverse.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Life Extension Therapies

29 mars 2023 | 69 min

Woodrow Hartzog, "Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies" (Harvard UP, 2018)

28 mars 2023 | 27 min

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves―even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies (Harvard UP, 2018), Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, "The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games" (U California Press, 2023)

28 mars 2023 | 56 min

Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

28 mars 2023 | 29 min

The Science of Security

27 mars 2023 | 68 min

Winning & Losing in the Emerging EV Wars/The Aftershocks of the EV Transition Could Be Ugly

27 mars 2023 | 97 min

Felix Zimmermann, "Virtual Realities: Atmospheric Experience of the Past in Digital Games (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)

26 mars 2023 | 36 min

Reinhold Martin, "Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University" (Columbia UP, 2021)

25 mars 2023 | 103 min

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia UP, 2021) reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.

Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Dominique A. Tobbell, "Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

24 mars 2023 | 52 min

An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II. Nurses represent the largest segment of the US health care workforce and spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the health care team.

Dominique A. Tobbell's book Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing (U Chicago Press, 2022) probes their history to examine major changes that have taken place in American health care in the second half of the twentieth century. The book examines the major changes in nursing education and the place of nursing in the post-war research university, revealing how federal and state health and higher education policies shaped education within health professions after World War II. Starting in the 1950s, academic nurses sought to construct a science of nursing--distinct from that of the related biomedical or behavioral sciences--that would provide the basis of nursing practice. Facing broad changes in patient care driven by the introduction of new medical innovations, they worked both to develop science-based nursing practice and to secure their roles within the post-war research university. By their efforts, academic nurses transformed nursing's labor into a valuable site of knowledge production and demonstrated how the application of this knowledge was integral to improving patient outcomes and healthcare delivery. Exploring the knowledge claims, strategies, and politics involved as academic nurses negotiated their roles and nursing's future, Dr. Nurse reveals how state-supported health centers have profoundly shaped nursing education and health care delivery.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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David J. Halperin, "Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO" (Stanford UP, 2020)

24 mars 2023 | 53 min

Gordon Barrett, "China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

23 mars 2023 | 62 min

Alvin Hall, "Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance" (HarperOne, 2023)

21 mars 2023 | 68 min

Left to Our Own Devices: A Conversation with Julia Ticona

20 mars 2023 | 80 min

The Challenge of AI to Publishing: A Discussion with Sally Wilson

18 mars 2023 | 48 min

John Miller, "The Philosophy of Tattoos" (British Library, 2021)

17 mars 2023 | 53 min

Bleddyn E. Bowen, "Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space" (Oxford UP, 2022)

17 mars 2023 | 47 min

Eric Porter, "A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport" (U California Press, 2023)

16 mars 2023 | 62 min

Computer Music and Human Computer Interaction

15 mars 2023 | 20 min

Illuminations Episode 3: Divine Technology

14 mars 2023 | 17 min

Illuminations Episode 2: Beyond Belief

13 mars 2023 | 25 min

Traveling Black, A Story of Race and Resistance: A Conversation with Mia Bay

13 mars 2023 | 52 min

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, "The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left" (Hurst, 2023)

12 mars 2023 | 76 min

During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies.

The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (Hurst, 2023) provides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which has had devastating consequences for democratic rights and the poor worldwide. As the fortunes of the richest soared, nationwide shutdowns devastated small businesses, the working classes, and the Global South’s informal economies.

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi argue that these policies grossly exacerbated existing trends of inequality, mediatisation and surveillance, with grave implications for the future. Rich in human detail, The Covid Consensus tackles head-on the refusal of the global political class and mainstream media to report the true extent of the erosion of democratic processes and the socioeconomic assault on the poor.

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the emergence of a global consensus, the abject failure of the left to hold power to account, and the sometimes fine line between critique and conspiracy theorising.

Richard Seymour’s critique of the book on Politics, Theory, Other.

Toby Green is Professor of African History at King’s College London, and author of A Fistful of Shells and The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa.

Thomas Fazi is the author and co-author of several books on economic and political issues, including Reclaiming the State. His article with Toby Green for UnHerd, The Left’s Covid Failure, was translated into ten languages. He is a regular contributor to Compact.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Jessa Lingel, "The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom" (U California Press, 2023)

12 mars 2023 | 31 min

James W. Cortada, "Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments and Businesses" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

12 mars 2023 | 53 min

Publishing Science: A Discussion with Tiffany Gasbarrini, Senior Science Editor, Johns Hopkins University Press

11 mars 2023 | 52 min

Seeing Truth in the Lab

9 mars 2023 | 36 min

Miguel Sicart, "Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture" (MIT Press, 2023)

8 mars 2023 | 62 min

Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing

7 mars 2023 | 17 min

Measure for Measure Episode 6: IQ

7 mars 2023 | 25 min

Radio Broadcasting Along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950

6 mars 2023 | 77 min

Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education

5 mars 2023 | 12 min

In this episode, Chris Gondek interviews author John Palfrey about how diversity and free expression can coexist on a modern campus.

Safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, the disinvitation of speakers, demands to rename campus landmarks—debate over these issues began in lecture halls and on college quads but ended up on op-ed pages in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, on cable news, and on social media. Some of these critiques had merit, but others took a series of cheap shots at “crybullies” who needed to be coddled and protected from the real world. Few questioned the assumption that colleges must choose between free expression and diversity. In Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces, John Palfrey argues that the essential democratic values of diversity and free expression can, and should, coexist on campus.

Palfrey, currently Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, and formerly Professor and Vice Dean at Harvard Law School, writes that free expression and diversity are more compatible than opposed. Free expression can serve everyone—even if it has at times been dominated by white, male, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied citizens. Diversity is about self-expression, learning from one another, and working together across differences; it can encompass academic freedom without condoning hate speech.

Palfrey proposes an innovative way to support both diversity and free expression on campus: creating safe spaces and brave spaces. In safe spaces, students can explore ideas and express themselves with without feeling marginalized. In brave spaces—classrooms, lecture halls, public forums—the search for knowledge is paramount, even if some discussions may make certain students uncomfortable. The strength of our democracy, says Palfrey, depends on a commitment to upholding both diversity and free expression, especially when it is hardest to do so.

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Girish Shambu, "The New Cinephilia" (Caboose, 2022)

4 mars 2023 | 46 min

Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today's "new cinephilia" and the classical cinephilia of the 1950s is the robust sociability which these new technologies have facilitated. Each activity of today's cinephilic practice - viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films - is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction facilitated by the Internet. As with their classical counterparts, the thoughts and writings of today's cinephiles are born from a vigorous and broad-ranging cinephilic conversation. Further, by dramatically lowering the economic barriers to publication, the Internet has also made possible new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models.

The New Cinephilia (Caboose, 2022) both describes and theorises how and where cinephilia lives and thrives today. In this expanded second edition, author Girish Shambu revisits some of his original ideas and calls into question the focus in cinephilia on the male canon in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the lack of racial and gender diversity in contemporary cinema. As Dr. Shambu writes:"There is more to the cinephile experience than simply surfing from one link to another in a state of perpetual motion. How does this movement - this daily proliferation of encounters - power one's cinephilia? What special affective charge does this experience hold? In other words, how is the experience of the Internet cinephile affectively different from that of a 'traditional' cinephile who spends little time online?"

In this conversation with host Annie Berke, Dr. Shambu talks working as a Professor of Management while maintaining his profile as a prolific cinephile, explains why auteurism is a "manspreading machine," and offers recommendations on what films exemplify a "cinema of the future."

Girish Shambu is Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he teaches sustainability and supply chain management. In a dual career as film blogger, critic and scholar, Girish is also the author of The New Cinephilia (Caboose, 2020, 2nd ed.) and editor of Film Quarterly’s online column Quorum. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection, Framework Journal of Film & Media, and Film Quarterly.

In addition to being a host on New Books in Film, Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television. You can read her reviews and essays at Literary Hub, Public Books, LA Review of Books, The A.V. Club, Little White Lies, Film Quarterly, and The Washington Post.

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Elizabeth T. Hurren, "Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

3 mars 2023 | 66 min

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

3 mars 2023 | 36 min

Measure for Measure Episode 1: Fathom

2 mars 2023 | 10 min

Isabel Huacuja Alonso, "Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders" (Columbia UP, 2022)

2 mars 2023 | 42 min

From news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Isabel Huacuja Alonso examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners.

Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians’ efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp. She demonstrates that the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being merely a tool of nation building in South Asia, radio created affective links that defied state agendas, policies, and borders. It forged an enduring transnational soundscape, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility.

The book traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of “radio resonance” to understand how radio relied on circuits of oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this “talk” created. By analyzing Hindi film-song radio programs, she demonstrates how radio spurred new ways of listening to cinema. Drawing on a rich collection of sources, including newly recovered recordings, listeners’ letters to radio stations, original interviews with broadcasters, and archival documents from across three continents, Radio for the Millions rethinks assumptions about how the medium connects with audiences.

Isabel Huacuja Alonso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asia, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is a historian of sound media and modern South Asia.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

2 mars 2023 | 23 min

In this episode Chris Gondek interviews Ed Finn, author of the new book What Algorithms Want. Tune in for an interesting discussion on algorithm disconnect revolving around things humans regularly use, like Siri. And listen in for a definition of the phrase "culture machines".

We depend on--we believe in--algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations--the marriage vow, the shaman's curse--do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm--in practical terms, "a method for solving a problem"--has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.

Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.

If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of "algorithmic reading" and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.

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Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (EF, JP)

2 mars 2023 | 44 min

Celeste Vaughan Curington et al., "The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance" (U California Press, 2021)

1 mars 2023 | 50 min

The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media

1 mars 2023 | 24 min

In this episode, author Ryan Milner talks to Chris Gondak about the rise of the internet meme, and the five logics that factor into the foundation, growth, and success of a meme.

Internet memes--digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection--are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations.

Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent.

For better or worse--and Milner offers examples of both--memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.

Ryan Milner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston.

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Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)

28 februari 2023 | 96 min

Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt: A Conversation with Andrew Simon

27 februari 2023 | 68 min

Bernard D. Geoghegan, "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke UP, 2023)

25 februari 2023 | 53 min

David H. Price, "The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent" (Pluto Press, 2022)

23 februari 2023 | 57 min

When the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged. Now, in our post-9/11 world, it's accepted that corporations are vested with human rights, and government agencies and corporations use computers to monitor our private lives. In The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent (Pluto Press, 2022), David H. Price pulls back the curtain to reveal how the FBI and other government agencies have always functioned as the secret police of American capitalism up to today, where they luxuriate in a near-limitless NSA surveillance of all.

Price looks through a roster of campaigns by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and corporations to understand how we got here. Starting with J. Edgar Hoover and the early FBI's alignment with business, his access to 15,000 pages of never-before-seen FBI files shines a light on the surveillance of Edward Said, Andre Gunder Frank and Alexander Cockburn, Native American communists, and progressive factory owners.

Price uncovers patterns of FBI monitoring and harassing of activists and public figures, providing the vital means for us to understand how these new frightening surveillance operations are weaponized by powerful governmental agencies that remain largely shrouded in secrecy.

David H. Price is Professor of Anthropology at Saint Martin’s University’s Department of Society and Social Justice. He is the author of a number of books on the FBI and CIA, and has written articles for The Nation, Monthly Review, CounterPunch, Guardian and Le Monde. His work has been translated into five languages.

Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus.

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Social Media Influencers and Digital Media Regulation in Vietnam

23 februari 2023 | 25 min

In 2021, a famous Vietnamese businesswoman hosted a three-hour long Facebook livestream, in which she named and shamed celebrities for their controversial public behaviours. This formed part of a regular pattern of personal attacks, in which she weaponised livestreaming to denounce media and charity organisations in front of huge online audiences. This case marked a turning point in Vietnam, forcing the government to contend with growing political activity in the online environment, and prompting new digital media regulation.

In this episode, Dr Jonathon Hutchinson joins Dr Natali Pearson to discuss this case and other examples of online socio-political activism in Vietnam, reflecting on the tension between social media influencing and digital media regulation, and highlighting its potential positive and negative effects.

About Jonathon Hutchinson:

Dr Jonathon Hutchinson is a Senior Lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University of Sydney. He is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Online News and Media Pluralism, and is also a Chief Investigator on the eSafety Commission Research project, Emerging online safety issue: co-creating social media education with young people. His research explores cultural production, public service media, cultural intermediation, everyday social media, automated media, and algorithms in media. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Policy & Internet journal and the Treasurer for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association. Dr Hutchinson is on the Board of Directors for the Wholistic World Innovation Trophy as part of the Diplomatic World Institute and is an active and regular contributor to the media. He is an award-winning author with articles in a number of national and international Scimago Q1 journals, government submissions, and his book, Cultural Intermediaries: Audience Participation and Media Organisations (2017), is published through Palgrave Macmillan.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Seeing Truth in Photographs

23 februari 2023 | 43 min

David Bond, "Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment" (U California Press, 2022)

21 februari 2023 | 68 min

So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment (U California Press, 2022) is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hydrocarbon harm that lay the groundwork for environmental science and policy, this book brings into clear focus the dialectic between the negative ecologies of fossil fuels and the ongoing discovery of the environment. Exploring iconic sites of the oil economy, ranging from leaky Caribbean refineries to deepwater oil spills, from the petrochemical fallout of plastics manufacturing to the extractive frontiers of Canada, Negative Ecologies documents the upheavals, injuries, and disasters that have long accompanied fossil fuels and the manner in which our solutions have often been less about confronting the cause than managing the effects. This history of our present promises to re-situate scholarly understandings of fossil fuels and renovate environmental critique today. David Bond challenges us to consider what forms of critical engagement may now be needed to both confront the deleterious properties of fossil fuels and envision ways of living beyond them.

David Bond is the Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action and teaches on the environment and public action. Trained as an anthropologist, Bond studies oil spills and their imprint on environmental science and governance. His work shows how toxic disruptions can fix vital relations with new forms of knowledge and care.

Cody Skahan ([email protected]) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, media and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog here where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books.

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Pete Millwood, "Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

21 februari 2023 | 70 min

Garima Garg, "Heavens and Earth: The Story of Astrology Through Ages and Cultures" (Penguin, 2023)

20 februari 2023 | 40 min

Jacob Birken, "Video Games: Digital Image Cultures" (Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2022)

19 februari 2023 | 94 min

Alan Meades, "Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade" (MIT Press, 2022)

18 februari 2023 | 55 min

The story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present.

Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications, he tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline.

Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade (MIT Press, 2022) highlights the differences between British and North American arcades, especially in terms of the complex relationship between gambling and amusements. He also underlines Britain’s role in introducing coin-operated technologies into Europe, as well as the industry’s close links to America and, especially, Japan. He shows how the British arcade is a product of centuries of public play, gambling, entrepreneurship, and mechanization. Examining the arcade’s history through technological, social, cultural, biographic, and legislative perspectives, he describes a pendulum shift between control and liberalization, as well as the continued efforts of concerned moralists to limit and regulate public play.

Finally, he recounts the impact on the industry of legislative challenges that included vicious taxation, questions of whether copyright law applied to video-game code, and the peculiar moment when every arcade game in Britain was considered a cinema.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, "Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy" (Henry Holt, 2023)

18 februari 2023 | 31 min

Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Alvarez, "Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space" (MIT Press, 2021)

18 februari 2023 | 71 min

Why technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers.

In Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space (MIT Press, 2021), Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. Technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play—in the sense of acting for one's own enjoyment rather than to achieve a goal—that we explore new territories, create new devices and languages, and transform ourselves. Only then can innovative spatial design create resonant spaces that go beyond functionalism to evoke an emotional response in those who use them.

The authors show how creativity emerges in moments of instability, when a new technology overthrows an established one, or when internal factors change a technology until it becomes a different technology. Exploring the role of fantasy in design, they examine Disney World and its outsize influence on design and on forms of social interaction beyond the entertainment world. They also consider Las Vegas and Dubai, desert cities that combine technology with fantasies of pleasure and wealth. Video games and interactive media, they show, infuse the design process with interactivity and participatory dynamics, leaving spaces open to variations depending on the users' behavior. Throughout, they pinpoint the critical moments when technology plays a key role in reshaping how we design and experience spaces.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Victor Roy, "Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines" (U California Press, 2023)

17 februari 2023 | 55 min

The Politics of Bicycling

16 februari 2023 | 91 min

99* Gael McGill Visualizes Intracellular Data (JP, GT)

16 februari 2023 | 38 min

What’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence.

For this scientific conversation taped back in 2021, Recall this Book host John is joined once again by Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (think ep 4 Madeline Miller; think ep 2 Addiction!).

You may want to check out Digizyme‘s images of the spike protein attaching the SARS-CoV2 virus to a hapless cell and fusing their membranes. Or click through to watch a gorgeous video Gael and his team have created.

Mentioned in the Episode:

Gael praised Galileo’s revolutionary images (drawings? diagrams?) of Jupiter’s moons:
Leonardo’s stunning anatomical drawings:
The DNA Double-Helix: We all knew that Watson and Crick‘s revelation came with this model: But it’s easy to forget this indispensable antecedent: the enigmatic yet foundational x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin:
“All models are wrong; some are useful.”smiley statistician George Box
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 115
And what sort of deceptive picture did Wittgenstein have in mind? well, how about the 1904 “Plum-pudding model” of what the atom might look like? Wrong, and productive of all sorts of mistaken hypotheses.
Gina credited the beautiful drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal with inspiring and illuminating generations of neuroscientists.
John credits Science in the Marketplace, an edited collection reminding us that even in crowded lecture-halls, to display science may also mean doing science…..
Gael ended his historical tour by praising David Goodsell, cell-painter extraordinaire:
John also raved (as he is wont to do) about cave paintings as the first animation in the world (e.g. these horses from Peche-Merle).

Listen and Read Here:

47 Glimpsing COVID: Gael McGill on Data Visualization

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A Primer for Teaching Digital History

16 februari 2023 | 58 min

Today’s book is: A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2022), which is a guide for those who are teaching digital history for the first time, and for experienced instructors who want to reinvigorate their pedagogy. Offering design principles for approaching digital history that represent the possibilities that digital research and scholarship can take, Dr. Jennifer Guiliano outlines potential strategies and methods for building syllabi and curricula. Taking readers through the process of selecting data, identifying learning outcomes, and determining which tools students will use in the classroom, Guiliano outlines popular research methods including digital source criticism, text analysis, and visualization. She also discusses digital archives, exhibits, and collections as well as audiovisual and mixed-media narratives such as short documentaries, podcasts, and multimodal storytelling. Throughout, Guiliano illuminates how digital history can enhance understandings of not just what histories are told but how they are told and who has access to them.

Our guest is: Dr. Jennifer Guiliano, who is a white academic living and working on the lands of the Myaamia/Miami, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Wea, and Shawnee peoples. She currently holds a position as Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty in both Native American and Indigenous Studies and American Studies at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is co-director with Trevor Muñoz of the Humanities Intensive Teaching + Learning Initiative (HILT). She is the author of Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America , and of A Primer for Teaching Digital History: 10 Design Principles . She is co-editor with Roopika Risam of Reviews in Digital Humanities, of DevDH.org with Simon Appleford, and of Digital Humanities Workshops with Laura Estill. She is also completing a co-authored work Getting Started in the Digital Humanities (Wiley & Sons).

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication, by Alex D. Ketchum
Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time: Models for Higher Education Researchers, by Adriana J. Kezar et al
Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross
What is Digital History? by Hannu Salmi
The Unessay as Native-Centered History and Pedagogy [an open journal article]
This episode on teaching about race and racism in the college classroom
This episode on From Equity Talk to Equity Walk with Dr. Tia Brown McNair
This podcast the Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education

Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy.

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Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media" (Princeton UP, 2023)

15 februari 2023 | 49 min

Lisa Haushofer, "Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition" (U California Press, 2022)

14 februari 2023 | 62 min

Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World" (Little, Brown, 2023)

14 februari 2023 | 62 min

Lee D. Baker, "From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954" (U California Press, 1998)

13 februari 2023 | 54 min

American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D

13 februari 2023 | 59 min

Bioethics, Humility, and Responsibility: A Conversation with Arthur Caplan

13 februari 2023 | 61 min

Gun-Detecting AI, Infrastructure, and Bureaucracy

12 februari 2023 | 86 min

James Raven, "The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022)

11 februari 2023 | 66 min

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope.

The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craftsmanship, dissemination, reading and debate.

Yet the history of books is not simply a question of material form, nor indeed of the history of reading and reception. The larger question is of the effect of textual production, distribution and reception - of how books themselves made history. To this end, each chapter of this volume, succinctly bounded by period and geography, offers incisive and stimulating insights into the relationship between books and the story of their times.

James Raven is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Formerly he was Reader in Social and Cultural History, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. He is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous books in early modern and modern British, European and colonial history, including Judging New Wealth (1992); The Practice and Representation of Reading (1996); The English Novel 1770-1829 (2000); Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing (2000); London Booksellers and American Customers (2002); Lost Libraries (2004); The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (2007); Books between Europe and the Americas (2011); Publishing Business (2014) and Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (2014).

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm.

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The Future of the News: A Discussion with Roger Mosey

11 februari 2023 | 34 min

Ijlal Naqvi, "Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan" (Oxford UP, 2022)

11 februari 2023 | 58 min

The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication

10 februari 2023 | 69 min

The Geopolitics of Microchips: China, the EU, and the US

10 februari 2023 | 24 min

Seeing Truth in the Archives

9 februari 2023 | 51 min

How a California Electricity Utility Caused Deadly Wildfires

8 februari 2023 | 66 min

“Tech” Journalism and the Many Lives of Stewart Brand

7 februari 2023 | 68 min

Jeremiah McCall, "Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History" (Routledge, 2022)

7 februari 2023 | 53 min

Christiaan De Beukelaer, "Trade Winds: A Sailing Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping" (Manchester UP, 2023)

5 februari 2023 | 49 min

Emily Strasser, "Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)

5 februari 2023 | 60 min

In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees—from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers—were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs.

It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world, learned the true purpose of the local industry. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project for the express purpose of developing the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Emily Strasser exposes the toxic legacy—political, environmental, and personal—that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world. Sifting through archives and family memories, and traveling to the deserts of Nevada and the living rooms of Hiroshima, she grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work. She learns that during the three decades he spent building nuclear weapons, George suffered from increasingly debilitating mental illness. Returning to Oak Ridge, Strasser confronts the widespread contamination resulting from nuclear weapons production and the government's disregard for its impact on the environment and public health. With brilliant insight, she reveals the intersections between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy within the nuclear industry, which persists, with grave consequences, to this day.

Emily Strasser: Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist’s Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow.

Cody Skahan ([email protected]) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books.

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The Promises and Perils of Hype in Science and Technology

5 februari 2023 | 73 min

The Internet, Inequality, and the “Digital Divide”

4 februari 2023 | 84 min

Thomas Poell et al., "Platforms and Cultural Production" (Polity, 2022)

4 februari 2023 | 90 min

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our co-hosts Aswin Punathambekar and Jing Wang discusses the book Platforms and Cultural Production (2021) by Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy.

You’ll hear about:

How this collaborative project came about, given each of the authors has distinct interests and disciplinary orientations;
Given the two keywords of “platforms” and “cultural production,” how did the authors make sense of these keywords in relation to broader processes of digital infrastructures and imaginaries;
How three key sections – social media, games, and journalism – were identified by the authors to explain the idea of “platformization”;
How the platforms work as multi-sided markets and the approaches to account for the dynamism and lifecycles at work in platform economies;
A discussion of Twitter as a useful case of platformization to grasp the challenges of platform governance;
Why the authors chose to specifically focus on the role and agency of cultural producers;
How to study cultural practices in various platforms across a wide variety of sociopolitical contexts in both Global North and South;
The structural inequalities of platform economies, the precarity of the platform-dependent labor market, and the efforts of cultural producers to face insecurity;
The cultural meanings of “creativity” and “authenticity” and the tension between the profit-driven platform logic and the individual search for belonging in social media such as TikTok;
The relevance of cultural production and platforms to understanding the present and future of democratic governance and civic life in the post-truth era;
The next collaborative project, such as a second volume, conferences, and research networks.

About the book

Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. You can find the book from Polity Press HERE.

Authors:

Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam, program director MA Media Studies, and director of the Research Priority Area on Global Digital Cultures.

David B. Nieborg is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough with a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information.

Brooke Erin Duffy is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she is also a member of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty.

Co-Hosts: Aswin Punathambekar is Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

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The Future of Nuclear Fusion: A Discussion with Sharon Ann Holgate

4 februari 2023 | 38 min

Amy S. Bruckman, "Should You Believe Wikipedia?: Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

3 februari 2023 | 47 min

Curtis Runstedler, "Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

3 februari 2023 | 59 min

Computers, Information, and Decision-Making

3 februari 2023 | 65 min

Horton's Cosmic Zoom: A Discussion with Zachary Horton

2 februari 2023 | 44 min

Nick Seaver, "Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

2 februari 2023 | 88 min

Inventing American Telecommunications

1 februari 2023 | 80 min

Angela Vanhaelen, "The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths" (Penn State UP, 2022)

30 januari 2023 | 50 min

Public Thinking: Social Media and the New 'Public Intellectual'

30 januari 2023 | 30 min

The History of Teletherapy

30 januari 2023 | 64 min

Peter Jones and Kristel van Ael, "Design Journeys Through Complex Systems" (Bis Publishers, 2022)

29 januari 2023 | 63 min

As I slowly settle into 2023 — reflecting on the blur that was 2022 — I can’t help but think about the complex problems (aka big messes!) we face at every turn: from increasingly devastating manifestations of the climate emergency, to the ubiquitous homelessness crisis, to the perplexing challenge of accessing a family physician in prosperous regions such as British Columbia, Canada. At the same time I am buoyed by the promise of Systems Thinking. Systems practices can take many forms and have the potential to inform — and guide us through — sensible, comprehensive and creative problem-solving.

Here on this channel, we have explored some of the origins of systems and cybernetics by talking to knowledgeable experts from across the globe. Today’s systems thinkers and practitioners are building upon a rich tradition, and are activating systems lineages in incredibly interesting ways. I’ve recently been drawn to works that highlight the application of systems — especially those with intriguing connections to other disciplines. The book that is the subject of this episode does just that by exploring the intersection of systems and design thinking. Design Journeys for Complex Systems: Practice Tools for Systemic Design (Bis Publishers, 2022) is a designer's handbook to learn systemic design tools to engage stakeholder groups in collaborative design to address complex societal systems.

Authors Peter Jones and Kristel Van Ael describe how systemic design uses systems thinking and service design to address large-scale societal contexts and complex socio-technical systems. These are contexts characterized by social and technological complexity, high uncertainty, and often problematic outcomes. They describe the function of design as “system sensemaking” and using a tour guide metaphor, the book trains people's mindsets and provides tools for dealing with hyper complexity, to enable understanding of systemic problems, and to build capacity to collaborate in teams to produce action proposals.

A little bit about the authors of Design Journeys for Complex Systems:

Dr. Peter Jones teaches systemic design and health service design in the MDes programs at Toronto’s OCAD University, is a co-founder of the Systemic Design Association. Kristel Van Ael is a business partner at Namahn, a humanity-centered design agency based in Brussels, and is lead author of the Service Design and Systemic Design toolkits.

It was a pleasure to talk to Peter and Kristel. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

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Collaborations between Cold War Scientists and Artists

29 januari 2023 | 76 min

The Future of Computer Chips: A Discussion with Julian Kamasa

28 januari 2023 | 50 min

Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 2)

28 januari 2023 | 27 min

The History of Electricity in Mexico

27 januari 2023 | 73 min

Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 1)

27 januari 2023 | 31 min

Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)

27 januari 2023 | 60 min

Virtually Violent: Are Online Attacks "Violence?"

26 januari 2023 | 24 min

Postscript: Narrative and Influence Activities in the Russo-Ukraine War

26 januari 2023 | 51 min

For almost a year now, we have been absorbing news and information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are a variety of different, or competing, narratives to explain and define what we understand about the origins of this conflict and the ongoing military successes and failures on the ground in Ukraine and in Russia. I had the chance to interview Jordan Miller for PostScript (a special series that allows scholars to comment on pressing contemporary issues) about his work on narrative and attempts to influence the activities within the field of battle in Ukraine. Miller is finishing his dissertation on this topic at the War Studies Program at the Royal Military College of Canada. Miller’s research specifically focusses on these narrative dynamics, which are influential to battlefield success and potentially the outcome of this war. In our discussion, we examine the various points of information that were being put forward by Russia and by the United States before Russia moved into Ukraine in February of 2022. The intention of this approach is to “inoculate” the public by highlighting the misleading or false narratives that will be forthcoming to try to shape global understandings of the war. As the war progressed, Ukraine also actively tried to shape perception of its own capacity, heroics, and commitment to success against Russian aggressions. We also saw a shift in approaches in the fall and winter since there was concern about the impact of energy scarcity in western Europe and in Ukraine.

Miller’s work builds on basic concepts like propaganda – and what ultimately makes this effective within situations like Ukraine, or other global military contests. As we discuss on the podcast, the images and ideas that have come out of Ukraine—of humanized citizens and soldiers, of the citizen army there that has come forward to push against the Russian war machine, of soldiers adopting cats and dogs as they continue to fight—all contribute to an overall concept of the Ukrainian people and their capacity to potentially defeat the Russian Army. Ukrainian efforts in this regard also speak to particular audiences, like NATO member countries and their citizens, the United Nations General Assembly, as well as to Russian citizens and soldiers. This kind of effort—to communicate ideas and images to key audiences is an important component of the useful implementation of narrative within the field of battle, even if it is not on the battlefield itself.

Join us for this conversation about the capacity to manage narrative within global political situations – and how this applies, in particular, the current war in Ukraine.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

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The Archaeology of Innovation

26 januari 2023 | 74 min

Engineering and Social Justice

25 januari 2023 | 72 min

Ajay Agrawal et al., "Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence" (HBR Press, 2022)

24 januari 2023 | 52 min

Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines describe what you can do to prepare. Banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, retail. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into many industries around the world. But the truth is, it has just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions to drive strategic business decisions--powering and accelerating business. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform. The disruption that comes with such transformation is yet to be felt--but it is coming. How do businesses prepare?

In Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence (HBR Press, 2022), they go further to reveal AI as a prediction technology directly impacting decision-making and to teach businesses how to identify disruptive opportunities and threats resulting from AI. Their exhaustive study of new developments in artificial intelligence and the past history of how technologies have disrupted industries highlights the striking phase we are now in: after witnessing the power of this new technology and before its widespread adoption--what they call "the Between Times." While there continue to be important opportunities for businesses, there are also threats of disruption. As prediction machines improve, old ways of doing things will be upended. Also, the process by which AI filters into the many systems involved in application is very uneven. That process will have winners and losers. How can businesses leverage, or protect, their positions? Filled with illuminating insights, rich examples, and practical advice, Power and Prediction is the must-read guide for any business leader or policy maker on how to make the coming AI disruptions work for you rather than against you.

Interviewee Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab and the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium, a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute and the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy.

He has published academic articles in marketing, statistics, law, management, medicine, political science, refugee studies, physics, computing, and economics. Avi is a former Senior Editor at Marketing Science. His work on online advertising won the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award. He testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on competition and privacy in digital advertising. His work has been referenced in White House reports, European Commission documents, the New York Times, the Economist, and elsewhere.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Climate of Denial: Why Do Americans Doubt Climate Change?

23 januari 2023 | 33 min

Amy Kohout, "Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

22 januari 2023 | 73 min

Deafness “Cures” in History

22 januari 2023 | 62 min

Trend Forecasting and the Business of the Future

21 januari 2023 | 60 min

Helen Anne Curry, "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction" (U California Press, 2022)

21 januari 2023 | 50 min

The Thought of Ivan Illich

20 januari 2023 | 86 min

Jennifer Forestal, "Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments" (Oxford UP, 2021)

19 januari 2023 | 40 min

Political Theorist Jennifer Forestal’s new book is a fascinating exploration of contemporary democracy and how it operates in different spaces. Forestal’s avenue into the question of democracy and the space in which it functions comes out of the idea of how spaces are designed and for what reasons. This idea of built environments—be they city centers in urban areas, software architecture, or the existence and width of sidewalks—contribute to how we, as individuals and community members, operate in those spaces. Forestal is paying particular attention to participatory democracy, where community members come together to solve problems collectively.

Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments (Oxford UP, 2021)weaves together the concrete, the actual spaces where we can gather together or where we are pushed apart, and the theoretical, the way democracy, as a concept, draws on the will of the people to govern themselves. In examining democratic theory, Forestal integrates work from Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Dewey, all of whom provide frameworks for thinking about and understanding interactions between individuals and the effort to share responsibility to govern in common.

Forestal unpacks the many ways that built environments guide our choices and behavior—from how the layout of a grocery store pushes us towards certain kinds of purchases, to the design of sidewalks or the absence of sidewalks as determining our public engagement or disengagement—and how this is an often overlooked or obscured exertion of power, especially political power. The power of the built environment trains us in a variety of ways, and this is an area where changing the design of the space in which we exist can also change our behavior and can shift our perspectives. Democratic theory is predicated on individuals acting together, and the space in which we do this contributes to the success of these efforts, or their fragmentation. Social media spaces are very much like the physical built environment, and Forestal examines three different social media spaces, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, exploring how they are and are not hospitable spaces for democracy.

Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments is an original analysis of how physical and virtual spaces provide individuals with barriers or openings to engagement, and how these spaces can shift our behavior and our priorities. Ultimately, democracy is an idea that must be translated by real people in real spaces and places, and how we all engage with one another is not just important, it is the basis for the implementation of this concept of self-government.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Lorraine Daston Books In Dark Times (JP)

19 januari 2023 | 34 min

BONUS EPISODE: New Books Network and Future Plans

19 januari 2023 | 13 min

Spiritual Machines: Transhumanism and Religion

19 januari 2023 | 30 min

Automating Finance

19 januari 2023 | 57 min

Shoddy: Recycled Textiles in History

18 januari 2023 | 56 min

South Korea, Technology, and Globalization

16 januari 2023 | 62 min

Infrastructure and Inequality

15 januari 2023 | 64 min

Benjamin Hegarty, "The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2022)

15 januari 2023 | 63 min

Bridget Whearty, "Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor" (Stanford UP, 2022)

14 januari 2023 | 52 min

Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor (Stanford UP, 2022) demystifies digitization, revealing what it's like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet.

Examining classic late-1990s projects like Digital Scriptorium 1.0 alongside late-2010s initiatives like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and world-famous projects created by the British Library, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Stanford University, and the Walters Art Museum against in-house digitizations performed in lesser-studied libraries, Bridget Whearty tells never-before-published narratives about globally important digital manuscript archives. Drawing together medieval literature, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and imaging sciences, Whearty shines a spotlight on the hidden expert labor responsible for today's revolutionary digital access to medieval culture. Ultimately, this book argues that centering the modern labor and laborers at the heart of digital cultural heritage fosters a more just and more rigorous future for medieval, manuscript, and media studies.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Christopher Bartel, "Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

14 januari 2023 | 48 min

The Politics of Digital Technology

14 januari 2023 | 75 min

The Future of Inequality: A Discussion with Mike Savage

13 januari 2023 | 42 min

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

13 januari 2023 | 63 min

Harald Koberg, "Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness" (Büchner-Verlag, 2021)

13 januari 2023 | 59 min

Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

12 januari 2023 | 62 min

Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022)

12 januari 2023 | 39 min

Understanding Technology Bubbles

11 januari 2023 | 78 min

Ciara Breathnach, "Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902" (Oxford UP, 2022)

10 januari 2023 | 69 min

Poverty, Race, and Rural Sanitation

10 januari 2023 | 61 min

The History of Household Technology from Open Hearth to the Microwave

9 januari 2023 | 74 min

Char Miller, "Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril" (Chin Music, 2022)

7 januari 2023 | 61 min

Albert Glinsky, "Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022)

7 januari 2023 | 71 min

Mirror Image: New Technologies and the Self

7 januari 2023 | 15 min

Lorraine Daston Rules the World (EF, JP)

5 januari 2023 | 46 min

Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022).

Historian of science Lorraine Daston's wonderful new book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022). is just out. Daston's earlier pathbreaking works include Against Nature, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and many co-authored books, including Objectivity (with Peter Galison) which introduced the idea of historically changeable "epistemic virtues."

In this Recall this Book conversation, Daston--Raine to her friends--shows that rules are never as thin (as abstract and context-free) as they pretend to be. True, we love a rule that seems to brook no exceptions: by the Renaissance, even God is no longer allowed to make exceptions in the form of miracles. Yet throughout history, Raine shows, islands of standardized stability are less stable than they seem. What may feel like oppressively general norms and standards are actually highly protected ecotopes within which thin rules can arise. Look for instance at the history of sidewalks (Raine has)!

Raine, Elizabeth and John dive into the details. Implicit and explicit rules are distinguished in the case of e.g. cookbooks and monasteries--and then the gray areas in-between are explored. When students unconsciously ape their teachers, that is a tricky form of emulation--is it even possible to "follow but not ape"? Perhaps genres do this work: The Aeneid is not the Iliad and yet older writers are somehow internalized in the later ones.

Mentioned in the Episode

Karl Polanyi, 1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on the embeddedness of markets in norms and rules.
John Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1690) denounces the "arbitrary will of another," an early case of seeing will simply qua will is unacceptable.
Arnold Davidson sees genre variation (like Milton learning from Homer) also happening in musical invention.
Michael Tomasello works on children's rule-following and enforcement against violations,
Johannes Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938) with its notion of demarcated "sacred spaces of play" is a touchstone of rule-following Lorraine and John both adore.

Recallable Books

The Rule of Saint Benedict (516 onwards)
Irma Rombauer, Joy of Cooking (1931 onwards) As Elizabeth says, it's from following the rules that joy emerges....
Walter Miller's Canticle for Liebowitz
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864) an instance of the notion that one establishes free will by caprice or defiance against natural laws ("damnit, gentleman, sometimes 2+2=5 is a nice thing too!")

Read the transcript here.

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Robert M. Geraci, "Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2021)

5 januari 2023 | 45 min

Samantha Muka, "Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

4 januari 2023 | 51 min

In Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Samantha Muka, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Stevens Institute of Technology, dives into the unexpected world of tank crafting. Throughout the book, Muka tells the stories behind the development of various kinds of aquariums, such as photography tanks and reef tanks. She explains how the knowledge and ingenuity of a variety of actors have been contributing to furthering our knowledge of oceanic environments. The myriad of technical and technological challenges that arise when attempting to maintain aquatic species in artificial environments has been the source of at least as many experiments in tank tinkering.

Focusing on aquariums as complex, situated, and constantly evolving technological devices, Muka shows how the production of knowledge about the ocean depends on interactions between communities holding different knowledge, expertise, and interests: public aquarists, academic researchers, and hobbyists. Analyzing the “craft circulation” between these three groups, the author provides us with a dynamic picture that challenges a series of assumptions on how scientific knowledge is and can be produced.

More than a history and sociology of tank craft, Oceans under Glass offers a meditation on the necessity of aquariums and their artificiality not only to learn about the ocean, but also to preserve some of their biodiversity. “Imagined worlds”, as Muka puts it, aquariums should also be understood as critical places where our future relationship to the oceans, for better and for worst, is being shaped.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is teaching the Humanities and French language to undergraduates.

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Why are Insects so Scary? On Insects in Films.

3 januari 2023 | 43 min

John P. Gluck, "Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

3 januari 2023 | 78 min

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh the costs of the traumatic effects on the animals; but today, even the researchers themselves have come to question the practice. John P. Gluck has been one of the scientists at the forefront of the movement to end research on primates, and in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey (U Chicago Press, 2016) he tells a vivid, heart-rending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist for animal protection.

Gluck begins by taking us inside the laboratory of Harry F. Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, where Gluck worked as a graduate student in the 1960s. Harlow’s primate lab became famous for his behavioral experiments in maternal deprivation and social isolation of rhesus macaques. Though trained as a behavioral scientist, Gluck finds himself unable to overlook the intense psychological and physical damage these experiments wrought on the macaques. Gluck’s sobering and moving account reveals how in this and other labs, including his own, he came to grapple with the uncomfortable justifications that many researchers were offering for their work. As his sense of conflict grows, we’re right alongside him, developing a deep empathy for the often smart and always vulnerable animals used for these experiments.

At a time of unprecedented recognition of the intellectual cognition and emotional intelligence of animals, Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals is a powerful appeal for our respect and compassion for those creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Through the words of someone who has inflicted pain in the name of science and come to abhor it, it’s important to know what has led this far to progress and where further inroads in animal research ethics are needed.

John P. Gluck is professor emeritus of psychology and a senior advisor to the president on animal research ethics and welfare at the University of New Mexico. He is also research professor of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and coauthor of The Human Use of Animals.

Callie Smith is a poet and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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Donovan O. Schaefer, "Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin" (Duke UP, 2022)

2 januari 2023 | 73 min

Paul Nelles and Rosa Salzberg, "Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World: The Practice and Experience of Movement" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)

2 januari 2023 | 33 min

Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022)

2 januari 2023 | 81 min

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez discusses the book The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (2022) by Dr. Lilie Chouliaraki and Dr. Myria Georgiou.

You’ll hear about:

What The Digital Border is about, its importance, and its implication;
How the authors’ previous works helped build the foundation for writing this book collaboratively;
Why and how the authors chose to focus on specific forms of media such as social media and journalism;
A discussion of humanitarian securitization vis a vis entrepreneurial securitization;
How to understand the theoretical shift from the “crisis of migration” to the “crisis of responsibility”;
How do we contend the different temporalities of resistance as various actors produce or respond to border technologies and infrastructures;
As the displacement of people are intensifying, what frameworks and toolkits can be useful for us to rethink global migration against the “crisis of imaginary” (imaginary as a representational framework that people normatively think about certain issues);
What are the futures of globalization and its counter movements in Global North from the perspectives of migration and bordering;
What are the areas the authors wish to further explore in the future.

About the book

What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. You can find this book on the NYU Press website.

Authors:

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director.

Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director.

Host: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he researches and teaches global media cultures, digital technologies, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American media.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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Felicity M. Turner, "Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2022)

1 januari 2023 | 65 min

Ethical AI

31 december 2022 | 23 min

Seeing Truth in Picturing the Pandemic:

29 december 2022 | 67 min

Ed Cohen, "On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know" (Duke UP, 2022)

28 december 2022 | 85 min

Luke Munn, "Automation Is a Myth" (Stanford UP, 2022)

27 december 2022 | 67 min

Sayan Dey, "Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems" (Routledge, 2022)

26 december 2022 | 44 min

Mariëlle Wijermars et al., "The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

24 december 2022 | 56 min

How has digitalisation changed Russian politics? How has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed Russia studies? What is special about Russia’s approach to algorithmic governance and internet control? Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics from Maastricht University, Mariëlle Wijermars, talks about her ongoing research on Russian politics, internet policy and platform governance.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Mariëlle Wijermars also talks about The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies. This open-access handbook was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020 and was edited by Mariëlle together with Daria Gritsenko and Mikhail Kopotev.

This handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization.

Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars is an Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She is currently a CORE Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where she researches internet freedom and the human rights’ implications of internet policy and platform governance, in particular in authoritarian states.

You can connect with Mariëlle Wijermars on Twitter @Marielle_W_ and on Mastodon @[email protected].

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or on Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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Neurasthenia

23 december 2022 | 18 min

Geert Lovink, "Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism" (Pluto Press, 2019)

22 december 2022 | 60 min

John D. Wong, "Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s-1998" (Harvard UP, 2022)

22 december 2022 | 44 min

On July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor.

Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong Kong’s aviation, as told in Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s–1998 (Harvard University Press, 2022) by John D. Wong and published by Harvard University Press.

Hong Kong’s growth as a hub for commercial aviation was often unplanned, often the result of compromise–and yet wildly successful. The city was able to carve a niche for itself, in both the declining British empire and the wider world, while also having to deal with colonial bureaucracy, geopolitics, fierce competition and an entirely new Communist government across the border.

In this interview, John and I talk about Hong Kong’s history with aviation, from its very start with flying boats and puddlejumpers right through to the jumbo jet era.

John D. Wong is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong. He is also the author of Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hong Kong Takes Flight. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Heather Ford, "Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age" (MIT Press, 2022)

21 december 2022 | 59 min

Jenny L. Davis, "How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things" (MIT Press, 2020)

20 december 2022 | 39 min

A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective.

Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things (MIT Press, 2020), offers a useful analytical tool in technology studies—but, Jenny L. Davis argues in How Artifacts Afford, it is in need of a conceptual update. Davis provides just such an update, introducing the mechanisms and conditions framework, which offers both a vocabulary and necessary critical perspective for affordance analyses.

The mechanisms and conditions framework shifts the question from what objects afford to how objects afford, for whom, and under what circumstances. Davis shows that through this framework, analyses can account for the power and politics of technological artifacts. She situates the framework within a critical approach that views technology as materialized action. She explains how request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow are mechanisms of affordance, and shows how these mechanisms take shape through variable conditions—perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy.

Putting the framework into action, Davis identifies existing methodological approaches that complement it, including critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), app feature analysis, and adversarial design. In today's rapidly changing sociotechnical landscape, the stakes of affordance analyses are high. Davis's mechanisms and conditions framework offers a timely theoretical reboot, providing tools for the crucial tasks of both analysis and design.

Jenny L. Davis is Associate Professor of Sociology at Australian National University.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Renee M. P. Teate, "SQL for Data Scientists: A Beginner's Guide for Building Datasets for Analysis" (John Wiley & Sons, 2021)

19 december 2022 | 43 min

Economists and other social scientists are used to working with data that comes nicely organized into a table with a series of variable names across the top and a list of observations or datapoints down the right hand side. Data also naturally falls into this format when it comes from surveys we run. But the vast amounts of data generated by businesses and by all our online activities are usually organized in different ways. In corporate settings that first step of getting the right data and putting it into a table where it can be analyzed can be as important and challenging as the subsequent analyses. SQL (Structured Query Language) has been the standard language for accessing information in databases since the 1980s.

In this episode I interview Renee Teate, also known as “Data Science Renee” on Twitter, about her new book, SQL for Data Scientists: A Beginner’s Guide for Building Datasets for Analysis (Wiley, 2022). I learned about Renee from her popular blog and podcast, “Becoming a Data Scientist,” in which she talked about the paths she and others took to becoming a data scientist. While she was coming from more of an engineering background, many economists have been becoming data scientists from the other direction. They are building up their skills with databases and programming to complement their statistical and social science training, either because of new jobs in the tech sector or because of the new academic research possibilities this opens up. SQL is a crucial part of this toolkit, and this book is a great way to get started learning it.

In our conversation, we also discuss her current role as a lead data scientist at higher education analytics company Heliocampus, and some of her tips for aspiring data scientists as they apply for and interview for their first jobs.

Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he created a new Master’s degree in Applied Economics designed specifically to train students in a combination of economics and data science skills that equips them to succeed in the new digital economy.

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Pamela H. Smith, "From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

19 december 2022 | 62 min

Danielle Keats Citron, "The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age" (Norton, 2022)

17 december 2022 | 36 min

The Future of the Arms Industry: A Discussion with Pieter D. Wezeman

17 december 2022 | 46 min

Kelly I. Aliano, "The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture Through Play" (McFarland, 2022)

17 december 2022 | 42 min

Shelley Fraser Mickle, "Borrowing Life: How Scientists, Surgeons, and a War Hero Made the First Successful Organ Transplant a Reality" (Imagine, 2020)

17 december 2022 | 62 min

Michael Weeks, "Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)

17 december 2022 | 84 min

In 1870 several hundred settlers arrived at a patch of land at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre Rivers in Colorado Territory. Their planned agricultural community, which they named Greeley, was centered around small landholdings, shared irrigation, and a variety of market crops. One hundred years later, Greeley was the home of the world’s largest concentrated cattle-feeding operation, with the resources of an entire region directed toward manufacturing beef. How did that transformation happen? Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado (U Nebraska Press, 2022) is animated by that question.

Expanding outward from Greeley to all of northern Colorado, Cattle Beet Capital shows how the beet sugar industry came to dominate the region in the early twentieth century through a reciprocal relationship with its growers that supported a healthy and sustainable agriculture while simultaneously exploiting tens of thousands of migrant laborers. Michael Weeks shows how the state provided much of the scaffolding for the industry in the form of tariffs and research that synchronized with the agendas of industry and large farmers. The transformations that led to commercial feedlots began during the 1930s as farmers replaced crop rotations and seasonal livestock operations with densely packed cattle pens, mono-cropped corn, and the products pouring out of agro-industrial labs and factories. Using the lens of the northern Colorado region, Cattle Beet Capital illuminates the historical processes that made our modern food systems.

Michael Weeks is a lecturer of history at Utah Valley University.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB. MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or Department of Defense.

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Matthew Hall et al., "Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations" (Routledge, 2022)

16 december 2022 | 71 min

This groundbreaking book argues that the fundamental issues around how victim-survivors of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSVs) are abused can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics, constructions, positioning and logics. Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations (Routledge, 2022) builds upon Hall and Hearn's previous work, Revenge Pornography, but has been substantially reworked to examine other forms of DGSV such as upskirting and sexual deepfakes, as well as the latest research and debates in the field.

Facilitated by developments in internet and mobile technologies, the non-consensual posting of real or fake sexually explicit images of others for revenge, entertainment, homosocial status or political leverage has become a global phenomenon. Using discourse and thematic analytical approaches, this text examines digital, survey and interview data on gendered sexual violences, abuses, and violations. The words of both the perpetrators and victim-survivors are presented, showing the impact on victim-survivors and the complex ways in which phallocentric power relations and existing hegemonic masculinities are reinforced and invoked by perpetrators to position girls and women as gendered and sexualised commodities to be traded, admired, violated or abused for the needs of individual men or groups of men.

Hall, Hearn, and Lewis explore their research in a broader social and political context, evaluating and suggesting changes to existing legislative frameworks, education, victim support, and practical and policy interventions against DGSV, along with wider political considerations. This is a unique resource for students, academics and researchers as well as professionals dealing with issues around digital gender-sexual violations.

Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their latest book: The Other #MeToos. Follow them on Twitter.

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Samuel J. Redman, "Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums" (Harvard UP, 2022)

15 december 2022 | 47 min

Seeing Truth in Variability, Creativity, and Building Biological Collections

15 december 2022 | 44 min

Karen Levy, "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" (Princeton UP, 2022)

15 december 2022 | 34 min

Yasmine Ali, "Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America" (Citadel Press, 2023)

14 december 2022 | 44 min

The first book to examine the rarely-acknowledged Waverly Train Disaster of 1978 - the catastrophic accident that changed America forever and led to the formation of FEMA.

Coinciding with the 45th anniversary of the event, Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America (Citadel Press, 2023) is a tribute to the first responders, as well as an examination of the strengths and vulnerabilities in rural America. On the night of February 22, 1978, a devastating freight train derailment drastically altered Waverly, Tennessee, and its place in history. This was one of the worst train explosions of the twentieth century, killing 16 people, injuring hundreds more, and causing millions of dollars in damage. What could have been dismissed as a single community's terrible misfortune instead became the catalyst for radical change, including the formation of FEMA, much-needed reforms in emergency response training, and the creation and enforcement of national and state safety regulations. Response to the disaster reshaped American infrastructure and laid the groundwork for the future of emergency management and disaster relief . . . and yet most Americans have never heard of Waverly.

Dr. Yasmine S. Ali, an award-winning medical writer and Waverly native, sets out to change this in Walk Through Fire, drawing from over a decade of meticulous research and interviews with survivors, first responders, and other firsthand accounts, including those of her own parents, first-generation Americans who were on call at the local hospital that treated the victims. Ali weaves a compelling narrative of small-town tragedy set against the broader backdrop of U.S. railroad history, rural healthcare, and other elements of American infrastructure that played a part in the creation--and the aftermath--of the Disaster. A tribute to resiliency and a call to action, Walk Through Fire tells the harrowing story of the Waverly Train Disaster from the perspectives of those who survived it, and those who still feel its impact today, illuminating how much a nation still has to learn from one small town in Tennessee.

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Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)

13 december 2022 | 40 min

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. This book helps foreign countries, companies, and other organizations prepare for a future shaped by sustainability, technology—and a dramatic new chapter for China and our world.

Sample takeaways:

China-linked political + economic risk isn’t going away and will get worse. No-regrets supply chain diversification will only make more sense over time.
Environmental sustainability will become a bigger and bigger priority in the China market because of growing regulatory + consumer pressure. This is both in direct operations & larger supply chains.
Data privacy, security, and surveillance will pose growing dilemmas for multi-national companies. Data governance is becoming more fragmented, and compliance and cross-border transfer more difficult. Firms need to prepare for “data de-globalization.”
China is becoming a more isolated, but still large & important, innovation ecosystem. How to access & leverage this ecosystem, and the talent within it, will become a bigger challenge as China-global research collaborations, student flows, etc. shrink.
China’s frothy biotech sector is cooling, but will still be a major growth driver in the years ahead. And developments in biotech will disrupt and reshape many sectors and industries via biometrics, biomaterials, etc.

Dr. Scott Moore is an acclaimed authority on China, sustainability, and technology whose career has spanned the U.S. government, multi-lateral institutions, and academia. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives. Before returning to academia, Dr. Moore worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change at the U.S. Department of State and at the World Bank. He graduated from Princeton University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), distinguished professor of history at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

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Jacalyn Duffin, "Covid-19: A History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

12 december 2022 | 73 min

Barbara Katz Rothman, "The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic" (Stanford UP, 2021)

11 december 2022 | 53 min

We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity—drivers of our access to basic goods and services—rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. Moreover, a vast and powerful global market has risen up around the empire, making it one of the largest economic forces in the world.

In The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic (Stanford UP, 2021), Katz Rothman shows that biomedicine has the key elements of an imperial power: economic leverage, the faith of its citizens, and governmental rule. She investigates the Western colonial underpinnings of the empire and its rapid intrusion into everyday life, focusing on the realms of birth and death. This provides her with a powerful vantage point from which to critically examine the current moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the power structures of the empire in unprecedented ways while sparking the most visible resistance it has ever seen.

Barbara Katz Rothman is Professor of Sociology, at the City University of New York. She has served as President of Sociologists for Women in Society; the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. Her awards include the Jesse Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association, and an award for "Midwifing the Movement" from the Midwives Alliance of North America, and a distinguished Chair in Health Sciences from the Fulbright Association. She is the author of numerous books, most recently A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization (2016).

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Matthew Thaler, "No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

10 december 2022 | 68 min

Nancy J. Nersessian, "Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science" (MIT Press, 2022)

10 december 2022 | 69 min

Julia Ticona, "Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2022)

9 december 2022 | 53 min

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Florence Madenga discusses the book Left to Our Own Devices

Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (2022) by Dr. Julia Ticona.

You’ll hear about:

Dr. Ticona’s intellectual trajectory and how her first monograph has been transformed from a dissertation project into a book
What audience the book is intended for and what critical scholarship means for the author
The design of the research project and the processes and ethics of conducting research about the gig economy
How the ongoing pandemic has changed or altered the way Dr. Ticona thinks about this book
The core arguments and take-away points from the book around keywords such as “digital inequality,” “precarity,” “platform economy,” and “digital hustle”
The global implications of a study on low-wage gig economy workers in the American labor market
The question of agency in workers’ everyday life and how people survive in the global platform economy
The gendered nature of labor in the gig economy and what Dr. Ticona calls “tethered care work”
How we can better understand the complexity of our mediated worlds and precarious work beyond the tech companies and digital platforms

About the book

Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

You can find this book on the Oxford University Press website.

Author: Julia Ticona is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Host: Florence Madenga is a doctoral fellow at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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The Future of AI in Work: A Discussion with Daniel Susskind

9 december 2022 | 52 min

Dan Bouk, "Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them" (MCD, 2022)

8 december 2022 | 58 min

Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

8 december 2022 | 65 min

Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), addresses scholars and readers interested in literary studies, visual culture, and transformative justice in modern America. The book also transcends these areas to speak to readers in science & technology studies, in history of technology, or broadly interested in science justice.

The premise of the book is that America was living through two collective experiments as it suffered the aftermath of the failed Reconstruction following the US Civil War. The first was the experiment of Black freedom and the second was the experiment of new technologies to document (Black) life at a time when standards for how to use and to read their outputs were excitingly wide-open. In the hands of Black cultural producers, the yield of these technologies was “undisciplined data,” which pointed to the possibility of true freedom not mere social reform as defined by White progressives.

Readers follow writer Zora Neale Hurston working with anthropological film, WEB Dubois working with the social survey as a foundation for his urban sociology as well as for his literary novels, and other historical actors who were using documentary technologies to demonstrate the impossibility of capturing the fullness of Black sociality with those very technologies. Producing “undisciplined data,” Womack suggests, is not only a practice of the past, but the hope for greater justice in the present day.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Science & Technology Studies.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: [email protected].

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James A. Geraghty, "Inside the Orphan Drug Revolution: The Promise of Patient-Centered Biotechnology" (Cold Springs Harbor Lab Press, 2022)

6 december 2022 | 43 min

Advances in medicine have made possible better treatments for widespread, familiar human illnesses like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Yet there are thousands of much less common diseases, most of genetic origin, each classed as rare because it afflicts only a small number of people. These patient groups were long ignored by a pharmaceutical industry that judged them too small to provide a return on the investment needed to develop an effective remedy. Yet these orphaned diseases collectively caused misery and expense, often far greater than did more common ailments, for tens of millions of individuals and their families.

Forty years ago, a revolution that transformed the prospects of patients with rare diseases was lit by three sparks. The passage of the 1983 U.S. Orphan Drug Act resulted from public pressure brought by rare disease patients, their families, and advocates. The AIDS epidemic triggered additional activism, compounded when patients with the rare disease hemophilia became HIV-positive after infusion of tainted blood products. And the third spark was the emergence in the early 1980s of biotechnology companies like Genentech, Amgen, and Biogen employing then-new genetic engineering instead of conventional approaches to pharmaceutical development. Soon after, Genzyme became the first company to develop a treatment for a rare genetic disorder, Gaucher disease, which would come to transform the industry.

Jim Geraghty has been a passionate participant in the orphan drug revolution since its inception--a leader in the field as a strategy consultant, biotechnology executive, and venture entrepreneur. Inside the Orphan Drug Revolution: The Promise of Patient-Centered Biotechnology (Cold Springs Harbor Lab Press, 2022) is in part a history, with eyewitness accounts of advances as they occurred and portraits of the pioneering scientists and physicians, tireless activists, and visionary business leaders who made the revolution happen. And it tells deeply personal stories of patients and parents willing to risk new, untried therapies. But Geraghty also uses his exceptional experience and vantage point to look forward to the immense promise of the newest technologies like gene therapy and gene editing for the treatment of patients today and tomorrow. He concludes with thoughtful consideration of important questions. Why do drugs to treat orphan diseases cost so much? How can we ensure they are affordable? How can their effectiveness be responsibly assessed? And how can access to them be expanded internationally? This book graphically and poignantly illustrates how far an important healthcare revolution has come and reminds us that if not nurtured, it could end before its immense promise has been fulfilled.

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Melissa Kagen, "Wandering Games" (MIT Press, 2022)

4 december 2022 | 53 min

Huw J. Davies, "The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War" (Yale UP, 2022)

1 december 2022 | 73 min

Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)

1 december 2022 | 79 min

94 Elizabeth Kolbert on the Nature of the Future (GT, JP, NS, HY)

1 december 2022 | 46 min

How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide underground.

"You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel called to some kind of action when you see what we humans have done." But Elizabeth wonders what the best alternatives are. Should we set aside half the earth for biodiversity? Why is it that genetic engineering has become the cultural flashpoint for fear of unintended consequences? There are no easy answers at this point. Elizabeth thinks that if you're not frightened by what's going right now, including American politics around vaccination refusal, you're not paying attention.

Because this episode is associated with the annual Brandeis New Student Book Forum, first-year students Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman (who also goes by Nidhi) jump in with some thoughts.

Noticing repeated mentions of Henry David Thoreau in the book, Nidhi inquires about his role in inspiring Elizabeth's writing. Hedy's question about environmental justice and the comparative agency of rich and poor countries moves Elizabeth to talk about the staggering inequities in consumption and the goal of convergence in carbon emissions. What is the mechanism by which this happens, though? Do humans have the right to implement these technologies? Is the solution to issues created by human control really more control?

Mentioned in the Episode

E.O. Wilson, Half Earth
"Gene editing could revive a nearly lost tree"; the chestnut gene splicing debate in a recent Washington Post article. (Elizabeth has reported on Bill Powell's work)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Cli-fi: climate fiction in all its bleakness. For example, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence: how to see things happening at different time scales.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
Henry David Thoreau, "the touchstone" of American nature writing. e.g Walden (1854); dated yes, but "in most ways ahead of his time"
Des Poissons dans le Desert: Elizabeth's book title in French!

Listen to the episode here.

Read the transcript here.

Special credit and thanks for this episode goes to Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman, who took part in the audio editing and the preparation of the show notes, respectively.

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Sofya Glazunova, "Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

30 november 2022 | 47 min

Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz, "The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

30 november 2022 | 50 min

Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021)

29 november 2022 | 66 min

Michael Bess, "Planet in Peril: Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

29 november 2022 | 50 min

Tim Walker and Lucian Morris, "The Handbook of Banking Technology" (John Wiley & Sons, 2021)

28 november 2022 | 82 min

Joseph Silk, "Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind" (Princeton UP, 2022)

28 november 2022 | 36 min

Christopher Willoughby, "Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools" (UNC Press, 2022)

24 november 2022 | 53 min

Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back" (Beacon Press, 2022)

23 november 2022 | 47 min

Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both.

In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back (Beacon, 2022), scholar Dr. Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.

By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.

In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.

Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away—before it’s too late.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Ann-Christine Duhaime, "Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2022)

22 november 2022 | 59 min

Why is it so difficult to adopt a more sustainable way of life, even when convinced of the urgency of the environmental crisis? If adopting new behaviors beneficial for the environment is so challenging at the individual level, no wonder it is even harder at the community or governmental levels. Seeing individual and collective behaviors not changing, or not rapidly enough, eventually leads to the belief that nothing can be done and that human beings are just “hard-wired” that way.

This is where, quite unexpectedly, neuroscience can help us tackle the multidimensional and unprecedented problem that is the environmental crisis. In Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime argues that by considering the long evolutionary history of the human brain and its reward-system, one can better understand, and therefore grow less frustrated about, why adopting sustainable behaviors can be so challenging. “Our brains are amazing," writes Dr. Duhaime, "– fine-tuned, capable, adaptable, to handle the incredible tasks of human life in its infinite variety and with its infinite day-to-day challenges. […] But there is a mismatch between the pace of evolution of this extraordinary able, pulsating, three-pound bundle of sparks and what we need to meet the challenge of this extraordinary rapid Age of the Anthropocene.”

It is this mismatch that Dr. Duhaime proposes to analyze in this surprising book. Using insights provided by research at the intersection of neuroscience, environmental sciences and a number of other fields, Minding the Climate invites us to think about what a “sustainable brain” might look like and how to achieve it.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Aynne Kokas, "Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty" (Oxford UP, 2022)

22 november 2022 | 55 min

On August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese government refused to let Bytedance sell TikTok on national security grounds. As it turns out, the pandemic era platform for dance challenges is a Chinese government asset.

As digital technologies and social media have evolved into organizing forces for the way in which we conduct our work and social lives, the business logic that undergirds these digital platforms has become clear: we are their product. We give these businesses information about everything--from where we live and work to what we like to do for entertainment, what we consume, where we travel, what we think politically, and with whom we are friends and acquaintances. We do this willingly, but often without a full understanding of how this information is stored or used, or what happens to it when it crosses international boundaries. As Aynne Kokas argues, both corporations and governments traffic much of this data without our consent--and sometimes illegally--for political and financial gain.

In Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2022), Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens, putting US national security at risk. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fuelled China's technological goldrush. In turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Probability

22 november 2022 | 18 min

Anna Pendergrast and Kelly Pendergrast, "More Zeros and Ones: Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand" (Bridget Williams Books, 2022)

21 november 2022 | 55 min

Robert P. Crease with Peter D. Bond, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022)

18 november 2022 | 55 min

Plumbing the Depths of Wikipedia: A Conversation with Annie Rauwerda

17 november 2022 | 33 min

Adam Laats, "Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2020)

16 november 2022 | 31 min

Anita Guerrini, "Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

16 november 2022 | 63 min

Experimentation on animals—particularly humans—is often assumed to be a uniquely modern phenomenon. But the ideas and attitudes that encourage biological and medical scientists to experiment on living creatures date from the earliest expressions of Western thought. In Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) (Johns Hopkins UP), Anita Guerrini looks at the history of these practices and examines the philosophical and ethical arguments that justified them.

Guerrini discusses key historical episodes in the use of living beings in science and medicine, including the discovery of blood circulation, the development of smallpox and polio vaccines, and recent research in genetics, ecology, and animal behavior. She also explores the rise of the antivivisection movement in Victorian England, the modern animal rights movement, and current debates over gene therapy and genetically engineered animals. We learn how perceptions and understandings of human and animal pain have changed; how ideas of class, race, and gender have defined the human research subject; and that the ethical values of science seldom stray far from the society in which scientists live and work.

Thoroughly rewritten and updated, with new material in every chapter, the book emphasizes a broader understanding of experimentation and adds material on gene therapy, self-experimentation, and prisoners and slaves as experimental subjects. A new chapter brings the story up to the present while reflecting on the current regulatory scene, new developments in science, and emerging genomics. Experimenting with Humans and Animals offers readers a context within which to understand more fully the responsibility we all bear for the suffering inflicted on other living beings in the name of scientific knowledge.

Anita Guerrini is a historian of science and medicine, recently retired as Horning Professor in the Humanities at Oregon State University, where she's been since 2008. Before that she was a professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was educated at Connecticut College and Oxford University and received a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University.

Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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Janaki Srinivasan, "The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India" (MIT Press, 2022)

15 november 2022 | 68 min

The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India (MIT Press, 2022), written by Janaki Srinivasan and published by MIT Press in October 2022, examines how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications of this for development. Information, says Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice.

In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change.

Countering claims that information is naturally and universally empowering, Srinivasan shows how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender. Srinivasan draws on archival and ethnographic research to challenge the idea of information as objective and factual. Using the concept of an “information order,” she examines how the meaning and value of information reflect the social relations in which it is embedded. She asks why casting information as a tool of development and solution to poverty appeals to actors across the political spectrum. She also shows how the power to label some things information and others not is at least as significant as the capacity to subsequently produce, access, and leverage information.

The more faith we place in what information can do, she cautions, the less attention we pay to its political lives and to the role of specific social structures, individual agency, and material form in the defining, production, and use of that information.

Janaki Srinivasan is Associate Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, in Bangalore, India.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Matthew Crain, "Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

15 november 2022 | 42 min

The contemporary internet's de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising.

The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences of the internet's rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous business model called "surveillance advertising." He draws on a range of primary resources from government, industry, and the press and highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial surveillance.

The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is the result of political choices--not the inevitable march of technology. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google and Facebook, Profit over Privacy argues that the internet did not have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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The Future of Data Control: A Discussion with Sarah Lamdan

15 november 2022 | 50 min

On H. G. Well's "The Time Machine"

15 november 2022 | 37 min

Ernest M. Valea, "Artificial Intelligence, Reincarnation, and Resurrection: An Inquiry Into the Ultimate Fulfillment of Human Nature" (Resource Publications, 2021)

14 november 2022 | 44 min

Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto, "(Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media" (Oxford UP, 2022)

14 november 2022 | 30 min

Sofi Thanhauser, "Worn: A People's History of Clothing" (Vintage, 2022)

11 november 2022 | 53 min

Karen Bakker, "The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants" (Princeton UP, 2022)

11 november 2022 | 56 min

Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish, "Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

10 november 2022 | 51 min

Sarah E. Wagner, "What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home from the Vietnam War" (Harvard UP, 2019)

10 november 2022 | 67 min

For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans— and more than 300,000 Vietnamese—involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home from the Vietnam War (Harvard UP, 2019), Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America’s missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America’s most fraught war.

Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.

Sarah Wagner is Professor of Anthropology at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University. Professor Wagner is a social anthropologist whose research explores loss through the lens of war, memory, prolonged mourning, and uncertain death. Studying forensic responses to missing persons, she has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Bosnia and Herzegovina and with the US military, including in Vietnam, in its attempts to account for the Missing In Action (MIA) from the past century's conflicts. Since 2020, she has focused on COVID-19 death and remembrance.

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Veronica Kirin, "Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don't" (2018)

9 november 2022 | 55 min

Andrew Fiss, "Performing Math: A History of Communication and Anxiety in the American Mathematics Classroom" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

9 november 2022 | 45 min

The Future of Rules: A Discussion with Lorraine Daston

8 november 2022 | 36 min

Gerd Gigerenzer, "How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms" (MIT Press, 2022)

3 november 2022 | 67 min

Timothy W. Burns, "Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education" (SUNY Press, 2021)

3 november 2022 | 111 min

There are few thinkers who engender as much debate about their legacy as Leo Strauss (1899 –1973). His critics and biographers often don’t even agree about what scholarly discipline he practiced. Political theory or philosophy? Was he a proto-neoconservative or a middle-of-the-road Cold War defender of liberal democracy? He is often depicted as a major intellectual influence on sections of the national security state right, especially during the presidency of George W. Bush when he was portrayed as a puppeteer pulling from the grave the strings of such notable hawks as Paul Wolfowitz.

But the writings of Strauss often go unexamined. That is partly because they lean towards the abstruse. Strauss was not a general-audience-friendly public intellectual in his day and much of the homage to and attacks on him at this point are to be found in the pages of academic journals and in the halls of think tanks.

We are fortunate, therefore, that we can turn to the 2021 book, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education by Timothy W. Burns for elucidation of Strauss's thinking about how we can preserve liberal democracy in the face of apathy from moderates, classical liberals and traditional conservatives flummoxed by the rise of an aggressive left that questions whether the United States is a democracy at all and an alienated alt-right that regards liberal democracy as now practiced as a character-sapping anachronism leading to civilizational decline.

We learn from Burns of Strauss's admiration for Winston Churchill and touting of him as an exemplar of greatness within democracy. In one of the most absorbing sections of the book we learn of a 1941 lecture by Strauss entitled, “German Nihilism” in which he examined the arguments of such groups as rightist German students in the 1920s that liberal democracy fostered moral mediocrity.

Burns contrasts in detail the ideas of Strauss and Martin Heidegger and shows that Strauss foresaw that the other man’s emphasis on resoluteness would metastasize into Heidegger’s support for Nazism. Burns tells us that Strauss can speak to us today via his call to defend democratic constitutionalism and its spiritual and religious traditions.

That call can lead to charges of elitism against Strauss because it entailed his championing of the idea of an “aristocracy within democracy,” a cadre of cultivated, well-educated leaders who would help maintain the intellectual and cultural moorings of democracies.

Let’s hear now from Professor Burns about who Leo Strauss was and what he actually wrote and thought.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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David Kaiser, "Well, Doc, You're In: Freeman Dyson’s Journey through the Universe" (MIT Press, 2022)

2 november 2022 | 70 min

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson’s roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.

"Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson’s Journey through the Universe (MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman’s remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson’s life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson’s colleagues—trace Dyson’s formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson’s innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson’s daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You’re In” assesses Dyson’s successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist’s outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas.

Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.

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Brian A. Wong, "The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That Is Changing the World" (PublicAffairs, 2022)

1 november 2022 | 64 min

This podcast features Brian A. Wong, discussing his new book, The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That is Changing the World (Public Affairs, 2022). Brian joined Alibaba early, as its 52nd employee and first American employee, and worked for them for nearly twenty years. His book provides both insider insights and an analytical perspective on how Alibaba grew to become one of the most important companies in the global digital economy. This well-written and engaging book explains Alibaba’s unique organizational culture and how the Alibaba platform has helped spread economic opportunity beyond the elites in China’s big cities to the broader world of small and medium businesses throughout the country.

Brian Wong’s Radii China is an independent media platform founded in 2017 dedicated to bridging the East and West by highlighting topics and issues that connect the world’s young, globally-minded citizens. Listeners interested in the development of the US-China relationship are encouraged to participate in the NCUSCR’s CHINA Town Hall, on November 17th, featuring a national webcast by former Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. Local partner events around the US, including one at the University of San Francisco, provide opportunities to discuss the topic further in person with other community members and local experts on China. In the interview, we also discuss Benjamin Ho’s book Why Trust Matters, featured on this show last year.

Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China and he is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) and USF’s new Center on Business Studies and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific.

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Chris Salter, "Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life" (MIT Press, 2022)

1 november 2022 | 77 min

Ashley Sweetman, "Cyber and the City: Securing London’s Banks in the Computer Age" (Springer, 2022)

1 november 2022 | 51 min

Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, "Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing)" (MIT Press, 2022)

31 oktober 2022 | 65 min

Darts Transit Commission: Silicon Valley’s Car Culture

31 oktober 2022 | 47 min

Sian E. Harding, "The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart" (MIT Press, 2022)

31 oktober 2022 | 67 min

Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly, "Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry" (MIT Press, 2022)

28 oktober 2022 | 55 min

Krystale E. Littlejohn, "Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics" (U California Press, 2021)

27 oktober 2022 | 62 min

The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial.

In Just Get On the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics (University of California Press, 2021), a keenly researched and incisive examination, Krystale Littlejohn investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the burden for preventing pregnancy. Littlejohn draws on extensive interviews to document this gendered compulsory birth control—a phenomenon in which people who give birth are held accountable for preventing and resolving pregnancies in gender-constrained ways. She shows how this gendered approach encroaches on reproductive autonomy and poses obstacles for preventing disease. While diverse cisgender women are the focus, Littlejohn shows that they are not the only ones harmed by this dynamic. Indeed, gendered approaches to birth control also negatively impact trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in overlooked ways. In tracing the divisive politics of pregnancy prevention, Littlejohn demonstrates that the gendered division of labor in birth control is not natural. It is unjust.

Nicole Bourbonnais is Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational, historical perspective. Profile here.

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Andrei Nae, "Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games" (Routledge, 2021)

26 oktober 2022 | 55 min

Adrian Hon, "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All" (Basic Books, 2022)Adrian Hon, "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All" (Basic Books, 2022)

25 oktober 2022 | 45 min

On Social Media and Hinduism

25 oktober 2022 | 59 min

Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis, "Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

21 oktober 2022 | 66 min

Seeing Truth in Data

20 oktober 2022 | 23 min

Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson, "Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future" (HBR Press, 2022)

20 oktober 2022 | 37 min

Technocracy Now! Part 3: Technocracy in the Private Sector

19 oktober 2022 | 65 min

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise.

However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old.

For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers’ every step, turning their bodies into machines. On part #3 of our technocracy series, we take a look inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism.

Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. We discuss Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, and the technocratic liberal disinformation machine that wants to defeat the neo-reactionaries.

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Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain" (Mariner Books, 2020)

19 oktober 2022 | 82 min

Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain (Mariner Books, 2020), Feldman reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You’ll learn where brains came from, how they’re structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you’ll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a “lizard brain” and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behavior.

Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humor, and important implications for human nature—a gift of a book that you will want to savor again and again.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D.is among the top one percent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior.

She is the author of two books How Emotions are Made, and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. In addition, Dr. Barrett has published over 260 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. She has also given two popular TED talks one of which has over 6.5 million views.

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website.

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Josh Bowsher, "The Informational Logic of Human Rights" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

19 oktober 2022 | 52 min

Orli Fridman, "Memory Activism and Digital Practices After Conflict: Unwanted Memories" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)

19 oktober 2022 | 61 min

Asim Sajjad Akhter, "The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons" (Pluto Press, 2022)

18 oktober 2022 | 37 min

Robert P. Crease, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022)

18 oktober 2022 | 91 min

Leslie A. Geddes, "Watermarks: Leonardo Da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature" (Princeton UP, 2020)

17 oktober 2022 | 67 min

Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022)

17 oktober 2022 | 50 min

How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration?

As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that circulate among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility?

Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities.

The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (NYU Press, 2022) is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and violence, but also of care, conviviality, and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the authors argue, the digital border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; undercut by competing emotions, desires, and judgments; and traversed by fluid and fragile social relationships—relationships that entail both the despair of inhumanity and the promise of a better future.

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director. She is the author of several books, including The Spectatorship of Suffering and The Ironic Spectator, Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication

Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of five books, including Diaspora, Identity and the Media; Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference; and the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration.

Padmapriya Vidhya-Govindarajan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental justice, digital and film cultures, and community media-use practices.

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Geert Lovink, "Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet" (Valiz, 2022)

13 oktober 2022 | 61 min

We’re all trapped. No matter how hard you try to delete apps from your phone, the power of seduction draws you back. Doom scrolling is the new normal of a 24/7 online life. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call center and you’re too fried to log out of Facebook? We’re addicted to large-scale platforms, unable to return to the frivolous age of decentralized networks. How do we make sense of the rising disaffection with the platform condition? Zoom fatigue, cancel culture, crypto art, NFTs and psychic regression comprise core elements of a general theory of platform culture. Geert Lovink argues that we reclaim the internet on our own terms. Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet (Valiz 2022) is a relapse-resistant story about the rise of platform alternatives, built on a deep understanding of the digital slump.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His center organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the creative sector. In December, 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the Art History Department, Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam for one day a week.

Reuben Niewenhuis is interested in philosophy, theory, technology, and interdisciplinary topics. Subscribe to his interviews here.

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Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)

13 oktober 2022 | 52 min

“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West.

Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford University Press, 2022). With reference to issues like public health, A.I and biotechnology, he gives his views on how the U.S. should approach China–cooperation, competition or conflict.

In this interview, Scott and I talk about the U.S.-China relationship, how it’s changed–and how U.S.-China competition could, under the right circumstances, still lead to global progress.

Scott M. Moore is Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Provost as well as a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Moore was previously a Young Professional with the World Bank Group and served as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State. He is also the author of Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press: 2018). You can follow Scott on Twitter at @water_futures.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China’s Next Act. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022)

12 oktober 2022 | 87 min

Christopher Lukman, "Control Machines: Toward a Dispositive Theory of Computer Games" (Lit Verlag, 2022)

11 oktober 2022 | 31 min

Technocracy Now! Part 2: Exploring Technocracy through Cybernetics

10 oktober 2022 | 68 min

Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP)

6 oktober 2022 | 39 min

Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality.

Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and America, recap the history of early VR headset adapters on trains and compare various Japanese words for "virtual" and their antonyms. Paul wonders if the ephemerality of the views glimpsed in a rock garden served as guiding paradigm for how VR is experienced.

Mentioned in the episode

Yoshikazu Nango, "A new form of 'solitary space'...." (2021)
Haruki Murakami's detailed fictional worlds of the 1980's onwards: real-feeling yet not actual history.
Walter Scott's Waverley novels: can we also understand the novel as an immersive machine that leaves readers half in their actual world?
Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with its interplay between enclosure and expansion, and its shrinking/expanding motif)
Ian Bogost on e-readers
C S Lewis's wardrobe as portal in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
Lukacs focuses on the dizzying and transformative scale in Naturalism in "Narrate or Describe?" (1936)
Wearable heart monitors as feedback machines for watching scary movies.
The pre-history of Pokemon Go is various games played by early users of VR headsets on trains.
Sword Art Online is a breakout popular example of Japanese stories of players trapped inside a game-world
Thomas Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life
We Met in Virtual Reality
Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined the concept of the metaverse.

Recallable Books

Madeline L'Engle The Wind in the Door (1973).
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1606/1615)
Futari Okajima Klein Bottle (1989)
Collections such as Immersed in Technology, Future Visions, Virtual Realities and their Discontents; also, other early VR criticism of the 1990s including early feminist critique, scattered across journals in the early to mid 1990s . Paul feels someone should put together those germane articles into a new collection.

Read the transcript here.

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Elizabeth Ellcessor, "In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality" (NYU Press, 2022)

5 oktober 2022 | 57 min

Dr. Elizabeth Ellcessor presents a much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives in In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality (NYU Press, 2022).

In an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren’t even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an “emergency.” In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of “emergency” as an opposite of “normal.” Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Dr. Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media.

By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archival materials, and discursive and technological readings of hardware and infrastructures, Dr. Ellcessor demonstrates that emergency media are powerful components of American life that are rarely, if ever, neutral. The normalization of ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. As emergency media undergo massive growth and transformation in response to digitization and attendant entrepreneurial cultures, Dr. Ellcessor asks where access, equity, and accountability fit in all of this.

The first book to develop a typology of emergency media, In Case of Emergency opens a much-needed conversation around the larger cultural meanings of “emergency,” and what an ethical and care-based approach to emergency could entail.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Technocracy Now! Part 1: Noam Chomsky on Intellectuals and Expertise

3 oktober 2022 | 68 min

Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert, "Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)" (Verso, 2022)

29 september 2022 | 63 min

Social Media and Political Participation in the Philippines

29 september 2022 | 26 min

James Bessen, "The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation" (Yale UP, 2022)

29 september 2022 | 45 min

Tripp Mickle, "After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul" (William Morrow, 2022))

28 september 2022 | 40 min

Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs's spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator's death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration.

In many ways, Cook was Ive's opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions.

Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple's valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world's stock market into freefall with a single sentence.

Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple's history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul (William Morrow, 2022). His research shows the company's success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive's departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple's shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.

Tripp Mickle is a technology and corporate reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Digital Lethargy

27 september 2022 | 16 min

Kathryn Harkup, "Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

26 september 2022 | 39 min

William Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters, and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions – shock, sadness, fear – that they did more than 400 years ago when these plays were first performed. But how realistic are these deaths, and did Shakespeare have the knowledge to back them up?

In the Bard's day death was a part of everyday life. Plague, pestilence and public executions were a common occurrence, and the chances of seeing a dead or dying body on the way home from the theatre were high. It was also a time of important scientific progress. Shakespeare kept pace with anatomical and medical advances, and he included the latest scientific discoveries in his work, from blood circulation to treatments for syphilis. He certainly didn't shy away from portraying the reality of death on stage, from the brutal to the mundane, and the spectacular to the silly.

Elizabethan London provides the backdrop for Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts (Bloomsbury, 2020), as Dr. Kathryn Harkup turns her discerning scientific eye to the Bard and the varied and creative ways his characters die. Was death by snakebite as serene as Shakespeare makes out? Could lack of sleep have killed Lady Macbeth? Can you really murder someone by pouring poison in their ear? Dr. Harkup investigates what actual events may have inspired Shakespeare, what the accepted scientific knowledge of the time was, and how Elizabethan audiences would have responded to these death scenes. Death by Shakespeare will tell you all this and more in a rollercoaster of Elizabethan carnage, poison, swordplay and bloodshed, with an occasional death by bear-mauling for good measure.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kirsti Niskanen and Michael J. Barany, "Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

26 september 2022 | 54 min

In Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona. Incarnations and Contestations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Professors Kirsti Niskanen and Michael J. Barany present a rich collection of essays on the historical construction and reinvention of scholarly personae. The book carries this investigation by focusing on three contextual conditions that play a decisive role in the fashioning of such personae: international travels, embodiment, and gender. The book also pays great attention to the role of incomes and funding opportunities in the evolution of scholarly personae in disciplines as varied as mathematics, philosophy, experimental psychology, pedagogy, history, and medicine.

Niskanen and Barany “see the history of scholarly personae as occupying a vital space in cultural theories of science and scholarship”. This statement should be understood in at least two ways. Firstly, the study of scholarly personae delves into the dynamic interactions between personalities, institutions, professional ethos, social norms, international exchanges, and explains how these interactions generate ways of conducting and presenting one’s life. Secondly, uncovering such histories of scholarly personae eventually leads to a better understanding of contextual forces that prevent or encourage the emergence of greater diversity and equity within academia today.

At the intersection of a wide range of scholarly disciplines and geographical contexts, Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona represent a major contribution to the historical study of scientific personae since Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum’s special issue, “Scientific Personae and Their Histories”, published in 2003.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is teaching the Humanities and French language to undergraduates.

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NBN Classic: Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017)

25 september 2022 | 63 min

NBN Classic: Mark Bartholomew, "Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing" (Stanford Law Books, 2017)

25 september 2022 | 74 min

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

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 world where advertising can be expected anywhere and anytime―has come, transforming not just our purchasing decisions, but our relationships, our sense of self, and the way we navigate all spaces, public and private.

In Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing (Stanford Law Books, 2017), Mark Bartholomew journeys through the curious and sometimes troubling world of modern advertising. Bartholomew exposes an array of marketing techniques that might seem like the stuff of science fiction: neuromarketing, biometric scans, automated online spies, and facial recognition technology, all enlisted to study and stimulate consumer desire. This marriage of advertising and technology has consequences. Businesses wield rich and portable records of consumer preference, delivering advertising tailored to your own idiosyncratic thought processes. They mask their role by using social media to mobilize others, from celebrities to your own relatives, to convey their messages. Guerrilla marketers turn every space into a potential site for a commercial come-on or clandestine market research. Advertisers now know you on a deeper, more intimate level, dramatically tilting the historical balance of power between advertiser and audience.

In this world of ubiquitous commercial appeals, consumers and policymakers are numbed to advertising's growing presence. Drawing on a variety of sources, including psychological experiments, marketing texts, communications theory, and historical examples, Bartholomew reveals the consequences of life in a world of non-stop selling. Adcreep mounts a damning critique of the modern American legal system's failure to stem the flow of invasive advertising into our homes, parks, schools, and digital lives.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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NBN Classic: Virginia Eubanks, "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (St. Martin's, 2018)

24 september 2022 | 85 min

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

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 Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems―rather than humans―control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martin's, 2018), Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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NBN Classic: Jonathan Sadowsky, "The Empire of Depression: A New History" (Polity, 2020)

24 september 2022 | 74 min

David Max Moerman, "The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)

23 september 2022 | 83 min

From the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. Expansively illustrated with multiple maps and illustrations, The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) by D. Max Moerman is the first monograph of its kind to explore the largely unknown archive of Japanese Buddhist world maps and analyze their production, reproduction, and reception. In examining these fascinating sources of visual and material culture, Moerman argues for an alternative history of Japanese Buddhism—one that compels us to recognize the role of the Buddhist geographic imaginary in a culture that encompassed multiple cartographic and cosmological world views.

The contents and contexts of Japanese Buddhist world maps reveal the ambivalent and shifting position of Japan in the Buddhist world, its encounter and negotiation with foreign ideas and technologies, and the possibilities for a global history of Buddhism and science. Moerman’s visual and intellectual history traces the multiple trajectories of Japanese Buddhist world maps, beginning with the earliest extant Japanese map of the world: a painting by a fourteenth-century Japanese monk charting the cosmology and geography of India and Central Asia based on an account written by a seventh-century Chinese pilgrim-monk. He goes on to discuss the cartographic inclusion and marginal position of Japan, the culture of the copy and the power of replication in Japanese Buddhism, and the transcultural processes of engagement and response to new visions of the world produced by Iberian Christians, Chinese Buddhists, and the Japanese maritime trade. Later chapters explore the transformations in the media and messages of Buddhist cartography in the age of print culture and in intellectual debates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries over cosmology and epistemology and the polemics of Buddhist science.

The Japanese Buddhist World Map offers a wholly innovative picture of Japanese Buddhism that acknowledges the possibility of multiple and heterogeneous modernities and alternative visions of Japan and the world.

D. Max Moerman is a Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research interests lie in the visual and material culture of Japanese religions.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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James Belich, "The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe" (Princeton UP, 2022)

23 september 2022 | 71 min

In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion.

In The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2022) Dr. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how the plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and the plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons.

Setting the rise of Western Europe in a global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)

22 september 2022 | 82 min

The Future of Nuclear Weapons: A Conversation with Fred Kaplan

20 september 2022 | 61 min

Amber Sinha, "The Networked Public: How Social Media is Changing Democracy" (Rupa Publications, 2019)

20 september 2022 | 54 min

Amber Sinha works at the intersection law, technology and society, and studies the impact of digital technologies on socio-political processes and structures. His research aims to further the discourse on regulatory practices around internet, technology, and society. He is currently a Senior Fellow-Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation studying models for algorithmic transparency.

Networks, whether in the form of Facebook and Twitter or WhatsApp groups, are exerting immense, unchecked power in subverting political discourse and polarizing the public in India. If people’s understandings of their political reality can be so easily manipulated through misinformation, then what role can they play in fostering deliberative democracies? Amber Sinha asks this much ignored and often-misunderstood question in his book The Networked Public: How Social Media is Changing Democracy (Rupa Publications, 2019). In search for an answer, he investigates the history of misinformation and the biases that make the public susceptible to it, how digital platforms and their governance impacts the public’s behaviour on them, as well as the changing face of political targeting in this data-driven world.

The book weaves sharp analysis with academic rigour to show that while the public can be irrational and gullible, their actions—be it mob violence or spreading fake news—are symptoms of deeper social malaise and products of their technological contexts.The Networked Public is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how social media and the Internet is transforming democracy not only in India, but across the world.

Alok Prasanna Kumar is Co-Founder and Lead, Vidhi Karnataka. Sarayu Natarajan is the Founder of Aapti Institute. In the past, she has worked in management consulting and the venture fund industry before the plunge into researching politics.

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Alex Nathanson, "A History of Solar Power Art and Design" (Routledge, 2021)

19 september 2022 | 24 min

Stefan Höltgen, "Open History: The Archaeology of Retrocomputing" (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021)

16 september 2022 | 49 min

Today I talked to Stefan Höltgen about his book Open History: The Archaeology of Retrocomputing (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021).

How can historical computers be described properly from the viewpoint of computer science? By considering media archaeology’s theory of operative and thus a-historical media computer archaeology combines an interdisciplinary set of theories and methods to answer this question. At first, the problems of computer historiography (technical inaccuracy, inconsistency, and idiosyncrasy) will be deconstructed with the help of history criticism (H. Whyte, R. G. Collingwood), discourse archaeology (M. Foucault), and media archaeology (W. Ernst). Following that, technology–oriented tools and methods are gathered for describing ‘old’ computers within an ‘archaeography’ and analyzing them within a mid-range theory. Methods of computer science (from theoretical, practical, and technical c.s.), electronics, logics, mathematics, and diagrammatics supersede hermeneutical methods of historiography. Additional tools (re-enactment, demonstration, computer philology) from media science and other disciplines complement this set of methods. The objects of the following analyzation are early microcomputers (1975-95).

Retro computing, that has been practiced for decades as a hobbyistic way of computer archaeology, sets the frame for four computer archaeological projects that had been implemented within media scientific seminars (and other occasions): 1. a computer philological analysis of a ‘traditional’ computer demo (simulating a jumping ball) on different platforms and in different programming languages since the 1960s; 2. the development of a “Game of Life” on an 8-bit platform to examine the didactical and ‘historiographical’ potentialities of cellular automata; 3. the development of a new computer game for a 1978 gaming console to examine the differences between software emulation and material hardware; 4. the reparation of an 8-bit computer from 1976 done by a hardware hacker to analyze the tools, methods and knowledge-gaining process of such a non-professional approach.

These projects are discussed afterwards to gain the specific didactical modus operandi of retro computing hobbyists. Just like historical home computing (starting from the late 1970s) retro computing autodidactically gathers theoretical, historical, and practical knowledge by trial and error, gamification, and e-learning through a “learning by doing” procedure. The confrontation of three historical examples with three actual retro computing projects will prove this. The didactical reflection of retro computing projects describes a ‘retro didactic’ that would be useful for a broad application of historic sensitive, computer scientific knowledge with the help of less complex systems (like early microcomputers are).

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021)

15 september 2022 | 21 min

Felicia Wu Song, "Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age" (InterVarsity Press, 2021)

14 september 2022 | 25 min

Esther Wright, "Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity" (de Gruyter, 2022)

13 september 2022 | 36 min

For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses.

But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity (de Gruyter, 2022) offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian.

By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past – and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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Karen Hunger Parshall, "The New Era in American Mathematics, 1920–1950" (Princeton UP, 2022)

12 september 2022 | 70 min

Josh Chin and Liza Lin, "Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)

9 september 2022 | 58 min

As we build the AI-powered digital economy, how far do we want to go? Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St. Martin's Press, 2022) explores how China’s Communist Party is harnessing new technologies in an effort to achieve an unprecedented level of social control. The authors outline the most brutal and extreme applications of these technologies to the Uighur people of western China. They contrast this with the relatively benign-seeming applications to traffic control, crime, and public order in the prosperous Han Chinese heartland, where a little loss of privacy can feel like a small price to pay.

They also make clear that these developments are not isolated to China. They show how America faces similar tradeoffs between using the benefits these tools can bring for crime fighting and other goals, against the risks of losing privacy and potentially making our criminal justice system even less fair. They examine the role of US companies in selling crucial elements of the technology package to Chinese firms and government agencies and challenge their defense that they had no way of knowing how or where these technologies would be used. And they examine China’s export of surveillance technologies to other countries around the world.

This book is essential reading for anyone thinking about how the digitization of the economy and our lives can benefit us or be turned against us.

Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin are award-winning journalists with the Wall Street Journal. The book grows out of years of reporting on these developments within China, as well as an extensive investigation into the roots of these trends and their connections around the world.

Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China.

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Elise Vernon Pearlstine, "Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance" (Yale UP, 2022)

8 september 2022 | 54 min

Georg Striedter, "Model Systems in Biology: History, Philosophy, and Practical Concerns" (MIT Press, 2022)

7 september 2022 | 50 min

Jerry C. Zee, "Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System" (U California Press, 2022)

5 september 2022 | 69 min

J. Bradford DeLong, "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century" (Basic Books, 2020)

5 september 2022 | 60 min

Lucía Fernández-Amaya, "A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication" (Brill, 2022)

5 september 2022 | 36 min

Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022)

5 september 2022 | 57 min

Truck Nuts: The Political History of Trucks and Trucking

5 september 2022 | 80 min

The Tamiflu Trials: Profit and Public Health

2 september 2022 | 64 min

88 Underwater Eye: Margaret Cohen explores the Film Aquatic

1 september 2022 | 46 min

Margaret Cohen joins John to discuss The Underwater Eye, which explores "How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy." Margaret's earlier prizewinning books include The Novel and the Sea and The Sentimental Education of the Novel, but this project brings her places even her frequent surfing forays hadn't yet reached. She charts the rise of "wet for wet" filming both in the ocean itself and in various surrogates, exploring the implications of entering a domain that humans can explore and come to know, but never master.

She and John discuss the rarity of professional divers in early 19th century (Henri Edwards 1843) and Natasha Adamowsky on the abiding fear of the depths. Conversation also pivots towards such SF classics as Stanislas Lem Solaris (1961), featuring a sentient underwater being which controls the planetary tides, though this wrinkle disappears in the 1971 Tarkovsky film. Margaret wittily labels the unintended consequences of human agency the "dialectic of the anthropocene."

Mentioned in the episode

1916 20,000 Leagues was Hollywood’s first great underwater filming project. Underwater scenes of a length and complexity not seen again until modern films like The Deep (1977).
Man Ray The Starfish is proof of high art's shared investment (also in Jean Painleve's science and sexlife films) in the same oceanic aspects that thrilled popular filmmakers.
Esther William's Jupiter's Darling may be the apotheosis of bathing beauty breath-holding.
Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges as underwater beefcake.
Luc Besson, The Big Blue

Recallable Books/Films

Margaret chose Creature from the Black Lagoon 1954 which inspired Benicio del Toro's The Shape of Water (a "dry for wet" film, shot in studio rather than underwater) and was in its turn inspired by Gabriel Figueora, cinematographer of The Pearl'

John favored a SF novel about space aliens who on landing seek out the oceanic depths, John Wyndham The Kraken Wakes (1953)

Read a transcript here.

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Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, "Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of Our Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)

1 september 2022 | 44 min

The Heroin Clinic

1 september 2022 | 53 min

This is Your Brain on Trial

31 augusti 2022 | 68 min

Property Technology

30 augusti 2022 | 23 min

Pathological: The Work of Dr. Charles Smith

30 augusti 2022 | 81 min

Jennifer Jill Fellows and Lisa Smith, "Gender, Sex, and Tech!: An Intersectional Feminist Guide" (Canadian Scholars, 2022)

29 augusti 2022 | 51 min

Derailed: The Crisis of Forensic Expertise

29 augusti 2022 | 87 min

Julie A. Turnock, "The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism" (U Texas Press, 2022)

26 augusti 2022 | 78 min

Don’t Hate the Player: The World of E-Sports

26 augusti 2022 | 35 min

Enter the Zuckerverse: On the Metaverse and its Corporatization

25 augusti 2022 | 47 min

The term “metaverse” was coined in a 1993 science fiction novel. Since then, it’s grown from a dystopian literary concept to a reality that corporations want to sell you. Strap on some VR goggles and escape your tired analog life! Except that the systemic issues we already have seem to be creeping into the metaverse, too.

As the lines between virtuality and physicality continue to blur, companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta are setting their sights on virtual worlds. It’s a new frontier, full of potential – and full of our valuable data. Metaverses like Second Life or World of Warcraft can be positive and even game-changing experiences on the individual level, but when it comes to navigating a virtual society with a capitalist backdrop…things get a bit dicey.

On this episode, guest host and producer Ren Bangert explores the metaverse. First, we hear a love story from the glory days of Second Life, told to us by Sandrine Han – a scholar of virtual worlds and a long-time Second Lifer. Then, writer and game developer Ian Bogost takes us on a deep dive into the corporatization of the metaverse. We’ll hear how the metaverse has grown from a dystopian warning from science fiction to a sinister data-mining reality – and how even the shiniest of tech utopias are still functioning under the same old capitalism.

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Cassidy Puckett, "Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

25 augusti 2022 | 69 min

Picture a typical computer geek. Likely white, male, and someone you’d say has a “natural instinct” for technology. Yet, after six years teaching technology classes to first-generation, low-income middle school students in Oakland, California, Cassidy Puckett has seen firsthand that being good with technology is not something people are born with—it’s something they learn. In Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens (U Chicago Press, 2022), she overturns the stereotypes around the digitally savvy and identifies the habits that can help everyone cultivate their inner geek.

Drawing on observations and interviews with a diverse group of students around the country, Puckett zeroes in on five technology learning habits that enable tech-savvy teens to learn new technologies: a willingness to try and fail, management of frustration and boredom, use of models, and the abilities to use design logic and identify efficiencies. In Redefining Geek, she shows how to measure and build these habits, and she demonstrates how many teens historically marginalized in STEM are already using these habits and would benefit from recognition for their talent, access to further learning opportunities, and support in career pathways. She argues that if we can develop, recognize, and reward these technological learning habits in all kids—especially girls and historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups—we can address many educational inequities and disparities in STEM.

Revealing how being good with technology is not about natural ability but habit and persistence, Redefining Geek speaks to the ongoing conversation on equity in technology education and argues for a more inclusive technology learning experience for all students.

Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Candidate in Sociology of Education at the New York University.

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Alfie Bown, "Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships" (Pluto Press, 2022)

24 augusti 2022 | 60 min

Gamify Everything: Turning Work Into Play . . . for Better and for Worse

24 augusti 2022 | 51 min

Brett Scott, "Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets" (Harper Business, 2022)

24 augusti 2022 | 65 min

In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our various forms of money and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.

Cloudmoney takes us to the front lines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom, from marketing strategies against cash to the weaponization of COVID-19 to push fintech platforms, and from there to the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back. It asks the most pressing questions:

Who benefits from a cashless society and who gets left behind?
Is the end of cash the end of true privacy?
And is our cloudmoney future closer than we think it is?

Brett Scott is an economic anthropologist, financial activist, and former broker. In 2013 he published The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, and since then has spoken at hundreds of events across the globe and has appeared across international media, including BBC World News and Sky News. He has written extensively on financial reform, digital finance, alternative currency, blockchain technology, and the cashless society for publications like the Guardian, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Wired, and CNN.com, and also publishes the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter. He has worked on financial reform campaigns and alternative currency systems with a wide range of groups and is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab (UK). He currently resides in Berlin.

Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at [email protected]. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are purely personal and do not reflect the official position of NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India.

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Save the Whales: The Addictive Psychology Behind Video Games

23 augusti 2022 | 61 min

Ann Blair et al., "Information: A Historical Companion" (Princeton UP, 2021)

23 augusti 2022 | 79 min

Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

22 augusti 2022 | 74 min

Moral Kombat: How Mortal Kombat Caused Moral Outrage

22 augusti 2022 | 68 min

Adam Nocek, "Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2022 | 56 min

Paris Marx, "Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation" (Verso, 2022)

16 augusti 2022 | 99 min

Eswar S. Prasad, "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance" (Harvard UP, 2021)

16 augusti 2022 | 40 min

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021) provides a cutting-edge look at how accelerating financial change, from the end of cash to the rise of cryptocurrencies, will transform economies for better and worse. We think we have seen financial innovation. We bank from laptops and buy coffee with the wave of a phone. But these are minor miracles compared with the dizzying experiments now underway around the globe, as businesses and governments alike embrace the possibilities of new financial technologies. As Eswar Prasad explains, the world of finance is at the threshold of major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite how ordinary people live. Above all, Prasad foresees the end of physical cash. The driving force won't be phones or credit cards but rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve unpredictably as global corporations like Facebook and Amazon join the game. The changes will be accompanied by snowballing innovations that are reshaping finance and have already begun to revolutionize how we invest, trade, insure, and manage risk. Prasad shows how these and other changes will redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. The promise lies in greater efficiency and flexibility, increased sensitivity to the needs of diverse consumers, and improved market access for the unbanked. The risk is instability, lack of accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the worst of what is to come.

Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously chief of the Financial Studies Division in the International Monetary Fund's Research Department and, before that, was the head of the IMF's China Division.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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The Future of Net Zero: A Discussion with Eric Lonergan

16 augusti 2022 | 50 min

Joseph Mileti, "Modern Mathematical Logic" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

15 augusti 2022 | 48 min

Made of Corn: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 2 of 2)

12 augusti 2022 | 46 min

Modifying Maize: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 1 of 2)

11 augusti 2022 | 56 min

Christian Wolmar, "British Rail: A New History" (Michael Joseph, 2022)

11 augusti 2022 | 50 min

Minh-Ha T. Pham, "Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property" (Duke UP, 2022)

10 augusti 2022 | 51 min

J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, "The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945" (Harvard UP, 2016)

10 augusti 2022 | 68 min

The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke's book The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard UP, 2016) explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism.

More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption.

We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.

J.R. McNeill holds the appointment of University Professor at Georgetown University, serving as a faculty member of the School of Foreign Service and History Department. Professor McNeill is also a past president of American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association.

Peter Engelke is the Deputy Director of Foresight at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and a Nonresident Senior Fellow, Global Energy Center.

Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist at the University of Florida. Email: [email protected]

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Twitter, Intellectual Discourse, and Humility

10 augusti 2022 | 70 min

Environmental Catastrophe

9 augusti 2022 | 16 min

M. I. Franklin, "Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural" (Oxford UP, 2021)

9 augusti 2022 | 52 min

Music sampling has become a predominantly digitalized practice. It was popularized with the rise of Rap and Hip-Hop, as well as ambient music scenes, but it has a history stretching back to the earliest days of sound recording and experimental music making from around the world. Digital tools and networks allow artists to sample music across national borders and from diverse cultural traditions with relative ease, prompting questions around not only fair use, copyright, and freedom of expression, but also cultural appropriation and "copywrongs." For example, non-commercial forms of sharing that are now commonplace on the web bring musicians and their audiences into closer contact with emerging regimes of commercial web-tracking and state-sponsored online surveillance. Moreover, when musicians actively engage in political or social causes through their music, they are liable to both commercial and state forces of control. Shifts back to corporate ownership and control of the global music business—online and offline—highlight competing claims for commercial and cultural ownership and control of sampled music from local communities, music labels, and artists.

Each case study is based on archival research, close listening, and musical analysis, alongside conversations and public reflections from artists such as David Byrne, Annirudha Das, Asian Dub Foundation, John Cage, Brian Eno, Sarah Jones, Gil Scott-Heron, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dunya Yunis, and Sonia Mehta.

Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural (Oxford UP, 2021) provides ways to listen and hear (again) how sampling practices and music making work, on its own terms and in context. In so doing, M.I. Franklin corrects some errors in the public record, addressing some longstanding misperceptions over the creative, legal, and cultural legacy of music sampling in some cases of rich, and complex practices that have also been called musical "borrowing," "cultural appropriation," or "theft." This book considers the musicalities and musicianship at stake in each case, as well as the respective creative practices and performance cultures underscoring the ethics of attribution and collaboration when sampling artists make music.

Marianne Franklin is Professor of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London

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Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten, "Probability and Forensic Evidence: Theory, Philosophy, and Applications" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

9 augusti 2022 | 63 min

Lindsay Starkey, "Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)

9 augusti 2022 | 54 min

On Online Churches

8 augusti 2022 | 67 min

Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, "Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie" (Companyédition PUF/Disclose, 2021)

8 augusti 2022 | 64 min

What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, a nuclear scientist, and an investigative journalist? Working together beginning in early 2020, Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, the authors of Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie (Presses universitaires de France and Disclose, 2021) have now shared with readers the meaningful and provocative results of just such a collaboration. Revisiting the history of France's nuclear weapons program over a period of three decades (following an initial set of atmospheric and underground detonations in the Algerian Sahara from 1960 to 1966), Toxique is a scientific and journalistic interrogation of the immediate and long-term health and environmental effects of the 193 bombs the French military exploded in the region, exposing civilians, as well as French military and other personnel to the fallout and radiation emitted by these explosions.

The significance of this interdisciplinary investigation cannot be overstated. As Toxique shows, these nuclear detonations continue to have harmful effects on the everyday lives of thousands of local residents, along with those veterans who served in the area. As Philippe and Statius have shown, the toxicity of these nuclear blasts has been consistently underestimated and misrepresented by the French military and state. Holding important implications for the victims of these detonations in terms of both recognition and financial compensation, the book and its accompanying online platform, Moruroa Files, have made a huge impact. I was thrilled to have the chance to speak with these remarkable researchers and writers and hope listeners will learn from and enjoy our conversation. The more people within and beyond the field of French Studies who are aware of this damaging past and present, the better.

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American Chernobyl, Part 2: The Most Poisonous Place in the USA

5 augusti 2022 | 59 min

Nina Rattner Gelbart, "Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France" (Yale UP, 2021)

4 augusti 2022 | 54 min

America's Chernobyl, Part 1: Living in a Poison Town

4 augusti 2022 | 53 min

Daniel Bergner, "The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches" (Ecco, 2022)

4 augusti 2022 | 37 min

The Revolution Will Not Be Streamed: The Intellectual Culture of Twitch Streamers

3 augusti 2022 | 88 min

Ellis Jones, "DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

3 augusti 2022 | 91 min

Socialise the Series of Tubes: Toward a Democratic Internet

2 augusti 2022 | 57 min

Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs

1 augusti 2022 | 73 min

Techno-utopianism is everywhere. It’s driven by a new tech-bro/crypto culture, supported by online hordes of true believers, and couched in philosophies of meritocracy and technocracy. But this thinking is not new, and World’s Fairs are a perfect example.

One of our ongoing series within Darts and Letters is techno utopias, and we do mean that with all the skepticism it’s due. Silicon Valley is trying to change the world with NFTs and metaverses and electric cars and all kinds of nonsense technologies that will do nothing to improve the lives of the world’s poor, but will increase the wealth of Zuckerburg and Musk, probably while destroying the planet in the process.

To start that series off we decided to go to the original techno-utopia: The World’s Fair. Host Gordon Katic talks to a historian of world’s fairs, and then to a photographer who spends her time in the dilapidated abandoned glory of former world’s fair sites. We’ve got loads of really fun historical footage in this episode too… it’s funny and nostalgic, I think you’re gonna love it.

It’s not all world’s fairs though. We also explore the nature of technology itself… like what actually is a technology?

So that seemed a good place to start off this week’s theme of the politics of technology and techno utopias. We’re doing a different theme every week until we relaunch the show on September 18th.

So here it is… Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs.

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You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

——————-FURTHER READING AND LISTENING——————

Check out Rob Rydell’s books on the history of world’s fairs: All the World’s a Fair, World’s Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, and Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Plus, see more of his work on ResearchGate.
Visit Jade Daskow’s photography project Lost Utopias to see what remains once the fair leaves town. Then, visit her homepage to have a look at her other projects, including The Architecture of Activism.
Have a look at Jennifer Slack’s co-written book Culture and Technology: A Primer. Then, see her faculty page at Michigan Tech to peruse more of her work.

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Mark Solovey, "Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the 'Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation" (MIT Press, 2020)

1 augusti 2022 | 51 min

This is part two of a two part interview.

Mark Solovey’s ‘Social Science for What?’ is essential reading for anyone in either the history of science policy or the history of the social sciences in the United States. The book is not, as the subtitle might imply, merely an institutional history of the social sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Rather, Solovey’s follow-up to his 2013 book, ‘Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America’, is a commanding explanation of certain characteristics of academic social science as commonly practiced in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.

— Audra J. Wolfe, PhD. history and sociology of science, in ISIS Vol. 113, No. 2, June 2022

In our first episode, Professor Solovey shared some of the political and legislative history establishing the National Science Foundation; heated controversy over the social sciences that undermined the effort to include them in the initial legislation for the new science agency; how they nevertheless became included on a small and cautious basis grounded in a scientistic strategy; and some of the landmark developments, controversies, and interesting individuals involved from roughly the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. This included Senator Harris's remarkable legislative proposal in the mid-to-late 1960s to establish a separate national social science foundation.

This second part of the interview opens with the late 1960s' controversy over Project Camelot and draws on Mark’s 2001 journal article in the Social Studies of Science, titled ‘Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution: Rethinking the Politics–Patronage–Social Science Nexus’ - which remains the professor’s most often cited scholarly article. We then move up through the dark days of the Reagan years, along the way discussing key figures, from David Stockman to Talcott Parsons, Clifford Geertz, Thomas Kuhn, Milton Friedman, and Richard Atkinson, the emergence and impact of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), alternatives to the scientistic strategy, and persistent challenges faced by the social sciences at the levels of institutional representation, leadership and funding constraints relative to the natural sciences - all of which continue to the present day.

We end with Professor Solovey’s call for reviving the idea of a new federal agency for the social sciences, a National Social Science Foundation, as first introduced by Senator Harris of Oklahoma, and finally, with some book recommendations.

An open access edition of Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the "Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation (MIT Press, 2020) was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.

Mark Solovey is professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the development of the social sciences in the United States, and especially the controversies regarding the scientific identity of the social sciences, private and public funding for them, and public policy implications of social science expertise. He has written and co-edited a number of books related to the Cold War and social science history.

Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University.

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Erica Gies, "Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

29 juli 2022 | 58 min

The Science Wars: Post-Truth and the Nature of Science

29 juli 2022 | 69 min

Lachlan Fleetwood, "Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

28 juli 2022 | 46 min

Today, the idea that the Himalayas have the world’s tallest peaks—by a large margin—is entirely uncontroversial. Just about anyone can name Mount Everest and K2 as the world’s tallest and second-tallest mountains respectively.

But the idea that this mountain range had the highest summits used to be quite controversial. Mountaineers claimed that the Himalayas could not be taller than peaks in Europe or South America, like Ecuador’s Chimborazo. Even when it was proven that the Himalayas were taller, mountaineers would praised the aesthetic quality of European and South American peaks—essentially giving the nineteenth-century equivalent of “height isn’t everything”

That’s merely one of the historical details from Lachlan Fleetwood’s Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which studies the first attempts to survey this mountain range. Fleetwood’s book examines not just the expeditions themselves, but also how surveyors procured their equipment, how they handled altitude sickness, and the fossils they found (among other details), in order to analyze the connection between knowledge, the frontier, and empire.

Lachlan Fleetwood is a historian of science, empire, geography and environment. He holds a PhD in history from Cambridge University, and is currently a research fellow at University College Dublin. He is currently developing a new project that examines climatic sciences and environmental determinism in imperial surveys of Central Asia and Mesopotamia in the long nineteenth century.

In this interview, Lachlan and I talk about the Himalayas, how the first surveyors studied them, and why these early efforts to understand this mountain range are important to how we understand the history of science.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Science on the Roof of the World. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Stuart Ellis-Gorman, "The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King" (Pen & Sword Military, 2022)

28 juli 2022 | 56 min

The Battle of Buxton: Saving a Lighthouse in the Era of Climate Change

28 juli 2022 | 33 min

If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor: Cited. (If you didn’t, check it out - there’s everything from science fiction to prison activism back there!)

Today, as we continue exploring the politics of education, we’re bringing you another episode of Cited. This one was produced in collaboration with 99% Invisible. It tells a vivid story of science, politics, nature, and a heated battle over a small town’s beloved lighthouse.

The forces of nature versus the forces of human willpower has been an eternal struggle. This is an evocative short documentary, melding history with salient reminders: in the face of climate change, the struggle is becoming more and more intense.

We’ve got one more episode for this week, and then we’ll be moving on to a different theme! Stay tuned for more of our classic content, and get ready for new episodes of Darts and Letters right here on the New Books Network starting on September 16th.

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You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

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To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email [email protected] or tweet Gordon directly.

———-CREDITS———-

Today’s episode was produced by Gordon Katic, and edited by 99% Invisible’s Delaney Hall and Cited's Sam Fenn.

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James Steinhoff, "Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

27 juli 2022 | 63 min

Nic Maclellan, "Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests" (ANU Press, 2017)

27 juli 2022 | 108 min

Felix Schniz, "Genre and Video Game: Introducing an Impossible Taxonomy" (Springer, 2021)

26 juli 2022 | 83 min

Effective Altruism: What it is, What it Does, and How You Can Help

25 juli 2022 | 34 min

Mark Solovey, "Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the 'Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation" (MIT Press, 2020)

25 juli 2022 | 47 min

This is part one of a two part interview.

"The social sciences have prospered best in the federal government where they have been included under broad umbrella classifications of the scientific disciplines. … In close company with scientific areas which enjoy the prestige and status of biological or physical sciences, the social sciences have enjoyed a protection and nourishment which they normally do not have when they are identified as such and stand exposed, 'naked and alone.'"

— Harry Alpert, sociologist and first social science policy architect, 1960 (Solovey: Ch. 1 lead-in)

In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to “other sciences.” Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major—albeit controversial—source of public funding for them.

Solovey's analysis underscores the long-term impact of early developments, when the NSF embraced a “scientistic” strategy wherein the natural sciences represented the gold standard, and created a social science program limited to “hard-core” studies. Along the way, Solovey shows how the NSF's efforts to support scholarship, advanced training, and educational programs were shaped by landmark scientific and political developments, including McCarthyism, Sputnik, reform liberalism during the 1960s, and a newly energized conservative movement during the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, he provides a balanced assessment of the NSF's relevance in a “post-truth” era.

Solovey's study of the battles over public funding is crucial for understanding the recent history of the social sciences as well as ongoing debates over their scientific status and social value. In this first part of two episodes the professor takes us from the mid-1940s up to the tumultuous 1960s and the (ultimately unsuccessful) legislative proposal for a National Social Science Foundation. Look for the second part which moves from the late 1960s' controversy over Project Camelot up through the dark days of the Reagan years, culminating in a call to revive discussion about the need to create a new federal agency, a National Social Science Foundation.

An open access edition of Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the "Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation (MIT Press, 2020) was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.

Mark Solovey is professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the development of the social sciences in the United States, and especially the controversies regarding the scientific identity of the social sciences, private and public funding for them, and public policy implications of social science expertise. He has written and co-edited a number of books related to the Cold War and social science history.

Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University.

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Jay Baruch, "Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER" (MIT Press, 2022)

22 juli 2022 | 75 min

Jason Resnikoff, "Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work" (U Illinois Press, 2021)

21 juli 2022 | 61 min

Lisa Jean Moore, "Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature" (NYU Press, 2022)

20 juli 2022 | 45 min

Rosetta S. Elkin, "Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

20 juli 2022 | 41 min

The Future of War: A Discussion with Mark Galeotti

19 juli 2022 | 49 min

Rachael Pells, "Genomics: How Genome Sequencing Will Change Healthcare" (Random House, 2022)

15 juli 2022 | 58 min

Keith W. Campbell, "The New Science of Narcissism: Understanding One of the Greatest Psychological Challenges of Our Time" (Sounds True, 2020)

15 juli 2022 | 49 min

“Narcissism” is truly one of the most important words of our time―ceaselessly discussed in the media, the subject of millions of online search queries, and at the center of serious social and political debates. But what does it really mean?

In The New Science of Narcissism (Sounds True, 2020), Dr. W. Keith Campbell pulls back the curtain on this frequently misused label, presenting the most recent psychological, personality, and social research into the phenomenon.

Rather than pathologizing all behaviors associated with the label, Campbell reveals that not only does narcissism occur on a spectrum, but almost everyone exhibits narcissistic tendencies in their day-to-day behavior. Drawing from real-life incidents and case studies, The New Science of Narcissism offers tools, tips, and suggestions for softening toxically selfish behaviors both in yourself and others. Here you will discover:

· An exploration of personality disorders connected with and adjacent to narcissism

· Why minor narcissistic tendencies are common in most people

· The foundational difference between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism

· The “recipe” of mental and emotional traits that combine into narcissism

· How to identify when you’re in a relationship with a narcissist and what you can do about it

· Why the 21st century has seen the rise of a “Great Fantasy Migration” into evermore insular subcultures

· The connection between narcissistic tendencies and leadership

· Why “the audience in your pocket” of social media has exacerbated culture-wide narcissistic tendencies

Though narcissism looms large in our cultural consciousness, The New Science of Narcissism offers many different options for understanding and treating it. With Campbell’s straightforward and grounded guidance, you’ll not only discover the latest and best information on the condition, but also a hopeful view of its future.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected].

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Jeannie N. Shinozuka, "Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

15 juli 2022 | 51 min

Disintermediation

14 juli 2022 | 15 min

Veronica S. W. Mak, "Milk Craze: Body, Science, and Hope in China" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)

14 juli 2022 | 58 min

Nicole Erin Morse, "Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art" (Duke UP, 2022)

13 juli 2022 | 65 min

Elena Conis, "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT" (Bold Type Books, 2022)

13 juli 2022 | 49 min

The story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporations have stoked the flames of science denialism for their own benefit In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes. Thirty years later the U.S. would ban the use of DDT—only to reverse the ban in the 1990s when calls arose to bring it back to fight West Nile and malaria. What changed?

How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT (Bold Type Books, 2022) traces the surprising history of DDT’s rapid rise, infamous fall, and controversial revival to reveal to show that we’ve been taking the wrong lesson from DDT’s cautionary tale. Historian Elena Conis uncovers new evidence that it was not the shift in public opinion following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that led to the ban but in fact the behind-the-scenes political machinations of Big Business. She makes a compelling case that the real threat was not DDT itself but the prioritization of profits over public health. If we don't change the ways we make decisions about new scientific discoveries and technologies, Conis argues, we’re doomed to keep making the same mistakes and putting people at risk—both by withholding technologies that could help them and by exposing them to dangerous chemicals without their knowledge or consent. In an age when corporations and politicians are shaping our world behind closed doors and deliberately stoking misinformation around public health issues, from pesticides to vaccines to COVID-19 to climate change, we need greater transparency and a new way of communicating about science—as a discipline of discovery that's constantly evolving, rather than a finite and immutable collection of facts—in order to combat the war on facts and protect ourselves and our environment.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022)

11 juli 2022 | 66 min

Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom by narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.

Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories. You can access the ebook here.

Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University Of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. Follow her on Twitter @DrJSarkar or check out her website (www.JayitaSarkar.com).

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Cultures in the United States" (Routledge, 2022)

11 juli 2022 | 39 min

Jamie Susskind, "The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century" (Pegasus Books, 2022)

11 juli 2022 | 43 min

From one of the leading intellectuals of the digital age, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century (Pegasus Books, 2022) is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? A Financial Times “Book to Read” in 2022. Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired, and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly. The Digital Republic charts a new course. It offers a plan for the digital age: new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. Inspired by the great political essays of the past, and steeped in the traditions of republican thought, it offers a vision of a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand.

Jamie Susskind is a barrister and the author of the award-winning bestseller Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (Oxford University Press, 2018), which received the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2019, and was an Evening Standard and Prospect Book of the Year. He has fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge and currently lives in London.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Andrew Witt, "Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture" (MIT Press, 2022)

8 juli 2022 | 19 min

In Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture (MIT Press, 2022), Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects.

Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design.

Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. btoepfer@toepferarchitecture

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Samuel Ulbricht, "Ethics of Computer Gaming: A Groundwork" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

8 juli 2022 | 45 min

Jody Rosen, "Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle" (Crown, 2022)

8 juli 2022 | 53 min

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike--and nearly everyone does.

In Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Crown Publishing, 2022), journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dream life--and a flash point in culture wars--for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen's book sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a "green machine," an emblem of sustainability in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle-rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world's fastest-growing megacity, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station.

Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle's past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel--a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.

Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His work has appeared in Slate, New York, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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“Vaccine: The Human Story”: A Chat with Historian and Podcaster Annie Kelly

8 juli 2022 | 74 min

Samuel Ulbricht, "Ethics of Computer Gaming: A Groundwork" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

8 juli 2022 | 45 min

84* Cixin Liu Talk About Science Fiction (JP, Pu Wang)

7 juli 2022 | 50 min

Frank Close, "Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass" (Basic Book, 2022)

6 juli 2022 | 93 min

Ben Davis, "Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy" (Haymarket Books, 2022)

6 juli 2022 | 89 min

Adrienne Buller, "The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism" (Manchester UP, 2022)

5 juli 2022 | 49 min

Daniel M. Davis, "The Secret Body: How the New Science of the Human Body Is Changing the Way We Live" (Princeton UP, 2022)

1 juli 2022 | 44 min

Roberto J. González, "War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future" (U California Press, 2022)

1 juli 2022 | 63 min

A critical look at how the US military is weaponizing technology and data for new kinds of warfare—and why we must resist. War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future (University of California Press, 2022) is the story of how scientists, programmers, and engineers are racing to develop data-driven technologies for fighting virtual wars, both at home and abroad. In this landmark book, Roberto J. González gives us a lucid and gripping account of what lies behind the autonomous weapons, robotic systems, predictive modeling software, advanced surveillance programs, and psyops techniques that are transforming the nature of military conflict. González, a cultural anthropologist, takes a critical approach to the techno-utopian view of these advancements and their dubious promise of a less deadly and more efficient warfare.

With clear, accessible prose, this book exposes the high-tech underpinnings of contemporary military operations—and the cultural assumptions they're built on. Chapters cover automated battlefield robotics; social scientists' involvement in experimental defense research; the blurred line between political consulting and propaganda in the internet era; and the military's use of big data to craft new counterinsurgency methods based on predicting conflict. González also lays bare the processes by which the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have quietly joined forces with Big Tech, raising an alarming prospect: that someday Google, Amazon, and other Silicon Valley firms might merge with some of the world's biggest defense contractors. War Virtually takes an unflinching look at an algorithmic future—where new military technologies threaten democratic governance and human survival.

Dr. Gonzalez is Professor and Chair of the San Jose State University Anthropology Department. He has authored four books including Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network and Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State. You can learn more about his work here.

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Teletherapy

30 juni 2022 | 19 min

James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, "Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World" (W. W. Norton, 2021)

30 juni 2022 | 68 min

Susan H. Brandt, "Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

29 juni 2022 | 61 min

In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women’s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries.

Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphia’s Female Medical College, the first women’s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women’s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women’s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women’s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

Corinne Doria is a historian specializing in the social history of medicine. She is a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen and teaches Disability Studies at Sciences-Po (Paris). Her work focuses on the history of ophthalmology and visual impairment in the West.

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Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky, "Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power" (MIT Press, 2022)

29 juni 2022 | 51 min

Victor Seow, "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

29 juni 2022 | 77 min

Whitney Trettien, "Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

27 juni 2022 | 38 min

Ryan North, "How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain" (Riverhead Books, 2022)

27 juni 2022 | 69 min

Adrienne Mayor, "Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities" (Princeton UP, 2022)

24 juni 2022 | 34 min

Mark Andrejevic, "Automated Media" (Routledge, 2019)

24 juni 2022 | 109 min

Bharat Jayram Venkat, "At the Limits of Cure" (Duke UP, 2021)

23 juni 2022 | 81 min

Slobodan Perovic, "From Data to Quanta: Niels Bohr’s Vision of Physics" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

22 juni 2022 | 48 min

Drone Life

22 juni 2022 | 19 min

Jonathan Crary, "Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World" (Verso, 2022)

22 juni 2022 | 66 min

In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso, 2022) surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.

This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

Dr. Jonathan Crary is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University in the Art history and Archeology Department. He is a prolific art and culture critic and is the co-founder (and co-editor) of Zone Books. Professor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005, his teaching and mentoring were recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. Dr. Crary is also the author of Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award), and 24/7 (a finalist for the 2016 Terzani International Literary Prize).

Cody Skahan ([email protected]) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog here where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on.

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Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish, "Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

22 juni 2022 | 72 min

Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish edit contributions that explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power.

Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (U Illinois Press, 2022) offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives. The book has been dubbed by the experts in the field as “a veritable smorgasbord of perspectives on the all-pervasive and all-important nature of food on visual social media” (Tama Leaver, the co-author of Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures) that “shows how the digital app and the kind of food representations it supports contribute to the building identities and negotiating social and economic relationships” (Fabio Parasecoli, author of Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture). It is a path-blazing, inspirational work offering a vast array of theoretical perspectives, methodological tools, and conceptual innovations.

Emily Contois is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. She holds a PhD in American studies from Brown University along with master's degrees in Gastronomy from Boston University and Public Health Nutrition from University of California, Berkeley. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (2020). She serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, H-Nutrition, and Advertising and Society Quarterly. As a public scholar, she has written for NBC News, Jezebel, and Nursing Clio and has appeared on CBS This Morning, BBC Ideas, and Ugly Delicious on Netflix. Learn more about her work at emilycontois.com or connect on social media (@emilycontois).

Zenia Kish is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. She earned her PhD in American studies at New York University and was a post- doctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her work explores global digital media, sociotechnical imaginaries of food and agriculture, and philanthrocapitalism and has been published in journals including American Quarterly, Cultural Studies, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Environment and Planning A. She is a member of the Agri-Food Technology Research (AFTeR) Project and is associate editor for the Journal of Cultural Economy, as well as serving on the boards of the Journal of Environmental Media and Communication and Race. She is writing a book on philanthropic media cultures (@ZeniaKish).

Amir Sayadabdi is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism.

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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe" (Dey Street Books, 2022)

22 juni 2022 | 60 min

Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells, "Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed." (Ubiquity Press, 2022)

21 juni 2022 | 62 min

Catherine Gibson, "Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic" (Oxford UP, 2022)

17 juni 2022 | 62 min

Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (Oxford UP, 2022) examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively became a tool that lent legitimacy and an experiential dimension to nationalist arguments, as well as a wide range of alternative spatial configurations that rendered the inhabitants of the Baltic as part of local, imperial, and global geographies.

Catherine Gibson argues that map production and the spread of cartographic literacy as a mass phenomenon in Baltic society transformed how people made sense of linguistic, ethnic, and religious similarities and differences by imbuing them with an alleged scientific objectivity that was later used to determine the political structuring of the Baltic region and beyond. Geographies of Nationhood treads new ground by expanding the focus beyond elites to include a diverse range of mapmakers, such as local bureaucrats, commercial enterprises, clergymen, family members, teachers, and landowners. It shifts the focus from imperial learned and military institutions to examine the proliferation of mapmaking across diverse sites in the Empire, including the provincial administration, local learned societies, private homes, and schools. Understanding ethnographic maps in the social context of their production, circulation, consumption, and reception is crucial for assessing their impact as powerful shapers of popular geographical conceptions of nationhood, state-building, and border-drawing.

Catherine Gibson is a historian of modern eastern Europe, currently a research fellow at the University of Tartu in Estonia.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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David L. Sloss, "Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare" (Stanford UP, 2022)

17 juni 2022 | 64 min

When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram were first introduced to the public, their mission was simple: they were designed to help people become more connected to each other. Social media became a thriving digital space by giving its users the freedom to share whatever they wanted with their friends and followers. Unfortunately, these same digital tools are also easy to manipulate. As exemplified by Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, authoritarian states can exploit social media to interfere with democratic governance in open societies.

Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first detailed analysis of how Chinese and Russian agents weaponize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to subvert the liberal international order. In addition to examining the 2016 U.S. election, David L. Sloss explores Russia's use of foreign influence operations to threaten democracies in Europe, as well as China's use of social media and other digital tools to meddle in Western democracies and buttress autocratic rulers around the world. Sloss calls for cooperation among democratic governments to create a new transnational system for regulating social media to protect Western democracies from information warfare. Drawing on his professional experience as an arms control negotiator, he outlines a novel system of transnational governance that Western democracies can enforce by harmonizing their domestic regulations. And drawing on his academic expertise in constitutional law, he explains why that system―if implemented by legislation in the United States―would be constitutionally defensible, despite likely First Amendment objections. With its critical examination of information warfare and its proposal for practical legislative solutions to fight back, this book is essential reading in a time when disinformation campaigns threaten to undermine democracy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Artificial Intelligence with Chinese Characteristics

17 juni 2022 | 25 min

What is artificial intelligence (AI) with Chinese characteristics? Why is the Chinese Government labelling AI as a matter of security? How has AI been empowering China’s authoritarian governance? Jinghan Zeng, Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University, talks about his latest book Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Chinese Characteristics: National Strategy, Security and Authoritarian Governance (Palgrave, 2022) at the Nordic Asia Podcast.

In his conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and affiliated PhD at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Jinghan Zeng introduces his book which argues that China’s AI approach is sophisticated and multifaceted, and it has brought about both considerable benefits and challenges to China. The book suggests that a more accurate understanding of AI with Chinese characteristics is essential in order to inform the debate regarding what lessons can be learnt from China’s AI approach and how to respond to China’s rise as the AI leader, if not a superpower.

Jinghan Zeng is Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University. He is also Academic Director of China Engagement and Director of Lancaster University Confucius Institute. He plays a key role in supporting the development and implementation of the University’s China strategy. He is the author of Slogan Politics: Understanding Chinese Foreign Policy Concepts (2020) and The Chinese Communist Party's Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion (2015). He is also the co-editor of One Belt, One Road, One Story?: Towards an EU-China Strategic Narrative (2021).

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Juli Berwald, "Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs" (Riverhead Books, 2022)

16 juni 2022 | 65 min

Coral reefs are a microcosm of our planet: extraordinarily diverse, deeply interconnected, and full of wonders. When they're thriving, these fairy gardens hidden beneath the ocean's surface burst with color and life. They sustain bountiful ecosystems and protect vulnerable coasts. Corals themselves are evolutionary marvels that build elaborate limestone formations from their collective skeletons, broker symbiotic relationships with algae, and manufacture their own fluorescent sunblock. But corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented die-off, beset by warming oceans, pollution, damage by humans, and a devastating pandemic.

Juli Berwald fell in love with coral reefs as a marine biology student, entranced by their beauty and complexity. Alarmed by their peril, she traveled the world to discover how to prevent their loss. She met scientists and activists operating in emergency mode, doing everything they can think of to prevent coral reefs from disappearing forever. She was so amazed by the ingenuity of these last-ditch efforts that she joined in rescue missions, unexpected partnerships, and risky experiments, and helped rebuild reefs with rebar and zip ties.

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs (Riverhead Books, 2022) is an inspiring, lucid, meditative ode to the reefs and the undaunted scientists working to save them against almost impossible odds. As she also attempts to help her daughter in her struggle with mental illness, Berwald explores what it means to keep fighting a battle whose outcome is uncertain. She contemplates the inevitable grief of climate change and the beauty of small victories.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Andrew Simon, "Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2022)

16 juni 2022 | 74 min

Albert Folch, "Hidden in Plain Sight: The History, Science, and Engineering of Microfluidic Technology" (MIT Press, 2022)

15 juni 2022 | 62 min

Hidden from view, microfluidics underlies a variety of devices that are essential to our lives, from inkjet printers to glucometers for the monitoring of diabetes. Microfluidics--which refers to the technology of miniature fluidic devices and the study of fluids at submillimeter levels--is invisible to most of us because it is hidden beneath ingenious user interfaces. In this book, Albert Folch, a leading researcher in microfluidics, describes the development and use of key microfluidic devices. He explains not only the technology but also the efforts, teams, places, and circumstances that enabled these inventions.

Folch reports, for example, that the inkjet printer was one of the first microfluidic devices invented, and traces its roots back to nineteenth-century discoveries in the behavior of fluid jets. He also describes how rapid speed microfluidic DNA sequencers have enabled the sequencing of animal, plant, and microbial species genomes; organs on chips facilitate direct tests of drugs on human tissue, leapfrogging over the usual stage of animal testing; at-home pregnancy tests are based on clever microfluidic principles; microfluidics can be used to detect cancer cells in the early stages of metastasis; and the same technology that shoots droplets of ink on paper in inkjet printers enables 3D printers to dispense layers of polymers.

In Hidden in Plain Sight: The History, Science, and Engineering of Microfluidic Technology (MIT Press, 2022), Folch tells the stories behind these devices in an engaging style, accessible to nonspecialists. More than 100 color illustrations show readers amazing images of microfluids under the microscope.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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John Wills, "Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

15 juni 2022 | 56 min

In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units.

In Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoods, and legends. Arguing that video games toy with Americans' mass cultural and historical understanding, Wills show how games reprogram the American experience as a simulated reality. Blockbuster games such as Civilization, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption repackage the past, refashioning history into novel and immersive digital states of America. Controversial titles such as Custer's Revenge and 08.46 recode past tragedies. Meanwhile, online worlds such as Second Life cater to a desire to inhabit alternate versions of America, while Paperboy and The Sims transform the mundane tasks of everyday suburbia into fun and addictive challenges.

Working with a range of popular and influential games, from Pong, Civilization, and The Oregon Trail to Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill, and Fortnite, Wills critically explores these gamic depictions of America. Touching on organized crime, nuclear fallout, environmental degradation, and the War on Terror, Wills uncovers a world where players casually massacre Native Americans and Cold War soldiers alike, a world where neo-colonialism, naive patriotism, disassociated violence, and racial conflict abound, and a world where the boundaries of fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. Ultimately, Gamer Nation reveals not only how video games are a key aspect of contemporary American culture, but also how games affect how people relate to America itself.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Michael Munger, "The Sharing Economy: Its Pitfalls and Promises" (Duke UP, 2021)

15 juni 2022 | 56 min

Transactions have always taken place. For hundreds of years that 'place' was a market or, more recently, a shopping mall. But in the past two decades these physical locations have increasingly been replaced by their virtual counterparts - online platforms. In this book Michael Munger explains how these platforms act as matchmakers or middlemen, a role traders have adopted since the very first exchanges thousands of years ago. The difference today is that the matchmakers often play no direct part in buying or selling anything - they just help buyers and sellers find each other. Their major contribution has been to reduce the costs of organizing and completing purchases, rentals or exchanges. The Sharing Economy: Its Pitfalls and Promises (Duke UP, 2021) contends that the key role of online platforms is to create reductions in transaction costs and it highlights the importance of three 'Ts' - triangulation, transfer and trust - in bringing down those costs.

Professor Munger trained as an economist at Washington University in St. Louis under Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass North. He has published prolifically across disciplines in the areas of political economy and public choice, and is now a professor of political science at Duke University, with secondary appointments in economics and public policy.

Professor Munger is also an avowed libertarian, and has stood for office as a candidate of the Libertarian Party. In our interview, he explains how the emergence of the platform economy creates concentrations of economic power that are just as concerning to him as concentrations of political power. He also explains how thinking through the many changes and disruptions in our working lives that will result from the platform economy has led him to the view that Universal Basic Income and single-payer healthcare are necessary to creating the kind of free and prosperous society that he and other libertarians want.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics that trains students in the skills of data analytics needed to understand, succeed in, or make positive changes to the evolving digital platform economy.

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Gian Maria Campedelli, "Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads" (Routledge, 2022)

14 juni 2022 | 45 min

Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads (Routledge, 2022) reviews the roots of the intersection between machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and research on crime; examines the current state of the art in this area of scholarly inquiry; and discusses future perspectives that may emerge from this relationship.

As machine learning and AI approaches become increasingly pervasive, it is critical for criminology and crime research to reflect on the ways in which these paradigms could reshape the study of crime. In response, this book seeks to stimulate this discussion. The opening part is framed through a historical lens, with the first chapter dedicated to the origins of the relationship between AI and research on crime, refuting the novelty narrative that often surrounds this debate. The second presents a compact overview of the history of AI, further providing a nontechnical primer on machine learning. The following chapter reviews some of the most important trends in computational criminology and quantitatively characterizing publication patterns at the intersection of AI and criminology, through a network science approach. This book also looks to the future, proposing two goals and four pathways to increase the positive societal impact of algorithmic systems in research on crime. The sixth chapter provides a survey of the methods emerging from the integration of machine learning and causal inference, showcasing their promise for answering a range of critical questions.

With its transdisciplinary approach, Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research is important reading for scholars and students in criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and economics, as well as AI, data sciences and statistics, and computer science.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

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R. John Aitken, "The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

13 juni 2022 | 63 min

Mark Anthony Neal, "Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive" (NYU Press, 2022)

10 juni 2022 | 70 min

We are living in an era of unprecedented access to popular culture: contemporary digital infrastructure provides anyone with an internet connection access to a dizzying array of cultural objects past and present, which mingle and connect in fascinating, bizarre and sometimes troubling ways.

In Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (NYU Press, 2022), Mark Anthony Neal considers the opportunities and challenges that this vast archive represents for Black American culture, with a particular focus on music and sound. He suggests that despite the profusion of what he terms ‘Black big data’ and the supposed democratisation of access this entails, the contemporary moment is characterised by a profound amnesia and an absence of attention to the dense web of connections that bind the analogue past with the digital present. Black Ephemera seeks to at once draw out and ‘mystify’ these links, by attending to recordings, historical moments and archival projects which have often been neglected in other studies of Black music. Neal’s explorations have a wide historical scope and operate simultaneously in microscopic and conjunctural registers. The book includes analyses of legendary Memphis record label Stax, the place of Aretha Franklin and Mavin Gaye’s overlooked early recordings in/as the Great American Songbook, the use of musical citation to try and combat the erasure of Black women’s experience from the historical archive, and the significance of archival ephemera to Black mourning practices from Pattie LaBelle to Kendrick Lamar.

We cover a lot of music in this episode, and there’s even more in the book! A good place to start might be with two mixes made in response to Black Ephemera, which you can listen to here and here.

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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Timothy J. Jorgensen, "Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life" (Princeton UP, 2021)

10 juni 2022 | 66 min

When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices--or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical.

The story of how we came to understand electricity's essential role in all life is rooted in our observations of its influences on the body--influences governed by the body's central nervous system. Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life (Princeton UP, 2021) explains the science of electricity from this fresh, biological perspective. Through vivid tales of scientists and individuals--from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk--Timothy Jorgensen shows how our views of electricity and the nervous system evolved in tandem, and how progress in one area enabled advancements in the other. He explains how these developments have allowed us to understand--and replicate--the ways electricity enables the body's essential functions of sight, hearing, touch, and movement itself.

Throughout, Jorgensen examines our fascination with electricity and how it can help or harm us. He explores a broad range of topics and events, including the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of the electron and neuron, the history of experimentation involving electricity's effects on the body, and recent breakthroughs in the use of electricity to treat disease.

Filled with gripping adventures in scientific exploration, Spark offers an indispensable look at electricity, how it works, and how it animates our lives from within and without.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

9 juni 2022 | 69 min

Nikita Braguinski, "Mathematical Music: From Antiquity to Music AI" (Focal Press, 2022)

9 juni 2022 | 66 min

On Religion and Photography in 19th-Century America

9 juni 2022 | 51 min

Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins, "Who Needs the ABC?: How Digital Disruption and Political Dysfunction Threaten the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Existence" (Scribe, 2022)

8 juni 2022 | 54 min

Marco Grasso, "From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022)

8 juni 2022 | 56 min

Gernot Wagner, "Geoengineering: The Gamble" (Polity, 2021)

7 juni 2022 | 63 min

Allison Hahn, "Media Culture in Nomadic Communities" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)

7 juni 2022 | 60 min

Joshua Citarella, "Politigram and the Post-Left" (Blurb, 2021)

7 juni 2022 | 62 min

The internet’s potential to perform political miracles has been a source of both hope and disappointment for many grassroots movements. We remember that the Sanders campaign tried to master the meme to mobilise a young, eager audience. Equally, we ascribe Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 to seemingly leaderless internet misinformation.Many of such events have been the subject of academic study - but research is often slow to keep up with the rapidly changing scene. If a researcher tracing the role of the meme to the politicisation and radicalisation of online communities struggles to keep up what hope does an artist have?

Joshua Citarella’s practice starts with the understanding that it is impossible to predict what the next generation of meme posters will be interested in and whether their memes will reach beyond their tiny echo chambers. What is clear is that mainstream politics, particularly the politics of the left, remains afraid of these unruly communities that can just as easily turn to the dark corners of the demonised alt-right as they are to carry the flag for Bernie.

Joshua Citarella speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about researching internet subcultures, playing politics with the extremely online, the multiple meanings of radicalisation, strategies for subverting right-wing content, and the role of art in internet political aesthetics.

Joshua Citarella is an artist, content creator, and researcher. Politigram and the Post-left is one of many projects he has released through self-publishing channels and directly to his supporters.

Joshua on Instagram and Patreon
20 Interviews with meme-posters
Do Not Research, and online internet culture magazine
When Guys Turn 20, Joshua's video series at dis.art
Do Not Research exhibition at Lower Cavity
Interview with Mike Watson on The Memeing of Mark Fisher

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Thomas J. Misa, "Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

6 juni 2022 | 75 min

David B. Goldstein, "The End of Genetics: Designing Humanity's DNA" (Yale UP, 2022)

6 juni 2022 | 58 min

Experimental Life

3 juni 2022 | 16 min

Shara Rambarran, "Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

3 juni 2022 | 65 min

Virtuality has entered our lives making anything we desire possible. We are, as Gorillaz once sang, in an exciting age where 'the digital won't let [us] go…' Technology has revolutionized music, especially in the 21st century where the traditional rules and conventions of music creation, consumption, distribution, promotion, and performance have been erased and substituted with unthinkable and exciting methods in which absolutely anyone can explore, enjoy, and participate in creating and listening to music.

Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the interactive relationship of sound, music, and image, and its users (creators/musicians/performers/audience/consumers). Areas involving the historical, technological, and creative practices of virtual music are surveyed including its connection with creators, musicians, performers, audience, and consumers. Shara Rambarran looks at the fascination and innovations surrounding virtual music, and illustrates key artists (such as Grace Jones, The Weeknd), creators (such as King Tubby, Kraftwerk, MadVillain, Danger Mouse), audiovisuals in video games and performances (such as Cuphead and Gorillaz), audiences, and consumers that contribute in making this musical experience a phenomenon. Whether it is interrogating the (un)realness of performers, modified identities of artists, technological manipulation of the Internet, music industry and music production, or accessible opportunities in creativity, the book offers a fresh understanding of virtual music and appeals to readers who have an interest in this digital revolution.

Shara Rambarran is Assistant Professor of Music at Bader International Study Centre, UK (Queen’s University, Canada). She co-runs the Art of Record Production conferences and is an editor on the Journal on the Art of Record Production and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2016). Shara Rambarran on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Jahara Matisek and Buddhika Jayamaha, "Old and New Battlespaces: Society, Military Power, and War" (Lynne Rienner, 2022)

3 juni 2022 | 77 min

Joshua Neves, "Underglobalization: Beijing's Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy" (Duke UP, 2020)

3 juni 2022 | 62 min

Andrew Shortland and Patrick Degryse, "When Art Isn’t Real: The World's Most Controversial Objects under Investigation" (Leuven UP, 2022)

3 juni 2022 | 62 min

In When Art Isn’t Real: The World's Most Controversial Objects under Investigation (Leuven University Press, 2022), Dr. Andrew Shortland and Dr. Patrick Degryse examine how an initially valueless object becomes worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa.

The art world is a multi-billion-dollar industry which captures world headlines on a regular basis, for both good and bad reasons. This book deals with one of the most-discussed areas of controversy: high-profile objects that have experts arguing about their veracity. Some may have been looted, others may be fakes, some may be heavily restored or misattributed. Often, in these cases, analytical science is called on to settle a dispute.

The authors of this book have decades of experience in this field, working on a range of objects dating from prehistory to the twentieth century. They present seven of the most famous cases from the Getty Kouros to the Turin Shroud – some of which are still contested, and examine how a few words from a connoisseur or scientist can make a virtually valueless object worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa.

“We want to give readers some feel for the people involved. A feel for those period or material experts who give their opinion on an object’s validity from its looks, feel, even smell. A feel for the analysts, who employ their sicnetific equipment to the object and give their opinion from the numbers and pictures that are derived from them. A feel for the experts working with, in parallel with, and occasionally against each other.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Andrew Bickford, "Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military" (Duke UP, 2021)

3 juni 2022 | 63 min

Margie Meacham, "AI in Talent Development: Capitalize on the AI Revolution to Transform the Way You Work, Learn, and Live" (ASTD, 2020)

2 juni 2022 | 52 min

Jessamyn Abel, "Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train" (Stanford UP, 2022)

2 juni 2022 | 65 min

Rob Dunn, "A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species" (Basic Book, 2021)

2 juni 2022 | 62 min

Paul Huebener, "Nature's Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis" (U Regina Press, 2020)

1 juni 2022 | 34 min

Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan, "Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities" (U California Press, 2021)

1 juni 2022 | 68 min

What would it take to make urban places greener, more affordable, more equitable, and healthier for everyone? In recent years, cities have stepped up efforts to address climate and sustainability crises. But progress has not been fast enough or gone deep enough. If communities are to thrive in the future, we need to quickly imagine and implement an entirely new approach to urban development: one that is centered on equity and rethinks social, political, and economic systems as well as urban designs. With attention to this need for structural change, Reimagining Sustainable Cities advocates for a community-informed model of racially, economically, and socially just cities and regions. The book aims to rethink urban sustainability for a new era.

In Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities (U California Press, 2021), Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan ask big-picture questions of interest to readers worldwide: How do we get to carbon neutrality? How do we adapt to a climate-changed world? How can we create affordable, inclusive, and equitable cities? While many books dwell on the analysis of problems, Reimagining Sustainable Cities prioritizes solutions-oriented thinking--surveying historical trends, providing examples of constructive action worldwide, and outlining alternative problem-solving strategies. Wheeler and Rosan use a social ecology lens and draw perspectives from multiple disciplines. Positive, readable, and constructive in tone, Reimagining Sustainable Cities identifies actions ranging from urban design to institutional restructuring that can bring about fundamental change and prepare us for the challenges ahead.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Alexander Monea, "The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight" (MIT Press, 2022)

31 maj 2022 | 65 min

In The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight (MIT Press, 2022), Alexander Monea argues provocatively that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQIA+ content into increasingly narrow channels--rendering it invisible through opaque algorithms, automated and human content moderation, warped keywords, and other strategies of digital overreach. Monea explains how the United States' thirty-year "war on porn" has brought about the over-regulation of sexual content, which, in turn, has resulted in the censorship of much nonpornographic content--including material on sex education and LGBTQIA+ activism. In this wide-ranging, enlightening account, Monea examines the cultural, technological, and political conditions that put LGBTQIA+ content into the closet.

Monea looks at the anti-porn activism of the alt-right, Christian conservatives, and anti-porn feminists, who became strange bedfellows in the politics of pornography; investigates the coders, code, and moderators whose work serves to reify heteronormativity; and explores the collateral damage in the ongoing war on porn--the censorship of LGBTQ+ community resources, sex education materials, art, literature, and other content that engages with sexuality but would rarely be categorized as pornography by today's community standards. Finally, he examines the internet architectures responsible for the heteronormalization of porn: Google Safe Search and the data structures of tube sites and other porn platforms.

Monea reveals the porn industry's deepest, darkest secret: porn is boring. Mainstream porn is stuck in a heteronormative filter bubble, limited to the same heteronormative tropes, tagged by the same heteronormative keywords. This heteronormativity is mirrored by the algorithms meant to filter pornographic content, increasingly filtering out all LGBTQIA+ content. Everyone suffers from this forced heteronormativity of the internet--suffering, Monea suggests, that could be alleviated by queering straightness and introducing feminism to dissipate the misogyny.

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Rajesh Veeraraghavan, "Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India" (Oxford UP, 2021)

31 maj 2022 | 76 min

How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems.

Rajesh Veeraraghavan's book Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford UP, 2021) is an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines in detail NREGA’s implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It finds that the local system of power is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia, but because of coercive counter-strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process of patching development. Patching development is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical process that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions, and technology is intricate, fluid, and highly situated. The book throws new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs. While focused on one Indian state, the implications for increasing citizen participation and government transparency have global relevance.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim, "Song of the Earth: Understanding Geology and Why It Matters" (Oxford UP, 2021)

31 maj 2022 | 63 min

Nathaniel Isaacson, "Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction" (Wesleyan UP, 2017)

31 maj 2022 | 48 min

Chinese science fiction has been booming lately through the translation of books like Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, but where did the current surge come from? In Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), Nathaniel Isaacson introduces the genre’s origins in China and tracks its development from roughly 1904 to 1934. During that period, China’s final dynasty, the Qing, came to an end amid European nations’ increasing control of China, the Republic of China was established, and Japan conquered Manchuria while the Chinese Communist Party was established and grew into a major political-cultural force. Isaacson connects these political shifts to the establishment of science fiction in China through key works by authors like Lu Xun, Wu Jianren, and Lao She. In so doing, he shows how Chinese science fiction is connected to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, depicting authors’ struggles to subvert Orientalist attitudes toward China. Isaacson traces how Orientalism and its attendant colonialist projects were intertwined with Western scientific knowledge in such a way as to make science fiction a fruitful medium for cultural debates over China’s role in the world.

Nathaniel Isaacson is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at North Carolina State University. His research interests include the history of Chinese science and science fiction, Chinese cinema, cultural studies, and literary translation. Nathaniel has published articles and translations in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, Osiris, Science Fiction Studies, Renditions, Pathlight, and Chinese Literature Today. His book, Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (2017), examines the emergence of sf in late Qing China. His current book project, Moving the People: the Aesthetics of Mass Transit in Modern China, examines narratives of development as a theme in modern Chinese literary and visual culture primarily through the figure of the train.

Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. She writes about Japanese media and is currently completing Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, a book about contemporary media and Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels.

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Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)

31 maj 2022 | 62 min

Adam M. Romero, "Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture" (U California Press, 2021)

30 maj 2022 | 45 min

Aniket Aga, "Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India" (Yale UP, 2022)

30 maj 2022 | 59 min

Should Scholars Trust Machine Translation of their Articles?

30 maj 2022 | 45 min

Greg Brennecka, "Impact: How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong" (William Morrow, 2022)

30 maj 2022 | 45 min

Andrew Doig, "This Mortal Coil: A History of Death" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

27 maj 2022 | 77 min

On Blogging Religion

26 maj 2022 | 59 min

Paul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)

25 maj 2022 | 61 min

The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.

The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.

Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers (Picador, 2022) ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible.

Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.

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Pandemic Perspectives 12: Politicizing the COVID Pandemic

25 maj 2022 | 63 min

Nomi Claire Lazar, "Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time" (Yale UP, 2019)

24 maj 2022 | 49 min

John Markoff, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand" (Penguin, 2022)

24 maj 2022 | 52 min

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live.

In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world.

John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Comstock Publishing, 2021)

23 maj 2022 | 55 min

Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World" (Basic Books, 2022)

23 maj 2022 | 74 min

Emily Mendenhall, "Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji" (Vanderbilt UP, 2022)

23 maj 2022 | 33 min

Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town. The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, grew up in Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected public health guidance, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities.

Professor Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist and Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2017. She is Editor-in-Chief of Social Science and Medicine-Mental Health and leads the office of Medical Anthropology and Critical Social Science. She has served as Honorary Faculty at the University of the Witwatersrand for the past decade. At Georgetown, she leads the global health concentration in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the School of Foreign Service.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2021)

23 maj 2022 | 61 min

John Lardas Modern, "Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

23 maj 2022 | 108 min

Alice Dailey, "How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol" (Cornell UP, 2022)

20 maj 2022 | 59 min

Jim Al-Khalili, "The Joy of Science" (Princeton UP, 2022)

19 maj 2022 | 50 min

Today’s world is unpredictable and full of contradictions, and navigating its complexities while trying to make the best decisions is far from easy. The Joy of Science (Princeton UP, 2022) presents 8 short lessons on how to unlock the clarity, empowerment, and joy of thinking and living a little more scientifically. In this brief guide to leading a more rational life, acclaimed physicist Jim Al-Khalili invites readers to engage with the world as scientists have been trained to do. The scientific method has served humankind well in its quest to see things as they really are, and underpinning the scientific method are core principles that can help us all navigate modern life more confidently. Discussing the nature of truth and uncertainty, the role of doubt, the pros and cons of simplification, the value of guarding against bias, the importance of evidence-based thinking, and more, Al-Khalili shows how the powerful ideas at the heart of the scientific method are deeply relevant to the complicated times we live in and the difficult choices we make. Read this book and discover the joy of science. It will empower you to think more objectively, see through the fog of your own preexisting beliefs, and lead a more fulfilling life.

Jim Al-Khalili is Distinguished Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Surrey and one of Britain’s best-known science communicators. He has written numerous books, including The World According to Physics (Princeton); Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed; and Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and lives in Southsea, England. Twitter @jimalkhalili

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Shannon L. Walsh, "Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

19 maj 2022 | 72 min

Today we are joined by Dr. Shannon Walsh, Associate Professor of Theatre History, and author of Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of women’s physical culture in the United States, the role that physical culture reformers played in producing femininity and whiteness, and the possibilities for anti-racist and anti-sexist sport to reconceptualize the white supremist roots of American athleticism.

In Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Walsh traces the beginnings of reform era physical culture, paying special attention to the way that physical culturists attempted to shape women’s bodies. She argues that their efforts hinged on using exercise to produce femininity and whiteness and that they prefigured the larger eugenic movements aimed at perpetuating the white race later in the 20th century. In each chapter she looks at different physical culturists or physical cultural movement. Her second chapter looks at Steele MacKaye and Americanised Delsarte, a physical cultural practice that combined acting, dance and exercise. Her third chapter focuses on Dudley Allen Sargent and mimetic workouts that introduced working class motions – for example wood chopping - to middle and upper-middle class men and women at Ivy League colleges.

The fourth and fifth chapter work together to unpack the complicated position of women’s physical culture, femininity and motherhood. In chapter four, Walsh shows how Abby Shaw Mayhew and the YWCA articulated a genre of motherhood, which Walsh calls “social motherhood,” that reframed women’s exercise as domestic and maternal rather than grotesque and masculine. In the fifth chapter, Walsh examines Bernarr MacFadden – the Barnum of physical culture – to showcases the places where advertising, motherhood, and women’s exercise came into explicit contact.

Relying on a close reading of physical culture through critical theory, these main chapters trace the intersections between exercise, femininity, motherhood, race and social class, to illustrate how debates over these issues helped to produce whiteness. Whether they were in elite educational institutions in the Northeast, Midwestern metropolises like Minneapolis, or travelling around the country these experts helped to code physical culture as specifically as womanly, middle class, white, and ultimately as unremarkable.

He final body chapter, chapter six, looks at physical culture for indigenous women in three sites: the Odanah Mission School, the Model Indian School at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Unlike their white counterparts, indigenous women were not offered significant opportunities for physical exercise and if they were it was only for the purpose of assimilation. Unsurprisingly, many indigenous girls and women challenged those expectations and were successful athletes.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at [email protected] and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter.

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Pandemic Perspectives 11: The Covid Pandemic and Learning about Learning

18 maj 2022 | 54 min

Elena Esposito, "Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2022)

18 maj 2022 | 54 min

Alison Calder, "Synaptic" (U Regina Press, 2022)

17 maj 2022 | 47 min

David M. Peña-Guzmán, "When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness" (Princeton UP, 2022)

17 maj 2022 | 43 min

Gijs Mom, "Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980" (Berghahn Books, 2020)

17 maj 2022 | 48 min

Donald A. Barclay, "Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)

17 maj 2022 | 63 min

Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces–historical, psychological, economic, and culture–to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies.

Disinformation explains:

How human psychology—the very way our brains work—can leave us vulnerable to disinformation.
How the early visions of what a global computer network would and should be unintentionally laid the groundwork for the current post-truth culture.
The ways in which truth is twisted and misrepresented via propaganda and conspiracy theories.
How new technology not only spreads disinformation but may also be changing the way we think.
The ways in which the economics of information and the powerful influence of popular culture have contributed to the creation of the post-truth culture.

Unlike the far-too-numerous one-sided, politically ideological treatments of the post-truth culture, Disinformation does not seek to point the finger of blame at any individuals or groups; instead, its focus is on how a number of disparate forces have influenced human behaviors during a time when all of humanity is struggling to better understand and more effectively control (for better or worse) challenging new technologies that are straining the limits of human intellectual and emotional capacity.

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Will Kinney, "An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe" (MIT Press, 2022)

16 maj 2022 | 50 min

Simon Peter Rowberry, "Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform" (MIT Press, 2022)

15 maj 2022 | 69 min

Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform (MIT Press, 2022) is the first book-length analysis of Amazon's Kindle explores the platform's technological, bibliographical, and social impact on publishing.

Dr. Simon Peter Rowberry recounts how Amazon built the infrastructure for a new generation of digital publications, then considers the consequences of having a single company control the direction of the publishing industry. Exploring the platform from the perspectives of technology, texts, and uses, he shows how the Kindle challenges traditional notions of platforms as discrete entities. Dr. Rowberry argues that Amazon's influence extends beyond “disruptive technology” to embed itself in all aspects of the publishing trade; yet despite industry pushback, he says, the Kindle has had a positive influence on publishing.

Dr. Rowberry documents the first decade of the Kindle with case studies of Kindle Popular Highlights, an account of the digitization of books published after 1922, and a discussion of how Amazon's patent filings reflect a shift in priorities. Rowberry argues that while it was initially convenient for the book trade to outsource ebook development to Amazon, doing so has had adverse consequences for publishers in the mid- and long term, limiting opportunities for developing an inclusive and forward-thinking digital platform. While it has forced publishers to embrace digital forms, the Kindle has also empowered some previously marginalized readerships. Although it is still too early to judge the long-term impact of ebooks compared with that of the older technologies of clay tablets, the printing press, and offset printing, the shockwaves of the Kindle continue to shape publishing.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Nigel Rothfels, "Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

13 maj 2022 | 69 min

Facing Failure and the Museum Dedicated to It

12 maj 2022 | 59 min

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

Why failure is part of the hidden curriculum
Why you can’t be creative or innovative without failing [sometimes a lot]
How to learn from it, instead of sweeping it under the rug
A failure our guest and our host each faced
A discussion of the Museum of Failure

Our guest is: Dr. Samuel West, a licensed psychologist (cognitive behavioral therapy) with a PhD in Organizational Psychology. His research focuses on creating climates for innovation by encouraging experimentation and exploration. In 2017 he founded the Museum of Failure showcasing over a 100 innovation failures from around the world. The aim of the museum is to stimulate productive discussions about the important role of failure for innovation and to increase organizational acceptance of failure.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life. She previously worked in Museum Education at a small museum in New York; and as a PhD student worked for a professor who was a Smithsonian curator.

Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:

The Museum of Failure
The Museum of Broken Relationships
The remote control referred to in this podcast
The marshmallow candy referred to in this podcast
TedTalk on Failing “Mindfully”
Podcast on fear and failure
Podcast on the role of failure in student success
Failosophy: A Handbook for When Things Go Wrong, by Elizabeth Day
Dr. Manu Kapur’s work on Productive Failure

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

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Banu Subramaniam, "Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism" (U of Washington Press, 2019)

12 maj 2022 | 41 min

Mark Neocleous, "The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies" (Verso, 2022)

12 maj 2022 | 51 min

Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance.

Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies (Verso, 2022) moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, this book lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.

In this interview, I spoke with Mark Neocleous about his fascinating and wide-ranging book The Politics of Immunity. We also spent time discussing his previous work on security and police power, the personal context informing this work, and connections with the ongoing UK undercover policing controversy (discussed in my previous interview with the authors of Deep Deception).

Content warning: between 43-45 minutes into the podcast, there is a brief discussion of suicide in the context of Mark's forthcoming work.

Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for his influential work on police power and security. His recent books include The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind' (2016); War Power, Police Power (2014); and the newly-reissued A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (2021).

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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Sam Tatam, "Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow's Challenges" (Harriman House, 2022)

11 maj 2022 | 66 min

Samuel J. Redman, "Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology" (Harvard UP, 2021)

11 maj 2022 | 50 min

Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect.

In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the “vanishing Indian” and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology.

The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions—a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors’ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public’s confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by “scientific” racism.

Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.

Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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Pandemic Perspectives 10: Covid and the Art of Science Communication

11 maj 2022 | 58 min

Eve Ng, "Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

11 maj 2022 | 53 min

Nicole Charles, "Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados" (Duke UP, 2022)

10 maj 2022 | 41 min

The Future of Opinion Polls: A Conversation with Mark Pack

10 maj 2022 | 54 min

Sangeet Kumar, "The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web" (Indiana UP, 2021)

10 maj 2022 | 47 min

Eugenics

9 maj 2022 | 14 min

Emily West, "Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly" (MIT Press, 2022)

9 maj 2022 | 64 min

Computational Creativity

6 maj 2022 | 21 min

Gary B. Fogel, "Sky Rider: Park Van Tassel and the Rise of Ballooning in the West" (U New Mexico Press, 2021)

6 maj 2022 | 43 min

Jason Steinhauer, "History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

6 maj 2022 | 34 min

Sarah Walsh, "The Religion of Life: Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

5 maj 2022 | 73 min

Pandemic Perspectives 9: Covid, 'Scientism,' and the Betrayal of the Enlightenment

4 maj 2022 | 61 min

Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell, "The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine" (Oxford UP, 2020)

4 maj 2022 | 55 min

The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley has been one of the most disputed territories in history. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinians and Israelis have each sought to claim the national identity of the land through various martial, social, and scientific tactics, but no method has offered as much legitimacy and national controversy as that of the map.

In The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2020), Dr. Christine Leuenberger and Dr. Izhak Schnell delve beneath the battlefield to unearth the cartographic strife behind the Israel/Palestine conflict. Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material, in-depth interviews and ethnographies, this book explores how the geographical sciences came to be entangled with the politics, territorial claim-making, and nation-state building of Israel/Palestine. Chapters chart the cartographic history of the region, from the introduction of Western scientific and legal paradigms that seemingly legitimized and depoliticized new land regimes to the rise of new mapping technologies and software that expanded access to cartography into the public sphere. Maps produced by various sectors like the "peace camps" or the Jewish community enhanced national belonging, while others, like that of the Green Line, served largely to divide.

The stories of Israel's many boundaries reveal that there is no absolute, technocratic solution to boundary-making. As boundaries continue to be controversial and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains intractable and unresolved,The Politics of Maps uses nationally-based cartographic discourses to provide insight into the complexity, fissures, and frictions within internal political debates, illuminating the persistent power of the nation-state as a framework for forging identities, citizens, and alliances.

Unfortunately, due to technical issues, Dr. Izhak Schnell was not able to join the audio interview about this book. His written answers to the questions are here.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John Zerilli, "A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2022)

4 maj 2022 | 66 min

Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring homeowners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, and voters in liberal democracies? Authored by experts in fields ranging from computer science and law to philosophy and cognitive science, A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2022) offers a concise overview of moral, political, legal and economic implications of AI. It covers the basics of AI's latest permutation, machine learning, and considers issues such as transparency, bias, liability, privacy, and regulation.

Both business and government have integrated algorithmic decision support systems into their daily operations, and the book explores the implications for our lives as citizens. For example, do we take it on faith that a machine knows best in approving a patient's health insurance claim or a defendant's request for bail? What is the potential for manipulation by targeted political ads? How can the processes behind these technically sophisticated tools ever be transparent? The book discusses such issues as statistical definitions of fairness, legal and moral responsibility, the role of humans in machine learning decision systems, “nudging” algorithms and anonymized data, the effect of automation on the workplace, and AI as both regulatory tool and target.

Dr John Zerilli is a philosopher with particular interests in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the law. He is currently a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Research Associate in the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

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William F. Eadie, "When Communication Became a Discipline" (Lexington, 2021)

2 maj 2022 | 44 min

Daniel J. Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, "Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It" (Oxford UP, 2022)

2 maj 2022 | 45 min

Digital connections permeate our lives-and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, finance, healthcare, and more, it is alarming how difficult it is to create rules for securing our personal information. Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasing at a record pace. In Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It (Oxford UP, 2022), Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, two of the world's leading experts on privacy and data security, argue that the law fails because, ironically, it focuses too much on the breach itself.

Drawing insights from many fascinating stories about data breaches, Solove and Hartzog show how major breaches could have been prevented or mitigated through a different approach to data security rules. Current law is counterproductive. It pummels organizations that have suffered a breach but doesn't address the many other actors that contribute to the problem: software companies that create vulnerable software, device companies that make insecure devices, government policymakers who write regulations that increase security risks, organizations that train people to engage in risky behaviors, and more.

Although humans are the weakest link for data security, policies and technologies are often designed with a poor understanding of human behavior. Breached! corrects this course by focusing on the human side of security. Drawing from public health theory and a nuanced understanding of risk, Solove and Hartzog set out a holistic vision for data security law-one that holds all actors accountable, understands security broadly and in relationship to privacy, looks to prevention and mitigation rather than reaction, and works by accepting human limitations rather than being in denial of them. The book closes with a roadmap for how we can reboot law and policy surrounding data security.

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Maia Weinstock, "Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus" (MIT Press, 2022)

29 april 2022 | 44 min

Anthony Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

28 april 2022 | 58 min

It’s no secret that the United States has the most expansive prison system of any nation in the world. And the US carceral system overwhelmingly and unjustly impacts Black and Brown individuals and communities. With postwar efforts to dismantle Jim Crow policies, our era of mass incarceration reproduced the old logics of white supremacism that uphold racist capitalism in this new setting. These are the things we know.

But in his book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (U Minnesota Press, 2019), Professor Anthony Hatch observes a feature of mass incarceration essential to its everyday function that many of us had never considered: the large-scale, persistent use of psychotropic drugs, including antipsychotics and antidepressants, not for medical care but rather to control the behavior of incarcerated people. Making a persuasive claim drawn from his training in STS and sociology, Hatch observes how the drugs are used at the level of individual brain chemistry to commit “soul murder” with enormous systemic implications and political stakes. What’s more, the carceral elites’ use of psychotropic drugs for the purposes of pacification, not care, of their wards extends to other (often state-backed) settings of “captive America,” including the military, foster care, elder care, and international detention centers. “Is it possible for the US carceral state to exist without psychotropics,” Hatch asks. “I think we can say the answer is no.”

Silent Cells accomplishes more than the (important) tasks of documentation and analysis. It is a work of liberatory social science. The book is of a piece with Hatch’s abolitionist agenda that he pursues through his generous and generative scholarly and activist engagements, including his work as director of the Black Box teaching laboratory and chair of the Program in Science in Society at Wesleyan University.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “Prison. Medicine” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: [email protected] .

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Rana A. Hogarth, "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" (UNC Press, 2017)

28 april 2022 | 47 min

Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (UNC Press, 2017), Rana Hogarth shows that familiar histories, though excellent, fail to explain how and why medicine and slavery became fused in the first place.

No doubt, defenders of slavery used medicine to justify the corrupt practice once it was under threat. But Hogarth shows how science and medicine grafted during times and in places where slavery was secure—where white elites had no need to justify the violent practice with medical ideas because slavery was taken for granted. How and why did medicine and slavery fuse, Hogarth asks, in the Atlantic World of the newly invented United States and ascendant imperial Britain? Understanding the answer helps us grasp the valences and impacts of racialized national and social identities, then as well as today.

White physicians inflated their value—financial as well as reputational—by locating medical reasons for already existing racist tropes. Circa 1800, white physicians were a disreputable and loosely aligned lot. They had many rivals (Black healers), rich skeptics (plantation owners), and no professional organization until the mid-nineteenth century under which they could rally. Before then, a wide-spread, active white belief in an innate difference between Black and white bodies was the foregone conclusion that white physicians worked to explain in order to appear of use. White physicians in the English-speaking Caribbean developed medical theories of innate difference in the etiology, progress and experience of illness in Black and white bodies—evidence to the contrary be damned. As a consequence, they ignored immense Black suffering, exposed Black workers to deadly diseases, and policed Black people through the hospital system, all the while seeing Black people as appropriate for service in the military and as objects for teaching dissection, that is to say, in projects of imperial and professional expansion.

Medicalizing Blackness broadens the story of medicine in the Atlantic World with a lens that perceives more than the institution of slavery. It also demonstrates the emergence of the Caribbean as a locus—not an outpost—of trustworthy medical knowledge circulated through an array of genres, including journals articles, plantation guides, hospital advertisements, and other media of “textual subjugation” that Hogarth reads with great insight. In short, medicine needed the racist logics of slavery in order to gain power before slavery needed racist medicine to defend its own might.

July 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the exposure of the abusive and unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in the US media. Engaging the roots of white supremacist ideas and practices is essential for better understanding and for stronger political action against racism, as important fifty years ago as it is in our ongoing racialized pandemic.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: [email protected].

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Amanda D. Lotz, "Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars" (MIT Press, 2021)

27 april 2022 | 78 min

Nancy L Segal, "Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021)

27 april 2022 | 46 min

A lot can be learned from scientific twin studies about the relative contributions of nature versus nurture to human experience. However, when such studies do lasting harm to its participants, what does it teach us about the dangerous power of scientific zeal? This is the subject of Dr. Nancy Segal’s latest book, Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), in which she documents the controversial methods employed by the Louise Wise Services-Child Development Center Twin Study of the 1960s and 1970s. In our interview, she addresses the fallout of such methods for twins that were studied but kept unaware of each other for years and what it says about the unique bond shared by twins. This discussion of a tragic but fascinating and important moment in scientific history is relevant for anyone interested in questions about the roles of genes versus the environment or about the uniqueness of twin relationships.

Nancy L. Segal, Ph.D. is professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton and director of the Twin Studies Center. She has authored over 250 scientific articles and six books on twins and twin development. She lives in Southern California. She can be followed on Twitter at @nlsegal.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse.

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Pandemic Perspectives 8: Covid and the Embrace of the Biological World

27 april 2022 | 59 min

Delinda Collier, "Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa" (Duke UP, 2020)

20 april 2022 | 58 min

Nicole Starosielski, "Media Hot and Cold" (Duke UP, 2021)

20 april 2022 | 62 min

Gavin Mueller, "Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job" (Verso, 2021)

20 april 2022 | 76 min

Deborah Gordon, "No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World" (Oxford UP, 2021)

19 april 2022 | 48 min

David Nemer, "Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil" (MIT Press, 2022)

19 april 2022 | 44 min

In Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022), David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.

David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and Princeton University's Brazil Lab. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Technology, ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013).

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Jeff Sebo, "Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes" (Oxford UP, 2022)

18 april 2022 | 41 min

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of our pandemic and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities.

Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes (Oxford UP, 2022) is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how.

Jeff Sebo is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, and Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program at New York University. He is also on the executive committee at the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection and the advisory board for the Animals in Context series at NYU Press.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Susanne A. Wengle, "Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022)

15 april 2022 | 62 min

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.

“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”

Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kris Ruijgrok, "Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and Other Authoritarian Regimes" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

15 april 2022 | 35 min

Jonathan Beller, "The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2021)

15 april 2022 | 59 min

Tim Hwang, "Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet" (FSG Originals, 2020)

14 april 2022 | 50 min

Jennifer Petersen, "How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech" (Duke UP, 2022)

14 april 2022 | 44 min

In How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Duke University Press, 2022), Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens.

Jennifer Petersen is an Associate Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is the director of the graduate certificate program in Science and Technology Studies and is affiliated with the Center for Law, History, and Culture. Before arriving at USC, she worked at the University of Virginia, where she was an affiliate with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also a former Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program.

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Robert A Jacobs, "Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha" (Yale UP, 2022)

13 april 2022 | 71 min

Robert Jacob’s book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale UP, 2022) re‑envisions the history of the Cold War as a slow nuclear war, fought on remote battlegrounds against populations powerless to prevent the contamination of their lands and bodies. Jacobs’s book put these “nuclear bodies” and the legacy of our eighty years history of nuclear weapon and power use at the center of his inquiry. The contaminated bodies of the hibakusha and the contaminated grounds on which they live (or in many cases lived. As many lost their homes), Jacobs argues, are largely invisible because of the colonial and post -colonial power relations that made these communities a target to begin with. Nuclear weapon tests and power stations usually were set at remote places, and the harm was done to people with no political power. Furthermore, it is not just contemporary communities that were harmed, but also future generations. “Plutonium will remain dangerous for over two hundred thousand years, and uranium particles for more than one million years”. Eighty years of tests and nuclear power have saddled our future descendants with radiative waste, most of which is still not safely stored, “a global legacy currently sitting in spent fuel pools and dry storage casks, waiting.” The invisibility of the problem and people affected by it, Jacobs argues, is manufactured in science and politics. Furthermore, the way we study the problem historically further obscured its scope. Different sites have been studied through different national historical “silos,” Jacobs, however, takes a global approach, and look at sites from Nevada to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kazakhstan to Xinjian, and the various Pacific sites that were sites of nuclear tests and accidents since 1945 to make the invisible global hibakusha visible.

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Dashun Wang and Albert-László Barabási, "The Science of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

13 april 2022 | 61 min

Listen to this interview of Dashun Wang, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and also with Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University. We talk about their new book The Science of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2021) and science, squared.

Albert-László Barabási : "There is, of course, the need that you grow professionally. If you're a mathematician, you need to perfect your math. If you're a physicist, you need to do your physics. If you're a biologist, you need to develop your lab techniques. But no matter the magnitude of any discovery you might make, it's not impactful unless you can actually communicate it. And I think that this is where science lacks significantly. I would even go so far as to say, there is a counter-selection: People who are not necessarily the best communicators tend to prefer science because there's the impression that that is not the skill that you need — you just need to be able to solve problems in a meaningful way. But if you're not able to write your ideas down, if you're not able to share your ideas with your community, then it's really as if you didn't have the ideas at all. And you know, I have experienced this in my own career. When I got interested in network science back in 1994/95, for the first few years my papers got rejected one after the other, and not because it wasn't good science (as I would later realize) — no, my papers were getting rejected because I could not communicate to the community at large and to my referees in particular why we should care about networks. And it took me about five years to find the way into people's minds, to learn how they write papers about networks. I needed to learn the hard way about how the community of scientists appreciated and did not appreciate research on networks. And it took me so long because I'd never been offered the opportunity to study the communication of science."

Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected].

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Laura J. Martin, "Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration" (Harvard UP, 2022)

13 april 2022 | 60 min

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology.

Restoration has been a touchstone of United States environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? In Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (Harvard University Press, 2022), Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be.

In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

Laura J. Martin is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. She is a past fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She has written for Scientific American, Slate, Environmental History, Environmental Humanities, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and other publications.

Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. She is also the creator and host of Drafting the Past, a podcast on the craft of writing history. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp.

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James C. Ungureanu, "Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

12 april 2022 | 74 min

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis.

In Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019), James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the “conflict thesis” was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

James C. Ungureanu is a Historian in Residence in the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland and in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Marcus Kaiser, "Changing Connectomes: Evolution, Development, and Dynamics in Network Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2020)

8 april 2022 | 45 min

The human brain undergoes massive changes during its development, from early childhood and the teenage years to adulthood and old age. Across a wide range of species, from C. elegans and fruit flies to mice, monkeys, and humans, information about brain connectivity (connectomes) at different stages is now becoming available. New approaches in network neuroscience can be used to analyze the topological, spatial, and dynamical organization of such connectomes. In Changing Connectomes: Evolution, Development, and Dynamics in Network Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2020), Marcus Kaiser provides an up-to-date overview of the field of connectomics and introduces concepts and mechanisms underlying brain network changes during evolution and development.

Drawing on a range of results from experimental, clinical, and computational studies, Kaiser describes changes during healthy brain maturation and during brain network disorders (including such neurodevelopmental conditions as schizophrenia and depression), brain injury, and neurodegenerative disorders including dementia. He argues that brain stimulation is an area where understanding connectome development could help in assessing the long-term effects of interventions. Changing Connectomes is a suitable starting point for researchers who are new to the field of connectomics, and also for researchers who are interested in the link between brain network organization and brain and cognitive development in health and disease. Matlab/Octave code examples available at the MIT Press website will allow computational neuroscience researchers to understand and extend the shown mechanisms of connectome development.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Pandemic Perspectives 5: Necessarily Global--How the Pandemic Forces Us To Think Bigger

6 april 2022 | 45 min

Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)

6 april 2022 | 37 min

Zeynep Pamuk, "Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society" (Princeton UP, 2021)

5 april 2022 | 63 min

Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other.

Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society (Princeton University Press, 2021) offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists' judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial "science court" to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies.

Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.

Zeynep Pamuk is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Robert Buderi, "Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub" (MIT Press, 2022)

5 april 2022 | 57 min

Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Takeda, and others. It's a major tech center, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all occupying big chunks of pricey office space. Kendall Square also boasts a dense concentration of startups, with leading venture capital firms conveniently located nearby. And of course, MIT is just down the block. In Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub (MIT Press, 2022), Robert Buderi offers the first detailed account of the unique ecosystem that is Kendall Square, chronicling the endless cycles of change and reinvention that have driven its evolution.

Buderi, who himself has worked in Kendall Square for the past twenty years, tells fascinating stories of great innovators and their innovations that stretch back two centuries. Before biotech and artificial intelligence, there was railroad car innovation, the first long-distance telephone call, the Polaroid camera, MIT's once secret, now famous Radiation Laboratory, and much more. Buderi takes readers on a walking tour of the square and talks to dozens of innovators, entrepreneurs, urban planners, historians, and others. He considers Kendall Square's limitations—it's “gentrification gone rogue,” by one description, with little affordable housing, no pharmacy, and a scarce middle class—and its strengths: the “human collisions” that spur innovation.

What's next for Kendall Square? Buderi speculates about the next big innovative enterprises and outlines lessons for aspiring innovation districts. More important, he asks how Kendall Square can be both an innovation hub and a diversity, equity, and inclusion hub. There's a lot of work still to do.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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The Future of Delusions: A Discussion with Lisa Bortolotti

5 april 2022 | 52 min

Sherryl Vint, "Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2021)

4 april 2022 | 61 min

Natali Valdez, "Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era" (U California Press, 2022)

30 mars 2022 | 63 min

In Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era (University of California Press, 2022), Natali Valdez examines research trials that enroll pregnant people in the United States and England. These research trials aim to lower the health risks to future generations by intervening in and studying the diet and exercise of pregnant people. As an ethnographer, Valdez enrolled pregnant participants into the studies, met with them to administer the intervention, and observed the processes of the trials. Valdez argues that these studies focus on the pregnant individual without accounting for the social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that present risk factors to their pregnancies. Structural factors such as racism, pollution, and poverty are not acknowledged, studied, or tracked. And this focus on the individual forecloses addressing issues, such as unstable housing, childcare, immigration, and racism. In the book, Valdez discusses how pregnancy trials have changed very little since the 1950s, the politics of recruiting participants to the trials, and how they handle racial diversity. Valdez asserts that these trials use race as an unstable and inconsistent marker of identifying participants, but they do not address racism, which is an underlying cause of health disparities. In the episode we discuss Valdez’s arguments, ethnographic work, and experience of writing the book. Weighing the Future would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, science and technology studies, as well as women and gender studies. Weighing the Future is the first book of its kind, and it contributes much to our understandings of the increasingly salient issues of maternal health, research, and race.

Natali Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Hannah Star Rogers, "Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies" (Routledge, 2021))

30 mars 2022 | 46 min

I spoke with Hannah Star Rogers, one of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2021). Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science has played the role of muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) as the interdisciplinary exploration of art–science.

This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics, and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge-making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world.

This book provides scholars and practitioners already familiar with the themes and tensions of art–science with a means of connecting across disciplines. It proposes organizing principles for thinking about art–science across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Encounters with art and science become meaningful in relation to practices and materials manifest as perceptual habits, background knowledge, and cultural norms. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, a variety of STS tools can be brought to bear on art–science so that systematic research can be conducted on this unique set of knowledge-making practices.

Hannah Star Rogers is Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies (STIS) and lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies.

Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University, where she studied in the Science and Society Program. She is also a drummer who has studied Gamelan in Bali, Berber in Morocco, and most traditional Ga patterns with master drummers in Ghana.

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Rachel E. Gross, "Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage" (W. W. Norton, 2022)

30 mars 2022 | 47 min

Vagina Obscura: an anatomical voyage by Rachel E. Gross

A myth-busting voyage into the female body.

A camera obscura reflects the world back but dimmer and inverted. Similarly, science has long viewed woman through a warped lens, one focused narrowly on her capacity for reproduction. As a result, there exists a vast knowledge gap when it comes to what we know about half of the bodies on the planet.

That is finally changing. Today, a new generation of researchers is turning its gaze to the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making—the uterus, ovaries, and vagina—and illuminating them as part of a dynamic, resilient, and ever-changing whole. Welcome to Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage (W.W. Norton, 2022), an odyssey into a woman’s body from a fresh perspective, ushering in a whole new cast of characters.

In Boston, a pair of biologists are growing artificial ovaries to counter the cascading health effects of menopause. In Melbourne, a urologist remaps the clitoris to fill in crucial gaps in female sexual anatomy. Given unparalleled access to labs and the latest research, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes readers on a scientific journey to the center of a wonderous world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves.

This paradigm shift is made possible by the growing understanding that sex and gender are not binary; we all share the same universal body plan and origin in the womb. That’s why insights into the vaginal microbiome, ovarian stem cells, and the biology of menstruation don’t mean only a better understanding of female bodies, but a better understanding of male, non-binary, transgender, and intersex bodies—in other words, all bodies.

By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, and shocking, Vagina Obscura is a powerful testament to how the landscape of human knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.

Sine Yaganoglu: Having trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer, I switched to industry following my PhD at ETH Zurich and have been working in innovation management and diagnostics. Besides reading about science, innovation and entrepreneurship, I have become interested in the scientific and cultural aspects of parenting and motherhood since welcoming my first child.

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Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi, "A New History of Modern Computing" (MIT Press, 2021)

30 mars 2022 | 49 min

In A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2021), Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace changes leading to the computer becoming a ubiquitous technology. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific super tool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music, and movies, communicate, and count their steps. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smartphones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.

Dr. Thomas Haigh is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Comenius Visiting Professor at Siegen University. He has been researching the history of computing for more than twenty years and is a past chair of SIGCIS, the group for historians of information technology. He is the lead author, with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope, of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, about the design, construction, and use of the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer, the ENIAC. His new book, with Paul Ceruzzi, is New History of Modern Computing: a comprehensive history of computing from ENIAC to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021)

29 mars 2022 | 53 min

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest.

Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support.

Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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The Future of Rational Decision Making: A Discussion with Olivier Sibony

29 mars 2022 | 45 min

Lucy Cooke, "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" (Basic Books, 2022)

28 mars 2022 | 49 min

Scott Timcke, "Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life" (Bristol UP, 2021)

28 mars 2022 | 56 min

Jing Tsu, "Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern" (Riverhead Books, 2022)

24 mars 2022 | 39 min

N. J. Enfield, "Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" (MIT Press, 2022)

23 mars 2022 | 69 min

Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)

23 mars 2022 | 49 min

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.

"Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe, and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.

In The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat (Pegasus Books, 2022), Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. This new book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat.

Rob Percival is Head of Policy at the Soil Association, Britain's leading food and farming charitable organization. He has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize as well as the Thompson Reuters Food Sustainability Media Award.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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John Bellamy Foster, "The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology" (Monthly Review Press, 2021)

23 mars 2022 | 102 min

It is slowly becoming clear that we are heading towards a deep ecological catastrophe. Our societies carbon footprint and its impact have been known for some time, and already we are starting to see the effects in terms of melting ice, warming oceans and more frequent extreme weather. This will contribute to food and water shortages, political unrest and migration crises that we are ill-prepared for.

In a context such as this, it has become urgent that we rethink the natural world and our relationship to it, but knowing where to start is difficult. Fortunately, John Bellamy Foster has stepped forward with just such a book. Picking up where his book Marx’s Ecology left off 20 years ago, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2021) starts with the funerals of both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, kicking off a story of the many people who worked in their combined shadow. Foster guides us through a century of scientific development in the relatively new field of ecology, showing how many of it’s founders were influenced by the socialist critique of capitalism, and vice-versa. What readers will find are a collection of texts and figures who understood that an economic model that prioritizes profit above all else will eventually have to start asking more of the earth than it can afford to give, incurring long and deep debts that we are now starting to pay. On the one hand, many ecologists have found Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism helpful for thinking dynamically about nature and scientific practice. On the other hand, ecologists have offered socialists a number of theoretical concepts and frameworks for their own thinking. In between are a number of other characters who make their own contributions to discussions on economics and nature, as well as literature, history, epidemiology, race, oppression and emancipation.

The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way, that a more sustainable world is possible.

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of a number of books, including Marx’s Ecology. With The Return of Nature he won the 2020 Isaac Deutscher Memorial prize. He is also the editor and a frequent contributor at the socialist periodical The Monthly Review.

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The Future of Disorder: A Discussion with Helen Thompson

22 mars 2022 | 48 min

Howard Burton, "Pandemic Perspectives: A Filmmaker's Journey in 10 Essays" (Open Agenda, 2022)

22 mars 2022 | 68 min

Kate Crawford, "The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" (Yale UP, 2021)

21 mars 2022 | 57 min

Stephen B. Heard, "The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed." (Princeton UP, 2022)

21 mars 2022 | 77 min

Ori Schwarz, "Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes That Bind Us Together" (Polity Press, 2021)

16 mars 2022 | 32 min

The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life – it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities in his book Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes that Bind Us Together, published by Polity Press in 2021.

What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations and is constantly documented as durable digital objects? How should we understand new digitally mediated forms of human association that bind our actions and lives together but have little in common with old-time 'collectives'; and why are they not simply ‘social networks’? How does social capital transform when it is materialized in a digital form, and how does it remold power structures? What happens to our conceptualization of power when faced with the emergence of new forms of algorithmic power? And what happens when labor departs from work? By posing and answering such fascinating questions, and offering critical tools for both students and scholars of social theory and digital society to engage with them, this thought-provoking book draws the outline of future sociological theory for our digital society.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Pandemic Perspectives 2: A Conversation with Stephen Scherer

16 mars 2022 | 45 min

Nanna Katrine Luders Kaalund, "Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

16 mars 2022 | 65 min

Florian Jaton, "The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating" (MIT Press, 2021)

16 mars 2022 | 51 min

Jackie Higgins, "Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses" (Atria Books, 2022)

16 mars 2022 | 33 min

Lydia Pyne, "Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network" (Reaktion Books, 2021)

15 mars 2022 | 43 min

Carl R. Weinberg, "Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism In America" (Cornell UP, 2021)

10 mars 2022 | 80 min

In Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism In America (Cornell UP, 2021), Carl R. Weinberg argues that creationism's tenacious hold on American public life depended on culture-war politics inextricably embedded in religion. Many Christian conservatives were convinced that evolutionary thought promoted immoral and even bestial social, sexual, and political behavior. The "fruits" of subscribing to Darwinism were, in their minds, a dangerous rearrangement of God-given standards and the unsettling of traditional hierarchies of power. Despite claiming to focus exclusively on science and religion, creationists were practicing politics. Their anticommunist campaign, often infused with conspiracy theory, gained power from the fact that the Marxist founders, the early Bolshevik leaders, and their American allies were staunch evolutionists.

Using the Scopes "Monkey" Trial as a starting point, Red Dynamite traces the politically explosive union of Darwinism and communism over the next century. Across those years, social evolution was the primary target of creationists, and their "ideas have consequences" strategy instilled fear that shaped the contours of America's culture wars. By taking the anticommunist arguments of creationists seriously, Weinberg reveals a neglected dimension of antievolutionism and illuminates a source of the creationist movement's continuing strength.

Carl R. Weinberg is Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion. His website is https://carlrweinberg.com/. You can also follow him on Twitter @Euclid585.

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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Joseph L. Graves and Alan H. Goodman, "Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions" (Columbia UP, 2021)

10 mars 2022 | 46 min

Silvia M. Lindtner, "Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation" (Princeton UP, 2020)

10 mars 2022 | 62 min

Maryam Ziaee, "Big Data Analytics Adoption in Pharmaceutical Advanced Manufacturing"

10 mars 2022 | 33 min

Pratik Chakrabarti, "Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

10 mars 2022 | 51 min

In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future.

In Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality.

Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here.

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Pandemic Perspectives 1: A Conversation with Miguel Nicolelis

9 mars 2022 | 65 min

Alan Rubel et al., "Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

8 mars 2022 | 53 min

The Future of Consciousness: A Discussion with Eva Jablonka

8 mars 2022 | 50 min

Sarah Brayne, "Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing" (Oxford UP, 2020)

4 mars 2022 | 55 min

Police use of advanced data collection and analysis technologies—or, "big data policing"—continues to receive both positive and negative attention through media, activism, and politics. While some high-profile cases illustrate its potential to hasten investigations or even solve previously unsolved crimes, and others showcase risks to individual liberties and vulnerable communities, we know surprisingly little about how and why police departments actually adopt and deploy these tools.

Sarah Brayne's new book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford UP, 2021) provides the first in-depth study of these questions. Dr. Brayne recorded observations and interviews over a 5-year period of ethnographic fieldwork and follow-up with the LAPD. In the book, she examines the roles of extra- and intra-departmental factors in the uptake of big data tools, their relationship to the practice and culture of policing, and the impacts and reactions they've precipitated among captains, sworn officers, civilian analysts, and policed communities.

A major theme of the book is the role of discretion: While data-driven decision-making tools may promise to replace biased human judgment, in practice they can instead displace human judgment—to earlier and less visible steps in the process, exacerbating the problem they are invoked to solve. Conversely, i was also interested in how Dr. Brayne suggests we shift our perspectives on these tools: She proposes to think of a "big data environment" that shapes our social behavior, and she flips the analogy of data as capital to describe a "cumulative disadvantage" that accrues to those with less access to and control over the data collected on them.

Dr. Brayne's study has legal and scholarly as well as policy implications, and it will be of interest to anyone interested in the societal role of data or in that of police. I hope that it becomes part of the foundation for urgently needed future work at their intersection.

Suggested companion work: Ballad of the Bullet by Forrest Stuart (listen to Stuart's interview with Sarah E. Patterson here)

Sarah Brayne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. Dr. Brayne is the founder and director of the Texas Prison Education Initiative, a group of faculty and students who volunteer to teach college classes in prisons throughout Texas.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Firmin Debrabander, "Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

3 mars 2022 | 49 min

The Future of Sleep: A Discussion with Derk-Jan Dijk

1 mars 2022 | 46 min

Paul M. Dover, "The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

25 februari 2022 | 80 min

In The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paul Dover argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. Dr. Dover argues that “paper, as never before, became the transactional medium; the repository of personal, communal, and institutional memory; the avenue of communication; the lifeblood of bureaucracies; and the foundation and residue of learning. Early modern Europeans, whether or not they sought to, and whether or not they were pleased with or trusted the new reality, put paper inscribed with text at the centre of their lives.” He argues that these developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life.

The book focuses on “two related and simultaneous developments in early modern Europe: the great increase in information created and circulating in European society, largely rendered on paper, and the accompanying efforts to manage and make sense of it, also chiefly via paper.” The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Gaye T. Lansdell et al., "Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses" (Edward Elgar, 2021)

23 februari 2022 | 59 min

Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) delves into an under-researched and little understood but extremely pertinent issue in law; the prevalence of neurodisability within criminal justice systems. Considering the challenges faced by both juveniles and adults with neuorodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system, a host of interdisciplinary international scholars examine the issue from multiple perspectives; from that of lawyers, magistrates, and through the lens of therapeutic and legal analysis, this contribution offers suggestions for reform of both legislation and practice. The book makes the case that criminal justice systems lack the accommodations required both within the institution and the community to adequately support those with neurodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system.

In this conversation, with one of the co-editors of the book, Anna Eriksson, we cover a broad range of ground - from the ways in which resources could be reallocated to better address issues of community safety, to how better with neurodisabilities may be better supported in a practical basis to bring more just, equitable and humane outcomes. This is an important book for criminal lawyers, policy makers, criminologists and members of the public who wish to understand and challenge the barriers that people with neurodisabilities face, not just as a result of the criminal justice system but on a day-to-day basis.

Gaye T. Lansdell is an Associate Professor in The Faculty of Law at Monash University.

Bernadette J Saunders is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University.

Anna Eriksson is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Monash University.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Mauro José Caraccioli, "Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire" (U Florida Press, 2021)

21 februari 2022 | 59 min

Marissa Mika, "Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda" (Ohio UP, 2021)

18 februari 2022 | 56 min

Kathryn Millard, "Double Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies" (Rutgers UP, 2022)

17 februari 2022 | 62 min

Keller Easterling, "Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World" (Verso, 2021)

17 februari 2022 | 51 min

Tony Veale, "Your Wit Is My Command: Building AIs with a Sense of Humor" (MIT Press, 2021)

16 februari 2022 | 66 min

Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman, "The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World" (MIT Press, 2021)

16 februari 2022 | 54 min

Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of different online experiences. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World (MIT Press, 2021), Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision-making in a data-driven world.

Luca and Bazerman describe the central role experiments play in the tech sector, drawing lessons and best practices from the experiences of such companies as StubHub, Alibaba, and Uber. Successful experiments can save companies money—eBay, for example, discovered how to cut $50 million from its yearly advertising budget—or bring to light something previously ignored, as when Airbnb was forced to confront rampant discrimination by its hosts. Moving beyond tech, Luca and Bazerman consider experimenting for the social good—different ways that governments are using experiments to influence or “nudge” behavior ranging from voter apathy to school absenteeism. Experiments, they argue, are part of any leader's toolkit.

In this show, Peter Lorentzen interviews economist Michael Luca about this new book on how organizations—including Google, StubHub, Airbnb, and Facebook—learn from experiments in a data-driven world.

Michael Luca, a professor of business administration at Harvard University, is an expert on the design of online platforms and the use of data to inform managerial and policy decision-making.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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In Science We Trust?: An insider Conversation with Health Policy Reporter, Fran Kritz

15 februari 2022 | 48 min

Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, "Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births" (MIT Press, 2021)

15 februari 2022 | 67 min

Raghuveer Parthasarathy, "So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World" (Princeton UP, 2022)

15 februari 2022 | 51 min

Rachel Pagones, "Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love" (Brevis, 2021)

14 februari 2022 | 52 min

Many in the global West have heard something about acupuncture as a treatment for pain relief; they may even have learned of its use in treating opioid addiction. But few know that, in the early 1970s, acupuncture was employed as a means of social and political revolution by Black, Latinx, and radical left-wing activists, inspired by the barefoot doctors of Mao Zedong's Communist revolution. Led by Mutulu Shakur, a charismatic member of the Republic of New Afrika, these young and idealistic people learned to apply acupuncture in the gritty confines of Lincoln Hospital, in the South Bronx of New York. The derelict public hospital, long known as "the Butcher Shop," became an unlikely source of energy and hope as the activists successfully helped people from the community recover from heroin addiction. The acupuncturists - some of them recovering from heroin addiction themselves - employed a combination of needling points in the ear with counseling and "political education"; for instance, taking clients to witness the trials of political prisoners (people imprisoned for their political beliefs or activities). By the late 1970s, the activists' radical approach led to their forced removal from Lincoln. But Shakur and others formed the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA) and founded a college to train a new generation of acupuncturists in the fine art of traditional Chinese medicine.

The fundamental principle was healthcare as a human right. The goal was the liberation of people oppressed by racism. The college had a short life; it was closed after an FBI raid in connection with the lethal armed robbery of a Brink's truck. Yet over three decades, the spirit of revolutionary acupuncture did not die, and neither did the issues that forced its rise, including drug addiction, racism, and social and health care inequities. Inspired by the radical acupuncturists of the 1970s, another group - the People's Organization of Community Acupuncture - founded the community acupuncture movement and took up the mantle of revolution. They, too, proclaim health care as a human right for people marginalized by society - and seek to give back that right through the art of inserting fine needles. Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press Limited, 2021) highlights a little-known intersection of acupuncture, leftist movements of the 1970s, and the global influence on the healthcare of Mao's Communist revolution - and shows how the legacy of that explosive meeting lives on today.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Eric Herschthal, "The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress" (Yale UP, 2021)

11 februari 2022 | 70 min

Retraction Watch: A Discussion with Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky

11 februari 2022 | 89 min

Jun Liu, "Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age: Mobile Communication and Politics in China" (Oxford UP, 2020)

11 februari 2022 | 26 min

How has digital communication technologies impacted the dynamics of political contention in China? What is the role of mobile technology in the country with the world’s largest number of mobile and internet users? Why is there little domestic resistance about surveillance and technology-related privacy risks in China during the pandemic? Jun Liu, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, shares his book Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age: Mobile Communication and Politics in China (Oxford UP, 2020) with the Nordic Asia Podcast.

In his talk with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and affiliated PhD at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Jun Liu introduces his work on mobile communication and political activism based on first-hand in-depth interview and fieldwork data. He also draws on one of his latest papers to explain how China’s unprecedented measures to mobilise its diverse surveillance apparatus played a crucial part in the country’s containment of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Jun Liu’s research stands at the intersection of communication, technology, politics, and society, with particular attention to the social, cultural, and political implications of digital communication. Drawing upon theories from communication, sociology, and political science, his research focuses on how digital technology interacts with socio-cultural forms and settings and generates new power dynamics in politics in specific cultural and institutional contexts such as authoritarian regimes like China.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Kevin Coe and Joshua M. Scacco, "The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times" (Oxford UP, 2021)

10 februari 2022 | 59 min

The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times (Oxford UP, 2021) is part of the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics book series, and it makes an important contribution to the literature on the American presidency and the understanding of presidential rhetoric. There are decades of literature on the concept of the rhetorical presidency, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. This area of study of executive politics focuses on public communication by the president, which is distinct from examining the powers and norms of the presidency itself. The media environment in which the president operates and in which the presidency exists has shifted and changed rather dramatically over the past century, moving the presidency to a position that is often or regularly the focus of news media, however consumed or delivered.

Josh Scacco and Kevin Coe’s new book examines this changed and continuing to change media landscape and to re-assess the capacity of presidential rhetoric, but they have also expanded and reconceptualized the idea of presidential communication, positioning it within important political contexts and goals that presidents often pursue. The Ubiquitous Presidency posits that accessibility, personalization, and pluralism (read as either exclusion or inclusion, depending on the president) are the dominant contexts in which to examine presidential communication. And that the goals that most presidents pursue within these contexts include visibility, adaptability, and control. Thus, Scacco and Coe have written about what has changed about the contemporary presidency, how it has adapted to changing circumstances, evolving digital spaces, and the need to seek audiences in these new spaces. They have also explained, within the research, how the president’s words may have more of an impact than is often considered to be the case. Given the changing environment in which presidential communication transpires, and the results that we have observed as individuals and group make choices and engage in activities based on communication from the president, there may, indeed, be significant effects connected to presidential rhetoric and communication.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Aubrey Clayton, "Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science" (Columbia UP, 2021)

10 februari 2022 | 69 min

There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations.

Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the seventeenth-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it. He highlights how influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures developed a statistical methodology they claimed was purely objective in order to silence critics of their political agendas, including eugenics.

Clayton provides a clear account of the mathematics and logic of probability, conveying complex concepts accessibly for readers interested in the statistical methods that frame our understanding of the world. He contends that we need to take a Bayesian approach--that is, to incorporate prior knowledge when reasoning with incomplete information--in order to resolve the crisis. Ranging across math, philosophy, and culture, Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science (Columbia UP, 2021) explains why something has gone wrong with how we use data--and how to fix it.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Rashmi Sadana, "The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure" (U California Press, 2021)

9 februari 2022 | 67 min

Sydney A. Halpern, "Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis" (Yale UP, 2021)

9 februari 2022 | 44 min

Diane Coyle, "Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be" (Princeton UP, 2021)

8 februari 2022 | 35 min

Fritjof Capra, "Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades" (High Road Books, 2021)

8 februari 2022 | 66 min

Welcome to the first Systems and Cybernetics episode of 2022! After a short break over the holidays to rest and spend time with family (and, of course, read!), it’s time to jump back into conversations with authors of exciting new works in systems thinking. We have a great lineup, and to kick things off I am thrilled to share my recent conversation with Fritjof Capra. Capra is a scientist, educator and activist. He has also been a best-selling author since his first book, The Tao of Physics, encouraged—rather captivated—the world to explore the parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophies nearly 50 years ago.

Many listeners will recall the one Capra book that challenged their worldview and got them asking new questions. For me, The Turning Point (1982) was that turning point. Capra’s new book Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades (High Road Books, 2021) presents the evolution of his thought over five decades, inviting the reader to go back to the beginning of the author’s inquiry and join him in his journey—to experience those milestone moments that represented a new development in his theory.

A systems thinker from his youth, Capra’s scientific training combined with a spiritual awakening in the late 1960s/early 1970s, led him to notice inherent connections between seemingly disparate disciplines. This led to a systemic questioning that compelled him to seek out and collaborate with—even build bridges between—thinkers across many realms. The result is a synthesis—or “systems view”—of life that serves as a “systemic framework for the understanding of biological and social phenomena” and informs “the design principles of our future social institutions… consistent with the principles of organization that nature has evolved to sustain the web of life”.

This conversation made me want to go back and (re)immerse myself in Capra’s previous works and I have a feeling it might make you want to do the same. If you’re new to Capra, Patterns of Connection is a great place to start.

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Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019)

7 februari 2022 | 47 min

Paul A. Offit, "You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation" (Basic Book, 2021)

7 februari 2022 | 42 min

Renny Thomas, "Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment" (Routledge, 2021)

4 februari 2022 | 57 min

Where the Wild Things Are: Reimagining the More-Than-Human City

4 februari 2022 | 25 min

Amidst accelerating environmental change and intense urbanisation, there is growing enthusiasm for building sustainable and ‘natural’ cities. Yet, when a flourishing eco-futuristic urban imaginary is enacted, it is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. In a Southeast Asian context, no city or country better encapsulates this than Singapore. But the pursuit of a singular narrative of progress has very specific consequences, particularly when that progress benefits some but not all beings. In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Jamie Wang to shed more light on the implications of Singapore’s growth fetish, and its implications for humans and non-humans.

About Jamie Wang:

Dr Jamie Wang is a Sydney Southeast Asia Centre Writing Fellow, a research affiliate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and an editor of the journal Feminist Review. She has a PhD in Environmental Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of environmental humanities, urban geography, more-than-human studies and sustainable development in the context of planetary urbanism, climate change and environmental injustice. Jamie’s recent project ‘Reimagining the More-than-Human cities, stories of Singapore’ has explored the multifaceted pressing urban environmental issues, from urban greenery to housing development projects, transportation, water infrastructure, and urban agriculture, with a geographic focus in Singapore. It asks how we might develop ways of re-thinking, re-seeing and re-storying cities through foregrounding their more-than-human worlds. Jamie is also a writer and poet.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Emily Levesque, "The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers" (Sourcebooks, 2021)

4 februari 2022 | 50 min

Peter Cappelli, "The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face" (Wharton School Press, 2021)

3 februari 2022 | 45 min

In this episode I spoke to Professor Peter Cappelli about his new book The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented experiment that reshaped white-collar work and turned remote work into a kind of "new normal." Now comes the hard part.

Many employees want to continue that normal and keep working remotely, and most at least want the ability to work occasionally from home. But for employers, the benefits of employees working from home or hybrid approaches are not so obvious. What should both groups do?

In a prescient new book, Cappelli lays out the facts in an effort to provide both employees and employers with a vision of their futures. Cappelli unveils the surprising tradeoffs both may have to accept to get what they want. Cappelli illustrates the challenges we face in drawing lessons from the pandemic and deciding what to do moving forward. Do we allow some workers to be permanently remote? Do we let others choose when to work from home? Do we get rid of their offices? What else has to change, depending on the approach we choose?

His research reveals there is no consensus among business leaders. Even the most high-profile and forward-thinking companies are taking divergent approaches:

Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies say many employees can work remotely on a permanent basis. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others say it is important for everyone to come back to the office.

Ford is redoing its office space so that most employees can work from home at least part of the time, and GM is planning to let local managers work out arrangements on an ad-hoc basis.

As Cappelli examines, earlier research on other types of remote work, including telecommuting offers some guidance as to what to expect when some people will be in the office and others work at home, and also what happened when employers tried to take back offices. Neither worked as expected.

In a call to action for both employers and employees, Cappelli explores how we should think about the choices going forward as well as who wins and who loses. As he implores, we have to choose soon.

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School of Business and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He teaches awesome sounding courses like How to be the boss and Managing and motivating. Some of his areas of research are human resource practices, public policy related to employment, talent, and performance management. He publishes in journals like theAcademy of Management Journal and Harvard Business Review and op-eds in many magazines like The New Yorker or the Atlantic magazine.

Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO.

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Leonard Mlodinow, "Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking" (Pantheon, 2022)

3 februari 2022 | 48 min

Lina Zeldovich, "The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

3 februari 2022 | 67 min

Kenneth Anderson, "Strychnine and Gold: The Untold History of Addiction Treatment in the United States" (2021)

2 februari 2022 | 61 min

Wim Van Petegem et al., "Evolving as a Digital Scholar: Teaching and Researching in a Digital World" (Leuven UP, 2021)

1 februari 2022 | 32 min

What does it take to become a digitally agile scholar? This manual explains how academics can comfortably navigate the digital world of today and tomorrow. It foregrounds three key domains of digital agility: getting involved in research, education and (community) service, mobilising (digital) skills on various levels, and acting in multiple roles, both individually and interlinked with others.

After an introduction that outlines the foundations of the three-dimensional framework, the chapters focus on different roles and skills associated with evolving as a digital scholar. There is the author, who writes highly specialised texts for expert peers; the storyteller, who crafts accessible narratives to a broader audience in the form of blogs or podcasts; the creator, who uses graphics, audio, and video to motivate audiences to delve deeper into the material; the integrator, who develops and curates multimedia artefacts, disseminating them through channels such as websites, webinars, and open source repositories; and finally the networker, who actively triggers interaction via social media applications and online learning communities. Additionally, the final chapters offer a blueprint for the future digital scholar as a professional learner and as a change agent who is open to and actively pursues innovation.

Informed by the authors' broad and diverse personal experience, Evolving as a Digital Scholar: Teaching and Researching in a Digital World (Leuven UP, 2021) offers insight, inspiration, and practical advice. It equips a broad readership with the skills and the mindset to harness new digital developments and navigate the ever-evolving digital age. It will inspire academic teachers and researchers with different backgrounds and levels of knowledge that wish to enhance their digital academic profile.

Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and Project Muse.

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Pankaj Jain, "Science and Socio-Religious Revolution in India" (Routledge, 2018)

31 januari 2022 | 50 min

Grant Tavinor, "The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality" (Routledge, 2021)

28 januari 2022 | 53 min

Carla Yanni, "The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States" (U Minnesota Press, 2007)

28 januari 2022 | 36 min

Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these buildings were razed long ago, and those that remain stand as grim reminders of an often cruel system. For much of the nineteenth century, however, these asylums epitomized the widely held belief among doctors and social reformers that insanity was a curable disease and that environment—architecture in particular—was the most effective means of treatment.

In The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (U Minnesota Press, 2007), Carla Yanni tells a compelling story of therapeutic design, from America’s earliest purpose—built institutions for the insane to the asylum construction frenzy in the second half of the century. At the center of Yanni’s inquiry is Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker, who in the 1840s devised a novel way to house the mentally diseased that emphasized segregation by severity of illness, ease of treatment and surveillance, and ventilation. After the Civil War, American architects designed Kirkbride-plan hospitals across the country.

Before the end of the century, interest in the Kirkbride plan had begun to decline. Many of the asylums had deteriorated into human warehouses, strengthening arguments against the monolithic structures advocated by Kirkbride. At the same time, the medical profession began embracing a more neurological approach to mental disease that considered architecture as largely irrelevant to its treatment.

Generously illustrated, The Architecture of Madness is a fresh and original look at the American medical establishment’s century-long preoccupation with therapeutic architecture as a way to cure social ills.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Paulette F. C. Steeves, "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

27 januari 2022 | 42 min

73 Teletherapy with Hannah Zeavin (High Theory Crossover, Saronik)

27 januari 2022 | 20 min

Stephanie A. Martin, "Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump" (U Alabama Press, 2021)

27 januari 2022 | 51 min

Dr. Stephanie (Sam) A. Martin’s new book, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (U Alabama Press, 2021), is a fascinating exploration of the way that sermons, particularly those delivered by white evangelical pastors with sizeable congregations, link together storytelling, patriotism, conservative and Republican politics, and American exceptionalism. Martin’s work is a rich and deep textual and rhetorical analysis of sermons that are delivered both in person and online. These sermons—delivered over the course of more than a decade—reach many listeners and believers since they are given by pastors who preside over churches with congregations of at least 2000 members. And Martin teases out the focus of so many of these sermons, which are not always directly discussing or addressing politics, but have and continue to create an understanding of the white evangelical individual within American society.

Decoding the Digital Church explains that part of the thrust of this understanding is to position white Evangelicals as both insiders and outsiders simultaneously. Part of this context, as explained via these sermons, is that the American Founders were the original evangelicals, thus contemporary evangelicals have an original claim to the benefits of being the first true Americans. This is also combined with the nostalgic rendering of America’s past—building on the concept of American exceptionalism as well. At the same time, the content of these sermons opens the pathway for Evangelicals to disavow the ill-effects of their political choices, absolving them of the responsibility for their votes or those they support for elected office. Martin provides a “digital rhetorical ethnography” to understand the narratives that are coming through the white evangelical megachurches. To unpack the threads of these narratives, Martin uses a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives for her research, including approaches from political science, rhetoric and communication, sociology and ethnography, and religious studies. This is an accessible and important study of the connection between evangelical storytelling and the evangelical community’s understanding of its place and role in American society.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Juan Manuel del Nido, "Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires" (Stanford UP, 2021)

25 januari 2022 | 64 min

Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani, "Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors" (PublicAffairs, 2021)

21 januari 2022 | 55 min

Matthew C. Kruger, "What The Living Know: A Novel of Suicide and Philosophy" (Nfb Publishing, 2020)

20 januari 2022 | 46 min

Helga Nowotny, "In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms" (Polity, 2021)

20 januari 2022 | 48 min

John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Cornell UP, 2021)

19 januari 2022 | 62 min

Colin Jerolmack, "Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town" (Princeton UP, 2021)

19 januari 2022 | 65 min

Matt Carlson et al., "News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture" (Oxford UP, 2021)

19 januari 2022 | 53 min

Ginger Nolan, "Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

18 januari 2022 | 23 min

Attempting to derive aesthetic systems from natural structures of human cognition, designers looked toward the “savage mind”—a way of thinking they associated with a racialized subaltern. In Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Ginger Nolan uncovers an enduring relationship between “the savage” and the development of technology and its wide-ranging impact on society, including in the fields of architecture and urbanism, the industrial arts, and digital design.

Nolan focuses on the relationship between the applied arts and the structuralist social sciences, proposing that the late-nineteenth-century rise of Freudian psychology, ethnology, and structuralist linguistics offered innovations and new opportunities in studying human cognition. She looks at institutions ranging from the Public Industrial Arts School of Philadelphia and the Weimar Bauhaus to the MIT Media Lab and the Centre Mondial Informatique, revealing a persistent theme of twentieth-century design: to supplant language with more subliminal, aesthetic modes of communication, thereby inculcating a deep intimacy between human habit and new technologies of production, communication, and consumption.

This book’s ultimate critique is of the development of the ergonomics of the spirit—the design of the human cognitive apparatus in relation to new aesthetic technologies. Nolan sees these ergonomics as a means of depoliticizing societies through aesthetic technologies intended to seamlessly integrate humans into the programs of capitalist modernity. Revising key modernist design narratives, Savage Mind to Savage Machine provides a deep historical foundation for understanding our contemporary world.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam.

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Rebekah Lee, "Health, Healing and Illness in African History" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

17 januari 2022 | 80 min

In Health, Healing and Illness in African History (Bloomsbury, 2021), Rebekah Lee makes an overall assessment of the history and historiography and health, healing and illness in the African context. This unique text is divided in two parts. In the first half of the book, Lee presents a chronological survey and analysis of the ideas and literature that multiple disciplines have produced while studying the experience of health and illness, as well as medical and healing practices in Africa. This part of the book guides readers through seminal questions about African agency and sources that are central to our understanding of the historiography of Africa in general, and to the study of healing and illness in particular.

By starting her narrative in the precolonial past, Lee is not only trying to highlight the value of the research that has been done in this area, but also provide the reader with a wider intellectual and chronological context that can reframe our reading of the literature that exists for the colonial and postcolonial periods. In the second part of the book, Lee examines four case studies each focused on a particular health problem: HIV/Aids, mental illness, malaria and sleeping sickness, and occupational lung disease. In each of these individual studies, Lee offers both a historiographical review and a critical assessment of the ideas and questions that have shaped our views of these issues. She also offers examples of primary sources that illustrate the complex ways in which scholars, from many different disciplinary backgrounds, have used them to draw conclusions about how Africans have experienced health and illness, and engaged with a wide range of healing practices over time.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel, "Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Science" (SIAM, 2019)

17 januari 2022 | 64 min

A true understanding of the pervasive role of software in the world demands an awareness of the volume and variety of real-world software failures and their consequences. No more thorough survey of these events may be available than Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel's Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Science (SIAM, 2019). Their book organizing an extensive collection of episodes into eight chapters that expand on an array of flavors of failures, increasing in intricacy from precision and rounding errors to the software–hardware interface and problems that emerge from complexity.

As I see it, this book serves three audiences: Instructors of computer engineering or numerical methods will find an educational text uniquely suited to a focus on software failures; software engineers will find an equally unique reference text; and students of the practice or the history of computational science will find a fully blazed trail through these complicated stories. Dr. Huckle joined me to discuss his and his coauthor's motivations for assembling the book, a sampler of the chapter headliners, and some of his thoughts on new and evolving computational tools with their own attendant opportunities for failure.

Technical readers will appreciate the mathematical excursions that rigorously introduce topics essential to understanding each chapter's headlining episodes, the exercises and MATLAB code provided at the book's website, and links to sources at Dr. Huckle's website. I found value in the recurring lesson that real-world failures arise from the coincidence of multiple, often multitudinous errors, as well as in the authors' consistent emphasis on the real human toll that the study of these errors is driven to prevent. That said, all readers may appreciate the fanciful taxonomy given in the introduction and the amusing (though sometimes apocryphal) idiosyncratic failures surveyed in the appendix.

Suggested companion works:

Thomas Huckle completed a degree program in mathematics and physics education and in pure mathematics, received a doctorate in 1985, and acquired his postdoctoral teaching qualification (habiliation) in 1991 at the University of Würzburg. A German research Foundation (DFG) grant enabled him to spend time performing research at Stanford University (1993–1994). In 1995 Professor Huckle joined TUM as professor of scientific computing. He has also been a member of the Mathematics Faculty since 1997. His primary research area is numerical linear algebra and its application in fields such as informatics and physics. His work focuses on solving linear problems on parallel computers, image processing and reconstruction, partial differential equations, and structured matrices.

Tobias Neckel has studied applied mathematics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and received a doctorate in Computer Science at TUM in 2009. He is currently senior researcher in scientific computing at TUM and has conducted research at the École Polytechnique, France (2003), the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2008), and the Australian National University (2017). His research interests include the numerical solution of differential equations, hierarchic and adaptive methods, uncertainty quantification, and various aspects of high-performance computing.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Harry Yi-Jui Wu, "Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization" (MIT Press, 2021)

14 januari 2022 | 72 min

In 1948, the World Health Organization began to prepare its social psychiatry project, which aimed to discover the epidemiology and arrive at a classification of mental disorders. In Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization (MIT Press, 2021), Harry Y-Jui Wu examines the WHO's ambitious project, arguing that it was shaped by the postwar faith in technology and expertise and the universalizing vision of a “world psyche.” Wu shows that the WHO's idealized scientific internationalism laid the foundations for today's highly metricalized global mental health system.

Examining the interactions between the WHO and developing countries, Wu offers an analysis of the “transnationality” of mental health. He examines knowledge-sharing between the organization and African and Latin American collaborators, and looks in detail at the WHO's selection of a Taiwanese scientist, Tsung-yi Lin, to be its medical officer and head of the social psychiatry project. He discusses scientists' pursuit of standardization—not only to synchronize sectors in the organization but also to produce a common language of psychiatry—and how technological advances supported this. Wu considers why the optimism and idealism of the social psychiatry project turned to dissatisfaction, reappraising the WHO's early knowledge production modality through the concept of an “export processing zone.” Finally, he looks at the WHO's project in light of current debates over psychiatry and global mental health, as scientists shift their concerns from the creation of universal metrics to the importance of local matrixes.

Harry Yi-Jui Wu is Associate Professor in the Cross College Elite Program and Department of Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan.

Kelvin Chan is a PhD Candidate at McGill University. His PhD dissertation focuses on the history of psychiatry and mental health care in colonial Hong Kong.

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Charles Foster, "Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)

14 januari 2022 | 60 min

How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all—the human being.

To experience the Upper Paleolithic era—a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment—the age of reason and the end of the soul—Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness (Metropolitan Books, 2021) is one man’s audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth—and thrive.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Brendan Borrell, "The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine" (Mariner Books, 2021)

13 januari 2022 | 44 min

Paul Halpern, "Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate" (Basic Books, 2021)

11 januari 2022 | 67 min

Jonathan B. Edelmann, "Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhagavata Purana and Contemporary Theory" (Oxford UP, 2020)

11 januari 2022 | 53 min

COVID-19 and Vaccine Hesitancy in Japan

7 januari 2022 | 26 min

Karl Herrup, "How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer's" (MIT Press, 2021)

3 januari 2022 | 51 min

Exploring Science Literacy and Public Engagement with Science

31 december 2021 | 48 min

David Sulzer, "Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music" (Columbia UP, 2021)

30 december 2021 | 76 min

Anna Bokov, "Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930" (Park Publishing, 2020)

29 december 2021 | 76 min

Laurie Winkless, "Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

29 december 2021 | 61 min

Paul Steinhardt, "Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale" (Open Agenda, 2021)

28 december 2021 | 108 min

Omar W. Nasim, "The Astronomer's Chair: A Visual and Cultural History" (MIT Press, 2021)

28 december 2021 | 67 min

The astronomer's chair is a leitmotif in the history of astronomy, appearing in hundreds of drawings, prints, and photographs from a variety of sources. Nineteenth-century stargazers in particular seemed eager to display their observing chairs--task-specific, often mechanically adjustable observatory furniture designed for use in conjunction with telescopes. But what message did they mean to send with these images? In

The Astronomer's Chair: A Visual and Cultural History (MIT Press, 2021), Omar W. Nasim considers these specialized chairs as both image and object, offering an original framework for linking visual and material cultures. Observing chairs, Nasim ingeniously argues, showcased and embodied forms of scientific labor, personae, and bodily practice that appealed to bourgeois sensibilities.

Viewing image and object as connected parts of moral, epistemic, and visual economies of empire, Nasim shows that nineteenth-century science was represented in terms of comfort and energy, and that "manly" postures of Western astronomers at work in specialized chairs were contrasted pointedly with images of "effete" and cross-legged "Oriental" astronomers. Extending his historical analysis into the twentieth century, Nasim reexamines what he argues to be a famous descendant of the astronomer's chair: Freud's psychoanalytic couch, which directed observations not outward toward the stars but inward toward the stratified universe of the psyche. But whether in conjunction with the mind or the heavens, the observing chair was a point of entry designed for specialists that also portrayed widely held assumptions about who merited epistemic access to these realms in the first place.

Corinne Doria is a historian specializing in the social history of medicine. She holds the chair of history of medicine at the School of Advanced Studies of the University of Tyumen (Russian Federation) and teaches Disability Studies at Sciences-Po (Paris).

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Jennifer Fay, "Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene" (Oxford UP, 2018)

27 december 2021 | 112 min

Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford UP, 2018) explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene —the mise-en-scène— where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film.

While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945.

Jennifer Fay is Associate Professor of English and Director of Film Studies, Vanderbilt University

Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is MA in Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez.

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Charles Sheppard, “Coral Reefs: Science and Survival” (Open Agenda, 2021)

27 december 2021 | 134 min

Claudia de Rham, “The Pull of the Stars” (Open Agenda, 2021)

24 december 2021 | 76 min

Gabriel Yoran, "The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology" (Open Humanities Press, 2021)

24 december 2021 | 50 min

Melinda Baldwin, "Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

24 december 2021 | 67 min

David Politzer, “The Physics of Banjos” (Open Agenda, 2021)

23 december 2021 | 173 min

Joseph Reagle on H. G. Wells's "World Brain" (1937)

22 december 2021 | 60 min

Sarah S. Richardson, "The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

21 december 2021 | 43 min

Jessica Hurley, "Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

20 december 2021 | 65 min

Alfred Mele, “Free Will: An Investigation” (Open Agenda, 2021)

20 december 2021 | 106 min

Timothy M. Yang, "A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan" (Cornell UP, 2021)

17 december 2021 | 104 min

Timothy Yang’s A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan (Cornell 2021) is a case study of Hoshi Pharmaceutical, a Japanese drug company that exemplified the push for a modern “culture of self-medication.” The history of Hoshi is tightly intertwined with state promotion of Western biomedicine beginning in the late nineteenth century, but also reveals tensions between pharmaceutical manufacturers’ self-promotion “as a humanitarian endeavor for greater social good” and their profit motive. As the title suggests, A Medicated Empire also expands our understanding of the production and consumption of drugs―licit and illicit―in the Japanese empire, exploring topics including how companies like Hoshi exploited national-defense concerns to secure lucrative government support in times of crisis on the one hand, and the differential marketing and regulation of pharmaceuticals such as opium to Japanese and colonial subjects. In the latter sections of the book, these elements are central to the story of Hoshi’s fall and rise: the opium scandal which crippled and bankrupted the company in the early 1930s and its resurrection and profiteering as Japan geared up for war later in the decade. Throughout, Yang is sensitive to the tensions between state-led national strengthening, corporate profit motives, and the desires of individuals to optimize their health, and also to the imperial context in which the particular story of Hoshi played out. This book will of course be of interest to historians of Japan, STS, and business, among others, but as we discuss in the podcast, many of its core issues―trust in pharma, government interventions in public health, etc.—are more salient today than ever.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Rocky Kolb, “A Universe of Particles: Cosmological Reflections” (Open Agenda, 2021)

16 december 2021 | 84 min

Jacob Johanssen, "Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibition" (Routledge, 2021)

14 december 2021 | 70 min

Andrew Piper, "Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

14 december 2021 | 47 min

Jade S. Sasser, "On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change" (NYU Press, 2018)

13 december 2021 | 55 min

Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is “back”—and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women’s universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back—and why now? In On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change (New York University Press, 2018), Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground—until now.

Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. Although well-intentioned—promoting positive action, women’s empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community—these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible.

On Infertile Ground presents a unique critique of international development that blends the study of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in a groundbreaking way. It will make any development professional take a second look at the ideals driving their work.

Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. witter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID

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Greg Hickock, “Beyond Mirror Neurons” (Open Agenda, 2021)

13 december 2021 | 97 min

Ginny Smith, "Overloaded: How Every Aspect of Your Life is Influenced by Your Brain Chemicals" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

10 december 2021 | 63 min

Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray, "Technology in World Civilization" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 december 2021 | 75 min

Kalanit Grill-Spector, “Vision and Perception” (Open Agenda, 2021)

10 december 2021 | 118 min

James Shires, "The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East" (Hurst, 2021)

9 december 2021 | 65 min

Britt Rusert, "Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture" (NYU Press, 2017)

9 december 2021 | 69 min

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It’s easy to see why.

At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right.

For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method.

In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway’s method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes’ technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021).

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process.

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Jamie Mustard, "The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out" (BenBella Books, 2019)

9 december 2021 | 40 min

Winka Dubbeldam, "Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms" (Actar, 2022)

9 december 2021 | 32 min

The object as solid, having three dimensions, is not just a different formal trend, but a paradigm shift; a reconceiving of how the architectural object is produced and experienced, changing the very concept of objectivity and meaning of architecture. This book celebrates the potential of the strange object, which finds its origin in the proto-space―the moment between the becoming of the idea and the ultimate shape it takes; the state of the still obscure and ‘uninhibited’ object outside the established framework of signification. As seen through an examination of 10 projects by Archi-Tectonics, this strange object is proof of the very capacity of the object to generate new habits and meanings.

For close to a century, modernism was the norm, presented to culturally aware citizens as the expression of modern life. It arrived hand in hand with medical advances, mass standardization, and a shared ideal of what the ease and speed of the modern lifestyle could offer. Only in the early years of the 21st century did our widespread allegiance begin to shift away from modernism and towards a new social realm. The digital revolution introduced online societies, niche cultures, and digital design. Digital manufacturing facilitated opportunities of surface patterning and the fabrication of one-off special building components, removing the constraints of standardization in the construction industry and celebrating the experimental. Testing designs through prototypes allows for a much more informed decision-making process. The focus is on precise, rigorous research and development, rather than representational models.

Now, after nearly two decades of implementing digital tools, we have reached a new platform where digital design and robotic production are the norm, and by extension, digital craft and integral design are as the future. This has been particularly important in the rethinking of advanced digital design processes. As showcased and examined in Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms (Actar, 2022), from the earliest projects and regardless of scale, Archi-Tectonics has valued performance over form, design intelligence over style. Through prototypes and mock-ups, process documentation and testimonials, the book presents 10 current and recent projects that celebrate the particular and singular over the ideal and universal.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Diana Kelly, "The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov" (Emerald, 2020)

9 december 2021 | 39 min

Noémi Tousignant, "Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018)

9 december 2021 | 51 min

What is “capacity”? In science research and health interventions, it typically refers to the relative availability of equipment, infrastructure, personnel, and skills needed to get a job done. Noémi Tousignant’s book, Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal (Duke UP, 2018), feels its way into the experience of capacity to observe a crucial characteristic. Capacity has “temporal qualities.”

Waiting, interrupting, prolonging, repairing: these processes show that the elements of lab science and public health called “capacity” operate with different rhythms that often fail to synchronize or to be formally acknowledged. Yet the material world of capacity also implies a direction, which orients scientists to (im)possibilities for better futures, “to moral imaginations of responsibility and commitment.”

The book won the 2020 Ludwik Fleck prize for outstanding book from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. The award signals the book’s broad relevance for anyone interested in critical studies of science, technology, and health; intrigued by the phenomenology of time; keen to combine training in history with ethnographic methods; or interested in postcolonial studies, especially Africa.

The book is based on Tousignant’s field work in Senegal from in 2010 and 2011 studying professional toxicologists across three institutions as they “improvised and imagined a more capacious and protective toxicology.” In terms of empirical content, this work is important for anyone interested in environmental contamination and the politics of poisoning lands, waters, and bodies.

The interview also refers to the work of Gabrielle Hecht on exposure and imaginaries of Africa, Julie Livingstone on improvisation and slow risks, Joanna Crane on commodification of global health, and Monika Krause on how NGOs perform worthy projects. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.

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Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021)

8 december 2021 | 45 min

Jennifer Ferng and Lauren R. Cannady, "Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks" (Voltaire Foundation, 2021)

8 december 2021 | 52 min

A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (Voltaire Foundation, 2021) argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans – some anonymous, eminent, and outside the margins – translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illustration, and mining. In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired chapters are also followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both chapters. Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment.

Lauren R. Cannady, assistant clinical professor in University Honors at the University of Maryland, is a historian of early modern art and architecture with an interest in intellectual and cultural history.

Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from MIT.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes, "Arguing with Numbers: The Intersections of Rhetoric and Mathematics" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021)

7 december 2021 | 68 min

One pervasive stereotype about mathematics is that it is objective, unbiased, or otherwise exempt from the influence of human passions. James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes's edited collection will be a revelation even to mathematics professionals who don't take this strict view. The essays in Arguing with Numbers: The Intersections of Rhetoric and Mathematics (The Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) explore the interplays between rhetoric and mathematics that have shaped scholarly and popular culture through to the present day.

Opening the collection are both an historical sketch of scholarship at the intersection of these disciplines, from their division in ancient Greece to their hesitant reunion since the mid-twentieth century, and also a taxonomy of modern research into three distinct approaches, which we review in our discussion. The remaining essays use these approaches to probe the impact of mathematical rhetoric on the sciences (including Hantaro Nakaoka's analogical "Saturnian" model of atomic spectra), on cultural norms and institutions (including the influence of David X. Li's Gaussian copula on the behavior of financial markets), and on relations between mathematics professionals and the lay public. This last part contains a chapter on the legacy of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics that highlights the importance to mathematics professionals of understanding the rhetorical dimensions of our discipline.

Bookending our discussion, Drs. Wynn and Reyes related the story of their edited collection, which makes the point that a cross-disciplinary exchange is needed to help both disciplines better understand their connections to each other and more responsibly manage those connections. Their suggestions will resonate with mathematicians interested in challenging narratives of objectivity, in diversifying our ranks, and in developing responsible rules and principles for the use of social and personal data. The analytical tools demonstrated in this book abet this effort.

Suggested companion works:

Trust in Numbers, Theodore Porter
Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad

James Wynn is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement and Evolution by the Numbers: The Origins of Mathematical Argument in Biology.

G. Mitchell Reyes is Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis and Clark College. He is author of Stranger Relations: Mathematics, Rhetoric, and the Translative Force of Mathematical Discourse (in press with Penn State University Press) and coeditor of Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Benjamin Labatut, "When We Cease to Understand the World" (NYRB, 2021)

7 december 2021 | 74 min

David Herzberg, "White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

6 december 2021 | 60 min

The contemporary opioid crisis is widely seen as new and unprecedented. Not so. It is merely the latest in a long series of drug crises stretching back over a century. In White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (U Chicago Press, 2020), David Herzberg explores these crises and the drugs that fueled them, from Bayer's Heroin to Purdue's OxyContin and all the drugs in between: barbiturate "goof balls," amphetamine "thrill pills," the "love drug" Quaalude, and more. As Herzberg argues, the vast majority of American experiences with drugs and addiction have taken place within what he calls "white markets," where legal drugs called medicines are sold to a largely white clientele.

These markets are widely acknowledged but no one has explained how they became so central to the medical system in a nation famous for its "drug wars"--until now. Drawing from federal, state, industry, and medical archives alongside a wealth of published sources, Herzberg re-connects America's divided drug history, telling the whole story for the first time. He reveals that the driving question for policymakers has never been how to prohibit the use of addictive drugs, but how to ensure their availability in medical contexts, where profitability often outweighs public safety. Access to white markets was thus a double-edged sword for socially privileged consumers, even as communities of color faced exclusion and punitive drug prohibition. To counter this no-win setup, Herzberg advocates for a consumer protection approach that robustly regulates all drug markets to minimize risks while maintaining safe, reliable access (and treatment) for people with addiction.

Accomplishing this requires rethinking a drug/medicine divide born a century ago that, unlike most policies of that racially segregated era, has somehow survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first century.

By showing how the twenty-first-century opioid crisis is only the most recent in a long history of similar crises of addiction to pharmaceuticals, Herzberg forces us to rethink our most basic ideas about drug policy and addiction itself--ideas that have been failing us catastrophically for over a century.

David Herzberg is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo is also the author of Happy Pills in America from Milltown to Prozac. David is also the co-editor of the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs.

Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, a stigma-destroying speaker, and the founder of Choose Your Struggle podcast. A guy in long-term recovery, Jay is dedicated to ending stigma and promoting fact-based education around Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. You can learn more about Jay at his links here.

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Shaoling Ma, "The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861–1906" (Duke UP, 2021)

6 december 2021 | 67 min

Matthew Walker, “Sleep Insights” (Open Agenda, 2021)

29 november 2021 | 108 min

Shaking the World: How Geology Can Help Us Address the Big Challenges of the 21st Century

26 november 2021 | 16 min

Southeast Asia is the most tectonically and geologically active region on Earth. These processes have enriched the mountains and basins with world-famous mineral and energy resources, fresh water, and highly productive soils. However, the same geological processes are responsible for incredible destruction – from the 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These natural hazards, coupled with the effects of human-induced climate change, are driving significant change. To talk us through these changes, Dr Sabin Zahirovic joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, exposing how climate change is amplifying existing vulnerabilities in Southeast Asia. He explains how understanding past and current geological process can help us reduce risks from natural hazards like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, but also address the huge challenges faced by growing populations and increased vulnerabilities resulting from climate change.

About Sabin Zahirovic:

Dr Sabin Zahirovic is a Robinson Fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sabin's research focuses on global plate tectonics and mantle evolution, and particularly for the Tethyan and Asian regions. He completed his PhD titled “Post-Pangea global plate kinematics and geodynamic implications for Southeast Asia” at the University of Sydney in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, he led the Papua New Guinea research stream of the ARC ITRH Basin GENESIS Hub at the University of Sydney. He now leads the Tectonics and Geodynamics stream of a collaborative industry project with BHP. In 2020, Sabin was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to explore the rise and demise of massive reefs and carbonate platforms on Australian continental margins. Sabin is a past recipient of the GSA Voisey Medal, the Deep Carbon Observatory Emerging Leader Award, and the AIPS NSW Tall Poppy award.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Oliver Rollins, "Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain" (Stanford UP, 2021)

26 november 2021 | 76 min

Exposing ethical dilemmas of neuroscientific research on violence, this book warns against a dystopian future in which behavior is narrowly defined in relation to our biological makeup. Biological explanations for violence have existed for centuries, as has criticism of this kind of deterministic science, haunted by a long history of horrific abuse. Yet, this program has endured because of, and not despite, its notorious legacy. Today's scientists are well beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Instead, they contend that scientific progress has led to a natureandnurture, biological and social, stance that allows it to avoid the pitfalls of the past.

In Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain (Stanford UP, 2021), Oliver Rollins cautions against this optimism, arguing that the way these categories are imagined belies a dangerous continuity between past and present. The late 80s ushered in a wave of techno-scientific advancements in the genetic and brain sciences. Rollins focuses on an often-ignored strand of research, the neuroscience of violence, which he argues became a key player in the larger conversation about the biological origins of criminal, violent behavior. Using powerful technologies, neuroscientists have rationalized an idea of the violent brain--or a brain that bears the marks of predisposition towards "dangerousness." Drawing on extensive analysis of neurobiological research, interviews with neuroscientists, and participant observation, Rollins finds that this construct of the brain is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, much less the ethical implications of informing treatment based on such simplified definitions. Rollins warns of the potentially devastating effects of a science that promises to "predict" criminals before the crime is committed, in a world that already understands violence largely through a politic of inequality.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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Nolan Gasser, "Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste" (Flatiron Books, 2019)

24 november 2021 | 57 min

Molly Thomasy Blasing, "Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture" (Cornell UP, 2021)

23 november 2021 | 59 min

Robin Ince, "The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity" (Atlantic Books, 2021)

23 november 2021 | 107 min

Herbert Lin, "Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons" (Stanford UP, 2021)

22 november 2021 | 56 min

Gavin Van Horn et al., "Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, 5-Volume Set" (Center for Humans and Nature, 2021)

22 november 2021 | 66 min

Beatrice Gruendler, "The Rise of the Arabic Book" (Harvard UP, 2020)

22 november 2021 | 91 min

Kenneth O'Reilly, "Asphalt: A History" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

22 november 2021 | 90 min

Chinese Digital Vigilantism: The Mediated and Mediatised Justice-Seeking

19 november 2021 | 29 min

Scott Cunningham, "Causal Inference: The Mixtape" (Yale UP, 2021)

19 november 2021 | 68 min

Frans de Waal, “On Atheists and Bonobos” (Open Agenda, 2021)

19 november 2021 | 72 min

James Garrison, "Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy" (SUNY Press, 2021)

19 november 2021 | 68 min

David A. B. Murray, "Living with HIV in Post-crisis Times: Beyond the Endgame" (Lexington Books, 2021)

18 november 2021 | 55 min

Gabriella Lukács, "Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy" (Duke UP, 2020)

18 november 2021 | 59 min

68 Martin Puchner: Writing and Reading from Gilgamesh to Amazon

18 november 2021 | 43 min

Book Industry Month continues with a memory-lane voyage back to a beloved early RtB episode. This conversation with Martin Puchner about the very origins of writing struck us as perfect companion to Mark McGurl's wonderful insights (in RtB 67, published earlier this month) about the publishing industry's in 2021, or as Mark tells it, the era of "adult diaper baby love."

Aside from being a fabulous conversation about Martin's wonderful history of book production through the ages (The Written World) this episode brings back happy memories of Elizabeth and John piling their guests into a cozy sound booth at Brandeis, the kind of place that's utterly taboo in Pandemic America.So travel with us back to 2019 for a close encounter with the epic of Gilgamesh. The three friends discuss the different stages of world writing--from the time of the scribes to the time of great teachers like Confucius, Socrates and Jesus Christ, who had a very complicated relationship to writing.

In Recallable Books, Martin recommends the fan fiction website Wattpad; Elizabeth recommends "No Reservations: Narnia," in which Anthony Bourdain goes through the wardrobe. John feints at recommending Dennis Tenen's book on the writing within coding before recommending the Brautigan Library.

Come for the discussion of writing, stay for the impressions of Gollum!

Discussed in this episode:

The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History and Civilization, Martin Puchner
Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, David Ferry
Wattpad
"No Reservations: Narnia," Edonohana
Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation, David Tenen
The Brautigan Library

Episode transcript available here: Episode 6 Puchner 3.28.19

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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Scott Tremaine, “Astrophysical Wonders” (Open Agenda, 2021)

18 november 2021 | 137 min

Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, "Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth" (Zone Book, 2021)

16 november 2021 | 49 min

Jill Tartar, “SETI: Astronomy as a Contact Sport” (Open Agenda, 2021)

16 november 2021 | 89 min

John S. Tregoning, "Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them" (Oneworld, 2021)

16 november 2021 | 48 min

Robert Brooks, "Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers" (Columbia UP, 2021)

15 november 2021 | 64 min

What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution―yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves into human interactions. Digital lovers, virtual friends, and algorithmic matchmakers help us manage our feelings in a world of cognitive overload. Will these machines, fueled by masses of user data and powered by algorithms that learn all the time, transform the quality of human life?

Robert Brooks, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers (Columbia UP, 2021) offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider the interaction of new technologies and fundamental human behaviors. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs―and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Naomi Oreskes, "Why Trust Science?" (Princeton UP, 2021)

15 november 2021 | 33 min

Ian Stewart, “The Joy of Mathematics” (Open Agenda, 2021)

12 november 2021 | 86 min

Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese, "Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work" (Routledge, 2020)

12 november 2021 | 55 min

Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese's Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work (Routledge, 2020) explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices.

The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work.

Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

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Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever, "Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations" (Oxford UP, 2021)

11 november 2021 | 75 min

Paul Steinhardt, “Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals” (Open Agenda, 2021)

11 november 2021 | 132 min

Kristin Hussey, "Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

11 november 2021 | 65 min

With the opening of the Suez Canal, larger and faster steamships, plus dockside engineering to accommodate them – time shrunk in the British Empire. The movement of bodies between the U.K and colonial outposts quickened. In Kristen D. Hussey’s Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021), readers are introduced to how such mobility transformed British conceptions of health and illness and the medical practices to heal. A scramble for “imperial bodies” occurred as medical professionals sought to cure the Empire’s “tropical” diseases.

Hussey’s intense archival work delivers several case studies in British medicine that brings together various historical narratives. Merging spatial theories to the history of medicine, for example, Hussey communicates well the reciprocal nature of Empire, movement, and diseased bodies. London loomed large as a place of recuperation, a place to get well, and the best that medicine had to offer. Imperial Bodies in London reads as if a microhistory, but never deviates from connecting to larger, much broader sweep of history. The story of how European men and women – administrators, soldiers, sailors, missionaries, doctors, servants, and families – returned home to recover or readjust from their imperial duties and thereby became specimens (in a sense) to advance medical knowledge is deftly handled by the author.

In this interview, discussed are ways in which British medical practitioners approached diseases affecting the liver, eyes, brain and blood of those that served the Empire. Many of their discoveries and practices were the foundations of modern medicine. The current Covid-19 pandemic makes this book not only timely, but a terrific read into the origins of modern medicine.

Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic.

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Jeffrey J. Hall, "Japan's Nationalist Right in the Internet Age: Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism" (Routledge, 2021)

11 november 2021 | 60 min

Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (PublicAffairs: 2021)

11 november 2021 | 47 min

The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point.

But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion.

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (PublicAffairs: 2021), written by Gershom Gorenberg, tells the story leading to the British Army holding off the Nazis at El Alamein: a battle not just of soldiers and tanks, but spies and codebreakers.

In this interview, Gershom and I talk about the years preceding the Battle for Egypt: those who broke Enigma, the spies who unlocked their enemies secrets, and the troubled relations between nominal allies.

Gershom Gorenberg’s previous books are The Unmaking of Israel (HarperCollins: 2011), The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (Macmillan: 2007), and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford University Press: 2002). He also co-authored The Jerusalem Report’s 1996 biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom Friend, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Gershom is a columnist for The Washington Post, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He can be followed on Twitter at @GershomG

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of War of Shadows. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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How to Be Wrong: An Introduction to the Podcast

10 november 2021 | 78 min

Sima Shakhsari, "Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan" (Duke UP, 2020)

10 november 2021 | 66 min

In the early 2000s, mainstream international news outlets celebrated the growth of Weblogistan—the online and real-life transnational network of Iranian bloggers—and depicted it as a liberatory site that gave voice to Iranians. As Sima Shakhsari argues in Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke UP, 2020), the common assumptions of Weblogistan as a site of civil society consensus and resistance to state oppression belie its deep internal conflicts. While Weblogistan was an effective venue for some Iranians to “practice democracy,” it served as a valuable site for the United States to surveil bloggers and express anti-Iranian sentiment and policies. At the same time, bloggers used the network to self-police and enforce gender and sexuality norms based on Western liberal values in ways that unwittingly undermined Weblogistan's claims of democratic participation. In this way, Weblogistan became a site of cybergovernmentality, where biopolitical security regimes disciplined and regulated populations. Analyzing online and off-line ethnography, Shakhsari provides an account of digital citizenship that raises questions about the internet's relationship to political engagement, militarism, and democracy.

Sima Shakhsari is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexualities Studies at the University of Minnesota. They are interested in transnational feminist theory, transnational sexuality studies, non-Eurocentric queer and transgender studies, Middle East studies, empire, militarism, neoliberal governmentality, biopolitics, digital media, refugees, diasporas, and political anthropology. They earned their PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University and have held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston. Before joining UMN, they were Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Wellesley College.

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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Andrew Leigh, "What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 november 2021 | 42 min

Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics (MIT Press, 2021), Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely.

Leigh explains that pervasive short-term thinking leaves us unprepared for long-term risks. Politicians sweat the small stuff—granular policy details of legislation and regulation—but rarely devote much attention to reducing long-term risks. Populist movements thrive on short-termism because they focus on their followers' immediate grievances. Leigh argues that we should be long-termers: broaden our thinking and give big threats the attention and resources they need.

Leigh outlines the biggest existential risks facing humanity and suggests remedies for them. He discusses pandemics, considering the possibility that the next virus will be more deadly than COVID-19; warns that unchecked climate change could render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable; describes the metamorphosis of the arms race from a fight into a chaotic brawl; and examines the dangers of runaway superintelligence. Moreover, Leigh points out, populism (and its crony, totalitarianism) not only exacerbates other dangers but is also a risk factor in itself, undermining the institutions of democracy as we watch.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Maria Jose de Abreu, "The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil" (Duke UP, 2021)

9 november 2021 | 104 min

Scott Soames, “Appreciating Analytic Philosophy” (Open Agenda, 2021)

9 november 2021 | 98 min

Diego Armus and Pablo Gómez, "The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

8 november 2021 | 73 min

Bradley Alger, "Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data" (Oxford UP, 2019)

8 november 2021 | 83 min

Lee Smolin, “Examining Time” (Open Agenda, 2021)

8 november 2021 | 126 min

Vicky Neale, "Why Study Mathematics?" (London Publishing Partnership, 2020)

5 november 2021 | 55 min

Students and their families face a consequential choice in whether to pursue a degree, and in what area. For those considering mathematics programs, the choice may be particularly fraught: A gulf separates the exploratory and experimental mathematics done by professionals from the computational training of most secondary schools, and this can obscure the meanings of program options. Meanwhile, cultural anxieties and stereotypes can dissuade students who would flourish in mathematical careers. This despite mathematical professionals being among the most satisfied and well-compensated in their careers.

In Why Study Mathematics? (2020), Vicky Neale provides a compact guide to this juncture, which i expect students and their families and teachers will find hugely valuable. As part of the London Publishing Partnership's "Why Study" series, her book in Part I explores in detail the substance and varieties of math degrees, how students can shape them to their needs and interests, and what those who complete them go on to do after. For Part II, Neale gives the reader a deeper view into a selection of subfields and the work their practitioners do, including the technologically vital study of data compression and the (for now) more humanistic study of abstract networks known as Ramsey theory.

Dr. Neale has exceptional experience and skill as a mentor that comes through as she addresses questions that, in my experience, often aren't: Are mathematics degrees mostly for mathematically adept students? Once in a program, whom should i get to know? Where are all the job postings for "mathematician"? It was a treat to hear her expound further on the book, and i would suggest that anyone at the beginning of their professional life, with interest, aptitude, or just curiosity about mathematics, seek out this resource (or recommend it to their mentors and guidance offices!) as they weigh their options.

Suggested companion works:

Vicky Neale is the Whitehead Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, and a Supernumerary Fellow at Balliol College. She teaches pure mathematics to undergraduates, and combines this with work on public engagement with mathematics: she gives public lectures, leads workshops with school students, and has appeared on numerous BBC radio and television programmes. One of her current interests is in using knitting and crochet to explore mathematical ideas. She is the author of Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2017)—listen to her interview with Jim Stein about that book here.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Alcino Silva, “Learning and Memory” (Open Agenda, 2021)

4 november 2021 | 149 min

67 Everything and Less: Mark McGurl on Books in the Age of Amazon

4 november 2021 | 44 min

Jonathan Schooler, “Mind-Wandering and Meta-Awareness” (Open Agenda, 2021)

1 november 2021 | 102 min

Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro, "When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves" (Princeton UP, 2021)

1 november 2021 | 44 min

Caitlin Ring Carlson, "Hate Speech" (MIT Press, 2021)

29 oktober 2021 | 67 min

Stephen Scherer, “Our Human Variability” (Open Agenda, 2021)

29 oktober 2021 | 148 min

George Styles, "Contemplation" (2021)

29 oktober 2021 | 47 min

Although many of us move through life at a fast pace, do you ever stop to wonder why things are the way they are? More so, do you even know why you showed up for work this morning? Whatever reasons you might have, could you say you thought them all the way through? And when you thought them all the way through, did you do this past the parts you might not like to think about as well? And what about what the world is doing? Even if you might not care, do you know why it is doing what it is doing? And what about the people that live far beyond your side of the planet? Do you know why they are doing what they are doing? More so than all of this, why is it that all of us are on this particular planet, in this particular galaxy, and this particular universe?

Perhaps we may not be able to find all the answers to such a series of questions. But there has never been a better time in history than now to try and discover all the answers. With so many resources available online, perhaps now is a better time than ever to start to ask questions about why things are the way they are. From online dictionaries to databases that have open access to the public, finding information has never been easier. However, the question then becomes, “How do we start?” And even more so, “Where do we start?” To answer those questions and more, we need to begin with a single question. And from that question, we can then begin our search. But what question should we start with?

George Styles' Contemplation (2021) is a convention-defying exploration of 400 questions the author has posted on Twitter, ranging from the mundane, such as “in general, what is the thing you would say people talk about the most?” to politically current, “does cancel culture really exist?” to intriguing thoughts such as “what is an intellectual?” The questions are initially presented sequentially with numbers and then again with short commentaries for each question. In many cases the commentaries have further questions, rather than answers to the questions raised.

The book is a product of our social media age and an innovative way to engage social media in a more intellectually stimulating manner than is common. It's a fascinating read.

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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A Conversation with Aliyah Kovner, Science Writer and Science Podcaster

27 oktober 2021 | 65 min

Roberto J. González, "Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network" (U California Press, 2020)

26 oktober 2021 | 67 min

Nicolette Hahn Niman, "Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat" (Chelsea Green, 2021)

26 oktober 2021 | 53 min

Alex Pentland and Alexander Lipton, "Building the New Economy: Data As Capital" (MIT Press, 2021)

25 oktober 2021 | 60 min

Ashley Hinck, "Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World" (LSU Press, 2019)

22 oktober 2021 | 59 min

Rebecca L. Stein, "Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2021)

20 oktober 2021 | 63 min

Eunice Blavascunas, "Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe's Last Primeval Forest" (Indiana UP, 2020)

20 oktober 2021 | 60 min

Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, "Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath" (NewSouth, 2021)

19 oktober 2021 | 63 min

Katherine Chandler, "Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

19 oktober 2021 | 58 min

Roger Penrose, “The Cyclic Universe” (Open Agenda, 2021)

19 oktober 2021 | 151 min

Cyrus R. K. Patell, "Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

18 oktober 2021 | 65 min

Catherine Knight Steele, "Digital Black Feminism" (NYU Press, 2021)

18 oktober 2021 | 37 min

Vincent Ialenti, "Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now" (MIT Press, 2020)

15 oktober 2021 | 73 min

Hannah Zeavin, "The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy" (MIT Press, 2021)

14 oktober 2021 | 49 min

Luci Marzola, "Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System" (Oxford UP, 2021)

13 oktober 2021 | 69 min

Luci Marzola's book Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building Studio System (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before.

Using extensive archival research, Marzola's book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here, the studio system is seen as a technology-dependent business with connections to the larger American industrial world. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians' societies. Rather than focusing on the technical improvements in any particular motion picture tool, this book centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with technology in this creative industry. Engineering Hollywood argues that the American industry was stabilized and able to dominate the motion picture field for decades through collaboration over technologies of everyday use. Hollywood's relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation-with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. As such, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of cooperation that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades.

Luci Marzola is a film and media historian who writes about the technology, labor, and infrastructure of the American film industry in the silent and classical eras. She teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California Irvine and at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Rebecca Earle, "Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

11 oktober 2021 | 68 min

Jenny Nelson, “Harnessing the Sun” (Open Agenda, 2021)

11 oktober 2021 | 132 min

Caitlin Donohue Wylie, "Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes" (MIT Press, 2021)

8 oktober 2021 | 56 min

Those awe-inspiring dinosaur skeletons on display in museums do not spring fully assembled from the earth. Technicians known as preparators have painstakingly removed the fossils from rock, repaired broken bones, and reconstructed missing pieces to create them. These specimens are foundational evidence for paleontologists, and yet the work and workers in fossil preparation labs go largely unacknowledged in publications and specimen records. In Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes (MIT Press, 2021), Caitlin Wylie investigates the skilled labor of fossil preparators and argues for a new model of science that includes all research work and workers.

Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, Wylie shows that the everyday work of fossil preparation requires creativity, problem-solving, and craft. She finds that preparators privilege their own skills over technology and that scientists prefer to rely on these trusted technicians rather than new technologies. Wylie examines how fossil preparators decide what fossils, and therefore dinosaurs, look like; how labor relations between interdependent yet hierarchically unequal collaborators influence scientific practice; how some museums display preparators at work behind glass, as if they were another exhibit; and how these workers learn their skills without formal training or scientific credentials. The work of preparing specimens is a crucial component of scientific research, although it leaves few written traces. Wylie argues that the paleontology research community's social structure demonstrates how other sciences might incorporate non-scientists into research work, empowering and educating both scientists and nonscientists.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Martin Monti, “The Limits of Consciousness” (Open Agenda, 2021)

8 oktober 2021 | 93 min

Cait McKinney, "Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies" (Duke UP, 2020)

8 oktober 2021 | 48 min

Michael Yudell, "Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century" (Columbia UP, 2018)

8 oktober 2021 | 64 min

Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld, "Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization" (Princeton UP, 2021)

7 oktober 2021 | 61 min

Paul Thagard, "Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?" (MIT Press, 2021)

6 oktober 2021 | 62 min

Paul Milgrom, "Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints" (Columbia UP, 2017)

6 oktober 2021 | 47 min

Jaap-Henk Hoepman, "Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths: Achieving Privacy Through Careful Design" (MIT Press, 2021)

5 oktober 2021 | 62 min

Alvin E. Roth, "Who Gets What--and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design" (HMH, 2015)

5 oktober 2021 | 61 min

Denis McQuail, “Perspectives on Mass Communication” (Open Agenda, 2021)

5 oktober 2021 | 112 min

Gideon Fujiwara, "From Country to Nation: Ethnographic Studies, Kokugaku, and Spirits in Nineteenth-Century Japan" (Cornell UP, 2021)

5 oktober 2021 | 53 min

Darrin McMahon, “Deconstructing Genius” (Open Agenda, 2021)

4 oktober 2021 | 101 min

Elaine Yuan, "The Web of Meaning: The Internet in a Changing Chinese Society" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

1 oktober 2021 | 26 min

What is the impact of Internet technology communication in China? How do Chinese people view "privacy" differently from the western perspective? How is the newly passed China's Personal Information Protection Law going to impact people's lives? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Elaine Yuan, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago, talks about her recent book, The Web of Meaning: the Internet in a Changing Chinese Society (University of Toronto Press, 2021).

Elaine Yuan's research focuses on how new and emerging forms of communication mediate various social institutions and relations. She has extensively researched the subjects of network and mobile communication, social media, digital infrastructure, and cultural change processes. Her latest book examines the role of the Internet as symbolic fields for reproducing the cultural practices of privacy, nationalism, and the network market in China.

Through three empirical cases – online privacy, cyber-nationalism, and the network market – the book traces how different social actors negotiate the practices, social relations, and power structures that define these evolving institutions in Chinese society. Examining rich user-generated social media data with innovative methods such as semantic network analysis and topic modelling, The Web of Meaning provides a solid empirical base to critique for critiquing the power relationships embedded in Chinese society's very fibre.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Kyle Harper, "Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" (Princeton UP, 2021)

1 oktober 2021 | 49 min

Mark Maslin, “Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact” (Open Agenda, 2021)

30 september 2021 | 119 min

Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller, "The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company’s Future" (HBR Press, 2021)

30 september 2021 | 37 min

Today I talked to Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller about their new book The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company’s Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).

Since the 1990s, the fade rate (i.e., the inability of companies to stay out ahead of their closest rivals) has gone from sustaining a lead on average for 10 years to now merely a single year. So focusing on offer innovation alone won’t suffice. A company that will survive and thrive must re-imagine really every aspect of the company’s culture and operations to succeed. That move requires an open mind and an inquisitive spirit not averse to surprise but, instead, welcoming of them. Who better than these two authors to take on that task? Reeves is in his own words a “failed” musician and biologist turned businessperson, and Fuller likewise prefers to go “inside” people and organizations to understand how their minds and even their very “souls” perform. This is an episode devoted, in short, to how can a company re-humanize itself in an age when converging forces requires a wholesale change.

Martin Reeves is a Senior Partner and Managing Director at BCG, i.e., the Boston Consulting Group. He’s also the Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG’s internal think tank. Jack Fuller is a former special project manager at the BCG Henderson Institute, and the founder of Casati Health, a company that reimagines mental and physical health. He’s a Rhodes Scholar with a background that combines neuroscience and philosophical theology.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Sandro Galea, "The Contagion Next Time" (Oxford UP, 2021)

30 september 2021 | 26 min

Lisa T. Sarasohn, "Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

28 september 2021 | 60 min

For most of our time on this planet, vermin were considered humanity's common inheritance. Fleas, lice, bedbugs, and rats were universal scourges, as pervasive as hunger or cold, at home in both palaces and hovels. But with the spread of microscopic close-ups of these creatures, the beginnings of sanitary standards, and the rising belief that cleanliness equaled class, vermin began to provide a way to scratch a different itch: the need to feel superior, and to justify the exploitation of those pronounced ethnically—and entomologically—inferior.

In Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Lisa T. Sarasohn tells the fascinating story of how vermin came to signify the individuals and classes that society impugns and ostracizes. How did these creatures go from annoyance to social stigma? And how did people thought verminous become considered almost a species of vermin themselves? Focusing on Great Britain and North America, Sarasohn explains how the label "vermin" makes dehumanization and violence possible. She describes how Cromwellians in Ireland and US cavalry on the American frontier both justified slaughter by warning "Nits grow into lice." Nazis not only labeled Jews as vermin, they used insecticides in the gas chambers to kill them during the Holocaust.

Concentrating on the insects living in our bodies, clothes, and beds, Sarasohn also looks at rats and their social impact. Besides their powerful symbolic status in all cultures, rats' endurance challenges all human pretentions. From eighteenth-century London merchants anointing their carved bedsteads with roasted cat to repel bedbugs to modern-day hedge fund managers hoping neighbors won't notice exterminators in their penthouses, the studies in this book reveal that vermin continue to fuel our prejudices and threaten our status. Getting Under Our Skin will appeal to cultural historians, naturalists, and to anyone who has ever scratched—and then gazed in horror.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021)

28 september 2021 | 52 min

Jonathan Rees, "The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley's Fight for Pure Food" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

28 september 2021 | 57 min

Though trained as a medical doctor, chemist Harvey Wiley spent most of his professional life advocating for "pure food"—food free of both adulterants and preservatives. A strong proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, still the basis of food safety legislation in the United States, Wiley gained fame for what became known as the Poison Squad experiments—a series of tests in which, to learn more about the effects of various chemicals on the human body, Wiley's own employees at the Department of Agriculture agreed to consume food mixed with significant amounts of various additives, including borax, saltpeter, copper sulfate, sulfuric acid, and formaldehyde. One hundred years later, Wiley's influence lives on in many of our current popular ideas about food: that the wrong food can kill you; that the right food can extend your life; that additives are unnatural; and that unnatural food is unhealthy food. Eating—the process of taking something external in the world and putting it inside of you—has always been an intimate act, but it was Harvey Wiley who first turned it into a matter of life or death.

In The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley's Fight for Pure Food (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Jonathan Rees examines Wiley's many—and varied—conflicts and clashes over food safety, including the adulteration of honey and the addition of caffeine to Coca-Cola, formaldehyde to milk, and alum to baking powder. Although Wiley is often depicted as an unwavering champion of the consumer's interest, Rees argues that his critics rightfully questioned some of his motivations, as well as the conclusions that he drew from his most important scientific work. And although Wiley's fame and popularity gave him enormous influence, Rees reveals that his impact on what Americans eat depends more upon fear than it does upon the quality of his research.

Exploring in detail the battles Wiley picked over the way various foods and drinks were made and marketed, The Chemistry of Fear touches upon every stage of his career as a pure food advocate. From his initial work in Washington researching food adulteration, through the long interval at the end of his life when he worked for Good Housekeeping, Wiley often wrote about the people who prevented him from making the pure food law as effective as he thought it should have been. This engaging book will interest anyone who's curious about the pitfalls that eaters faced at the turn of the twentieth century.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Eric. S. Hintz, "American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D" (MIT Press, 2021)

28 september 2021 | 82 min

Wonder how America's individual inventors persisted alongside corporate R&D labs as an important source of inventions beginning at the turn of the early twentieth century?

American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D (MIT Press, 2021) by Eric S. Hintz presents a candid look into the history behind the phenomenon.

During the nineteenth century, heroic individual inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell created entirely new industries while achieving widespread fame. However, by 1927, a New York Times editorial suggested that teams of corporate scientists at General Electric, AT&T, and DuPont had replaced the solitary "garret inventor" as the wellspring of invention. But these inventors never disappeared. In this book, Eric Hintz argues that lesser-known inventors such as Chester Carlson (Xerox photocopier), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Earl Tupper (Tupperware) continued to develop important technologies throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, Hintz explains how independent inventors gradually fell from public view as corporate brands increasingly became associated with high-tech innovation.

Focusing on the years from 1890 to 1950, Hintz documents how American independent inventors competed (and sometimes partnered) with their corporate rivals, adopted a variety of flexible commercialization strategies, established a series of short-lived professional groups, lobbied for fairer patent laws, and mobilized for two world wars. After 1950, the experiences of independent inventors generally mirrored the patterns of their predecessors, and they continued to be overshadowed during corporate R&D's postwar golden age. The independents enjoyed a resurgence, however, at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Apple's Steve Jobs and Shark Tank's Lori Greiner heralded a new generation of heroic inventor-entrepreneurs. By recovering the stories of a group once considered extinct, Hintz shows that independent inventors have long been—and remain—an important source of new technologies.

Nathan Moore is a history Ph.D. candidate and graduate assistant at Auburn University.

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Elizabeth Loftus, “The Malleability of Memory” (Open Agenda, 2021)

28 september 2021 | 80 min

Chris Bleakley, "Poems That Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms" (Oxford UP, 2020)

27 september 2021 | 84 min

As algorithms become ever more significant to and embedded in our everyday lives, ever more accessible introductions to them are needed. While several excellent technical and critical treatments have emerged in recent years, i had not come across a book for the general public that would provide a deep sense for the intuitions and motivations behind their development. Chris Bleakley's new book offers this and more: conceptual rigor woven into historical vignettes in a style that i believe general readers will find truly enjoyable to read.

Poems that Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms (Oxford UP, 2020) is itself a quite poetic book, in which echoes of ideas and variations on themes can be heard throughout. Its stories encompass the early hypothetical and mechanical computers, the charactered rise of weather forecasting, the origins (and lulls) of machine learning, and the sensational competitions between master game players and artificial intelligence. The book traverses a long historical arc, but each episode is a quick read, remarkable in their ability to convey depth and rigor in crisp, plain language. It was a delight to talk with Chris about these and other aspects of his book.

Suggested companion works:

--Simon Singh, The Code Book

--George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

--Greg Kohs (director), "AlphaGo"

Chris Bleakley is Head of the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin. He graduated with a BSc (Hons) degree in Computer Science from Queen's University, Belfast, and a PhD degree in Electronic Engineering from Dublin City University. After college, he was employed as a software consultant by Accenture and, later, as a senior telecommunications researcher at Broadcom Eireann Research.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Tony Leggett, “The Problems of Physics, Reconsidered” (Open Agenda, 2021)

27 september 2021 | 102 min

Vanilla Beer and Allenna Leonard, "Stafford Beer the Father of Management Cybernetics" (2019)

27 september 2021 | 55 min

Shannon Mattern, "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences" (Princeton UP, 2021)

24 september 2021 | 47 min

Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models.

Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city’s many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs.

Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

Shannon Mattern is professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her books include Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media and The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities. She lives in New York City. Website wordsinspace.net Instagram @atlas.sounds Twitter @shannonmattern

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Allan V. Horwitz, "DSM: A History of Psychiatry's Bible" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

24 september 2021 | 60 min

Over the past seventy years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has evolved from a virtually unknown and little-used pamphlet to an imposing and comprehensive compendium of mental disorder. Its nearly 300 conditions have become the touchstones for the diagnoses that patients receive, students are taught, researchers study, insurers reimburse, and drug companies promote. Although the manual is portrayed as an authoritative corpus of psychiatric knowledge, it is a product of intense political conflicts, dissension, and factionalism. The manual results from struggles among psychiatric researchers and clinicians, different mental health professions, and a variety of patient, familial, feminist, gay, and veterans' interest groups. The DSM is fundamentally a social document that both reflects and shapes the professional, economic, and cultural forces associated with its use.

In DSM: A History of Psychiatry's Bible (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Allan V. Horwitz examines how the manual, known colloquially as "psychiatry's bible," has been at the center of thinking about mental health in the United States since its original publication in 1952. The first book to examine its entire history, this volume draws on both archival sources and the literature on modern psychiatry to show how the history of the DSM is more a story of the growing social importance of psychiatric diagnoses than of increasing knowledge about the nature of mental disorder. Despite attempts to replace it, Horwitz argues that the DSM persists because its diagnostic entities are closely intertwined with too many interests that benefit from them.

This comprehensive treatment should appeal to not only specialists but also anyone who is interested in how diagnoses of mental illness have evolved over the past seven decades—from unwanted and often imposed labels to resources that lead to valued mental health treatments and social services.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Nick Lane, “A Matter of Energy: Biology From First Principles” (Open Agenda, 2021)

24 september 2021 | 130 min

Stephen Kosslyn, “Applied Psychology: Thinking Critically” (Open Agenda, 2021)

23 september 2021 | 95 min

Laura Paskus, "At the Precipice: New Mexico's Changing Climate" (U New Mexico Press, 2020)

23 september 2021 | 58 min

Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez, "Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human" (Princeton UP, 2021)

23 september 2021 | 66 min

Joshua Schimel, "Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded" (Oxford UP, 2011)

22 september 2021 | 77 min

Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer" (Princeton UP, 2020)

22 september 2021 | 59 min

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (Princeton UP, 2020) delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer’s evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments.

Athena Aktipis goes back billions of years to explore when unicellular forms became multicellular organisms. Within these bodies of cooperating cells, cheating ones arose, overusing resources and replicating out of control, giving rise to cancer. Aktipis illustrates how evolution has paved the way for cancer’s ubiquity, and why it will exist as long as multicellular life does. Even so, she argues, this doesn’t mean we should give up on treating cancer—in fact, evolutionary approaches offer new and promising options for the disease’s prevention and treatments that aim at long-term management rather than simple eradication. Looking across species—from sponges and cacti to dogs and elephants—we are discovering new mechanisms of tumor suppression and the many ways that multicellular life-forms have evolved to keep cancer under control. By accepting that cancer is a part of our biological past, present, and future—and that we cannot win a war against evolution—treatments can become smarter, more strategic, and more humane.

Unifying the latest research from biology, ecology, medicine, and social science, The Cheating Cell challenges us to rethink cancer’s fundamental nature and our relationship to it.

Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

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Caley Horan, "Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

21 september 2021 | 55 min

Mike Jones, "Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum" (Routledge, 2021)

21 september 2021 | 65 min

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum (Routledge, 2021) provides the first interdisciplinary study of the digital documentation of artefacts and archives in contemporary museums, while also exploring the implications of polyphonic, relational thinking on collections documentation.

Drawing on case studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the book provides a critical examination of the history of collections management and documentation since the introduction of computers to museums in the 1960s, demonstrating how technology has contributed to the disconnection of distributed collections knowledge. Jones also highlights how separate documentation systems have developed, managed by distinct, increasingly professionalised staff, impacting our ability to understand and use what we find in museums and their ever-expanding online collections. Exploring this legacy allows us to rethink current practice, focusing less on individual objects and more on the rich stories and interconnected resources that lie at the heart of the contemporary, plural, participatory ‘relational museum.’

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum is essential reading for those who wish to better understand the institutional silos found in museums, and the changes required to make museum knowledge more accessible. The book is a particularly important addition to the fields of museum studies, archival science, information management, and the history of cultural heritage technologies.

Mike Jones is an archivist, historian, and collections consultant with more than 12 years of experience working with the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) on digital, archival, and public history projects. His interdisciplinary research explores the history of collections-based knowledge, and the ways in which contemporary technologies can help us to develop and maintain relationships within and between archives, collections, disciplines, and communities.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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Justin Khoury, “Cosmological Conundrums” (Open Agenda, 2021)

21 september 2021 | 79 min

Ruth Aylett and Patricia A. Vargas, "Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know" (MIT Press, 2021)

21 september 2021 | 66 min

Firmin DeBrabander, "Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

20 september 2021 | 49 min

Princeton UP's "Pedia" Series: Beautiful, Short Books About Big, Important Subjects

17 september 2021 | 32 min

Richard Janko, “The Derveni Papyrus” (Open Agenda, 2021)

17 september 2021 | 88 min

Patrick T. Reardon, "The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago" (Southern Illinois UP, 2020)

14 september 2021 | 44 min

Every day Chicagoans rely on the loop of elevated train tracks to get to their jobs, classrooms, or homes in the city’s downtown. But how much do they know about the single most important structure in the history of the Windy City? In engagingly brisk prose, Patrick T. Reardon unfolds the fascinating story about how Chicago’s elevated Loop was built, gave its name to the downtown, helped unify the city, saved the city’s economy, and was itself saved from destruction in the 1970s.

Patrick T. Reardon's book The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (Southern Illinois UP, 2020) combines urban history, biography, engineering, architecture, transportation, culture, and politics to explore the elevated Loop’s impact on the city’s development and economy and on the way Chicagoans see themselves. The Loop rooted Chicago’s downtown in a way unknown in other cities, and it protected that area—and the city itself—from the full effects of suburbanization during the second half of the twentieth century. Masses of data underlie new insights into what has made Chicago’s downtown, and the city as a whole, tick.

The Loop features a cast of colorful Chicagoans, such as legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, poet Edgar Lee Masters, mayor Richard J. Daley, and the notorious Gray Wolves of the Chicago City Council. Charles T. Yerkes, an often-demonized figure, is shown as a visionary urban planner, and engineer John Alexander Low Waddell, a world-renowned bridge creator, is introduced to Chicagoans as the designer of their urban railway.

This fascinating exploration of how one human-built structure reshaped the social and economic landscape of Chicago is the definitive book on Chicago’s elevated Loop.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email tobtoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Katy Borner, "Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 september 2021 | 47 min

Caitlin Petre, "All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists" (Princeton UP, 2021)

10 september 2021 | 52 min

Over the past 15 years, journalism has experienced a rapid proliferation of data about online reader behavior in the form of web metrics. These newsroom metrics influence which stories are written, how news is promoted, and which journalists get hired and fired. Some argue that metrics help journalists better serve their audiences. Others worry that metrics are the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch-wielding factory manager. In All the News That's Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists (Princeton UP 2021), Caitlin Petre offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how metrics are reshaping the work of journalism.

The book is based on Petre's interviews and ethnographic observations at Chartbeat, Gawker, and the New York Times. Across the organizations, she finds that newsroom metrics are a powerful form of managerial surveillance and discipline. However, unlike the manager's stopwatch that preceded them, digital metrics are designed to gain the trust of wary journalists by providing a habit-forming user experience that mimics key features of addictive games. She details how metrics intersect with newsroom hierarchies and norms, as well as how their ambiguity leads to seemingly arbitrary interpretations of success. As performance analytics spread to virtually every professional field, Petre's findings speak to the future of expertise and labor relations in contexts far beyond journalism.

Caitlin Petre is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast.

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Stephen Hinshaw, “Understanding ADHD” (Open Agenda, 2021)

9 september 2021 | 102 min

Angelica Malin, "She Made It: The Toolkit for Female Founders in the Digital Age" (Kogan Page, 2021)

9 september 2021 | 35 min

Silvia Casini, "Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology" (MIT Press, 2021)

9 september 2021 | 62 min

Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology (MIT Press, 2021), Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image–and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization.

Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists’ body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen’s biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art-science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Stephen J. Pyne, "The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next" (U California Press, 2021)

8 september 2021 | 40 min

Emma Marris, "Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

8 september 2021 | 55 min

Audrey Watters, "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" (MIT Press, 2021)

7 september 2021 | 49 min

Nayanika Mathur, "Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

7 september 2021 | 98 min

Joanna Haigh, “Solar Impact: Climate and the Sun” (Open Agenda, 2021)

6 september 2021 | 113 min

H. Glenn Penny, "In Humboldt's Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology" (Princeton UP, 2021)

6 september 2021 | 50 min

Anil Seth, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness" (Dutton, 2020)

2 september 2021 | 64 min

Jennifer Groh, “Knowing One’s Place: Space and the Brain” (Open Agenda, 2021)

2 september 2021 | 79 min

Roy Richard Grinker, "Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness" (Norton, 2021)

1 september 2021 | 51 min

Stigma about mental illness makes life doubly hard for people suffering from mental or emotional distress. In addition to dealing with their conditions, they must also contend with social shame and secrecy. But by examining how mental illness is conceived of and treated in other cultures, we can improve our own perspectives in the Western world. In his new book, Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (Norton, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker offers a critique of our current mental health system based on cross-cultural observations as well as suggestions for improving upon it. In our interview, we talk about the impact of stigma on mental health treatment and his ideas about where it comes from. He also explains why he feels optimistic about recent trends in the way individuals speak about their mental health challenges.

Roy Richard Grinker is professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. His specialties include ethnicity, nationalism, and psychological anthropology, with topical expertise in autism, Korea, and sub-Saharan Africa. He is also the director of George Washington University’s Institute for Ethnographic Research and editor-in-chief of the journal Anthropological Quarterly. He is author of several books, including Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. He lives in Washington, DC.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse.

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Jemma Wadham, "Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity" (Princeton UP, 2021)

1 september 2021 | 35 min

Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp, "Systems Thinkers" (Springer, 2020)

1 september 2021 | 65 min

In this episode I spoke with Magnus Ramage, co-author of Systems Thinkers (Springer, 2020). This second edition provides an update to Ramage’s and co-author Karen Shipp’s earlier exploration, and presents an enlightening—often inspiring—biographical history of the field of systems thinking. Systems thinking is necessarily interdisciplinary; as such, the people highlighted in the book come from a wide range of areas such as biology, management, physiology, anthropology, chemistry, public policy, sociology and environmental studies among others.

Systems Thinkers examines the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers—some, like Gregory Bateson, only today becoming well-known outside systems circles, others less-known and in Ramage’s view, underappreciated. The book explores each thinker’s key contributions, and the way their contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker’s own writing, to give a flavor of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests. The thinkers are usefully categorized into six groupings ranging from ‘Early Cybernetics’ to ‘Learning Systems’.

A significant aim of the book is to broaden and deepen the reader’s interest in systems writers, providing an appetizing ‘taster’ for each of the 30 thinkers, so that the reader is encouraged to go on to study the published works of the thinkers themselves. Ramage describes Systems Thinkers as a “collective love letter to some of most remarkable people in academia and professional practice over the past century”. His passion for these thinkers comes through in his writing and in our conversation. It is a passion shared by others who stand on the shoulders of these thinkers.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

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Alessandra Tanesini, "The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology" (Oxford UP, 2021)

1 september 2021 | 62 min

Jennifer L. Lambe, "Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History" (UNC Press, 2017)

31 augusti 2021 | 86 min

"On the outskirts of Havana lies Mazorra, an asylum known to--and at times feared by--ordinary Cubans for over a century. Since its founding in 1857, the island's first psychiatric hospital has been an object of persistent political attention. Drawing on hospital documents and government records, as well as the popular press, photographs, and oral histories, Jennifer L. Lambe charts the connections between the inner workings of this notorious institution and the highest echelons of Cuban politics. Across the sweep of modern Cuban history, she finds, Mazorra has served as both laboratory and microcosm of the Cuban state: the asylum is an icon of its ignominious colonial and neocolonial past and a crucible of its republican and revolutionary futures. From its birth, Cuban psychiatry was politically inflected, drawing partisan contention while sparking debates over race, religion, gender, and sexuality. Psychiatric notions were even invested with revolutionary significance after 1959, as the new government undertook ambitious schemes for social reeducation. But Mazorra was not the exclusive province of government officials and professionalizing psychiatrists. U.S. occupiers, Soviet visitors, and, above all, ordinary Cubans infused the institution, both literal and metaphorical, with their own fears, dreams, and alternative meanings. Together, their voices comprise the madhouse that, as Lambe argues, haunts the revolutionary trajectory of Cuban history."

I talked with Dr. Lambe about her first book, Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History, which was published in 2017 by University of North Carolina Press as part of the Envisioning Cuba Series. Dr. Lambe is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at Brown University and is also the co-editor of The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959-1980 (2019). Dr. Lambe and I talked corruption, politics, and madness. Don't miss this wonderful conversation!

Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual politics surrounding black motherhood in twentieth-century Cuba. Twitter: @RozzmeryPV

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Thomas O. Haakenson, "Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

31 augusti 2021 | 58 min

Michael Gordin, “Science and Pseudoscience” (Open Agenda, 2021)

30 augusti 2021 | 109 min

Rohit Khanna, "Misunderstanding Health: Making Sense of America's Broken Health Care System" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

24 augusti 2021 | 37 min

With technological advances and information sharing so prevalent, health care should be more transparent and easier to access than ever before. So why does it seem like everything about it―from pricing, drug development, and the emergence of new diseases to the intricacies of biologic and precision medicine therapies―is becoming more complex, not less?

Rohit Khanna's Misunderstanding Health: Making Sense of America's Broken Health Care System (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) examines some of today's most revealing health care trends while imploring us to look at these issues with alacrity, humor, and vigilance. Over the course of eighteen short, engaging chapters, Khanna explains

• how unexamined beliefs can endanger patients, drive cost, and increase bureaucracy

• the "Dr. Google" effect on the ways that we seek (or eschew) care

• why our health care costs more than in any other country

• the unintended consequences of using rating sites like Yelp

• what we can learn about health care from hurricanes

• how social media influencers impact health care

• how artificial intelligence can improve health care

• why health screening programs are so complicated

• what the industry is doing to combat health care fraud

• what the big deal about legalizing medical cannabis is

• how to think about behavioral "nudges" designed to improve health

• why understanding how data are collected is critical to understanding what they can tell us

• and much more

Each provocative and easy-to-read chapter covers a familiar aspect of health care in a clear and succinct way. Offering inquisitive readers a warts-and-all view of American health care, Misunderstanding Health is the book that you'll want to read if you know enough to be frustrated by the system but want a deeper dive into its challenges and opportunities.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Jay Gargus, “Autism: A Genetic Perspective” (Open Agenda, 2021)

24 augusti 2021 | 130 min

Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer, "A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication" (Harvard UP, 2021)

23 augusti 2021 | 58 min

Uta Frith, “Exploring Autism” (Open Agenda, 2021)

23 augusti 2021 | 96 min

Craig Robertson, "The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

20 augusti 2021 | 62 min

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work.

In The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson's unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an "automatic memory" machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women's nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today's digital world.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Chris Frith, “In Search of a Mechanism: From the Brain to the Mind” (Open Agenda, 2020)

20 augusti 2021 | 91 min

Carol Anderson, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

20 augusti 2021 | 58 min

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second Amendment has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second.

In The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021) historian Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

Dr. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Connect on Twitter @ProfCAnderson

Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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Matthew Flisfeder, "Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media" (Northwestern UP, 2021)

20 augusti 2021 | 89 min

One of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is that much of it is lived on and through social media. We create profiles, post pictures, update stories, and even find new careers and lovers on various sites and apps. But is all this good for us? Our always-online way of living has been called into question for quite some time now, with many people, young and old, finding themselves burned out and disconnected in a world with no shortage of connections. So what does this prevalence of social media mean for our society at large?

This question is one of the starting points for my guest today, Matthew Flisfeder, in his new book Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern UP, 2021). While he is curious about the affects of social media on society, he also spends much of the book trying to flip the question around and ask: what does the structure of our society mean for social media? Flisfeder is interested in thinking of social media in it’s social, political and economic context, seeing the form our current social media takes as a gateway into broader social and economic structures. This broad Marxist vision is brought together with the theories of subjectivity developed in recent critical theory, particularly of Slavoj Žižek, to better understand both the ways social media hooks us into exploitative mechanisms, but it also gives us some offramps for possible resistance. Flisfeder is no luddite; not only is he himself an enthusiastic user of social media, but his critique here is meant as a course-correction rather than an all-out condemnation. If social media today produces alienation rather than true connection, then what does that tell us about society more broadly? And, more provocatively, what does it mean for broader social critique to take the social in social media seriously?

Matthew Flisfeder is an associate professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is also the author of Postmodern Theory and Bladerunner and The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Jonathan Brill, "Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change" (McGraw-Hill Education, 2021)

19 augusti 2021 | 39 min

Barbara Fredrickson, “The Science of Emotions” (Open Agenda, 2020)

19 augusti 2021 | 81 min

James W. Cortada, "IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon" (MIT Press, 2019)

18 augusti 2021 | 43 min

Mark L. Johnson and Don M. Tucker, "Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 81 min

Leslie Anne Hadfield, "A Bold Profession: African Nurses in Rural Apartheid South Africa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 68 min

Raghav Rajagopalan, "Immersive Systemic Knowing: Advancing Systems Thinking Beyond Rational Analysis" (Springer Nature, 2020)

17 augusti 2021 | 66 min

Jonathan E. Robins, "Oil Palm: A Global History" (UNC Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 55 min

Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows in Oil Palm: A Global History (UNC Press, 2021), sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across multiple centuries and continents, Robins demonstrates how the fruits of an African palm tree became a key commodity in the story of global capitalism, beginning in the eras of slavery and imperialism, persisting through decolonization, and stretching to the present day.

Jonathan E. Robins is Associate Professor of Global History at Michigan Technology University. He earned his PhD in history at the University of Rochester in 2010 and taught at Morgan State University before joining the faculty at Michigan Tech in 2012. He studies the histories of commodities and how they've reshaped societies, industries, and our planet. His first book, Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2016.

Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral student in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp.

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Benjamin R. Cohen et al., "Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 55 min

The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers trace our eating habits to World War II, but this book shows that our current food system began to coalesce much earlier. Modern food came from and helped to create a society based on racial hierarchies, colonization, and global integration. Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (MIT Press, 2021) explores these themes through a series of moments in food history—stories of bread, beer, sugar, canned food, cereal, bananas, and more—that shaped how we think about food today. Contributors consider the displacement of native peoples for agricultural development; the invention of Pilsner, the first international beer style; the “long con” of gilded sugar and corn syrup; Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and the rise of celebrity tastemakers; and faith in institutions and experts who produced, among other things, food rankings and fake meat.

Benjamin R. Cohen is Associate Professor at Lafayette College and the author of Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food. Michael S. Kideckel teaches history at Princeton Day School and is the author of the forthcoming Fresh from the Factory: Breakfast Cereal, Natural Food, and the Marketing of Reform, 1890-1920. Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History and Director of Food Studies at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, winner of the 2019 James Beard Award in Reference, History and Scholarship.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website

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P. J. Boczkowski and E. Mitchelstein, "The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 66 min

Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now (MIT Press, 2021), Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience.

Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Charles Foster, “Defined By Relationship” (Open Agenda, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 92 min

Lee McIntyre, "How to Talk to a Science Denier" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 augusti 2021 | 72 min

Mikkael A. Sekeres, "When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia" (MIT Press, 2020)

16 augusti 2021 | 61 min

When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia (MIT Press, 2020), Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes readers on the journey that patient and doctor travel together.

Sekeres, who writes regularly for the Well section of the New York Times, tells the compelling stories of three people who receive diagnoses of adult leukemia within hours of each other: Joan, a 48-year-old surgical nurse, a caregiver who becomes a patient; David, a 68-year-old former factory worker who bows to his family's wishes and pursues the most aggressive treatment; and Sarah, a 36-year-old pregnant woman who must decide whether to undergo chemotherapy and put her fetus at risk. We join the intimacy of the conversations Sekeres has with his patients, and watch as he teaches trainees. Along the way, Sekeres also explores leukemia in its different forms and the development of drugs to treat it--describing, among many other fascinating details, the invention of the bone marrow transplant (first performed experimentally on beagles) and a treatment that targets the genetics of leukemia.

The lessons to be learned from leukemia, Sekeres shows, are not merely medical; they teach us about courage and grace and defying the odds.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Victor Ferreira, “Speaking and Thinking” (Open Agenda, 2021)

16 augusti 2021 | 141 min

Nita Farahany, “Neurolaw” (Open Agenda, 2021)

12 augusti 2021 | 89 min

Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, "When Maps Become the World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

10 augusti 2021 | 68 min

Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021)

10 augusti 2021 | 48 min

Chiara Marletto, "The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals" (Viking, 2021)

9 augusti 2021 | 68 min

Artur Ekert, “Cryptoreality” (Open Agenda, 2021)

9 augusti 2021 | 176 min

John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, "The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

6 augusti 2021 | 78 min

Peter B. Kaufman, "The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge" (Seven Stories Press, 2021)

5 augusti 2021 | 40 min

Alex Csiszar, "The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

4 augusti 2021 | 72 min

Hoyt Long, "The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age" (Columbia UP, 2021)

3 augusti 2021 | 59 min

Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2021) tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly.

Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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John Duncan, “Investigating Intelligence” (Open Agenda, 2021)

3 augusti 2021 | 85 min

Iris Berent, "The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature" (Oxford UP, 2020)

2 augusti 2021 | 56 min

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself.

An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity.

You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris.

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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Chinmay Tumbe, "Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020)

2 augusti 2021 | 50 min

Joseph Curtin, “The Science of Siren Songs: Stradivari Unveiled” (Open Agenda, 2021)

30 juli 2021 | 102 min

James Ladyman and K. Wiesner, "What Is a Complex System?" (Yale UP, 2020)

30 juli 2021 | 74 min

While i find it pretty easy to recognize when i'm reading articles in complexity science, i've never been satisfied by definitions of complexity and related concepts. I'm not alone! Researchers' own attempts to define complex systems incorporate a mix of folk wisdom and fraught assumptions anchored to a menagerie of contested examples. The field was ripe for a 2013 article proposing a unified account of complexity, and it's no less ripe today for this book-length expansion.

In What Is a Complex System? (Yale UP, 2020), philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist and mathematician Karoline Wiesner systematically interrogate popular definitions. They break the most commonly cited features into three bins: truisms on which there is universal agreement, the conditions necessary for complexity to arise, and various emergent products of complexity. A key insight of their account, for me, was to understand emergence as a relation between features rather than one feature among many.

The book is compact, accessible, and at times profound. Indeed, James and Karoline bring the lessons of their account to some of the most consequential complex systems of our time, including Earth's climate and biosphere as well as our global social media ecosystem. I was honored to host them in conversation on this episode, and i encourage listeners to pick up the book itself for deeper dives into the topics we discussed.

James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol and works mainly in the philosophy of science. Karoline Wiesner is professor of physics at the University of Potsdam and uses information theory to understand complex systems.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains.

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Stefan Collini, “The Two Cultures, Revisited” (Open Agenda, 2021)

28 juli 2021 | 100 min

Simon Ferdinand, "Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)

27 juli 2021 | 42 min

Gayle Rogers, "Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI" (Columbia UP, 2021)

26 juli 2021 | 68 min

Patricia Churchland, “Philosophy of Brain” (Open Agenda, 2021)

26 juli 2021 | 97 min

The Renewable Energy Revolution in East Asia and the Nordics

26 juli 2021 | 40 min

The world is in a midst of a renewable energy revolution, with the price of utility scale photo-voltaic solar power falling by nearly 90% between 2009 and 2019, and the price of wind power falling by 70% during the same period. Annual global investment in renewable electricity generation assets is now more than double that for fossil fuel and nuclear-powered generation facilities combined, and yet the pace of adoption varies greatly across countries.

In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Assistant Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and coordinator of Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, moderates a discussion on the various barriers and opportunities countries in Asia and the Nordics face in trying to take advantage of this renewable energy revolution. He is joined by Paul Midford a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, in Yokohama, Japan, Espen Moe, a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and Eric Zusman, senior policy researcher and area leader at the Institute for Global Environmental Studies in Hayama, Japan.

The talk focuses on two new books: New Challenges and Solutions for Renewable Energy: Japan, East Asia and Northern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), edited by Midford and Moe, and Aligning Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies in Asia (Springer, 2021), edited by Zusman with Hooman Farzaneh and Yeora Chae.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

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Joseph P. Laycock, "Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds" (U California Press, 2015)

26 juli 2021 | 78 min

Eszter Varsa, "Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the 'Gypsy Question' in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956" (Central European UP, 2020)

26 juli 2021 | 50 min

Historian Eszter Varsa’s new book Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the 'Gypsy Question' in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956 (Central European UP, 2020) examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European history. Across the communist bloc, the prewar foster care system was increasingly replaced after 1945 by institutionalization in residential homes. This shift was often interpreted as a further attempt to establish totalitarian control. However, this study—based on hundreds of children's case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care—provides a new perspective.

Rather than being merely a tool of political repression, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad of problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. This response built on, rather than broke with, earlier models of reform and reformatory education. Yet child protection went beyond safeguarding and educating children; it also focused on parents, particularly lone mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. In so doing, children's homes both reinforced and changed existing cultural and social patterns, whether about gendered division of work or the assimilation of minorities. Indeed, a major finding of the book is that state socialist child protection continued a centuries-long national project of seeking a “solution to the Gypsy question,” rooted in efforts to eliminate the perceived “workshyness” of Roma.

Eszter Varsa is a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC project ZARAH: Women's Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century at Central European University, Vienna.

Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at [email protected] or tweet to @leslieh2Os.

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Popular Protests in the Age of #MilkTeaAlliance

23 juli 2021 | 38 min

Michael Moore, "We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

23 juli 2021 | 67 min

Rahul Mukherjee, "Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty" (Duke UP, 2020)

23 juli 2021 | 60 min

John Horgan, "Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science" (MIT Press, 2020)

23 juli 2021 | 67 min

Eugene T. Richardson, "Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health" (MIT Press, 2020)

22 juli 2021 | 49 min

In Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (MIT Press, 2020), physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson explores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities.

This book questions the Global North's "monopoly on truth" in global public health science, making a provocative claim: that public health science manages and maintains global health inequity. Richardson, a physician and anthropologist, examines the conventional public health approach to epidemiology through the lens of a participant-observer, identifying a dogmatic commitment to the quantitative paradigm. This paradigm, he argues, plays a role in causing and perpetrating public health crises. The mechanisms of public health science--and epidemiology in particular--that set public health agendas and claim a monopoly on truth stem from a colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.

Deploying a range of rhetorical tools, including ironism, “redescriptions” of public health crises, Platonic dialogue, flash fiction, allegory, and koan, Richardson describes how epidemiology uses models of disease causation that serve protected affluence (the possessing classes) by setting epistemic limits to the understanding of why some groups live sicker lives than others—limits that sustain predatory accumulation rather than challenge it. Drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, he concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.

Eugene T. Richardson, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Faculty at the University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, Rwanda, and Chair of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. Her current work concerns the politics of travel in Cold War US; she has previously published on US intervention in the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati, "Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice" (Routledge, 2020)

22 juli 2021 | 78 min

Andrew Jenks, "Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth" (Anthem Press, 2021)

21 juli 2021 | 58 min

Andrew Jenks' book Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth (Anthem Press, 2021) explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations.

The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics.

The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian.

Paul Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Stacia Ryder et al., "Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures" (Routledge, 2021)

20 juli 2021 | 34 min

Through various international case studies presented by both practitioners and scholars, Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures (Routledge, 2021) explores how an environmental justice approach is necessary for reflections on inequality in the Anthropocene and for forging societal transitions toward a more just and sustainable future. Environmental justice is a central component of sustainability politics during the Anthropocene - the current geological age in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Every aspect of sustainability politics requires a close analysis of equity implications, including problematizing the notion that humans as a collective are equally responsible for ushering in this new epoch. Environmental justice provides us with the tools to critically investigate the drivers and characteristics of this era and the debates over the inequitable outcomes of the Anthropocene for historically marginalized peoples.

The contributors to Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene focus on a critical approach to power and issues of environmental injustice across time, space, and context--drawing from twelve national contexts: Austria, Bangladesh, Chile, China, India, Nicaragua, Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Tanzania, and the United States. Beyond highlighting injustices, the volume highlights forward-facing efforts at building just transitions, with a goal of identifying practical steps to connect theory and movement and envision an environmentally and ecologically just future. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners focused on conservation, environmental politics and governance, environmental and earth sciences, environmental sociology, environment and planning, environmental justice and global sustainability and governance. It will also be of interest to social and environmental justice advocates and activists.

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Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, "Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

20 juli 2021 | 73 min

Terry McGlynn, "The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

19 juli 2021 | 76 min

Listen to this interview of Terry McGlynn, author of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching (U Chicago Press, 2020). McGlynn is also a professor of biology at California State University Dominguez Hills and research associate in the Department of Entomology in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We talk about learning, actually.

Terry McGlynn : “If you’re giving students a writing assignment, like an experimental protocol, and they’re supposed to write about what they did in the lab or in the field, and it’s a cookbook project, you know, where the students don’t design the methods themselves and they're just doing what they were told to do and they're writing that down–––well, then the students are just jumping through a hoop and there's no ownership. That just gets you following through the prescribed steps, and in each of those steps, you just need to know, 'Oh, I just need to write a sentence where I've said This is where I did this,' and you write that sentence. And so, I think you can get through the whole assignment without thinking about the grand reason why you're doing it, right? Because the grand reason why you're doing it is because you need to turn it in and get your grade. And so all the little decisions you're making when you're doing the writing assignment–––all those decisions are all based on a micro level of, 'Okay, this next sentence, and that next sentence,' rather than if you had more control over what you're writing or if you had a bigger set of questions–––basically, if you knew why you're doing this assignment, you know like, what is the purpose of the assignment other than to turn it in and to get a grade–––because then that would be the purpose which is behind all those other small decisions, the purpose that guides you toward some destination."

McGlynn's blog is here.

Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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John Troyer, "Technologies of the Human Corpse" (MIT Press, 2020)

19 juli 2021 | 70 min

Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination--not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In Technologies of the Human Corpse (MIT Press, 2020), John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways.

Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the "Happy Death Movement" of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into "death prevention technologies." The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Anna Reser and Leila McNeill, "Forces of Nature: The Women who Changed Science" (Frances Lincoln, 2021)

16 juli 2021 | 61 min

Yurou Zhong, "Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958" (Columbia UP, 2019)

15 juli 2021 | 84 min

Adam Crymble, "Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age" (U Illinois Press, 2021)

15 juli 2021 | 53 min

Lindy McDougall, "The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century" (Indiana UP, 2021)

14 juli 2021 | 44 min

Angus Fletcher, "Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature" (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

14 juli 2021 | 78 min

Nima Arkani-Hamed, “The Power of Principles: Physics Revealed” (Open Agenda, 2021)

13 juli 2021 | 121 min

Nicoletta Batini, "The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet" (Island Press, 2021)

13 juli 2021 | 57 min

Thomas D. Mullaney et al., "Your Computer Is on Fire" (MIT Press, 2021)

9 juli 2021 | 81 min

Alyssa Ney, "The World in the Wave Function: A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics" (Oxford UP, 2021)

9 juli 2021 | 74 min

Warren Mansell, "The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory" (Academic Press, 2020)

8 juli 2021 | 64 min

Regular listeners to this podcast will be well aware of my strong conviction that the Perceptual Control Theory initially formulated by William T. Powers entails many significant contributions to the domains of systems and cybernetics despite the fact that, for the last several decades, its applications have been further developed in a largely “adjacent” academic community.

It is in the ongoing spirit of a much-needed rapprochement between these fields, that previous guest, Warren Mansell, returns to this podcast; this time, as editor of The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory – Vol. 1, out from Elsevier in 2020. Astonishing in its sweeping, panoramic view of the contemporary sciences, both “natural” and “social,” this magnificent volume brings together the latest research, theory, and applications of Powers’ powerful and parsimonious theory proposing that the behavior of a living organism lies in the control of perceived aspects of both itself and its environment. Illustrating both the fundamental theory and the application of PCT to a broad range of disciplines, various chapters illuminate why perceptual control is fundamental to understanding human nature, describe a new way to do research on brain processes and behavior, reveal how the role of natural selection in behavior can be demystified, explain how engineers can emulate human purposeful behavior in robots with significantly lower computational expense, and so much more. If ever there was a book that could consolidate some of the world’s most rigorous applications of PCT in a manner rendering its remarkable explanatory power and paradigm exploding practical value in vivid detail and inspiring insight, this is it.

Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people.

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Kristin Poling, "Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

8 juli 2021 | 59 min

Catalina M. de Onís, "Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico" (U California Press, 2021)

7 juli 2021 | 41 min

Arunabh Ghosh, "Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China" (Princeton UP, 2020)

7 juli 2021 | 80 min

Martin Summers, "Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions" (Oxford UP, 2019)

7 juli 2021 | 60 min

From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation's capital, the institution became one of the country's preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so.

Martin Summers' book Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions (Oxford UP, 2019) is a history of the hospital and its relationship to Washington, DC's African American community. It charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late-1980s, when the hospital's mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization, and its transfer from the federal government to the District of Columbia. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including patient case files, the book demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital's existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experienced their institutionalization. The book argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a "rights consciousness" in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Stefan Vogler, "Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

7 juli 2021 | 71 min

Nathan R. Johnson, "Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age" (U Alabama Press, 2020)

6 juli 2021 | 54 min

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge.

In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices.

This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century.

Nathan R. Johnson is assistant professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Florida. His work has appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Poroi, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.

Connect with your host, Lee Pierce (they & she) on social and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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Sandeep Mertia, "Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India" (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020)

5 juli 2021 | 83 min

Jenny Price, "Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto" (W. W. Norton, 2021)

5 juli 2021 | 56 min

Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

2 juli 2021 | 57 min

Luiz Valerio de Paula Trindade, "No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media" (Vernon Press, 2020)

2 juli 2021 | 48 min

Open Access Publishing Explained: A Discussion with Ros Pyne

1 juli 2021 | 48 min

stef m. shuster, "Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender" (NYU Press, 2021)

30 juni 2021 | 54 min

Leah DeVun, "The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance" (Columbia UP, 2021)

29 juni 2021 | 58 min

Rowena Lennox, "Dingo Bold: The Life and Death of K'gari Dingoes" (Sydney UP, 2021)

29 juni 2021 | 57 min

Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

28 juni 2021 | 61 min

Faith Kearns, "Getting to the Heart of Science Communication: A Guide to Effective Engagement" (Island Press, 2021)

28 juni 2021 | 50 min

Margaret MacMillan, "War: How Conflict Shaped Us" (Random House, 2020)

28 juni 2021 | 36 min

Canay Özden-Schilling, "The Current Economy: Making Energy and Markets in the United States" (Stanford UP, 2021)

25 juni 2021 | 56 min

Electricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy: Making Energy and Markets in the United States (Stanford UP, 2021) is an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogeneous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life.

Canay Özden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work: cultures of science, technology, and engineering that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise, this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Canay Özden-Schilling is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore.

Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an urban anthropologist focusing on futurity, care, and migration in Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Sarah K. Mock, "Farm (and Other F Words): The Rise and Fall of the Small Family Farm" (New Degree Press, 2021)

23 juni 2021 | 54 min

Howard Burton, "First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute" (Open Agenda Publishing, 2021)

21 juni 2021 | 97 min

In this second edition of First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute, Howard Burton tells the remarkable and unconventional story—with a bold and biting humour and surprising candour—of the founding of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Howard was the Founding Director of Perimeter Institute and his experiences at developing the research and outreach mandates of PI are described in this thought-provoking book featuring a foreword by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose.

Howard Burton was a freshly-minted physics PhD from the University of Waterloo when a random job query resulted in a strange - albeit fateful - meeting with Research In Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. Mike had a crazy idea: he wanted to spend $100 million of his own recently-found wealth (Research In Motion had just gone public a year earlier and he suddenly found himself fabulously wealthy on paper) to do something new and transformative in the world of science. From these curious beginnings began the story of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Howard's role as its founding director from 1999-2007.

Howard Burton is also the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations. Ideas Roadshow is an award-winning initiative producing a wide range of innovative, multimedia resources, including several pedagogical databases and a wide range of books in both electronic and print format developed from in-depth conversations with more than 100 world-leading researchers, including 3 Nobel Laureates. Ideas Roadshow conversations reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research while providing behind-the-scenes insights into the world of frontline researchers. You can check it out on ideasroadshow.com. Howard also spoke to me about the books Conversations about Astrophysics and Cosmology, Biology and Neuroscience on the NBN, so make sure to look those episodes on our website or any podcast app you use.

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Jessica Helfand, "Face: A Visual Odyssey" (MIT Press, 2019)

17 juni 2021 | 36 min

Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer, "Wildness: Relations of People and Place" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

16 juni 2021 | 54 min

Aim Sinpeng, "Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand" (U Michigan Press, 2021)

15 juni 2021 | 38 min

Why did hundreds of thousands of Thai people rise up in opposition to elected governments in 2006, 2008 and 2013-14? What were the ideological underpinnings of the yellow shirt movement? How did the original People’s Alliance for Democracy differ from the later People’s Democratic Reform Committee? Were the yellow shirts simply trying to provoke military coups against administrations linked to the controversial former premier Thaksin Shinawatra? And why did the rise of satellite TV and digital media apparently undermine rather than enrich Thai democracy?

In this lively conversation, Aim Sinpeng – senior lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Sydney – discusses these topics with Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. She explains how many of her family, friends and neighbours took part in the yellow shirt protests, and argues for a more nuanced understanding of these movements, one that goes beyond the caricature of conservative royalists blinded by their overweening faith in monarchy.

Aim Sinpeng is a prolific scholar of Thailand’s politics, who has been at the forefront of recent work on the growing salience on online political participation in Southeast Asia. She is the author of Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (U Michigan Press, 2021). Sinpeng tweets at @aimsinpeng.

For Aim’s latest (Open Access) Critical Asian Studies article on Thailand’s 2020 student protests, see here.

Like this interview? If so, you might be interested in an earlier Nordic Asia podcast with Aim on the Future Forward Party here. Or some recent Southeast Asian Studies channel podcasts on Thai politics here and here.

Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here.

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Javier Guerrero C., "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave, 2020)

15 juni 2021 | 39 min

Howard Burton, "Conversations About Neuroscience" (Open Agenda, 2020)

14 juni 2021 | 77 min

This Ideas Roadshow Collection includes five Ideas Roadshow books that have been developed from filmed wide-ranging conversations with the following leading neuroscientists: Lisa Feldman Barrett (Northeastern University), Jennifer Groh (Duke University), Kalanit Grill-Spector (Stanford University), John Duncan (Cambridge University) and Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University). Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy.

This collection includes a detailed preface highlighting the connections between the different books which offer a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship while each individual book also includes a detailed introduction plus questions for discussion. These mind-stretching books provide readers through an engaging dialogue format with a wide range of fascinating findings in today's neuroscience research, such as: how the brain combines various streams of sensory input to determine where things are, together with the corresponding implications for a wide range of issues, from neuroplasticity to evolutionary mechanisms; how our brain is anticipating and making sense of sensory inputs from its environment; how functional imaging techniques are used to visualize the brain in action and how it functions to recognize people, objects and places; whether intelligence can be measured and improved; what role our frontal lobe plays in executive control; sophisticated ways of harnessing the thoughts of rats, monkeys and humans to drive mechanical devices in the rapidly emerging field of brain-machine interfaces, and much more.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Martin Halliwell, "American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics" (U California Press, 2021)

11 juni 2021 | 61 min

George Szmukler, "Men in White Coats: Treatment Under Coercion" (Oxford UP, 2017)

9 juni 2021 | 91 min

The laws that govern psychiatric treatment under coercion have remain largely unchanged since the eighteenth century. But this is not because of their effectiveness, rather, these laws cling to outdated notions of disability, mental illness and mental disorder why deny the fundamental rights of this category of people on an equal basis with all others. In Men in White Coats: Treatment Under Coercion (Oxford University Press, 2017) Professor George Szmukler examines the violation of these rights, such as the right to autonomy, self-determination, liberty, and security and integrity of the person in the context of the domestic laws which themselves perpetuate ongoing discrimination against people with mental impairments.

Tracing first the history of the medical coercion and involuntary treatment of people with mental illnesses and mental disorders, Professor Szmukler offers a potential path which he argues would end discrimination against this category of people. He puts forward a legal framework which is non-discriminatory and is based on a person's decision-making abilities and best interests, as opposed to a diagnosis. Crucially, he argues that this law is generic, and would not apply by reason of a person's mental disorder. His solution - Fusion Law - would better support people's autonomy, better engage with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and have significant social value by recognising the dignity and equality of people with mental health impairments. It would also have implications for the forensics system, in particular, with regards to defendants who have mental disorders.

Professor George Szmukler is a psychiatrist who started practising in the field as a trainee in 1972. He retired from clinical work in 2012, and is now an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Society at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's college London. His major research now concerns methods of reducing compulsion and ’coercion’ in psychiatric care, for example, through the use of ’advance statements’. A related interest is mental health law, particularly the possibility of generic legislation centred on impaired decision-making capacity which would apply to all persons, regardless of the cause of the underlying disturbance of mental functioning.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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W. Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture" (MIT Press, 2020)

9 juni 2021 | 59 min

Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural realms separated by impervious walls. But some fifty years ago, the borders between technology and art began to be breached. In Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020), W. Patrick McCray shows how in this era, artists eagerly collaborated with engineers and scientists to explore new technologies and create visually and sonically compelling multimedia works. This art emerged from corporate laboratories, artists' studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses. Many of the biggest stars of the art world—Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneemann, and John Cage—participated, but the technologists who contributed essential expertise and aesthetic input often went unrecognized.

Coming from diverse personal backgrounds, this roster of engineers and scientists includes Frank J. Malina, the American rocket-pioneer turned kinetic artist who launched the art-science journal Leonardo, and Swedish-born engineer Billy Klüver, who established the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T). At schools ranging from MIT to Caltech, engineers engaged with such figures as artist Gyorgy Kepes and celebrity curator Maurice Tuchman.

Today, we are in the midst of a new surge of corporate and academic promotion of projects and programs combining art, technology, and science. Making Art Work reveals how artists and technologists have continually constructed new communities in which they exercise imagination, display creative expertise, and pursue commercial innovation.

Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. I study science and its history, in the hope that understanding the past can help us make sense of the present and build a better future.

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Jonathan Rauch, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth" (Brookings, 2021)

7 juni 2021 | 40 min

A. Burton and R. Mawani, "Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times" (Duke UP, 2020)

7 juni 2021 | 44 min

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "Objectivity" (Zone Books, 2010)

7 juni 2021 | 66 min

Suzanne L. Marchand, "Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe" (Princeton UP, 2020)

4 juni 2021 | 62 min

Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a history of chemistry at the dawn of modern industry, and a history of aristocratic consumption of porcelain as these stories open into an economic history of globalized markets, as well as a social history of sorts of Central Europe’s fledgling bourgeois and lower-class consumer public. Marchand traces these interlocking stories across three centuries, from the first European firing of porcelain in 1708 under the supervision of Johann Friedrich Böttger to the present day, where contemporary tastes threaten to consign the white tableware of Europe’s past to the flea markets of today. Porcelain in Marchand’s hands acts as something like an objet de memoire, to think of Pierre Nora and other scholars’ work on national histories. One of the book’s many virtues is the sense of Professor Marchand reassembling a continental pattern out of several shards.

Porcelain, as Professor Marchand writes, “is a rich and complicated adventure, in which we not only visit lavishly decorated palaces but also linger in blisteringly hot craft workshops and spartan working-class homes. Though actual porcelain objects in all their splendor and strangeness play a central role, the focus is really on the people who made, marketed, and purchased them, whether they were princes, or peddlers, or middle-class housewives.” It is also an attempt to write Central European history in a new way, one that the author hopes will be taken up by other scholars of history and material culture.

John Raimo is a PhD. Candidate in History at NYU finishing up my dissertation (on postwar publishing houses) this summer in European history.

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Maneesha Deckha, "Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

4 juni 2021 | 56 min

In Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (University of Toronto Press, 2021), Maneesha Deckha critically examines how Canadian law and, by extension, other legal orders around the world, participate in the social construction of the human-animal divide and the abject rendering of animals as property. Through a rigorous but cogent analysis, Deckha calls for replacing the exploitative property classification for animals with a new transformative legal status or subjectivity called "beingness."

In developing a new legal subjectivity for animals, one oriented toward respecting animals for who they are rather than their proximity to idealized versions of humanness, Animals as Legal Beings seeks to bring critical animal theorizations and animal law closer together. Throughout, Deckha draws upon the feminist animal care tradition, as well as feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies. Her argument is critical of the liberal legal view of animals and directed at a legal subjectivity for animals attentive to their embodied vulnerability, and desirous of an animal-friendly cultural shift in the core foundations of anthropocentric legal systems.

Theoretically informed yet accessibly presented, Animals as Legal Beings makes a significant contribution to an array of interdisciplinary debates and is an innovative and astute argument for a meaningful more-than-human turn in law and policy.

Akash Ondaatje is a historical researcher focusing on the interconnected lives of humans and animals. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 (https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/27991). Contact: [email protected]

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Carla Diana, "My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human" (Harvard Business, 2021)

3 juni 2021 | 39 min

S. Livingstone and A. Blum-Ross, "Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children's Lives" (Oxford UP, 2020)

3 juni 2021 | 50 min

Cara A. Finnegan, "Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital" (U Illinois Press, 2021)

2 juni 2021 | 55 min

Amy D. Finstein, "Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-interstate America" (Temple UP, 2020)

2 juni 2021 | 56 min

Rob Boddice, "Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

2 juni 2021 | 60 min

Mikiya Koyagi, "Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway" (Stanford UP, 2021)

1 juni 2021 | 59 min

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway (Stanford UP, 2021) tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility.

Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on Mobilities and Methods.

Mikiya Koyagi is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Alize Arıcan is an urban anthropologist and incoming Postdoctoral Scholar at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Skylar Tibbits, "Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2021)

1 juni 2021 | 51 min

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution (Princeton UP, 2021) is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world.

Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself—and along the way help us build a more sustainable future.

Compelling and beautifully designed, Things Fall Together provides an insider’s perspective on the materials revolution that lies ahead, revealing the spectacular possibilities for designing active materials that can self-assemble, collaborate, and one day even evolve and design on their own.

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Patrick Maille, "The Cards: The Evolution and Power of Tarot" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

1 juni 2021 | 64 min

Ellen Peters, "Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers" (Oxford UP, 2020)

31 maj 2021 | 69 min

To many mathematicians and math enthusiasts, the word "innumeracy" brings to mind popular writing like that of John Allen Paulos. But inequities in our quantitative reasoning skills have received considerable interest and attention from researchers lately, including in psychology, development, education, and public health. Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a unified treatment of these broad-ranging studies, from the ways more and less numerate people differ in our perceptions of risk and our number-based decisions to the roots of our numeric faculties and how we can make the best of them. Dr. Ellen Peters has made significant contributions to the subject and brings her expertise and an exceptional clarity to its presentation.

Precious little of the research surveyed in her book could fit into this interview! We discussed the three components of numeric ability—objective numeracy, subjective numeracy, and the innate number sense—and how they vary within and across populations. We talked through some key lessons from this literature, such as the importance of calibrating our self-efficacy to our real ability and an awareness of how our cultural allegiances can drive even our mathematical reasoning. And we identified some of the essential personal habits and policy levers (early childhood education!!) available to us in our efforts to improve our individual numeracy and our collective numeric decision-making. For a firm grounding in the state of knowledge and urgent open questions, there may be no better resource for many years to come.

Suggested companion works: Contributions from the labs of Isaac Lipkus, Angela Fagerlin, John Opfer, Edward Cokely, Rocio Garcia-Retamero, Jakub Traczyk, Agata Sobków, Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Keith Stanovich, and Valerie Reyna.

Ellen Peters, Ph.D., is the Philip H. Knight Chair, and Director of the Center for Science Communication Research, in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. As a decision psychologist, she studies the basic building blocks of human judgment and decision making and their links with effective communication techniques and has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers on these topics. She is former President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She also works with federal agencies to advance decision and communication sciences in health and health policy, including having been Chair of FDA’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee and member of the NAS’s Science of Science Communication committee. She has been awarded the Jane Beattie Scientific Recognition Award and an NIH Group Merit Award. Finally, she has received extensive funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains.

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Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, "Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access" (MIT Press, 2020)

31 maj 2021 | 87 min

Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, editors of Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (published open access by MIT in 2020). We talk about a lot, and all of it, really, falls under the head "Ethics of Scholarly Communication."

interviewer : "How did you conceive of a project of this diversity on the subject of open access and publishing?"

Martin Paul Eve : "What's really interesting to me is that most academics think they know about scholarly publishing because they have all published. This is a bit like me saying that I'm an expert in how car engines work because I can drive. It doesn't equate to the same thing. And so what we really wanted to do was to put together a volume that did not really attempt forcibly to synthesize all of the propositions made under its roof, but rather to give a space for a debate to develop, a space for argument and conversation to flourish about the difficulties surrounding open access."

---------------------

interviewer : "The book just tells all it has to tell from every perspective, and these disagreements, and agreements, make for the feel of a real discussion. I wonder what your basic view of scholarly communication was throughout the, surely, long editing process."

Jonathan Gray : "Well, we thought of it like this: so if you look at work on the sociology of art––rather than looking at the artwork, you look at everything around that artwork which is required for it to be seen and appreciated as an artwork. You look at the supply chains involved in producing print and canvas, you look at the gallery workers, you look at ticket sales and so on. And I guess we were keen to kind of do a similar thing with this book, to perform a kind of inversion around scholarly communication and open access, and really situate it and re-world it in relation to all sorts of issues, communities, forms of labor, and infrastructures."

Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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Jurgen Martschukat, "The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement" (Polity, 2021)

31 maj 2021 | 88 min

Today on New Books in History, Juergen Martschukat, professor of North American History at Universitat Erfurt, talks about his new book, The Age of Fitness: How the Body Became a Sign of Success and Performance (Polity Press, 2021), to celebrate its translation into and publication in English with Polity Press, this year, 2021. The book was originally published in 2019, by S. Fischer, in German.

We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms, cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In this new book, Jurgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity's emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues, that the age of fitness truly emerged, as part and parcel of our contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism enjoins individuals to work on themselves, to cultivate themselves in body and mind. Fitness becomes a guiding principle of social life, an era-defining network of discourses and practices that shape individuals' actions and self-conceptions. The pursuit of fitness becomes a cultural repertoire that is deeply ingrained in our institutions and way of life. This wide-ranging book shows how deeply fitness is inscribed in modern societies, and how important fitness has become to success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition. It will be of great value not only to those interested in sport and fitness, but also to anyone concerned with the conditions of success and failure in our societies today.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Howard Burton, "Conversations About Astrophysics & Cosmology" (Open Agenda, 2020)

31 maj 2021 | 71 min

Zahi Zalloua, "Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

31 maj 2021 | 48 min

The figure of the human looms large of the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks speculating about featherless bipeds to contemporary programmers wondering if they can recreate human intelligence with a series of algorithms. Much philosophical thought in the last few decades has involved much speculation about the human subject, even if it was often hostile to the idea that there is such a thing, rather than an odd effect of linguistic and cultural practices. Other critics have pointed out that the idea of a universal human subject has often been used to legitimate and cover up nefarious political ideas and practices.

Still, many thinkers today continue to argue for an ontology that includes a unique place for the human subject. One of these thinkers is my guest today, Zahi Zalloua, here to discuss his new book Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2020). Written both as an introduction and intervention, it kicks off with a long history of humanism and its critics, which helps set the stage for the four chapters that make up the main book. The first explores cyborgs, and the ways technology is slowly becoming a part of our lives and what that might mean. The second explores animals and our treatment of them, and what our willingness to send them to slaughterhouses and consume them in enormous quantities says about us. The third explores new theoretical frameworks such as Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism, and the place of the subject in these frameworks. The final chapter looks at race in Afropessimism, and what a true emancipation might look like. In all this, Zalloua combines theoretical frameworks with cultural analysis, giving the book a sense of accessibility and relevance to our current moment (as well as a couple plot-spoilers for Black Mirror and Sorry to Bother You). Those interested in philosophy and critical theory, and particularly the work of Slavoj Žižek will find this to be both an accessible and provocative text.

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Randolph M. Nesse, "Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry" (Dutton, 2019)

28 maj 2021 | 58 min

Tim Lockley, "Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795–1874" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

26 maj 2021 | 53 min

Linda Colley, "The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World" (Liveright, 2021)

26 maj 2021 | 47 min

Jenny Bangham, "Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

26 maj 2021 | 59 min

Heba Y. Amin, "The General's Stork" (Sternberg Press, 2020)

25 maj 2021 | 51 min

Alex Wellerstein, "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

24 maj 2021 | 62 min

Deborah R. Coen, "The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter" (U Chicago Press, 2013)

21 maj 2021 | 51 min

Makis Solomos, "From Music to Sound: The Emergence of Sound in 20th and 21st-century Music" (Routledge, 2019)

21 maj 2021 | 77 min

In From Music to Sound: The Emergence of Sound in 20th and 21st-century Music (Routledge, 2019), Makis Solomos (Professor of Musicology, University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis “Paris 8”) argues that the 20th century bears witness to a kind of paradigm shift relating to the subject matter of music, a shift “from a musical culture centered on the note to a culture of sound” (5). Crucially, Solomos sets out to track this transformation as a change that is music-internal: that is, one that may be understood with reference to the new aesthetic and cultural forms of particular compositions that put sound at stake. Solomos draws on analysis, listening, and the aesthetic writings of composers themselves to argue for the “emergence” of sound-as-such as a topic of 20th- and 21st-century music, one consequence of the increasing complexity of music since 1900.

His first sole-author monograph in English, From Music to Sound is an accessible and engaging entry point into Solomos’s work for an Anglophone audience that draws not only on his long career as a musicologist with extensive experience of contemporary music but also as a specialist in the musical thought of Theodor Adorno and the music of Iannis Xenakis. The book's attention to the contingency of the six themes around which Solomos organises this history—timbre, noise, listening, immersion, the composition of sound as material, and “sound-space”—marks it out not only as a contribution to the history of contemporary music but also to its historiography. Composers and works likely familiar to listeners are marshaled to develop these themes: Russolo, Webern, Schaeffer, Xenakis, Tristan Murail. Its rich selection of music examples provides ample points of departure into the work of composers perhaps less well known to listeners: François-Bernard Mâche, Fausto Romitelli, and Dmitri Kourliandski, among others. Though the principal focus of the book rests squarely on the tradition of Western art music composition, Solomos is careful to acknowledge that this titular transition from “music to sound” is not the exclusive preserve of institutional music culture: examples from recorded rock, jazz, and post-rock help round out the picture by pointing to the role that sound-studio cultures—and, we might say, technique and technics in general—play in the objectification of sound across genre lines.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Joseph Rouse, "Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

21 maj 2021 | 65 min

Ellen Helsper, "The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities" (Sage, 2021)

21 maj 2021 | 46 min

Rob Kitchin, "Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World" (Policy Press, 2021)

20 maj 2021 | 57 min

Aaron Shapiro, "Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

19 maj 2021 | 68 min

The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph.D. takes readers on a behind the scenes tour of the smart city and shows the revolution in urban technology that is currently taking place in large metropolitan areas around the United States. Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. Throughout Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (U Minnesota Press, 2020), Shapiro develops a new lens called logistical governance in his effort to interpret and understand urban technologies. This lens was used to critique urban future based on extraction and rationalization.

Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps readers peer through cracks of the façade that smart cities are bearing. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it is ultimately serving the ends of commercial media. Shapiro also builds on his experience as a bike courier delivering food for a startup company and examines how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy paves the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his discussion toward the current debates about police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are the answer to reforming the ongoing crises of criminal justice in large urban cities.

Through these gripping accounts of new technology in urban areas, Shapiro and Design, Control, Predict make vital contributions to conversations about data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro provides a ground level account of a timely and important piece of research in Design, Control, Predict. This piece can be used when comprehending urbanism today and when identifying strategies to advance the critique and resistance to a dystopian future that is often viewed as inevitable.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the social interactions that people engage in at two annual festivals that take place during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at [email protected].

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L. Ayu Saraswati, "Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie" (NYU Press, 2021)

19 maj 2021 | 69 min

Climate Denialism and Propaganda with Catriona McKinnon

18 maj 2021 | 34 min

Zoetanya Sujon, "The Social Media Age" (Sage, 2021)

18 maj 2021 | 43 min

Adam Rogers, "Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern" (Houghton Mifflin, 2021)

17 maj 2021 | 84 min

Michael D. Gordin, "On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience" (Oxford UP, 2021)

17 maj 2021 | 55 min

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience", typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella-- astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements--both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides-- there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.

On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?

Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. On the Fringe provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Bijal P. Trivedi, "Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever" (Benbella, 2020)

13 maj 2021 | 63 min

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type—from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. In 1974, Joey O'Donnell was born with strange symptoms. His insatiable appetite, incessant vomiting, and a relentless cough—which shook his tiny, fragile body and made it difficult to draw breath—confounded doctors and caused his parents agonizing, sleepless nights. After six sickly months, his salty skin provided the critical clue: he was one of thousands of Americans with cystic fibrosis, an inherited lung disorder that would most likely kill him before his first birthday.

The gene and mutation responsible for CF were found in 1989—discoveries that promised to lead to a cure for kids like Joey. But treatments unexpectedly failed and CF was deemed incurable. It was only after the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a grassroots organization founded by parents, formed an unprecedented partnership with a fledgling biotech company that transformative leaps in drug development were harnessed to produce groundbreaking new treatments: pills that could fix the crippled protein at the root of this deadly disease.

From science writer Bijal P. Trivedi, Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever (Benbella, 2020) chronicles the riveting saga of cystic fibrosis, from its ancient origins to its identification in the dank autopsy room of a hospital basement, and from the CF gene's celebrated status as one of the first human disease genes ever discovered to the groundbreaking targeted genetic therapies that now promise to cure it. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope—and a fascinating peek into the future of genetics and medicine.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Lucy van de Wiel, "Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging" (NYU Press, 2020)

12 maj 2021 | 78 min

How does egg freezing reshape our conception of time, aging and fertility? In her new monograph, Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging (NYU Press, 2020) Dr. Lucy van de Wiel explores the significance of egg freezing in re-orienting the temporality of the gender politics of aging. Dr. van de Wiel argues that it is critical to examine the politicized dimensions of egg freezing because it transforms the broader discourses around aging and normative timeline of women's reproduction even though the technology is only accessible for an elite few.

Through a cultural analysis of popular media and documentaries to highlight the role of rhetoric in creating conditions that motivate women in making decisions about their reproductive futures, Dr. van de Wiel criticizes the moralistic boundaries between social and medical utilized by some state actors to condemn women who decide to freeze their eggs for their careers. Dr. van de Wiel also highlights the role of financialized capitalism in refiguring fertility under the investment logic of optimization to speculate on the potential risks posed by anticipated infertility. Egg freezing technology shows us how the biopolitical control of population shifted to managing fertility, which transcends national borders as frozen eggs circulate transnationally for assisted reproduction as well as stem cell research. An incredibly rich and nuanced book, Freezing Fertility would be an invaluable read for anyone who is interested in the politics of reproduction, ART, gendered politics of aging, mortality, life, and regeneration.

Dr. Lucy van de Wiel is a Research Associate at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the social and cultural analysis of assisted reproductive technologies like egg freezing, time-lapse embryo selection and cross-border reproductive care.

Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at [email protected].

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Michelle Nijhuis, "Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction" (Norton, 2021)

12 maj 2021 | 68 min

Jason Karlawish, "The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It" (St. Martin's Press, 2021)

11 maj 2021 | 65 min

Can we Disagree Online Respectfully?: A Discussion with Ian Leslie

11 maj 2021 | 56 min

Scott Berkun, "How Design Makes the World" (2020)

11 maj 2021 | 55 min

Tetyana Lokot, "Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)

10 maj 2021 | 57 min

T. Sanders et al., "Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020)

10 maj 2021 | 78 min

Pallavi Guha, "Hear #metoo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

7 maj 2021 | 56 min

Jillian C. York, "Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism" (Verso Book, 2021)

6 maj 2021 | 62 min

Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, "Twitter: A Biography" (NYU Press, 2020)

6 maj 2021 | 42 min

Susan M. Reverby, "Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy" (UNC Press, 2013)

5 maj 2021 | 44 min

Some books are new, others are newly relevant – and so worth looking at from a new, contemporary perspective. Such is the case with Susan Reverby’s book Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (UNC Press, 2013). When the book was published in 2009, our world was reeling from a global financial crisis that exposed how subprime mortgages disproportionately affected Black homeowners; today we reel from a global pandemic that has starkly exposed how Black Americans and other people of color are disproportionately affected by the virus SARS-CoV-2 and its effects. Another inequity connected to the pandemic relates to vaccine distribution and uptake: they are much lower among Black (and Latinx) than white Americans.

Examining Tuskegee is a deeply researched work that ranges from the trial’s origins within a public health partnership between the Tuskegee Institute and the Public Health Service, to portraits of its protagonists – the researchers, the men who were its subjects, the complex Nurse Rivers, and the persistent Peter Buxton, whose efforts eventually exposed the full truth of the study after it ran for 40 years – to the ways it was portrayed in popular culture and the media, to matters of bioethics and presidential apologies. In our conversation, Susan Reverby explains what actually happened in the study – no, the men were not injected by the researchers with syphilis – what it meant 50 years ago, and how it pertains, or not, to issues such as vaccine hesitancy among African Americans today.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her third book, an examination of the history of acupuncture as a means of social and political revolution, is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.

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David Rainbow, "Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2019)

5 maj 2021 | 66 min

Patrick Vitale, "Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

5 maj 2021 | 49 min

Daniel Greene, "The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope" (MIT Press, 2021)

3 maj 2021 | 67 min

Carol Dyhouse, "Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen" (Oxford UP, 2021)

3 maj 2021 | 56 min

Mary A. Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019)

30 april 2021 | 62 min

Mary Brazelton’s new book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell UP, 2019) could hardly be more timely. During the Covid-19 pandemic, China was in the headlines of Euro-American media as the site of the first cases of the disease. China is also centerstage in Brazelton’s insightful, antiracist book—not as a source of disease but as the source of an effective and pervasive global public health strategy that other nations during the Covid-19 pandemic have strained to implement: mass vaccination.

As a historian of modern China and a historian of medicine, Brazelton offers a trustworthy and well-documented account of the National Epidemic Prevention Board and its successor agencies during the republic’s war-torn twentieth century. The location—and relocation—of the Board and its refugee scientists was decisive, Brazelton argues. During World War II and Japanese occupation (1937-45), the Board’s labs and scientists decamped from China’s coastal cities to the mountainous southwest borderland of Yunnan—exactly because the area was rugged, sparsely populated, and far from China’s urban hubs. In Yunnan, scientists were not isolated, but rather set within an idiosyncratic health infrastructure and network of longstanding political rivals vying for sway in the region—including France to the south, UK to the east, the League of Nations in the capital, and everywhere indigenous rulers, who retained local authority as the Nationalist Party struggled to consolidate power in the early years of the republic. The distinctive geography, epidemiology, and communities of health knowledge in Yunnan channeled the Board’s research and strategies. This regional system, developed under the banner of the national Board, became the blueprint for public health interventions for the People’s Republic of China after the Communist Revolution (1949). In the 1970s because of its repressive practices, China was officially excluded from the global health community, which was dominated by Europe and the US under the World Health Organization. Yet, China’s program of mass vaccination and strategy of universal primary care directly informed practices of new and nonaligned countries.

Brazelton’s important new book addresses a classic puzzle of biopolitics in the history of science and medicine: when and why did governing regimes build public health programs that prioritized changing people’s behaviors and values (sanitation, hygiene; mask wearing, social distancing) rather than changing people’s health with quick technical fixes—such as vaccination.

The interview refers to the image on the book’s cover (also p130) and to the important, related work of Alicia Altorfer-Ong, Ruth Rogawski, and the Connecting Three Worlds project. The conversation was a collective interview by Vanderbilt students in Laura Stark’s course, American Medicine & the World.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.

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Elise K. Burton, "Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity" (Stanford UP, 2021)

29 april 2021 | 59 min

Elise K. Burton’s important book, Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (Stanford University Press, 2021), documents how race and nation became fused in concept and in political practice. Over the past century, nation-building and race-making became interdependent through the sciences of heredity and their uses during wartimes and their aftermaths. The book provincializes Euro-American histories of science by centering the intrepid and non-innocent scientists from land along the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea (often called by the imperial name of “Middle East”)—and their transnational networks.

The book tracks how scientists’ reputations, access to resources, and interpretations of data shifted from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the repackaged race science around World War II, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the lingering state-backed violence of the present day. The sciences of heredity—including physical anthropology and medical genetics—have continued to be used to justify violence and territorial occupation, as much as humanitarian “resettlement” programs, storage of biospecimen, and building of research infrastructures for a cosmopolitan science. Today, “the anti-racist, progressive discourses surrounding contemporary human genome projects have so far been unable to overcome the territorial regimes and ethnic concepts produced by a century of conflict,” Burton writes, because “nationalism is sustained by particular practices of human genetics research—specifically, the need to describe human populations according to geography and ancestral history, coinciding with the two major constituent elements of the nation-state paradigm.”

The interview refers to the important, related work of Jenny Bangham, Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, Gayle Rubin, and Kim TallBear. The conversation was a collective interview by Vanderbilt Master’s students in Laura Stark’s seminar, Critical Bioethics: Jazmyn Ayers, Kell Coney, Anyssa Francis, Caroline Goodman, Lily Jaremski, Natalie Jones, Ashley Mullen, Enna Pehadzic, Olivia Post, Karrie Raymond, Christina Rosca, Cecile Sahel, Chad Smith, and McKenzie Yates.

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John Ferris, "Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

28 april 2021 | 76 min

Dave Auckly, et al., "Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles" (AMS, 2019)

27 april 2021 | 73 min

Math circles defy simple narratives. The model was introduced a century ago, and is taking off in the present day thanks in part to its congruence with cutting-edge research in mathematics education. It is a modern approach to teaching—or facilitation—that resonates and finds mutual reinforcement with traditional practices and cultural preservation efforts. A wide range of math circle resources have become available for interested instructors, including the MSRI Math Circles Library, now in its 14th year of publication by the AMS.

I was excited to talk with three editors and contributors to a recent volume in the series, Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles (American Mathematical, 2019). Drs. Dave Auckly, Amanda Serenevy, and Henry Fowler have been instrumental to the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project, along with co-editors Tatiana Shubin and Bob Klein and a broader contact and support network. Their book showcases scripts developed and facilitated in Navajo Nation, including an introduction to modular arithmetic through bean bag tossing, prefix sorting in the guise of pancake flipping, and a tactile use of limiting behavior to folding a necktie. We discussed the origin and expansion of math circles, their potential to indigenous mathematics educators and students, and the content of and stories behind a selection of the scripts.

Dr. Fowler's foreword and the editors' introduction situate the math circles movement and the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project in history, geography, and culture. Each script begins with a (minimal!) list of the necessary materials and a student handout that invites explorations with them. A short survey of connections to deeper mathematics precedes each handout, and each is followed by an extensive teacher's guide with (illustrative) solutions and presentation suggestions. The scripts vary in complexity and are suitable for student- and teacher-focused math circles. I hope the text becomes widely adopted for science-based and culturally conscious mathematics education and helps introduce others like myself to the greater math circles project.

Suggested companion works:

-James Tanton

-The Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival

-Gordon Hamilton and Lora Saarnio, MathPickle

-Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free

-Rachel and Rodi Steinig, Math Renaissance

Dave Auckly is a research mathematician at Kansas State University and Co-founder and Director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project. Amanda Serenevy is Co-founder and Director of the Riverbend Community Math Center. Henry Fowler is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Navajo Technical University and Co-director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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Brent D. Ziarnick, "To Rule the Skies: General Thomas S. Power and the Rise of Strategic Air Command in the Cold War" (US Naval Institute Press, 2021)

27 april 2021 | 88 min

A sadist. A madman. A sociopath seduced by the terrible allure of nuclear weapons. These are but a few of the pejoratives commonly used to describe United States Air Force General Thomas S. Power, Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Air Command (SAC) from 1957 to 1964. Power’s remit as CinCSAC was twofold: deter the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear first strike on the United States and plan to unleash Armageddon if they did. Neither was easily achieved. Effective deterrence hinged upon the actual possession of qualitatively superior weapons systems combined with the perception that the United States was willing to use them. Loosing the nuclear dogs of war, in turn, depended on the exacting coordination of those weapons systems under combat conditions. Further complicating matters was the incredible compression of time and space brought on by the advent of new delivery systems like the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). SAC's mission was truly a Gordian Knot—one Power was determined to cut. Power approached the problem with an alacrity that transformed SAC into a formidable nuclear instrument, but which simultaneously earned him a less than flattering reputation. Within the Kennedy administration and among many members of the media, Power was seen as fatally unhinged, obsessed with nuclear weapons, violently anti-communist, and liable to start a nuclear war with the Soviets of his own volition. Whether accurate or not, this view dominated popular and historiographical appraisals of Power for the better part of seven decades.

In To Rule the Skies: General Thomas S. Power and the Rise of Strategic Air Command in the Cold War (US Naval Institute Press, 2021), historian Brent Ziarnick takes aim at this mainstream historiographic narrative. Telling in detail for the first time the story of Power’s personal and professional life, Ziarnick refocuses our attention away from the hyperbole and onto Power’s substantive contributions to the development of America’s strategic air and aerospace capability.

Brent D. Ziarnick is an assistant professor at the Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He has been published in Wired, Politico, and The Hill. He is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.

Scott Lipkowitz holds a MA in History, with a concentration in military history, and a MLIS, with a concentration in information technology, from Queens College, City University of New York

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Melvin Konner, "Believers: Faith in Human Nature" (Norton, 2019)

26 april 2021 | 64 min

Douglas M. O'Reagan, "Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

23 april 2021 | 51 min

James Doucet-Battle, "Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

23 april 2021 | 60 min

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her book about acupuncture as a tool of medical, social, and political revolution in the United States is under contract with University of Michigan Press.

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Leigh Calvez, "The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature's Most Elusive Birds" (Sasquatch Books, 2016)

23 april 2021 | 60 min

Mathew Sweezey, "The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media" (Harvard Business Press, 2020)

22 april 2021 | 34 min

Robert T. Tierney, "Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame" (U California Press, 2010)

22 april 2021 | 49 min

Daniel Heifetz, "The Science of Satyug: Class, Charisma, and Vedic Revivalism in the All World Gayatri Pariwar" (SUNY Press, 2021)

22 april 2021 | 48 min

Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia, "Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan" (Stanford UP, 2019)

21 april 2021 | 86 min

How did Japanese academics study their "fields" in places like Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the transwar decades? How did they transform in the postwar, under the US Occupation, and after? Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan (Stanford UP, 2019) is the first monograph on the collective biography of this cohort of professional Japanese intellectuals, or in Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia's words, "the men of one age."

Kadia observes that during the transwar decades (1930s-1060s), these "men of one age" jointly embraced a set of unchanging assumptions regarding epistemology that was anchored in the ideal of "objectivity." The scholarship, or gakujutsu, that they aimed to produce were concerned with the quest of universal laws governing human society and the natural world, the use of a comprehensively delineated method to assure rigor in pursuit of "truth," and impartiality. Those who studied the human sciences applied the ideal of "objectivity" to the study of Self and Others in Japanese colonized and occupied lands.

Following the lives of these transwar human scientists into the fields, Kadia reveals that these "men of one age," such as Izumi Seiichi, were both creators and creations of imperial epistemology. Kadia points out that although the duration of Japanese imperial control was too short to apply their academic findings to policy in much of the empire, Izumi and his colleagues "enjoyed outsized influence in justifying the empire as a hierarchy of confraternal races ruled for their own benefit by the putatively superior Japanese."

The US Occupation in the postwar allowed the continuation of the pursuit of "objective" knowledge for the Japanese human scientists, as well as opening new avenues for them. Kadia argues that "what changed after 1945 were the values understood to constitute objectivity," namely ideals vaunted as characteristically American: democracy, capitalism, and peace.

During the Cold War, Kadia reminds us, the US saw strategic potential in Japan's studies of East Asia and Oceania, and the Japanese academics largely "upheld the convenient fiction of their reluctant cooperation with and quiet opposition to the former government." To rehabilitate Japan's scholarly reputation, the Japanese academics were integrated into a new transnational intellectual community that both reflected and supported US hegemony, although some Japanese academics resisted the subordination of domestic progress to grand strategy.

Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Joel Waldfogel, "Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture" (Princeton UP, 2020)

21 april 2021 | 48 min

Carolyn J. Heinrich, et al., "Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education" (Harvard Education Press, 2020)

20 april 2021 | 66 min

The COVID19 pandemic has profoundly changed the landscape of K-12 education in our society. Last March, many states closed their brick-and-mortar schools and shifted to remote education. The massive shift is historic and unprecedented. Until now, while we see the light at the end of the tunnel in our battle against the coronavirus, millions and millions of students are still learning at home via online platforms. It is also because of this shift that digital learning all of a sudden has drawn attention from not only educators but also the general public from families to policy makers. Over the past months we have seen concerted efforts to invest in digital learning and improve the required infrastructure. In spite of this unexpected yet much welcomed attention from the society at large, digital teaching and learning a field has existed for a long time. Experts in the field have been documenting and exploring the best practice of digital teaching and learning. Today I am going to talk with three researchers who have been working in this field for a long time, Carolyn Heinrich from Vanderbilt University, Jennifer Darling-Aduana from Georgia State University and Annalee G. Good from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Last year, they published their new book with Harvard Education Press, titled Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education (2020). It systematically studies the implementation and best practice of using digital tools to reduce inequities in educational opportunities and improve student outcomes. Although the book was out right before the start of the pandemic, the lessons, best practice and insights they highlighted in their book have so much to offer for educators, policy makers and families to navigate a teaching-and-learning landscape during and after this pandemic.

Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, and an affiliated Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University.

Jennifer Darling-Aduana is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies in the Department of Learning Sciences, College of Education and Human Development, at Georgia State University.

Annalee G. Good is co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and Director of the Clinical Program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida.

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Kas Saghafi, "The World after the End of the World: A Spectro-Poetics" (SUNY Press, 2020)

20 april 2021 | 70 min

Allison Cobb, "Plastic: An Autobiography" (Nightboat Books, 2021)

20 april 2021 | 60 min

R. Armstrong and R. Hughes "The Art of Experiment: Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design" (Routledge, 2020)

19 april 2021 | 76 min

Jon Birger, "Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge" (Benbella, 2021)

15 april 2021 | 61 min

Apps have transformed dating from a mysterious adventure into a daily chore. Young, single, college-educated women are sick and tired of competing for a shrinking supply of guys. And marriage-material men, long expected to take the lead when it comes to asking women out, are suddenly balking at making the first move, fearing they'll come across as creepy or inappropriate.

Society is changing, which means it's time for dating to evolve. Millennial and Gen Z women are more than capable of seeking out what—and who—they want. They're standouts in the classroom and champions on the playing fields. They're leaders in the workplace and trailblazers in city halls, state houses, and Congress. So why would we tell a generation of badass women that they're not allowed to be bold when it comes to finding love? Why should they have to sit back and wait (and wait and wait) for men to find them?

In Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (Benbella, 2021), Jon Birger, author of Date-onomics, offers women bold new strategies for finding the one. Backed by research showing that women can win at romance by making the first move with the men of their choice, Birger explains why:

It's better to choose than to be chosen
The "play hard to get" method is not only outdated but grounded in bad science
The first move does not have to be a big move
It's time to log off of dating apps and date men you actually know
The workplace can be a terrific place to meet a long-term romantic partner
. . . and more!

Make Your Move is an honest, solution-based guide to finding love that lasts. If you're tired of playing by old rules, look no further: Make your move and win

Jon Birger is an award-winning writer, a contributor to Fortune, and the author of Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. A former senior writer at both Fortune and Money, Jon's work has also appeared in Barron's, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, New York Magazine, Time, and Washington Post. He was included on AlwaysOn Network's list of "Power Players in Technology Business Media." A familiar face and voice on television and radio, Jon has been a guest on ABC's Good Morning America, BBC World Service, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News-discussing a wide range of topics from the dating market to the stock market to oil market.

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website.

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Can We Fix Social Media?: A Discussion with Christopher A. Bail

15 april 2021 | 45 min

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Christopher A. Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton University Press, 2021) challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.

Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit “reset” and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research.

Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]

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Jürgen P. Melzer, "Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation" (Harvard UP, 2020)

15 april 2021 | 38 min

David Wills, "Prosthesis" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

15 april 2021 | 69 min

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are" (HarperCollins, 2017)

15 april 2021 | 55 min

Christopher Thaiss, "Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century" (Broadview Press, 2019)

14 april 2021 | 81 min

Listen to this interview of Christopher Thaiss, author of Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century (Broadview Press 2019). We talk about the research article, about writing styles, and about the uses of rhetoric to scientists.

Interviewer: "Too many students learning to write in the sciences lack helpful feedback on their writing, and this causes them to experience, quite personally, that disconnect we were talking about, between doing science and writing science."

Christopher Thaiss: "Feedback is one of the things I return to again and again in the book. And in my teaching, I think that one of the ways that feedback is used––I think that the most effective way that feedback is used is not so much the feedback that I give students about their writing, although the students will always say, 'We love your feedback!' But what's really important is the feedback that they learn to give and get in peer response workshops. I'm very careful in designing peer response so that students feel that sense of responsibility to give good feedback to one another, but also how to ask for feedback on the work that they're doing themselves. I think that peer response is so important in the scientific context, but it is, you know, in any writing context, and so I really try to foreground that within the course. The way I talk about it in writing in STEM is actually in the context of how research is done and how scientific discoveries and advancements are made: It's through the process of peer review. And if we can teach students early on to become good readers and then careful, conscientious givers of feedback to one another, we have achieved so much in terms of their ability to become contributing members of the scientific community."

Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write [email protected]

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Maria San Filippo, "Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media" (Indiana UP, 2021)

13 april 2021 | 74 min

Philip N. Howard, "Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives" (Yale UP, 2020)

12 april 2021 | 50 min

Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (Yale UP, 2020) is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives--including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down.

As dangerous as things are now, they will only get worse; the enormous flood of data coming from the so-called Internet of Things, along with the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence, will make disinformation easier to generate and disseminate and much harder to spot and remove. Howard tackles the tough task of suggesting the changes that are needed to create a radically redesigned social media ecosystem that would reinforce, rather than erode, democracy.

Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her [email protected]

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Mark A. Waddell, "Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

9 april 2021 | 67 min

Avi Loeb, "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth" (Houghton Mifflin, 2021)

6 april 2021 | 54 min

Lucas Richert, "Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture" (MIT Press, 2020)

5 april 2021 | 47 min

"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was mainstream psychiatry. A "Radical Caucus" formed within the psychiatric profession and the "antipsychiatry" movement arose. Critics charged that the mental health establishment was complicit with the military-industrial complex, patients were released from mental institutions, and powerful antipsychotic drugs became available. Meanwhile, practitioners and patients experimented with new approaches to mental health, from primal screaming and the therapeutic use of psychedelics to a new reliance on quantification.

In Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture (MIT Press, 2020), Lucas Richert investigates the radical challenges to psychiatry and to the conventional treatment of mental health that emerged in the 1970s and the lessons they offer for current debates. Drawing on archives and government documents, medical journals, and interviews, and interweaving references to pop (counter)culture into his account, Richert offers fascinating stories of the decade's radical mental health practices. He discusses anti-Vietnam War activism and the new diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder given to some veterans; the radical psychiatrists who fought the system (and each other); the entry of New Age-style therapies, including Esalen's Human Potential Movement, into the laissez-faire therapeutic marketplace of the 1970s; the development of DSM III; and the use of LSD, cannabis, and MDMA. Many of these issues have resonance today. Debates over medical marijuana and microdoses of psychedelics echo debates of the 1970s. With rising rates of such disorders as anxiety and depression, practitioners and patients continue to search for therapeutic breakthroughs.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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James S. J. Schwartz, "The Value of Science in Space Exploration" (Oxford UP, 2020)

5 april 2021 | 75 min

The Value of Science in Space Exploration (Oxford UP, 2020) provides a rigorous assessment of the value of scientific knowledge and understanding in the context of contemporary space exploration. It argues that traditional spaceflight rationales are deficient, and that the strongest defense of spaceflight comes from its potential to produce intrinsically and instrumentally valuable knowledge and understanding. It engages with contemporary epistemology to articulate an account of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and understanding. It also parleys with recent work in science policy and social philosophy of science to characterize the instrumental value of scientific research, identifying space research as an effective generator of new knowledge and understanding.

These values found an ethical obligation to engage in scientific examination of the space environment. This obligation has important implications for major space policy discussions, including debates surrounding planetary protection policies, space resource exploitation, and human space settlement. Whereas planetary protection policies are currently employed to prevent biological contamination only of sites of interest in the search for extraterrestrial life, it contends that all sites of interest to space science ought to be protected. Meanwhile, space resource exploitation and human space settlement would result in extensive disruption or destruction of pristine space environments. The overall ethical value of these environments in the production of new knowledge and understanding is greater than their value as commercial or real commodities, and thus, exploitation and settlement of space should be avoided until the scientific community adequately understands these environments.

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Doug Bierend. "In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms" (Chelsea Green, 2021)

2 april 2021 | 55 min

Edward Ashford Lee, "The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines" (MIT Press, 2020)

2 april 2021 | 71 min

Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2021)

31 mars 2021 | 63 min

Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (Public Affairs, 2021)

31 mars 2021 | 63 min

As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets.

Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began.

In War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2021), Gershom Gorenberg tells the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.

Gershom Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, as well as an Adjunct Faculty at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Agnieszka Kościańska, "Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland" (Indiana UP, 2021)

31 mars 2021 | 73 min

Katherine E. Standefer, "Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life" (Little, Brown Spark, 2020)

30 mars 2021 | 40 min

Roy Richard Grinker, "Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness" (Norton, 2021)

30 mars 2021 | 62 min

A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma.

For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.

Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity.

Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity.

Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Sara Ritchey, "Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health" (Cornell UP, 2021)

29 mars 2021 | 61 min

We are here today with Sara Ritchey, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, about her new book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health, out with Cornell University Press this year, 2021.

The author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and numerous articles, including “Caring by the Hours: the Psalter as a Source of Gendered Healthcare,” “Health, Healing, and Salvation: Hagiography as a Source of Medieval Healthcare,” “The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence: The Experience of God in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript,” Dr. Ritchey discusses her profound understanding in the intersection of religious practice (writ large) and the practice of medicine (writ large) in the Medieval era.

In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical.

The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns.

Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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William Max Nelson, "The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

29 mars 2021 | 119 min

Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris, "Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation" (MIT Press, 2020)

26 mars 2021 | 89 min

John Durham Peters et al., "Action at a Distance" (Meson Press, 2020)

26 mars 2021 | 72 min

Aaron Tugendhaft, "The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

25 mars 2021 | 69 min

A. Blair and K. von Greyerz, "Physico-Theology: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650–1750 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

19 mars 2021 | 39 min

Courtney E. Thompson, "An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

19 mars 2021 | 52 min

Alisha Rankin, "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science" (Alisha Rankin, 2021)

18 mars 2021 | 70 min

Mitchell L. Hammond, "Epidemics and the Modern World" (University of Toronto Press, 2020)

17 mars 2021 | 105 min

Katie Hindmarch-Watson, "Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital" (U California Press, 2020)

15 mars 2021 | 39 min

Juno Salazar Parreñas, "Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation" (Duke University Press, 2018)

15 mars 2021 | 47 min

Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke University Press, 2018) presents a multi-species ethnography of orangutans and humans that probes the shared susceptibilities of both species in the face of future extinction. In a series of provocative chapters, the book interweaves intimate entanglements in the workings of an orangutan rehabilitation centre with reflection on the work of care that draws on queer theory and feminist conceptions of welfare. By centralizing such rehabilitation efforts, the book reveals the contradictions inherent in such a system. The practice of rehabilitation, it shows, is underpinned by violence. Parreñas demonstrates the colonial origins of such an approach to conservation biology and how care within enclosures traps both humans and endangered primates alike. As such, we should urgently question how we could divest ourselves from the need for security that is dependent on cruelty and seek instead a decolonial era of co-existence which welcomes and finds joy in our moments of brief, mutual vulnerability.

In this conversation, we discuss models of orangutan care, coerced copulations, the concept of “arrested autonomy” and how we as a species could love better.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests centre on human-animal relations and the institution of environmental justice. This book received the 2019 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize, biennially awarded by the Association for Feminist Anthropology for a first book as well as honourable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Prize, the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

For more on orangutans in Borneo, check out the following:

SSEAC Interview with conservation scholar Dr. June Rubis here.

NBN Interview with historian Prof. Robert Cribb here.

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or Twitter @laurelinarien.

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Liat Ben-Moshe, "Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

12 mars 2021 | 66 min

David Payne on the Community of Scientists and Diversity

12 mars 2021 | 78 min

J. L. Heilbron, "The Ghost of Galileo: In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2021)

10 mars 2021 | 35 min

Pey-Yi Chu, "The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

9 mars 2021 | 53 min

Edzard Ernst, "Chiropractic: Not All That It's Cracked Up to Be" (Springer, 2020)

8 mars 2021 | 51 min

John M. Janzen, "Health in a Fragile State. Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo" (Wisconsin UP, 2019)

8 mars 2021 | 70 min

John M. Janzen's Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo (Wisconsin University Press, 2019) offers a granular and insightful view of the state of healthcare services in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo), and examines the extent to which said services are able to improve the health of the communities that inhabit this region.

The collapse of the Congolese state during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the deterioration and virtual disappearance of state-sponsored healthcare institutions. This vacuum came to be filled by organisms such as the World Health Organization, other NGOs and health-based institutions organized under the new framework of the health zone.

As a result, a precarious healthcare system emerged, one that combines the ingenuity and resources of the local population with those from external sources. Unfortunately, this system is only able to offer a limited and fragile solution to the health needs of the populations it seeks to serve. Janzen uses this examination to remind us that positive health outcomes are not merely a factor of adequate knowledge and resources, but also require that those in charge of creating and implementing health policies are seen as legitimate within their communities.

To support this argument, he starts by describing the population history of the region in relation to policies of the colonial and postcolonial era, and the ways in which specific diseases affected the lives peoples in the region. He then explores the different kind of institutions that support the social reproduction of health and the ways in which people in this region explain what it means to be healthy. Finally, he looks at theories of legitimation, both in Western thought and in the Kongo culture, and argues that legitimacy is a key element in the creation of a robust and effective healthcare system.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Evan Friss, "The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

5 mars 2021 | 57 min

Today on New Books in History, Dr. Evan Friss, associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the US to talk about The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). This book was originally released in 2015 by the University of Chicago press and we are chatting on the occasion of its paperback release in January.

Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.

The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.

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Roland T. Rust and Ming-Hui Huang, "The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)

4 mars 2021 | 35 min

Common Ground Scholar: A Discussion with Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

4 mars 2021 | 101 min

Listen to this interview of Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, creators of the website newlearningonline.com and also professors at the College of Education, University of Illinois. We talk about monastic instruction in the sixth century, we talk about textbook learning in the sixteenth century, and we talk about cybersecurity education in the twenty-first century, but overall we talk about imbalances in self agency.

Interviewer: "Could you describe one pedagogical affordance of the technology on your learning platform CGScholar?"

Bill Cope: "So, what we're doing is we're using big data and learning analytics as an alternative feedback system. So, what we say, then, is, okay, well: 'The test is dead! Long live assessment!' We have so much data from CGScholar. Why would you create a little sample of an arrow or two at the end of a course, when we can from day one be data mining every single thing you do? And by the way, by the end of the course, we have these literally millions of data points and for every student. Now, the other thing, as well, is, our argument is––and we call this recursive feedback––is that every little data point is a piece of actionable feedback. Someone makes a comment on what you do, you get a score from somebody on your work against a Likert scale...so what we're doing is, we have this idea of complete data transparency, but also, we're not going to make any judgments for you or about you, or the system's not going to do it, without that feedback being actionable, so that you can then improve your work. It feeds into your work. So, the difference is, instead of assessment being retrospective and judgmental, what we're doing is making micro-judgments which are prospective and constructive and going towards your learning."

Visit the Learning Design and Leadership Program here and visit CGScholar here.

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Han Yu, "Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer's" (Columbia UP, 2021)

3 mars 2021 | 73 min

J. Jureidini and L. B. McHenry, "The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research" (Wakefield Press, 2020)

3 mars 2021 | 57 min

Teresa Berger, "@Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds" (Routledge, 2018)

26 februari 2021 | 33 min

Ronald J. Deibert, "Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society" (House of Anansi, 2020)

26 februari 2021 | 65 min

Erika Engelhaupt, "Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science" (National Geographic, 2020)

25 februari 2021 | 56 min

L. Vinsel and A. L. Russell, "The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most" (Currency, 2020)

24 februari 2021 | 54 min

Tracie White and Ronald W. Davis, "The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist's Desperate Hunt to Cure the Illness That Stole His Son" (Hachette, 2021)

24 februari 2021 | 65 min

Based on a viral article, the gripping medical mystery story of Ron Davis, a world-class Stanford geneticist who has put his career on the line to find the cure for chronic fatigue syndrome, the disease killing his son. For the past six years, Whitney Dafoe has been confined to a bedroom in the back of his parents' home, unable to walk, to eat, to speak. The sound of music causes him pain. At one point, the formerly healthy, young, freelance photographer, faced starvation as his 6'3" frame withered to 115 pounds. In desperation, Whitney and his parents went from one specialist to another, and still no answers. Then, finally, a diagnosis: the mysterious disease myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Whitney's story is heartbreaking, but it's also one of redemption. It reaches far beyond just one family's harrowing tale.

Today, ME/CFS affects between 1 and 2.5 million Americans--and 20 million people around the world. Those afflicted largely suffer in silence because the disease is little known and much misunderstood. The question lingers still whether it even exists outside the patient's mind. Often disbelieved, they're abandoned by family and friends. They lose their jobs, and battle with insurance companies over rising medical costs as the chronic disease continues on year after year. In one way, Whitney has been lucky. He could reach out to his father, a world renowned, scientist, for answers. This book is the story of one father's desperate hunt for the insidious illness that stole his son away. The Puzzle Solver follows Ron as he unravels the molecular trail within his own son's donated blood and genome, to began to find answers. He confirms this is a biological disease and uncovers new possibilities for treatments and potentially a cure. At its heart, The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist's Desperate Hunt to Cure the Illness That Stole His Son by Tracie White and Ronald W. Davis (Hachette Books, 2021) is about more than just cutting edge research or a race to find the cure for ME/CFS--it's about the unbreakable bond between a father and his son, and the lengths to which a parent will go to save their child's life.

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Seema Yasmin, "Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

22 februari 2021 | 26 min

Jacob Steere-Williams, "The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England" (U Rochester Press, 2020)

19 februari 2021 | 58 min

Alan Lightman, "Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings" (Pantheon, 2021)

18 februari 2021 | 36 min

Nicole Perlroth, "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

18 februari 2021 | 61 min

S. Carlsson and J. Leijonhufvud, "The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance" (Diversion Books, 2021)

18 februari 2021 | 50 min

Fifteen years ago in Stockholm, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon had a big idea. The music industry was playing a desperate game of whack-a-mole with piracy via file sharing but this was proving as hopeless as the War on Drugs. Why not, they thought, use the new torrenting technologies to bring piracy in from the cold and make themselves rich in the process?

In 2006, they founded Spotify with a handful of engineers, no licences and no revenue. Today, Spotify is the world's most popular audio streaming subscription service with 345 million users and a market capitalization of $60 billion.

How did the shy computer nerd and hyperactive investor tame hostile music labels and withstand competition from US tech giants more than ten times their size? Still struggling to achieve sustained profitability in cut-throat market segments, will Ek’s latest foray into podcasting eventually free Spotify of its dependency on the music labels or suffer the same fate as Spotify TV?

The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance (Diversion Books, 2021) is the new English-language update of Spotify Untold – their 2019 Swedish business biography – Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud put Europe’s only tech giant under the microscope using information gleaned from interviews more than 80 sources and a mountain of public and private documents. The book has been translated into 15 languages and will soon be turned into a Netflix Originals miniseries.

Sven Carlsson is a technology reporter at Swedish Radio and and Jonas Leijonhufvud a business journalist at Di Digital.

*The authors own book recommendations are Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac (W. W. Norton, 2019) and Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (William Collins, 2018).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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Emily Willingham, "Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis" (Avery, 2020)

17 februari 2021 | 43 min

David Badre, "On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done" (Princeton UP, 2020)

17 februari 2021 | 42 min

On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives.

Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done?

In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being. Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do. A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior.

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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Hannah Marcus, "Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

16 februari 2021 | 52 min

Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean" (Oxford UP, 2020)

16 februari 2021 | 41 min

The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to suit their "tropical" needs and increase profitability. Not only were technologies reinvented so as to keep manufacturing processes local but slaveholders' adaptation of new racial ideologies also shaped their particular usage of new machines. Finally, these businessmen forged a new set of relationships with one another in order to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States.

In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineers and iron-makers in Virginia to collaborate with railroad and sugar entrepreneurs in Cuba.

Through his examination of the creation of these industrial bodies of knowledge, Daniel B. Rood demonstrates the deepening dependence of the Atlantic economy on forced labor after a few revolutionary decades in which it seemed the institution of slavery might be destroyed. The reinvention of this plantation world in the 1840s and 1850s brought a renewed movement in the 1860s, especially from enslaved people themselves in the United States and Cuba, to end chattel slavery.

This account of capitalism, technology, and slavery offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Americas.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton, "Vera Rubin: A Life" (Harvard UP, 2021)

16 februari 2021 | 66 min

Henry T. Greely, "CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans" (The MIT Press, 2021)

15 februari 2021 | 62 min

What does the birth of babies whose embryos have gone through genome editing mean—for science and for all of us?

In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences in CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (The MIT Press, 2021). Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.

The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers, in a balanced and thoughtful way, the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next.

Greely doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Nathaniel Greenberg, "How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Egypt and Tunisia" (Edinburgh UP, 2019)

12 februari 2021 | 63 min

Jeremy Black, "A History of the 20th Century: Conflict, Technology & Rock'n'roll" (Sirius Entertainment, 2021)

12 februari 2021 | 39 min

Jack Price, "The Future of Brain Repair: A Realist's Guide to Stem Cell Therapy" (MIT Press, 2020)

10 februari 2021 | 65 min

A scientist assesses the potential of stem cell therapies for treating such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.

Stem cell therapies are the subject of enormous hype, endowed by the media with almost magical qualities and imagined by the public to bring about miracle cures. Stem cells have the potential to generate new cells of different types, and have been shown to do so in certain cases. Could stem cell transplants repair the damaged brain? In his book The Future of Brain Repair: A Realist's Guide to Stem Cell Therapy (MIT Press, 2020), neurobiologist Jack Price assesses the potential of stem cell therapies to treat such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries.

Certainly brain disorders are in need of effective treatments. These disorders don’t just kill, they disable, and conventional drug therapies have not had much success in treating them. Price explains that repairing the human brain is difficult, largely because of its structural, functional, and developmental complexity. He examines the self-repairing capacity of blood and gut cells—and the lack of such capacity in the brain; describes the limitations of early brain stem cell therapies for neurodegenerative disorders; and discusses current clinical trials that may lead to the first licensed stem cell therapies for stroke, Parkinson’s and macular degeneration. And he describes the real promise of pluripotential stem cells, which can make all the cell types that constitute the body.

New technologies, Price reports, challenge the very notion of cell transplantation, instead seeking to convince the brain itself to manufacture the new cells it needs. Could this be the true future of brain repair?

You can find more about Jack’s work here and here.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Nina Jankowicz, "How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

10 februari 2021 | 61 min

Tara Fickle, "The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities" (NYU Press, 2019)

9 februari 2021 | 53 min

Jennifer M. Rampling, "The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

8 februari 2021 | 66 min

Ethan Lou, "Field Notes from a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended" (Signal, 2020)

5 februari 2021 | 36 min

We are just over a year from when global news first reported a new type of pneumonia emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan. A lockdown of Wuhan on January 23rd, 2020, was the first indication that these stories were more serious than originally thought.

All of us know what happened next: COVID-19 spread from China to other countries in Asia, then to Europe, then to North America, then worldwide. To slow the spread, countries frantically imposed travel restrictions on those coming from places affected by COVID-19: a massive shift away from the increasingly open borders seen over the past two decades.

One traveller caught up in these new restrictions was Ethan Lou, author of Field Notes From a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended (Signal, 2020). Ethan arrives in China in early 2020 to visit his family, as the first leg of a trip around the world. On each leg of his journey, he sees how different parts of the world are transformed by the global pandemic. Field Notes From a Pandemic, named among the CBC’s best Canadian non-fiction books of 2020, is one half travelogue, one half commentary, in and about a changed world.

In this interview, Ethan and I talk about his journey around the world, and how COVID-19 made a routine trip exceptionally complicated. He shares how he saw the world change in real-time, and which of those changes may end up sticking around.

Ethan Lou is a former Reuters reporter and has served as a visiting journalist at the University of British Columbia. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, the South China Morning Post, the Walrus, and the Washington Post. His next book is Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West. He can be found on Twitter at @Ethan_Lou, and his work can be found at https://ethanlou.com/.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Field Notes From a Pandemic. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Michael Rossi, "The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America" (Chicago UP, 2019)

5 februari 2021 | 57 min

The appreciation of color is considered universal among human societies, yet varies vastly according to cultural norms and material circumstances. In the nineteenth century, synthetic chemistry produced new hues like mauve that changed the sensory worlds of people living in industrial societies. In The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America (Chicago UP 2019), historian Michael Rossi explores how reformers and scientists turned to color science to ask and answer profound questions about the relationship between perception and personhood. Their efforts to define and standardize the modern sensorium were often proposed as solutions to practical problems of education and accountability. In this way, color systems made moral and political claims on what good governance in an increasingly bureaucratized society might look like.

From the Pragmatists’ protoplasmic preoccupations to the educational experiments of board game magnates, Rossi’s study of color in American life brings anxieties over the possibility of community in the modern world into brilliant focus. Whether rooted in philosophical paradoxes or unabashed racial animus, standardizing color cut to the heart of human difference at a crucial moment in the development of the human sciences. This vibrant book will find an audience in aesthetes and Americanists alike, or virtually anyone interested in why the technical tools for making and modulating color look the way they do—not to spoil it, but how deeply have you considered the color options in software like Photoshop?

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and numbers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law.

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Matthieu Ricard, "A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion" (Shambhala, 2016)

5 februari 2021 | 72 min

Today I talked to Matthieu Ricard about two books.

The first is A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion (Shambhala, 2016) It is a powerful and wide-ranging indictment of the treatment of animals by humans--and an eloquent plea for animal rights. Every cow just wants to be happy. Every chicken just wants to be free. Every bear, dog, or mouse experiences sorrow and feels pain as intensely as any of us humans do. In a compelling appeal to reason and human kindness, Matthieu Ricard here takes the arguments from his best-sellers Altruism and Happiness to their logical conclusion: that compassion toward all beings, including our fellow animals, is a moral obligation and the direction toward which any enlightened society must aspire. He chronicles the appalling sufferings of the animals we eat, wear, and use for adornment or “entertainment,” and submits every traditional justification for their exploitation to scientific evidence and moral scrutiny. What arises is an unambiguous and powerful ethical imperative for treating all of the animals with whom we share this planet with respect and compassion.

The second, co-authored with Jason Gruhl, is Our Animal Neighbors: Compassion for Every Furry, Slimy, Prickly Creature on Earth (Bala Kids, 2020). It offers a story about the fundamental connection between animals and people and how we can treat all of Earth's creatures with compassion and empathy.

Furry polar bears, playful sea otters, slow sloths, prickly porcupines, and slimy snakes are just a few of the many animals we share our world with. And even though we might not look the same or have the same needs as our animal neighbors, we have more in common with them than we might think. Our Animal Neighbors introduces children to the importance of treating all animals with the care and compassion they deserve. We all want to experience love, safety, and respect and this book is the first step to instilling those values at an early age. This planet is our home, and we should all be free to live a prosperous life regardless of whether we have hands, hooves, scales, or fur.

Matthieu Ricard is a French writer, photographer, translator and Buddhist monk. Ricard received a PhD in molecular genetics from the Pasteur Institute in 1972 before departing his native France to study Buddhism in the Himalayas, eventually becoming a monk of the Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal. Renowned also as a photographer and translator, he is the author of numerous previous books, including Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and Your World, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, and, with his father, the late Jean-François Revel, The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life. He dedicates all the income of his work to two hundred humanitarian projects run in the Himalaya by the organization he founded, Karuna-Shechen.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Earl Wright II, "Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology" (University of Cincinnati Press, 2020)

5 februari 2021 | 63 min

Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology (U Cincinnati Press, 2020) is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good" and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans.

Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright II demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois's Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology.

Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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Jon Birger, "Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge" (BenBella Books, 2021)

2 februari 2021 | 48 min

Modern romance is broken. It's time to flip the script.

Apps have transformed dating from a mysterious adventure into a daily chore. Young, single, college-educated women are sick and tired of competing for a shrinking supply of guys. And marriage-material men, long expected to take the lead when it comes to asking women out, are suddenly balking at making the first move, fearing they'll come across as creepy or inappropriate.

Society is changing, which means it's time for dating to evolve. Millennial and Gen Z women are more than capable of seeking out what—and who—they want. They're standouts in the classroom and champions on the playing fields. They're leaders in the workplace and trailblazers in city halls, state houses, and Congress. So why would we tell a generation of badass women that they're not allowed to be bold when it comes to finding love? Why should they have to sit back and wait (and wait and wait) for men to find them?

In Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (BenBella Books, 2021) Jon Birger, author of Date-onomics, offers women bold new strategies for finding the one. Backed by research showing that women can win at romance by making the first move with the men of their choice, Birger explains why:

It's better to choose than to be chosenThe "play hard to get" method is not only outdated but grounded in bad science

The first move does not have to be a big move

It's time to log off of dating apps and date men you actually know

The workplace can be a terrific place to meet a long-term romantic partner

. . . and more!

Make Your Move is an honest, solution-based guide to finding love that lasts. If you're tired of playing by old rules, look no further: Make your move and win.

Jon Birger is an award-winning magazine writer and author of two dating books -- Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (2021) and Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game (2015). A former senior writer at Fortune, Jon has been named to AlwaysOn Network's list of "Power Players in Technology Business Media." He's also a familiar face and voice on television and radio, having made appearances on ABC's Good Morning America, BBC World Service, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News -- discussing topics ranging from the dating market to the stock market. A graduate of Brown University, Jon lives with his family in Larchmont, N.Y. To contact Jon about media interviews, speaking opportunities, or consulting work, please visit his author website, www.jonbirger.com.

Clint Sabom is an award winning writer who hosts a podcast on mental health and psychology called The Sanity Sessions: Exploring Mental Illness And Maladaptations.

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Theresia Hofer, "Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform" (U Washington Press, 2018)

29 januari 2021 | 80 min

Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform (University of Washington Press, 2018) is the first full-length ethnography of Tibetan medical practitioners (amchi) in central Tibet working outside of major Tibetan medical institutions in Lhasa. Departing from extant ethnographies and scholarship on Tibetan medicine in the twentieth-century that often focus on institutions such as the Mentsikhang, Tibetan Medical College, and TAR Tibetan Pharmaceutical Factory, Theresia Hofer follows and traces the medical work of local Tibetan doctors in rural settings in Tsang and in Shigatse Town.

By centering on amchis who were not part of the Tibetan state-sponsored medical structures that were incorporated into the PRC socialist health care system in the 1950s, Hofer reveals perspectives and experiences that have been overlooked in national and institutional narratives. Drawing on literature addressing Tibetan amchis' memory and oral history in socialist and postsocialist contexts, Hofer also inquires into the social and political dynamics that influence memory and history-making, especially with regard to the violent past. Medicine and Memory in Tibet also consistently considers gender and aims to tackle the lack of understanding of gender in Tibetan medicine in the twentieth century. The perspectives of the amchis allow the inclusion of more women in the study of Tibetan medicine and uncover different subaltern histories of the Tibetan experience.

Medicine and Memory in Tibet demonstrates that amchis outside of major state-sponsored institutions have continued to contribute significantly to the survival and revival of Tibetan medicine and culture into the present day. Through the amchis' negotiations and agency within the new regime since the 1950s, Tibetan medicine was able to not only become an important health care resource for Tibetans and the state into the 1990s, it also became a stronghold for the preservation and revival of other aspects of Tibetan culture, language, and the local economy in contemporary China.

Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

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James E. Baker, "The Centaur's Dilemma: US National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution" (Brookings, 2020)

28 januari 2021 | 81 min

Simon Baron-Cohen, "The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention" (Allen Lane, 2020)

26 januari 2021 | 61 min

J. Rosenhouse, "Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles" (Princeton UP, 2020)

25 januari 2021 | 56 min

Jason Rosenhouse's Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles (Princeton UP, 2020) is about a panoply of logic puzzles. You’ll find Mastermind and sudoku discussed early on, and then you’ll be hit with an incredible array of some of the most intriguing logic puzzles that have ever been devised. Some will be familiar to you, but some will almost certainly be brain-teasers you have never heard of. It’s absolutely amazing what a truly deep field grew from recreational pastimes – and this book is an absolute treasure trove of stuff you can’t help thinking about. If you like logic, you’re certain to be sucked in – but you’ll enjoy the ride.

Logic puzzles were first introduced to the public by Lewis Carroll in the late nineteenth century and have been popular ever since. Games like Sudoku and Mastermind are fun and engrossing recreational activities, but they also share deep foundations in mathematical logic and are worthy of serious intellectual inquiry. Games for Your Mind explores the history and future of logic puzzles while enabling you to test your skill against a variety of puzzles yourself.

In this informative and entertaining book, Jason Rosenhouse begins by introducing readers to logic and logic puzzles and goes on to reveal the rich history of these puzzles. He shows how Carroll's puzzles presented Aristotelian logic as a game for children, yet also informed his scholarly work on logic. He reveals how another pioneer of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan, drew on classic puzzles about liars and truthtellers to illustrate Kurt Gödel's theorems and illuminate profound questions in mathematical logic. Rosenhouse then presents a new vision for the future of logic puzzles based on nonclassical logic, which is used today in computer science and automated reasoning to manipulate large and sometimes contradictory sets of data.

Featuring a wealth of sample puzzles ranging from simple to extremely challenging, this lively and engaging book brings together many of the most ingenious puzzles ever devised, including the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever, metapuzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective stories.

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Emmanuel Kreike, "Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature" (Princeton UP, 2021)

25 januari 2021 | 82 min

In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature (Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it should be a crime. The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature.

In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth-century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.

Dr. Emmanuel Kreike is a professor of history at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in African history from Yale University (1996) and a Dr. of Science (PhD) in Tropical Forestry from the School of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University (2006), the Netherlands. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of war/violence, population displacement, environment, and society.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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Brian Deer, "The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's War on Vaccines" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

25 januari 2021 | 54 min

Anna L. Tsing, "Feral Atlas: The More-than-human Anthropocene" (Stanford UP, 2020)

22 januari 2021 | 51 min

Do you feel lost in the Anthropocene? Would you like a map to chart your way through our changing world? How about an atlas? Well, the Feral Atlas Collective has something that might help you out. In this episode Anna Tsing, an anthropologist from U.C. Santa Cruz, tells us about the Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene.

Feral Atlas is one of the most unusual book projects that I have seen or been a part of (it includes my “field report” about colonial era sewer rats in Hanoi). It is a digital book published by Stanford University Press in 2020 and can be accessed for free here.

Exploring Feral Atlas is like taking a walk on the wild side as there is no structured or required way to enter into its various conversations. Instead, you are invited to explore at your own risk. There are luminary essays by Sven Beckert, Amitav Ghosh, Gabrielle Hecht, Karen Ho, Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, David M. Richardson, and Will Steffen; field reports by dozens of scholars from the humanities and sciences; and art ranging from video to poetry to music. Informative and thought-provoking, alternately humorous and emotionally gut wrenching, and provocative in both form and content, Feral Atlas invites you to go wild.

Anna Tsing is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her numerous books include In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (1993) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). She has received far too many awards to list here but they include Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, the Victor Turner Award, and a Guggenheim. The Feral Atlas Collective is composed of: Jennifer Deger: a visual anthropologist, filmmaker, and research leader at James Cook University, as well as the president of the Australian Anthropological Society; Alder Keleman Saxena: an environmental anthropologist at Northern Arizona University who examines the relationships linking agricultural biodiversity to human food cultures; Feifei Zhou: an artist and architect who explores ecological and cultural preservation through architectural interventions; and my guest, Anna Tsing.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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David Sepkoski, "Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

22 januari 2021 | 50 min

R. A. Woldoff and R. C. Litchfield, "Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy" (Oxford UP, 2021)

21 januari 2021 | 107 min

In the space of a few weeks this spring, organizations around the world learned that many traditional, in-person jobs could, in fact, be performed remotely. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, however, some individuals were already utilizing new options for personal mobility and online work to strike out on their own.

In the new book, Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy (Oxford UP, 2020), Rachael A. Woldoff and Robert C. Litchfield examine the growing demographic of individuals disaffected by the daily grind of office work who have left the U.S. and Europe to work remotely from low-cost global hubs around the world. These “digital nomads” seek out communities of like-minded unconventional people—what they call a tribe—in places like Indonesia, Thailand, Colombia, Mexico, or Portugal. Taking advantage of advancements in mobility, technology, and telecommunication, digital nomads are venturing around the world in search of a new way of living and working.

Through dozens of interviews and several stints living in a digital nomad hub in Bali, Indonesia, Woldoff and Litchfield show why digital nomads leave their conventional lives behind, arguing that the creative class and Millennial workers, though successful, often feel that “world class cities” and desirable jobs are anything but paradise. Digital Nomads follows these new workers through their transitions into freelancing, entrepreneurship, and remote work, and explains how digital nomads create fluid, intimate communities abroad.

Complete with a preface that addresses how COVID-19 is inevitably changing the landscape of work, Digital Nomads offers insight into the new ways people are balancing freedom, work, community, and creative fulfillment in the digital age.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019

20 januari 2021 | 53 min

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire.

Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio received her BA in history at the University of Puerto Rico and her PhD in Central/East European history from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her dissertation, “The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and Biopolitics in the Prussian-Polish Provinces, 1840-1914,” was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Award in Polish Studies by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) in 2010.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is the winner of the 2020 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies and honorable mention for the 2020 Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

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R. Douglas Fields, "Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better" (BenBella, 2020)

19 januari 2021 | 73 min

Andrew Jewett, "Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America" (Harvard UP, 2020)

19 januari 2021 | 41 min

Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that "tenured radicals" have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science's celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions--and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers.

Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (Harvard UP, 2020) reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation's bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s.

Looking at today's battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists' claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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L. Ferlier and B. Miyamoto, "Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832" (Brill, 2020)

19 januari 2021 | 62 min

Rob DeSalle, "A Natural History of Color: The Science Behind What We See and How We See it" (Pegasus Books, 2020)

13 januari 2021 | 64 min

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)

13 januari 2021 | 53 min

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 Know About the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health published September 2020 by University of California Press, was written in conversation with Kerry Trueman, a blogger and friend. Trueman’s questions served as prompts to organize Nestle’s 800-1000 word summaries in approachable and engaging prose. Readers familiar with Nestle’s groundbreaking Food Politics will recognize many of the ideas and information, but this new pocket-sized and affordable volume serves as an introduction for undergraduate students or readers new to Food Studies. However, Nestle does cover some new material in her explanation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, especially the campaign for Zero Hunger. Nestle also summarizes how nutrition advice has changed in the last few years by thinking about food in categories ranging from unprocessed (corn on the cob) to ultraprocessed (Nacho Cheese tortilla chips). This reevaluation makes it easier to identify foods that are acceptable to eat without excessive focus on micronutrients. In the conversation, Nestle addresses the ethics of marketing food to children, food as a human right and access in the Covid era, the possibility of a National Food Policy Agency, the politics of food banks, and the promise of regenerative agricultural practices. Nestle concludes by talking about the pleasures of food and eating and how to establish a “loving relationship” with food that doesn’t include fear, guilt, or anxiety about nutrition.

Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, and the author of books about food politics, most recently Unsavory Truth.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

Lindsay Herring is a first-year M.A. Food Studies Candidate at Chatham University. She loves historical cookbooks, food policy and activism through history, and vegan baking. Personally, she enjoys theatre, singing and traveling (someday again!).

Archish Kashakar is a chef and culinary educator who is currently a second-year M.A. Food Studies Candidate at Chatham University. He works with the program’s research offshoot CRAFT as a Food Lab Graduate Consultant and also serves on the board of the Graduate Association of Food Studies as a Social Media Manager. He is currently working on his thesis that traces the history of Singaporean street food dishes and their development in a post-World War II era. Follow on Twitter @archishkash.

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Kyle Johannsen, "Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering" (Routledge, 2020)

11 januari 2021 | 71 min

Michael Fisch, "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)

8 januari 2021 | 83 min

Snezana Lawrence, "A New Year's Present from a Mathematician" (CRC Press, 2019)

8 januari 2021 | 56 min

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 statements. In her book A New Year's Present from a Mathematician (CRC Press, 2020), Snezana Lawrence guides a tour of European mathematical history that broadens conventional ideas of who mathematicians are and what we do. Framed as journey across the desert out from Alexandria, the book recounts a vignette from European mathematical history anchored to each month of the year, as drops of creativity and wisdom to sustain the trek.

It is not unusual for books on the history of mathematics to tell very human stories about their often famous subjects. What is remarkable about Lawrence's collection is the breadth of these stories: Her subjects were idealists, pragmatists, mystics, skeptics, radicals, ascetics, and collectives. (Contrast, for example, the self-aware spite of Isaac Newton with the defiant good humor of Jean-Baptiste d'Alembert.) They contributed a mix each of original study, stewardship, and education. (Witness the precocious and persistent advocacy of Maria Agnesi and the devoted reciprocity of Johannes Kepler.) And they may or may not have been considered in their time, or even considered themselves, mathematicians.

This book also showcases the diversity of mechanisms through which mathematics is transmitted and expanded. The projects undertaken by Lawrence's subjects are inspired by surviving ancient texts, popular treatments, and personal correspondence, and they yielded instructional texts, organizational schema, reference works, and popular fiction still in circulation today. The book drove home for me that the history of mathematics is ultimately a history of dialogue, and one that any person has the potential to contribute to—and thereby to be a mathematician.

Suggested companion work: "Interstellar" (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Snezana Lawrence is a mathematical historian, with a particular interest in the links between mathematics, architecture, and the belief systems related to mathematics. Her work on the creativity, identity, and engagement in the learning of mathematics has taken her to be involved in national and international initiatives to promote the use of the history of mathematics in mathematics education. She maintains the website Maths Is Good For You! and tweets @snezanalawrence.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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Robert Baker, "The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution" (MIT Press, 2019)

6 januari 2021 | 72 min

Daniel Oberhaus, "Extraterrestrial Languages" (MIT Press, 2019)

6 januari 2021 | 59 min

Daniel A. Barber, "Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning" (Princeton UP, 2020)

6 januari 2021 | 62 min

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 adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design.

Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning (Princeton UP, 2020) provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

Daniel A. Barber is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Jennifer Burek Pierce, "Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media" (U Iowa Press, 2020)

5 januari 2021 | 46 min

Can we Bring Extinct Species Back?: A Conversation with Beth Shapiro

4 januari 2021 | 40 min

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, evolutionary biologist and pioneer in “ancient DNA” research, walks readers through the astonishing and controversial process of de-extinction. From deciding which species should be restored, to sequencing their genomes, to anticipating how revived populations might be overseen in the wild, Shapiro vividly explores the extraordinary cutting-edge science that is being used—today—to resurrect the past. Journeying to far-flung Siberian locales in search of ice age bones and delving into her own research—as well as those of fellow experts such as Svante Paabo, George Church, and Craig Venter—Shapiro considers de-extinction’s practical benefits and ethical challenges. Would de-extinction change the way we live? Is this really cloning? What are the costs and risks? And what is the ultimate goal?

Using DNA collected from remains as a genetic blueprint, scientists aim to engineer extinct traits — traits that evolved by natural selection over thousands of years—into living organisms. But rather than viewing de-extinction as a way to restore one particular species, Shapiro argues that the overarching goal should be the revitalization and stabilization of contemporary ecosystems. For example, elephants with genes modified to express mammoth traits could expand into the Arctic, re-establishing lost productivity to the tundra ecosystem.

Looking at the very real and compelling science behind an idea once seen as science fiction, How to Clone a Mammoth demonstrates how de-extinction will redefine conservation’s future.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Elizabeth Catte, "Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia" (Belt, 2021)

29 december 2020 | 64 min

Charles R. Acland, "American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder" (Duke UP, 2020)

29 december 2020 | 77 min

Alyson K. Spurgas, "Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity Into the Twenty-First Century" (Ohio State UP, 2020)

28 december 2020 | 82 min

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 a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal, contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire, new models for understanding women’s sexual response, and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing.

Spurgas makes the case that, together, all of these technologies create a “feminized responsive desire framework” for understanding women’s sexuality, and that this, in fact, produces women’s sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem, Spurgas argues, is that gendered and sexualized trauma—including as it is produced within techno-scientific medicine itself—is too often ignored in contemporary renderings. Through incisive textual analysis and in-depth qualitative research based on interviews with women with low desire, Spurgas argues for a more radical and communal form of care for feminized—and traumatized—populations, in opposition to biopolitical mandates to individualize and neo-liberalize forms of self-care. Ultimately, this is a book not just about a specific diagnosis or dysfunction but about the material-discursive regimes that produce and regulate femininity.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot edu.

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Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

24 december 2020 | 78 min

Eben Kirksey, "The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans" (St. Martin's Press, 2020)

23 december 2020 | 62 min

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: Whose values are guiding gene editing experiments? And what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species?

At a conference in Hong Kong in November 2018, Dr. He Jiankui announced that he had created the first genetically modified babies—twin girls named Lulu and Nana—sending shockwaves around the world. A year later, a Chinese court sentenced Dr. He to three years in prison for “illegal medical practice.”

As scientists elsewhere start to catch up with China’s vast genetic research program, gene editing is fueling an innovation economy that threatens to widen racial and economic inequality. Fundamental questions about science, health, and social justice are at stake: Who gets access to gene editing technologies? As countries loosen regulations around the globe, from the U.S. to Indonesia, can we shape research agendas to promote an ethical and fair society?

Eben Kirksey takes us on a groundbreaking journey to meet the key scientists, lobbyists, and entrepreneurs who are bringing cutting-edge genetic engineering tools like CRISPR to your local clinic. He also ventures beyond the scientific echo chamber, talking to disabled scholars, doctors, hackers, chronically-ill patients, and activists who have alternative visions of a genetically modified future for humanity.

The Mutant Project empowers us to ask the right questions, uncover the truth, and navigate this brave new world.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Jeff Levin, "Religion and Medicine: A History of the Encounter Between Humanity's Two Greatest Institutions" (Oxford UP, 2020)

22 december 2020 | 54 min

Richard Ovenden, "Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge" (Harvard UP, 2020)

18 december 2020 | 41 min

Alicia Puglionesi, "Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science" (Stanford UP, 2020)

18 december 2020 | 56 min

S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, "The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene" (Yale UP, 2018)

18 december 2020 | 46 min

Jeremy Black, "Tank Warfare" (Indiana UP, 2020)

16 december 2020 | 53 min

Christopher M. Kelty, "The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

16 december 2020 | 54 min

Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019)

16 december 2020 | 59 min

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 declining at an alarming rate, to the extent that even the seemingly ubiquitous Monarch could conceivably go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Many other, more obscure, butterfly species are already perilously close to extinction. For the last 20 years, Nick Haddad has worked to identify and save some of the rarest butterflies on earth, a quest that has taken him to both surprisingly ordinary and extraordinarily inhospitable areas, including a swampy, active artillery range on a military installation in North Carolina. It has also led him to some surprising conclusions about the best ways to protect these increasingly endangered butterflies.

In The Last Butterflies: A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature (Princeton UP, 2019), Haddad profiles five such species – the ones he has determined to be the rarest of all – and takes us into each one’s unique habitat, life cycle, and existential challenges. From the Crystal Skipper, bouncing over sand dunes adjacent to vacation homes on barrier islands, to the Schaus’ Swallowtail, confined to increasingly remote areas of the Florida Keys, Haddad shows how human activities have affected rare butterfly populations. His unexpected conclusion is that leaving them in peace is not a viable option; disturbances, both natural and human-caused, are necessary for the ecosystems that support butterfly populations to thrive. One of the hardest lessons for him to absorb was that to save populations, some individuals have to be killed in the process.

Haddad’s intrepid field work – he describes one of his strengths as “an unusual capacity to tolerate harsh environments - informs the story of each butterfly species. His lab’s effort to collect, quantify, propagate, and ultimately perpetuate, the rarest butterflies has led to increasing awareness of how much more biologists have to learn about their natural histories, and how critical such knowledge is to saving them. In perhaps the most dramatic example of unintended consequences, Haddad’s team discovered that the St. Francis Satyr, a small brown butterfly, was protected by regular artillery fire on the Fort Bragg army installation in southern North Carolina. The resulting fires were one disturbance the St. Francis Satyr needed to sustain viable conditions (dams built by beavers was another). In another twist, it turned out that Haddad’s initial efforts to help the species were having the opposite effect. Yet over time, these discoveries led to lessons that ultimately have helped the St. Francis Satyr and can be applied to other conservation efforts.

The Last Butterflies could be read as a warning, but Haddad’s tone is never dire. The book is infused with enthusiasm for conservation efforts, both now and in the future, and with an admiration for the beauty, fragility, and resilience of butterflies. It is an important book for anyone concerned with biodiversity and conservation issues. It’s also an eye-opening and engaging read for anyone with an interest in butterflies.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. She is a longtime butterfly enthusiast and is working, slowly, on a fictional book for middle-grade readers about butterfly conservation.

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Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

15 december 2020 | 31 min

Jose Sanchez, "Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms" (Routledge, 2020)

15 december 2020 | 30 min

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 organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design.

The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies.

This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Trevor Pearce, "Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

15 december 2020 | 52 min

Erica Fretwell, "Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling" (Duke UP, 2020)

11 december 2020 | 73 min

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, 2020) allows us to reconsider the history of psychophysics and psychology through the lens of sensory studies and to rethinking science in the context of racial capitalism. Breathing new life into nineteenth century psychophysics, Erica Fretwell presents a history of how science, technology, and literature came together to both reinforce and challenge racial boundaries.

While each central chapter of Sensory Experiments deals with the recognized five senses, Fretwell also writes short intervals, or what she calls intervals, on the synthesis of particular senses (for instance, color and sound or mouthfeel). The synthesia assumed in these intervals challenge the hierarchy of senses often assumed by scientists during this time period. Through examining these scientific models of sense and sensitivity, Fretwell provides the reader with the nineteenth and early twentieth century evolutionary frameworks of Lamarckism and Darwinism, alongside Galton’s eugenics program. Fretwell contrasts these theories with psychophysics, including the spiritually motivated psychophysicist, Gustav Fechner, as well as many media and literature that focuses on sensitivity. Spirit photography provides one such example, a visual medium intended to provide some healing to family members who lost loved ones during the American Civil War. Through these images sight is transformed into a sense of loss; this was particularly the case for white bodies, which were more likely to have their pictures taken and more likely to be seen as “particularly capable of feeling loss.”

To help us understand the racial politics of sound, Fretwell not only turns to the nascent field of psychoacoustics led by Hermann Helmholtz, but also the utopian fiction stories of Pauline Hopkins and Edward Bellamy. Each of these writers thought that differences in tonal sensitivity renders difference as racialized, and thus promoted segregated forms of social harmony from the most sensitive, civilized ear to the least sensitive, “primitive” ear. Meanwhile, inventions in chemistry and manufacturing of perfume performed functions of designating socially appropriate odors, which often segregated individuals by race and gender, while at other times challenging such segregation. In her taste chapter, Fretwell positions gastronomy and culinary science as ostensibly racial uplift projects. This can be further seen in Fretwell’s discussion of the racial framing of sweetness and black cake (the latter of which is taken up in the work of Emily Dickinson). In her penultimate chapter, Fretwell explores the relationality of touch through some of Helen Keller’s biography. While figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois thought that Keller could be an example of going beyond the sight of racial differences, as Fretwell points out, Keller, a deaf-blind woman, was actually attentive to the sensation of racial difference. In the Coda, Fretwell implores humanities and social science scholars to think about the historical dimensions of our sensory experiences. Overall, Sensory Experiments delivers a much needed history of senses that can provide important context for the racial politics of today.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. CJ’s research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and digital wellness culture.

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Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)

11 december 2020 | 59 min

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

11 december 2020 | 50 min

Gemma Milne, "Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It" (Robinson, 2021)

10 december 2020 | 79 min

O. Carter Snead, "What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics" (Harvard UP, 2020)

9 december 2020 | 129 min

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 such as whether to have children and how and when they wish to die. What could possibly be wrong with the idea that everyone should be in control of his or her own body and fate to the greatest extent possible and with the least intrusion by either the state or “outdated” social mores?

But there is a dark side to expressive individualism when one enters the realm of public bioethics. In his 2020 book What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2020), O. Carter Snead defines for us what the term “public bioethics” encompasses and provides a much-needed genealogy of the field.

He profiles key players in many of the most momentous bioethics-related developments of the post-WWII era from physicians such as Henry Knowles Beecher to jurists like Harry Blackmun and influential scholars in fields such as philosophy and sociology like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah.

Snead chronicles how the field of bioethics came to be shaped by shocking revelations of cases of inhumanity many of which are well-known (such as the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study) but many of which are rarely discussed such as medical experiments performed on near-term alive aborted babies. Such cases shocked the public and led to legislation creating commissions and other bodies designed to prevent such horrors.

But Snead argues that much of the action on the public policy front failed for multiple reasons and left vulnerable groups (e.g., the aged, the cognitively disabled, the unborn) outside a legal regime built upon the precepts of expressive individualism. And even those who were supposedly able to express their wishes were often harmed by the expressive individualism paradigm and its legal framework. Snead gives examples of the many actors in the area of assisted reproduction and assisted suicide whose rights can be trampled in the name of a notion of personal liberty that does not account for changes of mind. He also demonstrates that regulation and oversight was often, for all intents and purposes, absent in many cases.

Snead’s book is a clarion call for what he calls “remembering the body.” This is an important book for anyone who may at some point become ill or disabled or who will end up caring for someone who is. That is, it is a book for everyone. It is by a leading scholar, but its readership is anyone with a body and who loves other people—or at least has some control over them.

Give a listen.

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Virginia Postrel, "The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World" (Basic Books, 2020)

9 december 2020 | 63 min

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 string to fashion the earliest tools. Then, ten thousand years ago, humans began farming not only for food but also for fiber to make cloth. In the intervening millennia, for people everywhere, an inordinate amount of human time and energy went into the growing, harvesting, spinning, weaving, and dying of cloth for garments, bedding, blankets, rugs, hangings, tents, tarps, sails, sacks, and all manner of containers and fittings. Based on investigation and practice, Ms. Postrel explains the artisanal processes and sciences involved.

In addition, this book is about how textiles shaped our society more broadly: labor, trade, tribute, collaboration (and also exploitation), credit, banking, migration (some voluntary, some forced), style and cultural restrictions, all figure into the discussion. The Industrial Revolution that began when steam power replaced human toil in the spinning of thread and the weaving of cloth, changed our world. Cheap, high-quality, cloth became available to people everywhere. In the twentieth century, the advent of plastics, of synthetic fabrics, transformed our world again. All of this, Ms. Postrel achieves in 250 beautifully-written pages, with numerous helpful pictures and diagrams. She also has a blog filled with videos explaining the processes she investigates in the book at https://vpostrel.com/blog.

Virginia Postrel is a journalist, author, and independent scholar. Her books include author of The Substance of Style, The Power of Glamour, and The Future and its Enemies. She is currently a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and has been a columnist for the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe, the Spanish Empire, and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

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Abigail A. Dumes, "Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine" (Duke UP, 2020)

8 december 2020 | 53 min

Colleen Plumb, "Thirty Times a Minute" (Radius Books, 2020)

8 december 2020 | 98 min

James D. Stein, "The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive" (World Scientific, 2020)

7 december 2020 | 76 min

Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, "Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It" (FSG Originals, 2020)

7 december 2020 | 49 min

Nicolas Petit, "Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario" (Oxford UP, 2020)

7 december 2020 | 49 min

A. Espay and B. Stecher, "Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

4 december 2020 | 79 min

Peter Singer, "Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically" (Liveright, 2020)

3 december 2020 | 62 min

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, in Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically (Liveright, 2020), Singer brings together the most consequential essays of his career to make this devastating case against our failure to confront what we are doing to animals, to public health, and to our planet.

From his 1973 manifesto for animal liberation to his personal account of becoming a vegetarian in “The Oxford Vegetarians” and to investigating the impact of meat on global warming, Singer traces the historical arc of the animal rights, vegetarian, and vegan movements from their embryonic days to today, when climate change and global pandemics threaten the very existence of humans and animals alike. In his introduction and in “The Two Dark Sides of COVID-19,” cowritten with Paola Cavalieri, Singer excoriates the appalling health hazards of Chinese wet markets—where thousands of animals endure almost endless brutality and suffering—but also reminds westerners that they cannot blame China alone without also acknowledging the perils of our own factory farms, where unimaginably overcrowded sheds create the ideal environment for viruses to mutate and multiply.

Spanning more than five decades of writing on the systemic mistreatment of animals, Why Vegan? features a topical new introduction, along with nine other essays.

Written in Singer’s pellucid prose, Why Vegan? asserts that human tyranny over animals is a wrong comparable to racism and sexism. The book ultimately becomes an urgent call to reframe our lives in order to redeem ourselves and alter the calamitous trajectory of our imperiled planet.

One of the great moral philosophers of the modern age, Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. The best-selling author of Animal Liberation and The Ethics of What We Eat, among other works, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and Melbourne, Australia.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Richard Seymour, "The Twittering Machine" (Verso, 2020)

3 december 2020 | 64 min

Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)

3 december 2020 | 47 min

Reducing harm or shrinking the likelihood of accidental death are remarkably contentions projects—in areas from sex education, to pandemic management, to drug use. Nancy Campbell’s important new book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020) explores how a therapy that can stop an accidental drug overdose, called Naloxone, emerged in the American mainstream in the early years of the new millennium—despite existing in some form for nearly a century. What are now called “opioid antagonists” were used, not to save lives, but deployed by the carceral state to police drug users in the early twentieth century; sequestered within bioscience laboratories to build molecular theories of how the brain worked at midcentury; approved by the FDA in 1971 for the treatment of overdose only by physicians; and illicitly administered and widely shared in the 1980s and 1990s among drug-user-led activist organizations and communities, who created their own troves of training protocols, peer-education networks, and experiential evidence of its effectiveness. In the twenty-first century, Naloxone appeared on public policy agendas around harm reduction and arrived legally in the hands of the people best situated to intervene when an overdose was underway—but only in some US states and some countries.

Campbell tunes readers’ ears to the politics of evidence, the health effects of stigma, and the racism of false medical claims as she listens, amid a century of contention, to the quietness of “undone science.” As evidence, this intrepid book uses visual culture, vernacular documents, oral histories, and (expertly explained) scientific publications. It connects American histories at federal and local levels with the UK and especially Scotland. And it relates medical communities and activist networks without imposing false divides or drawing caricatures of either. The book builds on Campbell’s four previous books on the history of addiction, gendering knowledge, and social theory from the position of Science and Technology Studies.

The interview was a collaborative project among participants in the Vanderbilt University course, American Medicine & the World. For information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.

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Harmony Bench, "Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

2 december 2020 | 51 min

Glenn Sauer, "Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth" (Orbis Books, 2020)

2 december 2020 | 60 min

Jeremy Snyder, "Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us--and Makes Us Vulnerable" (Oxford UP, 2020)

1 december 2020 | 56 min

Anna Weltman, "Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

1 december 2020 | 107 min

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 it apart, such as impartiality, universality, and elegance. Far from incidental, these ideas prime mathematicians and the public to see in mathematics the answers—for example, an impartial arbiter, or a meritocratic equalizer—to many urgent societal questions. Anna Weltman's new book, Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), surveys a number of ways this conception of mathematics has informed scientific undertakings and public policies, not to mention our everyday behaviors, and makes a powerful case for reevaluating its assumptions.

The book's five chapters contain stories of mathematical exploits from ancient to ongoing and across the spectrum from pure to applied. Many may be familiar, for example active research and journalism into the use and misuse of predictive algorithms or G. H. Hardy's enumeration of the elements of mathematical beauty. Others, including continuing work to interpret Incan documents that survived European colonial erasure and the epidemiological insights obtained from massively multiplayer online gaming, will be new even to many mathematical readers. What they share is the essential but often ignored interplay between theory and culture that makes mathematics a thoroughly human activity. Weltman's book can be read as a call for scholars, educators, and communicators of mathematics to grapple with the power our training and credentialing in mathematics grants us, and to understand that its most basic promise of solving problems is not automatic but one that we must realize.

Anna Weltman is a math teacher and writer who earned her PhD in mathematics education from the University of California at Berkeley. She is also the author of This Is Not a Math Book and This Is Not Another Math Book.

Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

30 november 2020 | 52 min

Jinee Lokaneeta, "The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India" (U Michigan Press, 2020)

30 november 2020 | 58 min

Ray Ison, "Systems Practice: How to Act In Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Change World" (Springer, 2017)

25 november 2020 | 66 min

Xiaowei Wang, "Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside" (FSG Originals, 2020)

25 november 2020 | 37 min

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, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Xiaowei Wang corrects this metronormativity in their recent book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (FSG Originals: 2020), which explores how rural China is not just adapting the technology used around the world, but innovating on it.

In this interview, we talk about the frontiers of technology that are being charted in rural China, and why China’s countryside may be the best place to understand how technology, capitalism and society will intersect in the coming years — often in not altogether positive ways. We also talk about some of the more recent developments in how Chinese technology is treated in the United States, with reference to their recent articles: "WeChat Has Both Connected Families and Torn Them Apart" in Slate and "How the Theatrics of Banning TikTok Enables Repression at Home" in The Nation.

Xiaowei Wang is the creative director at Logic Magazine, whose work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and elsewhere. You can follow them on Twitter at @xrw.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Blockchain Chicken Farm. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Soraya de Chadarevian, "Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

24 november 2020 | 53 min

Amalia Leguizamón, "Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina" (Duke UP, 2020)

24 november 2020 | 62 min

Rosamond Rhodes, "The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)

23 november 2020 | 50 min

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 by presenting an original and novel account of the ethics of medicine, one deeply rooted in the actual experience of medical professionals. She argues that common morality accounts of medical ethics are unsuitable for the profession, and inadequate for responding to the particular issues that arise in medical practice. Instead, Rhodes argues that medicine's distinctive ethics should be explained in terms of the trust that society allows to the profession. Trust is the core and starting point of Rhodes' moral framework, which states that the most basic duty of doctors is to "seek trust and be trustworthy."

In The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism (Oxford UP, 2020), Rhodes explicates the sixteen specific duties that doctors take on when they join the profession, and demonstrates how her view of these duties is largely consistent with the codes of medical ethics of medical societies around the world. She then explains why it is critical for physicians to develop the attitudes or "doctorly" virtues that comprise the character of trustworthy doctors and buttress physicians' efforts to fulfill their professional obligations. Her book's presentation of physicians' duties and the elements that comprise a doctorly character, together add up to a cohesive and comprehensive description of what medical professionalism really entails. Rhodes's analysis provides a clear understanding of medical professionalism as well as a guide for doctors navigating the ethically challenging situations that arise in clinical practice.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.

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K. C. Smith and C. Mariscal, "Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology" (Oxford UP, 2020)

23 november 2020 | 71 min

Dale Kedwards, "The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland" (D. S. Brewer, 2020)

23 november 2020 | 67 min

Marisa Anne Bass, "Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt" (Princeton UP, 2019)

17 november 2020 | 52 min

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 and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At the book’s center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel’s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens.

Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. She reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.

Akash Ondaatje is a Research Associate at Know History. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 Contact: [email protected]

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Sharon T. Strocchia, "Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019)

17 november 2020 | 31 min

Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science" (Princeton UP, 2020)

16 november 2020 | 45 min

Daniel Deudney, "Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2020)

12 november 2020 | 75 min

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 expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times.

But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford UP, 2020) that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.

This is a provocative and exceptionally well-researched book that represents a must-read for anyone interested in space exploration and the growth of the space industry.

John W. Traphagan is a professor in Department of Religious Studies and Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Laura DeNardis, "The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch" (Yale UP, 2020)

11 november 2020 | 66 min

C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020)

10 november 2020 | 67 min

Jamie Merisotis, "Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines" (RosettaBooks, 2020)

5 november 2020 | 35 min

Eric Rutkow, "The Longest Line on the Map The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas" (Scribner, 2019)

5 november 2020 | 53 min

John Durham Peters, "Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

5 november 2020 | 59 min

Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World" (Part 2) (Routledge, 2020)

4 november 2020 | 45 min

This is the second episode of a two-part conversation with Hodgson, and in it we pick up our conversation on anticipatory systems and the role they play in ‘decision integrity’. Hodgson then talks about the second half of the book which focuses on “developing latent capacities beyond the analytical rational” and offers possibilities for more enlightened co-creation in these hyper-turbulent times.

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 human element into our understandings – whether the context is civic or scientific – and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making; and that the application of appropriate concepts and methods, will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncertainty. The intended outcome is the privileging of the positive human skills for collaborative navigation through uncertainty over the disjointed rationality of mechanism and artificial intelligence, which increasingly alienates us.

In Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives out from Routledge in 2020, Hodgson’s readers are introduced to concepts new to systems thinking that integrate systems thinking and futures thinking. Guiding readers through the unfolding of the ideas and practices with a narrative based on the metaphor of search portrayed in the tradition of ox herding, found in traditional Far Eastern consciousness practice, the concept of anticipatory present moment (APM) serves as a basis for learning the cognitive skills that better enable navigation through turbulent times. In his conversation with guest interviewer, Kevin Lindsay, Hodgson pulls together many of the threads with which long-time listeners of this podcast will be familiar and builds upon the work of Robert Rosen, a currently somewhat neglected pioneer of the systems field whose ideas about anticipatory systems has much to offer us in our current turbulent times.

This is the second episode of a two-part conversation with Hodgson, and in it we pick up our conversation on anticipatory systems and the role they play in ‘decision integrity’. Hodgson then talks about the second half of the book which focuses on “developing latent capacities beyond the analytical rational” and offers possibilities for more enlightened co-creation in these hyper-turbulent times.

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Andrew Liu, "Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India" (Yale UP, 2020)

4 november 2020 | 51 min

After water, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world. It is beloved by consumers in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and it comes in a bewildering array of varieties: from the cheap sachet of finely ground English black tea to fermented bricks of pu’er from Yunnan province. This beverage also has a fascinating place in the global history of science and capitalism. At the turn of the first millennium, it was prized as a medical concoction in southwestern China, and it became a ubiquitous beverage throughout the Chinese empire during the Tang Dynasty, when its spread coincided with the rising popularity of Buddhism. By the fifteenth century, the preparation of modern loose-leaf tea began to emerge, while the seventeenth century witnessed its ascent as major export commodity for the early Qing Empire, becoming enmeshed in a global circuit of bullion, commodities, and people. Then, during the 19th century, tea became absolute staple in Europe, especially among industrial workers in England, who sweetened the drink with cane sugar imported from the Caribbean. Anxious to stop hemorrhaging bullion to China and eager to assert its imperial self-sufficiency, the British empire fought two Opium Wars that severely weakened the Qing. Around the same time, English capitalists also began to export Chinese workers and knowledge to newly acquired colonial possessions in the Assam region of what is now Northeastern India. It was this aggressive push to begin cultivating tea as a British export commodity in South Asia that gave rise to the global competition between British India and China referenced in the title of Andrew B. Liu’s book: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (Yale University Press, 2020).

Liu’s book offers a fascinating new history of this ubiquitous beverage, leveraging its production, consumption, and global circulation to offer a fresh and compelling account of capitalist accumulation. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style plantations. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism, one that explicitly highlights global competition and coerced labor as a driving force in economic development.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

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M. Bekoff and J. Pierce, "The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age" (Beacon Press, 2017)

3 november 2020 | 66 min

A compelling argument that the time has come to use what we know about the fascinating and diverse inner lives of other animals on their behalf

Every day we are learning new and surprising facts about just how intelligent and emotional animals are—did you know rats like to play and laugh, and also display empathy, and the ears and noses of cows tell us how they’re feeling? At times, we humans translate that knowledge into compassion for other animals; think of the public outcry against the fates of Cecil the lion or the captive gorilla Harambe. But on the whole, our growing understanding of what animals feel is not resulting in more respectful treatment of them.

Renowned animal-behavior expert Marc Bekoff and leading bioethicist Jessica Pierce explore the real-world experiences of five categories of animals, beginning with those who suffer the greatest deprivations of freedoms and choice—chickens, pigs, and cows in industrial food systems—as well as animals used in testing and research, including mice, rats, cats, dogs, and chimpanzees. Next, Bekoff and Pierce consider animals for whom losses of freedoms are more ambiguous and controversial, namely, individuals held in zoos and aquaria and those kept as companions. Finally, they reveal the unexpected ways in which the freedoms of animals in the wild are constrained by human activities and argue for a more compassionate approach to conservation.

In each case, scientific studies combine with stories of individual animals to bring readers face-to-face with the wonder of our fellow beings, as well as the suffering they endure and the major paradigm shift that is needed to truly ensure their well-being.

The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age (Beacon Press, 2017) will educate and inspire people to rethink how we affect other animals, and how we can evolve toward more peaceful and less violent ways of interacting with our animal kin in an increasingly human-dominated world.

Marc Bekoff has published thirty books, including The Emotional Lives of Animals. He is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a former Guggenheim fellow. Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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I. Newkirk and G. Stone, "Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)

30 oktober 2020 | 49 min

The founder and president of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, and bestselling author Gene Stone explore the wonders of animal life and offer tools for living more kindly toward them.

In the last few decades, a wealth of new information has emerged about who animals are—intelligent, aware, and empathetic. Studies show that animals are astounding beings with intelligence, emotions, intricate communications networks, and myriad abilities. In Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion (Simon and Schuster, 2020), Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Stone present these findings in a concise and awe-inspiring way, detailing a range of surprising discoveries: that geese fall in love and stay with a partner for life, that fish “sing” underwater, and that elephants use their trunks to send subsonic signals, alerting other herds to danger miles away.

Newkirk and Stone pair their tour of the astounding lives of animals with a guide to the exciting new tools that allow humans to avoid using or abusing animals as we once did. They show readers what they can do in their everyday lives to ensure that the animal world is protected from needless harm. Whether it’s medicine, product testing, entertainment, clothing, or food, there are now better options to all the uses animals once served in human life. We can substitute warmer, lighter faux fleece for wool, choose vegan versions of everything from shrimp to sausage and milk to marshmallows, reap the benefits of medical research that no longer requires monkeys to be caged in laboratories, and scrap captive orca exhibits and elephant rides for virtual reality and animatronics.

Animalkind is a fascinating study of why our fellow living beings deserve our respect, and moreover, the steps every reader can take to put this new understanding into action.

Ingrid Elizabeth Newkirk is the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the world's largest animal rights organization.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Micha Rahder, "An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation" (Duke UP, 2020)

30 oktober 2020 | 58 min

S. Myers and H. Frumkin, "Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves" (Island Press, 2020)

30 oktober 2020 | 45 min

Doug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping" (U London Press, 2020)

29 oktober 2020 | 75 min

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 subjugated and subaltern. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of those in crisis, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data has become ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data collected from people in crisis, before selling it back to them.

Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping (University of London Press, 2020) brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations, and questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis.

Doug Sprecht is a Chartered Geographer (CGeog. FRGS), a Senior Lecturer (SFHEA) and the Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. His research examines how knowledge is constructed and codified through digital and cartographic artefacts, focusing on development issues in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, where he has carried out extensive fieldwork. He also writes and researches on pedagogy, and is author of the Media and Communications Student Study Guide. He speaks and writes on topics of data ethics, development, education and mapping practices at conferences and invited lectures around the world. He is a member of the editorial board at Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, and the journal Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. He is also Chair of the Environmental Network for Central America.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London

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M. Newhart and W. Dolphin, "The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience" (Routledge, 2018)

26 oktober 2020 | 50 min

Michael E. McCullough, "The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code" (Basic Books, 2020)

22 oktober 2020 | 35 min

Li Zhang, "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy" (U California Press, 2020)

22 oktober 2020 | 76 min

D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s 'Atalanta fugiens' (1618)" (U Virginia Press, 2020)

21 oktober 2020 | 59 min

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 engage the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains an accompanying "fugue" music scored for three voices. Historians of alchemy have long understood this virtuoso work as an ambitious demonstration of the art’s literary potential and of the possibilities of the early modern printed book.

Atalanta fugiens lends itself unusually well to today’s digital tools. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia alchemical project as an enhanced online publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that Maier perhaps imagined but that were impossible to fully realize before now. An interactive, layered digital edition provides accessibility and flexibility, presenting all the elements of the original book along with significant enhancements that allow for deep engagement by specialists and nonspecialists alike.

Three short introductory essays invite readers to get acquainted with early modern alchemy, and Michael Maier. Eight extended interpretive essays explore Atalanta fugiens and its place in the history of music, science, print, and visual culture in early modern Europe. These interdisciplinary essays also include interactive features that clarify and/or advance the authors’ arguments while positioning Furnace and Fugue as an original, uniquely engaging contribution to our understanding of early modern culture.

Drs. Bilak and Nummedal are the editors of this innovative digital edition of a seventeenth-century alchemical text that combines text, image, and music. Furnace & Fugue was developed by Brown University’s Mellon-supported Digital Publications Initiative, and published by the University of Virginia Press (2020) as an open-access edition.

Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute at Brown University.

Dr. Bilak is an academic and a goldsmith. She is the Creative Director of 12 Keys Consultancy & Design, LLC, and an Independent Scholar. She is an historian of early modern science Donna's research extends to the cross-cultural examination of jewellery, artisanal technologies, and meaning-making with materials. Dr. Nummedal is Professor of History and of Italian Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). With Janice Neri and John V. Calhoun, she published John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History.

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Dan Royles, "To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS" (UNC Press, 2020)

21 oktober 2020 | 73 min

Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018)

20 oktober 2020 | 68 min

Kristina M. Lyons, "Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics" (Duke UP, 2020)

19 oktober 2020 | 42 min

Rene Almeling, "GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health" (U California Press, 2020)

15 oktober 2020 | 37 min

Rene Almeling’s new book GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (University of California Press, 2020) provides an in-depth look at why we do not talk about men’s reproductive health and this knowledge gap shapes reproductive politics today.

Over the past several centuries, the medical profession has made enormous efforts to understand and treat women’s reproductive bodies. It is only recently, however, that researchers have begun to ask basic questions about how men’s health matters for reproductive outcomes, from miscarriage to childhood illness. Andrology failed to establish itself as a medical specialty in the nineteenth-century and there continues to be a lack of attention to the importance of men’s age, health, and exposure.

Dr. Almeling examines the production, circulation, and reception of biomedical knowledge about men’s reproductive health. Throughout this book she conducts an in-depth analysis of male reproductive health by using historical documents, media messages, and qualitative interviews. The findings outlined in this book demonstrate how this non-knowledge shapes reproductive politics today.

Rene Almeling, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology, and, by courtesy, American Studies, Public Health, and Medicine at Yale University.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at [email protected].

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Scholarly Communication: An Interview with Joerg Heber of PLOS

14 oktober 2020 | 69 min

Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher. Among PLOS's suite of journals, PLOS One is the nonprofit's largest in number of articles published and its broadest in coverage, ranging as it does over all topics in the natural sciences and medicine, to include, as well, some in the social sciences, too. PLOS One appears only online, a format the staff bring into service to foster Open Access Science, whether they do this through initiatives for Open Citations and Open Abstracts, or through Transparent Peer Review, or also through PLOS One's newest endeavor, registered reports.

Since its inception in 2006, PLOS One has been at the forefront of Open Access publishing. And today, against the trend to equate Impact Factors with journal names, PLOS One does not promote their own Impact Factor because the measure has been shown to be, at best, only an approximate indicator of research significance. However, in true PLOS fashion, PLOS One offers an alternative in various Article-Level Metrics. These ALMs (as the abbreviation goes) make a closer, tighter fit between value of research and quantifiable measures.

Joerg Heber is Editor-in-Chief of PLOS One. When you track Joerg Heber's career in publishing, you get the sense of a clear mission: (1) provide access to good science and (2) make providing that access not only viable, but enviable.

Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better.

The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write [email protected]

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Ernest Freeberg, "A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement" (Basic Books, 2020)

13 oktober 2020 | 62 min

Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020)

12 oktober 2020 | 59 min

Margaret Heffernan, "Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)

12 oktober 2020 | 36 min

Today I spoke with Dr Margaret Heffernan about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together (Simon and Schuster, 2020). Margaret produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she became a businesswomen. She is the author of six books and a successful TED Talk speaker. She is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath.

In her 2012 TED Talk, ‘Dare to disagree’, she told the story Alice Stewart. This is the story of how clear, certain medical data, are not always enough to change rapidly our professional rules and personal habits.

In her 2019 TED Talk she argued that the more we rely on technology to make us efficient, the fewer skills we have to confront the unexpected. That’s why we need less technology and ‘more messy human skills - imagination, humility, bravery - to solve problems in business, government and life in an unpredictable age’.

In her new book, she explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty: ‘We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t allow that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out’.

Uncertainty is clearly an important construct in both macroeconomics and behavioural economics. This book starts with an anecdote on the early life of a great American economist, Irving Fisher. His swimming accident and the discovery of his tuberculosis contributed to the development his research interest in stability and monetary economics.

Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milano-Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Co-operative economy and collective ownership. Currently he is associate editor of The Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE)

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John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbia UP, 2020)

8 oktober 2020 | 50 min

Since the dawn of the industrial age, we have unleashed a bewildering number of potentially harmful chemicals. But out of this vast array, how do we identify the actual threats? What does it take to prove that a certain chemical causes cancer? How do we translate academic knowledge of the toxic effects of particular substances into understanding real-world health consequences? The science that answers these questions is toxicology.

In The Alchemy of Disease: How Chemicals and Toxins Cause Cancer and Other Illnesses (Columbia University Press), John Whysner offers an accessible and compelling history of toxicology and its key findings. He details the experiments and discoveries that revealed the causal connections between chemical exposures and diseases. Balancing clear accounts of groundbreaking science with human drama and public-policy relevance, Whysner describes key moments in the development of toxicology and their thorny social and political implications.

The book features discussions of toxicological problems past and present, including DDT, cigarettes and other carcinogens, lead poisoning, fossil fuels, chemical warfare, pharmaceuticals—including opioids—and the efficacy of animal testing. Offering valuable insight into the science and politics of crucial public-health concerns, The Alchemy of Disease shows that toxicology’s task—pinpointing the chemical cause of an illness—is as compelling as any detective story.

John Whysner was formerly an associate clinical professor of environmental health sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. A board-certified toxicologist, he has consulted for the International Agency for Research on Cancer and federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and was director of biomedical research for the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, Executive Office of the President.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020)

7 oktober 2020 | 57 min

Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020)

7 oktober 2020 | 49 min

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 human element into our understandings – whether the context is civic or scientific – and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making; and that the application of appropriate concepts and methods, will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncertainty. The intended outcome is the privileging of the positive human skills for collaborative navigation through uncertainty over the disjointed rationality of mechanism and artificial intelligence, which increasingly alienates us.

In Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives out from Routledge in 2020, Hodgson’s readers are introduced to concepts new to systems thinking that integrate systems thinking and futures thinking. Guiding readers through the unfolding of the ideas and practices with a narrative based on the metaphor of search portrayed in the tradition of ox herding, found in traditional Far Eastern consciousness practice, the concept of anticipatory present moment (APM) serves as a basis for learning the cognitive skills that better enable navigation through turbulent times. In his conversation with guest interviewer, Kevin Lindsay, Hodgson pulls together many of the threads with which long-time listeners of this podcast will be familiar and builds upon the work of Robert Rosen, a currently somewhat neglected pioneer of the systems field whose ideas about anticipatory systems has much to offer us in our current turbulent times.

Our guest interviewer, Keven Lindsay, is a 25 year veteran of the software industry, currently with Adobe, who recently began graduate work in Transformative Leadership at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he encountered Dr. Hodgson and his work first hand. While it was in this recent coursework that he was formally introduced to systems thinking, Kevin is rapidly becoming a systems enthusiast—recognizing the significant potential for the application of systems thinking in addressing big issues ranging from customer experience (CX), to social justice reform and climate action. We look forward to having Kevin join the channel as a full-fledged co-host in the very near future.

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Daniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall" (UBC Press, 2020)

7 oktober 2020 | 62 min

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, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall (UBC Press, 2020) argues that one of the world's most famous natural attractions is not wholly natural but is an engineered landscape. Though the falls have been altered, it's designers seemingly found a balance between preserving its wonder and utilizing its power, MacFarlane argues.

The first people to record their reactions to the falls in North America were fascinated by its beauty and power. By the end of the nineteenth century, the falls had drawn the attention of both Canadian and American industrialist who saw in its majesty a great potential for energy generation. Since the falls is located on the border, it provoked conflict and negotiations between these two countries over how much water could be drawn upon by each. Utilizing the falls for power generation provoked another conflict over the extent to which power generation might hinder the natural beauty of this thriving tourist attraction. These two conflicts—one about power the other about natural appeal— would continue into the twenty-first century.

The book unravels the details of these conflicts while at the same time drawing the readers' attention to the often unseen changes being made in, around, and behind the falls. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are those that explain technocrats' debates over, and explorations into, how water reduction might change the natural look of the falls. Exposing these engineered elements of Niagara encourages readers to reimagine this popular natural attraction, and others like it.

Jason L. Newton is a post-doctoral fellow in the history of capitalism and the environment at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on capitalism and the environment.

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Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016)

7 oktober 2020 | 40 min

Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020)

5 oktober 2020 | 99 min

“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 we. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins.

In Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things (Basic Books, 2020), England presents, for the first time for a general audience, his groundbreaking theory of dissipative adaptation. Described simply, in any disordered system, matter clumps together and breaks apart mostly randomly. But some of the clumps that form momentarily dissipate more energy, and these structures are less likely to fall apart. Over time, they become better at both withstanding the disorder surrounding them and creating copies of themselves. From this deep insight, grounded in thermodynamics, England isolates the emergence of the first life-like behaviors. As he shows, rather than being a stroke of miraculous luck, life-like fine-tuning can emerge in matter under a variety of fairly generic experimental conditions.

In this fascinating account, England walks readers through a range of different concepts in physics and biology to sketch out his novel description of how life might emerge. One of the beauties of his approach is the way it matches recognizably with the messy complexity of the everyday world, from the way sleet slides down a windshield in cold rain to how salt and pepper grains dance together in a pan of heated oil.

But that is not the whole story. While the difference between being alive or not may seem as obvious as night and day, physics does not in fact make a clear distinction. That, as England argues, is a matter of perspective, and throughout the book he describes what he sees as the remarkable synergy between the account of life’s origins given by physics, and the account given in the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, England reckons with what, if anything, science can really tell us about life’s great mysteries.

Full of scientific and philosophical insight, Every Life is on Fire is a singular book from one of the most exciting physicists of his generation.

Jeremy England is senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, and is the former Thomas D. & Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a Hertz Fellow, and was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Rising Stars in Science. He lives in Brookline, MA.

Galina Limorenko is a post-doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at [email protected]

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Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019)

30 september 2020 | 69 min

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 species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts.

The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP, 2019) is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people, The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.

Thom van Dooren is associate professor at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia, 2014) and coeditor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (Columbia, 2017).

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science" (Lexington, 2018)

29 september 2020 | 45 min

Yves Citton, "Mediarchy" (Polity Press, 2019)

28 september 2020 | 66 min

James L. Nolan, Jr., "Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" (Harvard UP, 2020)

24 september 2020 | 42 min

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 grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the “Little Boy” bomb from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Participation on the project challenged Dr. Nolan’s instincts as a healer. He and his medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life. Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Harvard UP, 2020) follows these physicians as they sought to maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity.

A vital and vivid account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that ordinary people face in extraordinary times.

James L. Nolan, Jr., is Washington Gladden 1859 Professor of Sociology at Williams College. His previous books include What They Saw in America: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb and Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family" (Doubleday, 2020)

21 september 2020 | 46 min

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 science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the “schizophrenogenic” mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, bringing hope for paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The NBN’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected] or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought" (Princeton UP, 2020)

21 september 2020 | 46 min

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton UP, 2020), Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society.

Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women’s performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women’s sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world.

Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia.

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Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

18 september 2020 | 61 min

Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

18 september 2020 | 59 min

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 have seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the biological: instead of treating the heart, soul, and mind, we take a pill to treat the brain.

Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery (University of Chicago Press) is a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they’re increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the “body/brain,” and what these encounters might tell us.

Drawing on interviews with people dealing with struggles such as underperformance in school or work, grief after the end of a relationship, or disappointment with how their life is unfolding, Joseph E. Davis reveals the profound revolution in consciousness that is underway. We now see suffering as an imbalance in the brain that needs to be fixed, usually through chemical means. This has rippled into our social and cultural conversations, and it has affected how we, as a society, imagine ourselves and envision what constitutes a good life.

Davis warns that what we envision as a neurological revolution, in which suffering is a mechanistic problem, has troubling and entrapping consequences. And he makes the case that by turning away from an interpretive, meaning-making view of ourselves, we thwart our chances to enrich our souls and learn important truths about ourselves and the social conditions under which we live.

Joe Davis is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020)

17 september 2020 | 65 min

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 and Co.) looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community.

You too are not who you are by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance, received from thousands of individuals as pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You too may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. As situations shift, so does your community’s capacity for learning, especially social learning, which allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes alone could adapt.

Becoming Wild brings readers close to the lives of non-human animals to show how other creatures teach and learn. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside portraits of various animals in their free-living communities, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. Readers are taken behind the curtain of life on Earth and asked to reckon with the most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?

Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019)

17 september 2020 | 103 min

Gerald Posner, "Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)

14 september 2020 | 81 min

Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

14 september 2020 | 73 min

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 emotion, less often acknowledged, that can be nearly as powerful: guilt. When we see our cats gazing wistfully out the window, or watch a goldfish swim lazy circles in a bowl, we can’t help but wonder: are we doing the right thing, keeping these independent beings locked up, subject to our control? Is keeping pets actually good for the pets themselves?

That’s the question that animates Jessica Pierce’s powerful Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets (University of Chicago Press). A lover of pets herself (including, over the years, dogs, cats, fish, rats, hermit crabs, and more), Pierce understands the joys that pets bring us. But she also refuses to deny the ambiguous ethics at the heart of the relationship, and through a mix of personal stories, philosophical reflections, and scientifically informed analyses of animal behavior and natural history, she puts pet-keeping to the test.

Is it ethical to keep pets at all? Are some species more suited to the relationship than others? Are there species one should never attempt to own? And are there ways that we can improve our pets’ lives, so that we can be confident that we are giving them as much as they give us?

Deeply empathetic, yet rigorous and unflinching in her thinking, Pierce has written a book that is sure to help any pet owner, unsettling assumptions but also giving them the knowledge to build deeper, better relationships with the animals with whom they’ve chosen to share their lives.

Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer. She currently has a loose affiliation with the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado Denver, but considers herself mostly independent.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Angèle Christin, "Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms" (Princeton UP, 2020)

14 september 2020 | 58 min

S. J. Potter, "Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939" (Oxford UP, 2020)

11 september 2020 | 48 min

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, "NeuroScience Fiction" (Benbella Books, 2020)

10 september 2020 | 61 min

David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020)

10 september 2020 | 45 min

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 rise to a living world of purpose and meaning.

Natural selection is a process without purpose, yet gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. Haig proposes that the key to this is the origin of mutable “texts” that preserve a record of what has worked in the world, in other words: genes. These texts become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living beings.

Haig draws on a wide range of sources to make his argument, from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to the work of Jacques Derrida to the latest findings on gene transmission, duplication, and expression.

Genes and their effects, he explains, are like eggs and chickens. Eggs exist for the sake of becoming chickens and chickens for the sake of laying eggs. A gene's effects have a causal role in determining which genes are copied. The gene persists if its lineage has been consistently associated with survival and reproduction. Organisms can be understood as interpreters that link information from the environment to meaningful action in the environment.

Meaning, Haig argues, is the output of a process of interpretation; there is a continuum from the very simplest forms of interpretation, found in single RNA molecules near the origins of life, to the most sophisticated, like those found in human beings. Life is interpretation—the use of information in choice.

David Haig is George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Because he is a theorist, his research is wide and varied, working on everything from maternal-fetal conflict in human pregnancy to the evolution of plant life cycles. He has a particular interest in genetic conflicts within individual organisms, as exemplified by genomic imprinting.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Emily Anthes, "The Great Indoors" (Scientific American, 2020)

9 september 2020 | 31 min

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 remains unexplored territory. For all the time we spend inside buildings, we rarely stop to consider: How do these spaces affect our mental and physical well-being? Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Our productivity, performance, and relationships?

In this wide-ranging, character-driven book, science journalist Emily Anthes takes us on an adventure into the buildings in which we spend our days, exploring the profound, and sometimes unexpected, ways that they shape our lives. Drawing on cutting-edge research, she probes the pain-killing power of a well-placed window and examines how the right office layout can expand our social networks. She investigates how room temperature regulates our cognitive performance, how the microbes hiding in our homes influence our immune systems, and how cafeteria design affects what―and how much―we eat.

Along the way, Anthes takes readers into an operating room designed to minimize medical errors, a school designed to boost students’ physical fitness, and a prison designed to support inmates’ psychological needs. And she previews the homes of the future, from the high-tech houses that could monitor our health to the 3D-printed structures that might allow us to live on the Moon.

The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness provides a fresh perspective on our most familiar surroundings and a new understanding of the power of architecture and design. It's an argument for thoughtful interventions into the built environment and a story about how to build a better world―one room at a time.

Emily Anthes is a freelance science journalist. Her work has appeared in Seed, Scientific American Mind, Discover, Slate, Good, New York, and the Boston Globe.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Sandra Young, "The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge" (Routledge, 2015)

7 september 2020 | 74 min

David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020)

4 september 2020 | 78 min

Paul Offit, "Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far" (HarperCollins, 2020)

3 september 2020 | 32 min

M. del Pilar Blanco and J. Page, "Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America" (U Florida Press, 2020)

2 september 2020 | 64 min

Mary Augusta Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019)

31 augusti 2020 | 95 min

Scott Soames, "The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age" (Princeton UP, 2019)

28 augusti 2020 | 106 min

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 reconceptualizing fundamental questions, philosophy has progressed―and driven human progress―for more than two millennia. In short, we live in a world philosophy made. In this concise history of philosophy's world-shaping impact, Scott Soames demonstrates that the modern world―including its science, technology, and politics―simply would not be possible without the accomplishments of philosophy.

Firmly rebutting the misconception of philosophy as ivory-tower thinking, in The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2019) Scott Soames traces its essential contributions to fields as diverse as law and logic, psychology and economics, relativity and rational decision theory. Beginning with the giants of ancient Greek philosophy, The World Philosophy Made chronicles the achievements of the great thinkers, from the medieval and early modern eras to the present. It explores how philosophy has shaped our language, science, mathematics, religion, culture, morality, education, and politics, as well as our understanding of ourselves.

Philosophy's idea of rational inquiry as the key to theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom has transformed the world in which we live. From the laws that govern society to the digital technology that permeates modern life, philosophy has opened up new possibilities and set us on more productive paths. The World Philosophy Made explains and illuminates as never before the inexhaustible richness of philosophy and its influence on our individual and collective lives.

Scott Soames is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many books include Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century; The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, volumes one and two; and Analytic Philosophy in America (all Princeton). He lives in Marina Del Rey, California.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Nick Morgan, "Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World" (HBRP, 2018)

27 augusti 2020 | 44 min

Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

26 augusti 2020 | 74 min

J. Kim and E. Maloney, "Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education and The Low-Density University" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)

21 augusti 2020 | 33 min

David Moon, "The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

21 augusti 2020 | 57 min

Amelia Moore, "Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas" (U California Press, 2019)

21 augusti 2020 | 46 min

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 changes to the oceans and the climate. Spectacular coral reefs, low-lying islands, and a social life oriented towards the sea makes The Bahamas a posterchild of the existential dangers of global warming. At the same time, The Bahamas’s economy, firmly founded on tourism, also heavily depends upon airline and cruise line fossil fuel consumption.

Wading into this nexus, Amelia Moore casts an ethnographic eye towards the scientists, conservationists, educators, politicians, fisherpeople, and tourism boosters who attempt to understand and react to an age of ecological volatility. In contrast to assumptions of scientific objectivity and independence, Moore finds that science, politics, and business are deeply entangled in ways that are not apolitical and which require scrutiny to make adaptations to climate change more democratic and equitable.

Through prolonged research on the islands and well-paired case studies, Moore illuminates the ways that such adaptations do, can, and might not have to reproduce the inequalities inherited from colonialism and the age of fossil fuels.

Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas (University of California Press) is a stellar example of the significance and role of humanistic – and specifically ethnographic – inquiry regarding how climate change has, is, and will change human and human-nonhuman relations. Well-written and theoretically sophisticated without heavy jargon, Destination Anthropocene is a joy to read and very well suited for use in the classroom.

Amelia Moore is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Coastal Tourism and Recreation in the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Khary O. Polk, "Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948" (UNC Press, 2020)

19 augusti 2020 | 57 min

C. Besteman and H. Gusterson, "Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

18 augusti 2020 | 50 min

Katie Day Good, "Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education" (MIT Press, 2020)

17 augusti 2020 | 39 min

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 borders, and creating a participatory learning environment.

In Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (MIT Press), Katie Day Good amply illustrates that there is little new about these promises of tech-enhanced education. She demonstrates that already at the turn of the twentieth century, education reformers and technology entrepreneurs promoted emerging media as the necessary tools for preparing America’s children for a century of movement, interconnection, and rapid change.

Good examines the promulgation of both hi-tech gadgets, such as lantern slides and stereoscopes, and low-tech innovations that reformers believed would open the wide world to children’s senses and liberate them from provincial ignorance. Good’s analytical focus is on how these purportedly cosmopolitan technological applications served to strengthen American power on the world stage and masked, reinforced, and excused domestic racial and ethnic disparities instead of confronting them.

Bring the World to the Child is a thought-provoking and necessary read for anyone concerned about how the present necessity of online instruction exacerbates inequalities in education and technological access.

Katie Day Good is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, "The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2020)

14 augusti 2020 | 43 min

Maile Arvin, "Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania" (Duke UP, 2020)

13 augusti 2020 | 66 min

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 descent. In Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania (Duke University Press, 2020) Maile Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism in which Polynesians become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness.

This provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources. Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long contested these classifications, claims, and cultural representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of recognition.

In this episode of the podcast Maile talks to host Alex Golub about her book and its implications. She describes what 'possessing Polynesians' entails and how it plays out in anthropology. The discussion then shifts to ways in which Hawaiians are 'possessed' by this racial logic and use it in their own self-understanding and legal and political struggles. Finally, Maile discusses the concept of 'regenerative refusal' and how this strategy is being used by Hawaiians today.

Maile Arvin is an assistant professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and studies historical and contemporary issues of race, indigeneity and science.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles.

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Nadia Eghbal, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" (Stripe Press, 2020)

12 augusti 2020 | 68 min

Mack Hagood, "Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control" (Duke UP, 2019)

12 augusti 2020 | 81 min

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 with Mack Hagood, Blayney Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Miami University, writer, and podcaster about his book, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Duke University Press, 2011).

In Hush, Hagood examines a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies of sonic self-control that includes nature recordings, clinical audiometric tools, and “sound conditioners” through to top-selling white noise apps and the noise-canceling headphones offered under the commercially succesfull Bose and Beats brands.

What this assortment of tools and technologies have in common, Hagood argues, is that they are all “orphic media”: kinds of media that carry or generate content that is designed to efface itself as such. Orphic media can be understood as tactics and technologies that offer us respite from postmodern conditions of excess and distraction, even if that promise is not always fulfilled.

Hagood draws on a variety of sources, including the results of his own ethnographic work, patent documents, and archival material, to develop a critical account of these media that—ironically—fight sound with yet more sound, one that is both grounded in the technical detail of how specific devices do this work and is sensitive to their various use-contexts, both actual and intended.

Mack Hagood produces and hosts the Phantom Power podcast, an aural exploration of the sonic arts and humanities that launched in 2018 with the support of the Miami University Humanities Center and The National Endowment for the Humanities, and can be subscribed to wherever you get your podcasts.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020)

12 augusti 2020 | 49 min

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 locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study?

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are.

Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health.

Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Jeffrey J. Kripal, "The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge" (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019)

12 augusti 2020 | 48 min

Danielle Giffort, "Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

11 augusti 2020 | 34 min

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 decades-long hiatus, researchers are once again testing how effective these drugs are in relieving symptoms for a wide variety of psychiatric conditions, from depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder to posttraumatic stress disorder and substance addiction. In Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Danielle Giffort examines how this new generation of researchers and their allies are working to rehabilitate psychedelic drugs and to usher in a new era of psychedelic medicine.

As this team of researchers and mental health professionals revive the field of psychedelic science, they are haunted by the past and by one person in particular: psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with people working on scientific psychedelia, Giffort shows how today’s researchers tell stories about Leary as an “impure” scientist and perform his antithesis to address a series of lingering dilemmas that threaten to rupture their budding legitimacy. Acid Revival presents new information about the so-called psychedelic renaissance and highlights the cultural work involved with the reassembly of dormant areas of medical science.

This colorful and accessible history of the rise, fall, and reemergence of psychedelic medicine is infused with intriguing narratives and personalities—a story for popular science aficionados as well as for scholars of the history of science and medicine.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

11 augusti 2020 | 64 min

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 urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision.

Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world.

Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, U.S. history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.

New Books Network listeners can purchase The Nature of the Future for 25% off using the coupon code PAWLEY here.

Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020)

10 augusti 2020 | 78 min

Orit Kamir, "Betraying Dignity" (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2019)

7 augusti 2020 | 73 min

What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common?

Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals, political parties and nations around the world are abandoning the dignity-based culture we established in the aftermath of two world wars, less than a century ago.

Disappointed or intimidated, many turn their backs on the humanitarian, universalistic culture that presumes our inherent human dignity and celebrates it as the basis of every individual's equal human rights. Instead, people and nations are returning to a much older, honor-based cultural structure.

Because its ancient logic and mentality take new forms (such as social network shaming and certain aspects of "victimhood culture") -- we fail to recognize them, and overlook the pitfalls of the old honor-based structure. Narrating the history of honor-based societies, this book distinguishes their underlying principle from the post-WWII notion of dignity that underlies human rights. It makes the case that in order to revive and strengthen dignity-based culture, the concept of human dignity must be defined narrowly and succinctly, and enhanced with the principle of respect.

Continuing its historical and cultural narrative, the book discusses contemporary phenomena such as al-Qaeda terrorists, shaming via social network, FoMO, and some features of the emerging "victimhood culture". The book pays homage to Erich Fromm's classic Escape from Freedom.

Orit Kamir is founder and academic head of the Center for Human Dignity in Israel, and has taught law and culture studies at universities in Israel, the United States, and Europe.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: [email protected]

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Tanya Kant, "Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)

7 augusti 2020 | 37 min

Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

6 augusti 2020 | 64 min

J. Browning and T. Silver, "An Environmental History of the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2020)

6 augusti 2020 | 60 min

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world.

To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But in An Environmental History of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact.

As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale.

And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks.

In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

Judkin Browning is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Appalachian State University and has written two military histories of the Civil War: Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (2011) and The Seven Days’ Battle: The War Begins Anew (2012).

Timothy Silver is Professor of History at Appalachian State University and the author of Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America and A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800, a foundational work in the field of environmental history.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020)

6 augusti 2020 | 24 min

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In Contraception: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2020), Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily.

Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access

Dr. Donna Drucker leads the English as the Language for Instruction Project, which helps faculty, administrative staff, scientific staff, and students at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany) improve their English abilities for teaching and learning.

Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.

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Alex Sayf Cummings, "Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy" (Columbia UP, 2020)

5 augusti 2020 | 38 min

Beginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina’s low-wage economy. They pitched the universities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as the kernel of a tech hub, Research Triangle Park, which would lure a new class of highly educated workers. In the process, they created a blueprint for what would become known as the knowledge economy: a future built on intellectual labor and the production of intellectual property.

In Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy (Columbia UP, 2020), Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. She analyzes the use of ideas of culture and creativity to fuel economic development, how workers experienced life in the Triangle, and the role of the federal government in bringing the modern technology industry into being. As Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill were transformed by high-tech development, the old South gave way to a distinctly new one, which welded the intellectual power of universities to a vision of the suburban good life. Cummings pinpoints how the story of the Research Triangle sheds new light on the origins of today’s urban landscape, in which innovation, as exemplified by the tech industry, is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of gentrification and inequality. Placing the knowledge economy in a broader cultural and intellectual context, Brain Magnet offers vital insight int

Dr. Alex Sayf Cummings is a historian of law, technology, and American political culture at Georgia State University. She earned a BA in History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and her PhD in History from Columbia University.

Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.

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Anton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2020)

4 augusti 2020 | 71 min

Melissa J. Wilde, "Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion" (U California Press, 2020)

3 augusti 2020 | 65 min

Charlton D. McIlwain, "Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter" (Oxford UP, 2020)

3 augusti 2020 | 51 min

Mari K. Webel, "The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019)

3 augusti 2020 | 81 min

In The Politics of Disease Control. Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Mari K. Webel tells a history of colonial interventions among three communities of the Great Lakes region of East Africa. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Eastern African societies faced a range of social, political and economic challenges, many of which were connected to the establishment of British and German colonial regimes. In the midst of these, African societies experienced an epidemic outbreak of human African Trypanosomiasis, commonly known as “sleeping sickness.” The epidemic posed a serious threat to the economic prospects of colonial regimes who felt it necessary to authorize and fund large scale campaigns aimed at researching a treatment that could cure and stop the spread of the disease. Dr. Webel locates these colonial interventions in the context of the rich intellectual worlds that Great Lakes’ communities used to make sense of experiences of misfortune and illness. She argues that only by understanding the concepts and strategies that Africans had historically used to navigate challenging times, can we explain how and whether they chose to interact with the health efforts promoted by colonial authorities. The book highlights the long, largely neglected, and mostly unsuccessful, quest to eradicate or treat human African trypanosomiasis. It explains the impact that early campaigns to contain the disease had on the rationale and design of subsequent public health interventions in other parts of Africa, and how colonial narratives continue to affect modern research agendas into tropical diseases. Moreover, the book underscores the importance of paying attention to local, cultural and historical factors in the design of any public health campaign.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

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Olivia Weisser, "ll Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England" (Yale UP, 2015)

31 juli 2020 | 42 min

Sarah B. Rodriguez, "The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

30 juli 2020 | 46 min

T. Paulus and A. Wise, "Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk " (Routledge, 2019)

30 juli 2020 | 74 min

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Trena Paulus of Eastern Tennessee State University and Dr. Alyssa Wise of New York University on their new book, Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk (Routledge, 2019).

The book offers a comprehensive discussion of conducting research on online talk, which includes but is not limited to synchronous and asynchronous interactions on social media, discussion forums, and other forms of digital communication platforms.

It walks readers through the different stages and procedures of conducting online research, addresses the major challenges that researchers often encounter in doing this type of work, and presents a new research framework for conceiving online research. The book has a strong emphasis on supporting researchers to unpack their implicit assumptions and make informed decisions. It also pays close attention to the unique ethical challenges in doing research online.

In an era of physical distancing, many social and educational research activities have been moved from face-to-face to online settings. The book will provide researchers with timely, much-needed, and rich food for thought as they make this unexpected transition.

Novice and experienced researchers from multiple disciplines, such as education, communication, media studies, health sciences, political sciences and business, will all benefit from the methodological insights that Paulus and Wise shared in this book.

Trena M. Paulus is Professor of Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, USA.

Alyssa Friend Wise is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Director of the Learning Analytics Research Network at New York University, USA.

Pengfei Zhao is a qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.

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Paulo Drinot, "The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

29 juli 2020 | 62 min

Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020)

29 juli 2020 | 64 min

At age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate activist since age 11, studied engineering and public policy to understand what physically has to happen to solve climate change, and served in the Massachusetts state legislature on a climate-focused platform.

In 2018 he canceled his campaign for re-election so he could work full-time on climate change at the national and global levels. The 100% Solution framework is a product of his political experiences, numerous meetings with technical experts and activists, and intensive research and analysis.

The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change (Melville House) is a highly visual book, with informative and whimsical illustrations drawn by Violet Kitchen, a visual artist, illustrator, and writer based in western Massachusetts. She currently splits her time between being a full-time art student and a part-time hermit, and is available for commissions and freelance work. Violet also got her start at a young age: her instructional manual Drawing Comics Is Easy, Except When It’s Hard, written and drawn at age seven, earned her the title of youngest ever Eisner Award nominee.

In this New Books Network interview, we speak about the political, industrial, and scientific changes that need to occur by 2050 to solve climate change, as well as the importance of focusing on real solutions rather than wallowing in fear.

Solomon Goldstein-Rose was elected to the Massachusetts legislature on a climate change-focused platform at age 22. He previously interned in the Obama White House and in Congress, and ran a statewide carbon pricing campaign. He lives in Amherst, MA. For more see: SolomonGR.com

Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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Philip Butler, "Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

29 juli 2020 | 47 min

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 technology and spirituality in their fight towards materializing liberating realities.

The discussions shaping what it means for humans to exist with technology and as part of technology are already underway: transhumanism suggests that any use of technology to augment intellectual, psychological, or physical capability makes one transhuman. In an attempt to encourage Black people in the United States to become technological progenitors as a spiritual act, Butler asks whether anyone has ever been 'just' human? Butler then explores the implications of this question and its link to viewing the body as technology.

Re-imagining incarnation as a relationship between vitality, biochemistry, and genetics, the book also takes a critical scientific approach to understanding the biological embodiment of Black spiritual practices. It shows how current and emerging technologies might align with the generative biological states of Black spiritualities in order to concretely disrupt and dismantle oppressive societal structures.

Dr. Philip Butler is the Term Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman and Artificial Intelligence Systems at the Iliff School of Theology. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities. His work primarily focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, technology, spirituality, and race. Currently, he is working to construct a Black posthumanism that is both critical and speculative in nature. He is also building a distinctly Black AI interface combining machine learning and psychotherapeutic systems.

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Andrew Kettler, "The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

27 juli 2020 | 54 min

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 justifications for enslavement in the Atlantic world.

Western European defined the African subject as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. So powerful was this process of embodied cultural knowledge and racial othering that the very European biological function of smell altered in the early modern period.

While the first half of the book details this dialectical materialism from a European perspective, the second half speaks to the real consciousness and function that the sense of smell had in communities of African descent. Smell became a powerful tool for many enslaved peoples and racialized “others” to assert their agency, individualism, power, and perform everyday acts of resistance.

Deeply researched and theorized, The Smell of Slavery offers modern readers a deeper historical understanding of the unconscious development of their senses and the powerful legacy that such embodied cultural knowledge and olfactory racism still has on Atlantic societies.

Dr. Andrew Kettler is an Ahmason-Getty Fellow for the University of California, Los Angeles Center for 17th and 18th-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic word.

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Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (MIT Press, 2020)

27 juli 2020 | 37 min

Sandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020)

22 juli 2020 | 50 min

Marc Zimmer, "The State of Science" (Prometheus Books, 2020)

21 juli 2020 | 59 min

Will Rollason, "Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets" (Lexington Books, 2020)

20 juli 2020 | 58 min

Philip Reid, "The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800" (Brill, 2020)

20 juli 2020 | 48 min

Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures" (Princeton UP, 2020)

20 juli 2020 | 37 min

Mark Anderson, "From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology" (Stanford UP, 2019)

17 juli 2020 | 53 min

Eugenia Lean, "Vernacular Industrialism in China"(Columbia UP, 2020)

17 juli 2020 | 55 min

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 tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns.

In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.

Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work.

Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the twenty-first century.

Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press) offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

Eugenia Lean is professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures and current director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

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Luz María Hernández Sáenz, "Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018)

16 juli 2020 | 62 min

Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

15 juli 2020 | 53 min

Fay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2019)

14 juli 2020 | 53 min

David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

13 juli 2020 | 82 min

Matto Mildenberger, "Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics" (MIT Press, 2020)

13 juli 2020 | 62 min

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 Press, 2020), Matto Mildenberger (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) uses a comparative analysis of Norway, Australia, and the United States to explain differences in climate policy-making . Mildenberger concludes that despite variation in policy preferences and governmental systems, business and labor interests have infiltrated the policy-making process to prevent governments from combating climate change with legislation.

Mildenberger argues that carbon polluters capture governments through “double representation” because carbon polluters are represented regardless of what political coalition holds power. On the left, polluters are represented by labor unions who fear that increased regulations mean a decrease in jobs. On the right, polluters are represented by corporations who associate increased regulations with decreasing profits. Mildenberger asserts that the versatility of double representation makes it the most important factor in climate policy conflict across advanced economies. To support his theory, Mildenberger uses case studies of Australia, Norway, and the United States. Looking at these countries, Mildenberger describes two methods through which business and labor interests affect climate policy. One, where business or labor interests are part of a larger political coalition and use their position to participate in the writing of legislation. This results in weaker legislation. Alternatively, if business and labor interests are shut out of the political process, Mildenberger details how they mobilize the public against legislation making it less politically beneficial to take action.

Mildenberger’s comparative analysis of carbon polluters and their influence on climate policy sheds new light on policy discrepancies around the world. Additionally, Mildenberger offers a guide for future policy makers to combat the double representation of carbon polluters.

Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

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Philip M. Plotch, "Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City" (Cornell UP, 2020)

13 juli 2020 | 40 min

Lizzie O’Shea, "Future Histories" (Verso, 2019)

13 juli 2020 | 72 min

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 Us about Digital Technology (Verso), Lizzie O’Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O’Shea constructs a “usable past” that help us determine our digital future.

What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources—like the Internet—in common? Can debates over digital access be guided by Tom Paine’s theories of democratic economic redistribution? And how is Elon Musk not a visionary but a throwback to Victorian-era utopians?

In engaging, sparkling prose, O’Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and what potential exists for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our digital present. Future Histories is for all of us—makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites—who find ourselves in a brave new world.

Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer, writer, and broadcaster. She is a founder and the chair of Digital Rights Watch, which advocates for human rights online, is a special advisor to the National Justice Project, and also sits on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech and the Alliance for Gambling Reform. At the National Justice Project, she worked with lawyers, journalists and activists to establish a Copwatch program, for which she received a Davis Projects for Peace Prize. In June 2019, she was named a Human Rights Hero by Access Now.

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Her research intersects intellectual history, digital humanities and cultural heritage studies. She can be reached at [email protected]

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P. W. Singer and A. Cole, "Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution" (HMH, 2020)

10 juli 2020 | 28 min

Sabine Hildebrandt, "The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich" (Berghahn, 2017)

9 juli 2020 | 25 min

Rachel Mundy, "Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening" (Wesleyan UP, 2018)

7 juli 2020 | 84 min

“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 her book, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Mundy shows how the history of the humanities is intimately connected with the lives of animals.

Focusing on animal musicality, with a particular emphasis on birdsong, Mundy recounts dozens of twentieth-century encounters—in North America, Europe, and Africa—between animals and human researchers working in a variety of fields, work we now recognize as belonging to the disciplines of evolutionary biology, anthropology, ethology (the study of animal behavior), and ethnomusicology.

Carefully attending to the value that was assigned to animal life in the lab and in the field, Mundy relates the story of how lives that were figured as non-human or less-than-human shape the received accounts of human and animal behavior in these disciplines. Crucially, the moral calculus that this research enacted has had lasting consequences for how all kinds of critical differences are figured in the contemporary postmodern humanities, including those of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Not only a collection of diverse and deeply-researched vignettes into the ethics of research into animal musicality during the long twentieth century, Mundy’s book culminates in a powerful and timely call for a reappraisal of the “human” at the heart of humanities and the human sciences at large.

In this episode, we discuss the book and how it sketches the ambit of a notional field of the “animanities”: a new scholarly formation that problematises the long-standing reduction of life to a mere term in the exchange of animal vitality for human knowledge.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Greg Mitchell, "The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (The New Press, 2020)

7 juli 2020 | 62 min

Ruth Leys, "The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique" (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

6 juli 2020 | 61 min

Allison Bigelow, "Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World" (UNC Press 2020)

6 juli 2020 | 45 min

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 of silver ore from its colonies. Our knowledge about this vital industry, however, remains invariably tethered to the elite sources and perspectives that were preserved in the written record. In Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (UNC Press 2020), Allison Bigelow provides an important historiographical contribution by demonstrating how we can revisit these sources to trace the transmission of metallurgical knowledge from the colonized indigenous laborers who worked the ore to the metropolitan authors who codified practices and knowledge.

Rather than European science diffusing to colonial outposts, Bigelow’s studies of gold, silver, copper, and iron illustrate that the technologies that sustained Iberian imperialism were amalgamations like the ores themselves. From prospecting to refining, the making of imperial wealth required learning from indigenous ways of knowing and working the earth and its resources. Moreover, Mining Language goes beyond finding hybridity in the archive by teasing out how Europeans systematically (and sometimes not so systematically) erased the indigenous roots of knowledge and practices. Bigelow shows how as information traveled from American soils to European academies through translations and retranslations, identities became reified, fantasies were confirmed, meanings were lost and occasionally pure nonsense got into the mix.

Overall, Mining Language demonstrates the possibilities opened when we reconsider the history of technology to no longer center eye-popping inventions but instead the more quotidian practices that sustain life, create wealth, and enforce power. Seen thusly, the history of technology, power, and imperialism is not a story of implementation and adaptation, but rather one of syncretism and erasure. Scholars and readers interested in the social politics of knowledge production will find Mining Language a compelling and thought-provoking work that provides essential historical background to related issues in the 21st century.

Allison Bigelow is the Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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He Bian, "Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China" (Princeton UP, 2020)

2 juli 2020 | 84 min

Doron Galili, "Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939" (Duke UP, 2020)

2 juli 2020 | 55 min

Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020)

30 juni 2020 | 60 min

Ainissa Ramirez, "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another" (MIT Press, 2020)

25 juni 2020 | 40 min

Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019)

24 juni 2020 | 31 min

Alejandra Bronfman, "Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean" (UNC Press, 2016)

23 juni 2020 | 56 min

Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017)

23 juni 2020 | 47 min

Ashley E. Kerr, "Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910)" (Vanderbilt UP, 2020)

22 juni 2020 | 67 min

Mariann Hardey, "The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" (Emerald, 2019)

22 juni 2020 | 43 min

Nathan G. Alexander, "Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914" (NYU Press, 2019)

17 juni 2020 | 43 min

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 freethinkers have never been subjected to a systematic analysis.

In his new book, Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914, Nathan Alexander sets out to correct the oversight. The book centres on Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when popular atheist movements were emerging and skepticism about the truth of Christianity was becoming widespread.

This newly embraced secularization created a paradox. How could Western civilization represent the pinnacle of human progress, as most white atheists accepted, when the majority of these societies still believed in Christianity? The result of this tension was a profound ambivalence regarding issues of racial and civilizational superiority. At times, white atheists assented to scientific racism and hierarchical conceptions of civilization; at others, they denounced racial prejudice and spoke favorably of non-white, non-Western civilizations.

Covering racial and evolutionary science, imperialism, slavery, and racial prejudice in theory and practice, Alexander’s book provides a much-needed account of the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas espoused by the transatlantic community of atheists and freethinkers. It also reflects on the social dimension of irreligiousness, exploring how working-class atheists’ experiences of exclusion could make them sympathetic to other marginalized groups.

Nathan Alexander is a Canadian historian, researching the history of race and racism, and the history of atheism and secularization. He finished his PhD at the University of St Andrews in the UK and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies with the University of Erfurt, Germany.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Henry M. Cowles, "The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey" (Harvard UP, 2020)

17 juni 2020 | 55 min

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 from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking.

The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020) tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once taught as a natural process.

Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to John Dewey’s vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century—but their organic account was not to last.

Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful.

This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science’s power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

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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)

11 juni 2020 | 43 min

Jonathan Gelber, "Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow" (Skyhorse, 2019)

10 juni 2020 | 38 min

Kurt Braddock, "Weaponized Words" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

9 juni 2020 | 58 min

A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 1: Man into Wolf

9 juni 2020 | 53 min

Jay Timothy Dolmage, "Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race" (OSU Press, 2018)

8 juni 2020 | 70 min

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 Construction of Race and Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2018), a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century.

In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable.

Through careful archival research and consideration of the larger ideologies of racialization and xenophobia, Disabled Upon Arrival links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics—the flawed “science” of controlling human population based on racist and ableist ideas about bodily values. Dolmage casts an enlightening perspective on immigration restriction, showing how eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never really gone away and revealed how such ideas and attitudes continue to cast groups and individuals as disabled upon arrival.

Thanks to OSU Press for providing disabled Upon Arrival for free through the OSU Knowledge Bank (may require in Institutional subscription). Click here to access a PDF of disabled upon arrival. You can also find an open access version of Jay’s previous book, Academic Ableism, courtesy of the University of Waterloo Arts Research Office. Click here to access Academic Ableism. Connect with Jay on Twitter @jaydolmage Connect with your host,

Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Sam Han, "(Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty" (Routledge, 2020)

4 juni 2020 | 52 min

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—funeral homes, hospitals and other medical facilities. A mainstay in so-called traditional societies in the form of ritual practices, death was usually messy but meaningful, with the questions of what happens to the dead or where they go lying at the heart of traditional culture and religion. In modernity, however, we are said to have effectively sanitized it, embalmed it and packaged it—but it seems that death is back. In the current era marked by economic, political and social uncertainty, we see it on television, on the Internet; we see it almost everywhere.

In his new book, (Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty (Routledge, 2020), Sam Han analyzes the nexus of death and digital culture in the contemporary moment in the context of recent developments in social, cultural and political theory. It argues that death today can be thought of as "interfaced," that is mediated and expressed, in various aspects of contemporary life rather than put to the side or overcome, as many narratives of modernity have suggested. Employing concepts from anthropology, sociology, media studies and communications, (Inter)Facing Death examines diverse phenomena where death and digital culture meet, including art, online suicide pacts, the mourning of celebrity deaths, terrorist beheadings and selfies. Providing new lines of thinking about one of the oldest questions facing the human and social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, anthropology, sociology and cultural and media studies with interests in death.

Matt Coward-Gibbs is an Associate Lecturer and PhD student in Sociology at the University of York. He is the editor of the forthcoming collection Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead (Emerald, 2020). You can find his university page here.

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Donald Stevens, "Mexico in the Time of Cholera" (U New Mexico Press, 2019)

2 juni 2020 | 40 min

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)

2 juni 2020 | 121 min

Anthony Valerio, "Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor" (Zantedeschi Books, 2019)

1 juni 2020 | 61 min

Elinor Carmi, "Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media" (Peter Lang, 2020)

28 maj 2020 | 37 min

Govind Gopakumar, "Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities" (MIT Press, 2020)

27 maj 2020 | 57 min

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 pedestrians, pushcarts, vendors, and bicyclists, are now choked with motor vehicles, many of them private automobiles. In Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities (MIT Press, 2020), Govind Gopakumar examines this shift, analyzing the phenomenon of automobility in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), a rapidly growing city of about ten million people in southern India. He finds that the advent of automobility in Bengaluru has privileged the mobility needs of the elite while marginalizing those of the rest of the population.

Gopakumar connects Bengaluru's burgeoning automobility to the city's history and to the spatial, technological, and social interventions of a variety of urban actors. Automobility becomes a juggernaut, threatening to reorder the city to enhance automotive travel. He discusses the evolution of congestion and urban change in Bengaluru; the “regimes of congestion” that emerge to address the issue; an “infrastructurescape” that shapes the mobile behavior of all residents but is largely governed by the privileged; and the enfranchisement of an “automotive citizenship” (and the disenfranchisement of non-automobile-using publics). Gopakumar also finds that automobility in Bengaluru faces ongoing challenges from such diverse sources as waste flows, popular religiosity, and political leadership. These challenges, however, introduce messiness without upsetting automobility. He therefore calls for efforts to displace automobility that are grounded in reordering the mobility regime, relandscaping the city and its infrastructures, and reclaiming streets for other uses.

Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

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Nick Prior, "Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society" (SAGE, 2018)

18 maj 2020 | 71 min

Kory Olson, "The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris" (Liverpool UP, 2018)

18 maj 2020 | 61 min

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, sitting untouched since various digital forms have made printed map reading and handling something most of us rarely (if ever) do. Reading Kory E. Olson’s The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris (Liverpool University Press, 2018) reminded me how much I used to, and still sort of love maps, especially maps of the French capital. Coming at the history of urbanism through the city’s official maps over several decades, the book examines an evolving map discourse and literacy in France that was caught up with the evolution of technologies for producing, printing, and distributing maps; the history of public education; and the massive changes to the city brought about by industrialization, population growth, and new forms of transportation and mobility.

Pursuing the period that followed Haussmannization’s massive overhaul of the city, including those plans and changes that continued to be implemented for decades after Haussmann’s own tenure as Prefect of the Seine, The Cartographic Capital situates the urban geography of Paris and the very material of maps of the city at the heart of the story of Republican national consolidation, from the initial stabilization of the Third Republic to the 1930s. A history of depictions of the capital over time, the book also charts (!) a shift in the temporal orientation of maps, from their use as a form of historical documentation, to an emphasis on maps as accurate representations of geographic space in the present, to the emergence of maps intended to plan and shape the future of the city and its environs. Maps were a means by which government at different levels attempted to organize and control urban space. They were also a changing medium that reflected and shaped the geographic imaginations of map makers and map readers over time. The Cartographic Capital will be of tremendous interest to readers captivated by the history of Paris per se, as well as those fascinated by the histories of urbanism and space more broadly.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected])

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Paul Harkins, "Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies" (Routledge, 2019)

14 maj 2020 | 47 min

Robert Sroufe et al, "The Power of Existing Buildings" (Island Press, 2019)

12 maj 2020 | 57 min

John R. Gallagher, "Update Culture and the Afterlife of Writing" (Utah State UP, 2020)

11 maj 2020 | 74 min

Ayala Fader, "Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age" (Princeton UP, 2020)

5 maj 2020 | 93 min

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 in Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in a Digital Age––her new book with Princeton University Press (2020). She tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead “double lives” in order to protect those they love. While they no longer believe that God gave the Torah to Jews at Mount Sinai, these hidden heretics continue to live in their families and religious communities, even as they surreptitiously break Jewish commandments and explore forbidden secular worlds in person and online. The internet, which some ultra-Orthodox rabbis call more threatening than the Holocaust, offers new possibilities for the age-old problem of religious uncertainty. Fader shows how digital media has become a lightning rod for contemporary struggles over authority and truth.

Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe.

Dr. Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University investigating contemporary North American Jewish identities and languages in urban centers. She is the author of another book from Princeton University Press: Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Laurence Monnais, "The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

4 maj 2020 | 49 min

Andre Brock, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures" (NYU Press, 2020)

1 maj 2020 | 46 min

Lee Vinsel, "Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

30 april 2020 | 48 min

Jathan Sadowski, "Too Smart" (MIT Press, 2020)

29 april 2020 | 49 min

Patrick M. Condon, "Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities" (Island Press, 2020)

29 april 2020 | 57 min

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

28 april 2020 | 60 min

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 scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)

27 april 2020 | 55 min

A. B. Chastain and T. W. Lorek, "Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

23 april 2020 | 49 min

Emerging out of a 2016 conference, Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek have brought together Environmental History, Latin American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies in a single volume that reshapes scholarly understandings of Latin America’s Long Cold War. Rather than emphasize diplomatic, social or cultural histories of conflict, this volume emphasizes the roles of “experts” who cast themselves as apolitical technocrats just working on the ground. Chastain and Lorek’s book argues that experts and the networks in which they traveled significantly shaped geopolitical agendas, local cultures, and were in fact central to the history of the Cold War.

The essays in Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) focus on Chile, Mexico, Cuba, and Peru, in order to explore how knowledge circulated regionally as well as locally and globally. Essay topics vary from the space race to the Green Revolution, and from the Santiago Metro to Ubre Blanca, Cuba’s most famous dairy cow. By focusing on itineraries rather than exchanges or knowledge transfers, the contributors emphasize the movement of technology, knowledge, and practice within the global south, and particularly decenter the United States from the Cold War narrative. With summative essays from such luminaries as Gil Joseph on Latin America’s Long Cold War, and Edin Medina and Mark Carey combining STS and Environmental Studies, this work will be of great use to graduate students, teachers, and scholars in all three fields. Other contributors include: Tore Olsson, Mary Roldán, Reinaldo Funes-Monzote, Steven Palmer, Thomas Rath, Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Hugo Palmarola, Mark Healey, Fernando Purcell, Emily Wakild, and Javiera Barandiarán.

Andra Chastain is an assistant professor of Latin American and world history at Washington State University Vancouver. Timothy Lorek is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan.

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Lloyd B. Minor, "Discovering Precision Health" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020)

22 april 2020 | 58 min

Jodi Hilty, "Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation" (Island Press, 2019)

20 april 2020 | 55 min

Wenfei Tong, "Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds" (Princeton UP, 2020)

17 april 2020 | 54 min

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 and nest-building to protecting eggs and raising chicks. It delves into the reasons why some species, such as the wattled jacana, rely on males to do all the childcare, while others, such as cuckoos and honeyguides, dump their eggs in the nests of others to raise. For some birds, reciprocal promiscuity pays off: both male and female dunnocks will rear the most chicks by mating with as many partners as possible. For others, long-term monogamy is the only way to ensure their offspring survive.

The book explores the wide variety of ways birds make sure they find a mate in the first place, including how many male birds employ elaborate tactics to show how sexy they are. Gathering in leks to display to females, they dance, pose, or parade to sell their suitability as a mate. Other birds attract a partner with their building skills: female bowerbirds rate brains above beauty, so males construct elaborate bowers with twig avenues and cleared courtyards to impress them.

Looking at the differing levels of parenting skills across species around the world, we see why a tenth of bird species, including the fairy-wrens of Australia, have helpers at the nest who forgo their own reproduction to assist the breeding pair; how brood parasites and their hosts have engaged in evolutionary arms races; and how monogamous pairs share—or relinquish—their responsibilities.

Illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs, Bird Love is a celebration of the global diversity of avian reproductive strategies.

Lukas Rieppel is a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can find his personal website here, or on twitter here.

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Carlo Caduff, "The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger" (U California Press, 2015)

16 april 2020 | 50 min

Thor Magnusson, "Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

15 april 2020 | 78 min

Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi, "Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground" (Routledge, 2019)

14 april 2020 | 59 min

Brian A. Stauffer, "Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion" (U New Mexico Press, 2019)

9 april 2020 | 62 min

Amy Koerber, “From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History" (Penn State UP, 2018)

7 april 2020 | 64 min

Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Princeton UP, 2020)

3 april 2020 | 52 min

Arthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019)

3 april 2020 | 63 min

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. The study of a society divided between a dominant (European) settler minority and an Algerian Muslim majority, the book tracks the development and impact of new information technologies—the printing press, telegraph, cinema, radio (and later television)—in Algeria from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Throughout its chapters, readers are reminded to resist Eurocentric and teleological frameworks of “modernization” that do not apply to societies like Algeria’s where such technologies coexisted with other forms of news circulation including manuscripts, song, and rumor/word of mouth.

The book is grounded in an impressive range of sources in multiple languages. It challenges ideas about the relationship between print capitalism and nationalism over the course of this pivotal period in both Algerian and French history. Interrogating the history of colonial hegemony in and through the analysis of how Algerians accessed and interpreted the news in myriad ways often not anticipated by settler and state authorities, the book also has far-reaching implications for how we think about knowledge and power in imperial contexts more broadly. Its pages are rich with exciting and fascinating moments and stories—of surveillance, violence, and injustice, but also of the counterforces of the Algerian subversion of and resistance to colonial oppression.

*Special note in March 2020: I hope you are all keeping safe and healthy and that this conversation with Arthur might be helpful in some small way right now—with work, teaching and/or as a distraction in this period of global pandemic. Thanks so much to Arthur, who was SO much fun to speak with & to all the NBFS listeners out there!

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars(2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

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Owen Whooley, "On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

3 april 2020 | 62 min

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. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, peering deep into the human mind is, well, really hard.

On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing (University Chicago Press, 2019) begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the United States in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no anti-psychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results.

In this interview, Dr. Whooley and I discuss the sociology of knowledge and ignorance that guide this book. We then discuss the changing identity of the field of psychiatry, how the DSM affected the legitimacy and perception of the discipline, and ways of managing ignorance. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in sociology of knowledge, health and illness and medical sociology, historical sociology, and mental health.

Dr. Owen Whooley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and Senior Fellow, UNM Center for Health Policy.

Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)

30 mars 2020 | 54 min

Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018)

27 mars 2020 | 55 min

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 evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past?

In Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences (MIT Press, 2018), Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies and techniques at their disposal, and that this gives us every reason to be optimistic about their capacity to uncover truths about prehistory. Creative and opportunistic paleontologists, for example, discovered and described a new species of prehistoric duck-billed platypus from a single fossilized tooth. Examining the complex reasoning processes of historical science, Currie also considers philosophical and scientific reflection on the relationship between past and present, the nature of evidence, contingency, and scientific progress.

Currie draws on varied examples from across the historical sciences, from Mayan ritual sacrifice to giant Mesozoic fleas to Mars's mysterious watery past, to develop an account of the nature of, and resources available to, historical science. He presents two major case studies: the emerging explanation of sauropod size, and the “snowball earth” hypothesis that accounts for signs of glaciation in Neoproterozoic tropics. He develops the Ripple Model of Evidence to analyze “unlucky circumstances” in scientific investigation; examines and refutes arguments for pessimism about the capacity of the historical sciences, defending the role of analogy and arguing that simulations have an experiment-like function. Currie argues for a creative, open-ended approach, “empirically grounded” speculation.

Lukas Rieppel is a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can find his personal website here, or find him on twitter here.

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Neil Selwyn, "What is Digital Sociology?" (Polity, 2019)

27 mars 2020 | 56 min

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 approach that can deliver this: digital sociology.

In What is Digital Sociology (Polity, 2019), Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersections of the social and the digital. Blending theory and empirical examples, the five chapters highlight areas of inquiry where digital approaches are taking hold and shaping the discipline of sociology today. The book explores key topics such as digital race and digital labor, as well as the fast-changing nature of digital research methods and diversifying forms of digital scholarship.

In this interview, Dr. Selwyn and I discuss the overarching question guiding this book: what is digital sociology? We go on to discuss how the classical figures in sociology wrote about, and engaged with, technology, the distinctiveness of contemporary digital sociology, key methodologies, and the research ethics related to digital sociological research. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in digital humanities, big data and computational methods, or science and technology studies. This would be a great book for both undergraduate and graduate courses related to digital media and social science.

Dr. Neil Selwyn is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. His research and teaching focuses on the place of digital media in everyday life, and the sociology of technology (non)use in educational settings. Neil has written extensively on a number of issues, including digital exclusion, education technology policymaking and the student experience of technology-based learning. You can find him on Twitter @Neil_Selwyn.

Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.

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Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020)

27 mars 2020 | 50 min

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 Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.

She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites.

Roberts’s highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts’ insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public.

Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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Maurice Finocchiaro, "On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair" (Oxford UP, 2019)

26 mars 2020 | 64 min

Joseph Reagle, "Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents" (MIT Press, 2019)

26 mars 2020 | 76 min

Tweeting the Word of God: Evangelism from a "Digital Pulpit"

25 mars 2020 | 12 min

Great Books: Julie Carlson on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

24 mars 2020 | 54 min

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "Übermensch: Plädoyer Für Einen Nietzscheanischen Transhumanismus" (Schwabe, 2019)

19 mars 2020 | 77 min

Melissa Kravetz, "Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity" (U Toronto Press, 2019)

17 mars 2020 | 60 min

Nancy Appelbaum, "Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia" (UNC Press, 2016)

13 mars 2020 | 60 min

Jacob Turner, "Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

12 mars 2020 | 77 min

Jerome Whitington, "Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower" (Cornell UP, 2018)

6 mars 2020 | 42 min

Adrian Wisnicki, "Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature" (Routledge, 2019)

6 mars 2020 | 34 min

Kate Devlin, "Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots" (Bloomsbury, 2018)

5 mars 2020 | 64 min

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 hopes and our fears. But beyond the fantasies there are real and fundamental questions about our relationship with technology as it moves into the realm of robotics. Artificial intelligence raises very real concerns. Sexual activity is central to our very existence; it shapes how we think, how we act and how we live. With advances in technology come machines that may one day think independently. What will happen to us when we form close relationships with these intelligent systems?

In Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), Kate Devlin builds on the science and the philosophy surrounding our most intimate relationship with technology. The scene is set with the history of the artificial sexual companion, then goes on to explore the "modern" robot and the twentieth century sci-fi that promised us our own robot slaves. An explanation of artificial intelligence and the urge to create sentient machines delves into our own psychology: how does desire affect our own behavior, and can we become attached to an inanimate object? Can robots make society a better place? And what can go wrong?

Sex robots are here, and here to stay--and more are coming. This book explores how the emerging and future development of sexual companion robots might affect us, and our society. It explores the social changes arising from emerging technologies, and our relationships with the machines that may someday care for us and about us.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "Data Feminism" (MIT Press, 2020)

3 mars 2020 | 38 min

Michael Rechtenwald, "Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom" (New English Review, 2019)

2 mars 2020 | 101 min

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 Review, 2019) with the political, in particular with the objectives of the Big Digital conglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-be-monopolies.

Google Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may represent elements of a new corporate state power.

In contrast to academics who study digital media and bemoan such supposed horrors as digital exploitation, in Google Archipelago, Michael Rectenwald argues that the real danger posed by Big Digital is not digital capitalism as such, but leftist authoritarianism, a political outlook shared by academic leftists, who thus cannot recognize it in their object of study. Thus, while imagining that they are radical critics of Big Digital, academic digital media scholars (whom Rectenwald terms the "digitalistas") actually serve as ideological smokescreens that obscure its real character.

Michael Rectenwald is a recently retired Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University, where he taught cultural and social history as well as academic writing.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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David J. Gunkel, "Robot Rights" (MIT Press, 2018)

27 februari 2020 | 91 min

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

25 februari 2020 | 42 min

Sarah Fawn Montgomery, "Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir" (Mad Creek Books, 2018)

24 februari 2020 | 39 min

Amy Shira Teitel, "Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA" (Bloomsbury, 2016)

21 februari 2020 | 31 min

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. She is also the author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Apollo Pilot: The Memory of Astronaut Don Eisele (University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

NASA's history is a familiar story, culminating with the agency successfully landing men on the moon in 1969, but its prehistory is an important and rarely told tale. Breaking the Chains of Gravity looks at the evolving roots of America's space program--the scientific advances, the personalities, and the rivalries between the various arms of the United States military.

America's space agency drew together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the U.S. Air Force, meanwhile, brought rocket technology into the world of manned flight.

The road to NASA and successful spaceflight was paved by fascinating stories and characters. At the end of World War II, Wernher von Braun escaped Nazi Germany and came to America where he began developing missiles for the United States Army. Ten years after he created the V-2 missile, his Jupiter rocket was the only one capable of launching a satellite into orbit. NACA test pilots like Neil Armstrong flew cutting-edge aircraft in the thin upper atmosphere while Air Force pilots rode to the fringes of space in balloons to see how humans handled radiation at high altitude. After the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, getting a man in space suddenly became a national imperative, leading President Dwight D. Eisenhower to pull various pieces together to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

14 februari 2020 | 36 min

Angela Jones, "Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry" (NYU Press, 2020)

14 februari 2020 | 53 min

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 webcam industry where she tells a pornographic story about the multibillion-dollar online sex industry that is colloquially known as “camming.”

Through camming, millions of people from all over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure. This interview is full of stories from a diverse sample of cam models from all over the world whom Jones interviewed and observed as part of her five-year mixed-methods study. Cam models, like all sex workers, must grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones was attentive to how the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ experiences in camming as a new global sex industry.

This thorough examination of the camming industry provides a unique vantage point from which to understand and theorize around gender, sexuality, race, and labor in a time when workers globally face increasing economic precariousness and worsened forms of alienation, and desperately desire to recapture pleasure in work. Despite the serious issues cam models face, Jones’s focus on pleasure will help people better understand the motivations for engaging in online sex work, as well as the complex social interactions between cam models and customers. In Camming, Jones pioneers an entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure. The sociology of pleasure can provide new insights into the motivation for social behavior and assist sociologists in analyzing social interactions in everyday life.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it presents in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at [email protected].

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Francesca Minerva, "The Ethics of Cryonics: Is It Immoral to be Immortal" (Palgrave, 2018)

13 februari 2020 | 60 min

Germaine R. Halegoua, "The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place" (NYU Press, 2019)

12 februari 2020 | 54 min

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, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Dr. Halegoua draws from five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of “re-placing." In this book, Dr. Halegoua shows have different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to create built environment into places with deep meaning and emotional attachments. She argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral in understanding the complex relationships humans have with digital media.

In this interview, Dr. Halegoua talks about the multidisciplinary nature of her work as well as the distinct contribution she sees film and media studies providing her in studying the digital, place, place making, and the concept of “re-placing”. Dr. Halegoua shares that her research could be considered multidisciplinary and we agreed that value is added to the body of research when a topic is studies across multiple disciplines. She also shared that film and media studies contributes some unique aspects that other disciplines do not provide.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at [email protected].

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Gil Eyal, "The Crisis of Expertise" (Polity, 2019)

10 februari 2020 | 66 min

Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006)

7 februari 2020 | 39 min

Shannon Vallor, "Technology and the Virtues" (Oxford UP, 2016)

6 februari 2020 | 74 min

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 objects that track, record, analyze and share every detail of our daily lives, and biomedical techniques with the potential to transform and enhance human minds and bodies to an unprecedented degree.

Emerging technologies are reshaping our habits, practices, institutions, cultures and environments in increasingly rapid, complex and unpredictable ways that create profound risks and opportunities for human flourishing on a global scale. How can our future be protected in such challenging and uncertain conditions? How can we possibly improve the chances that the human family will not only live, but live well, into the 21st century and beyond?

Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford University Press, 2016) locates a key to that future in the distant past: specifically, in the philosophical traditions of virtue ethics developed by classical thinkers from Aristotle and Confucius to the Buddha. Each developed a way of seeking the good life that equips human beings with the moral and intellectual character to flourish even in the most unpredictable, complex and unstable situations--precisely where we find ourselves today.

Through an examination of the many risks and opportunities presented by rapidly changing technosocial conditions, Vallor makes the case that if we are to have any real hope of securing a future worth wanting, then we will need more than just better technologies. We will also need better humans.

Technology and the Virtues develops a practical framework for seeking that goal by means of the deliberate cultivation of technomoral virtues: specific skills and strengths of character, adapted to the unique challenges of 21st century life, that offer the human family our best chance of learning to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Kyle Devine, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music" (MIT Press, 2019)

5 februari 2020 | 43 min

Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019)

3 februari 2020 | 42 min

Catherine Newell, "Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017)

31 januari 2020 | 38 min

Allison Ochs, "Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?" (Amsterdam UP, 2019)

31 januari 2020 | 67 min

Alexis Elder, "Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves" (Routledge, 2017)

30 januari 2020 | 73 min

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

30 januari 2020 | 40 min

Christopher J. Phillips, "Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball" (Princeton UP, 2019)

29 januari 2020 | 46 min

Neil Maher, "Apollo in the Age of Aquarius" (Harvard UP, 2017)

24 januari 2020 | 34 min

Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)

24 januari 2020 | 41 min

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 clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020), Nancy D. Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned―and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and “reversal” after an overdose possible, became a tool for shifting law, policy, clinical medicine, and science toward harm reduction. Liberated from emergency room protocols and distributed in take-home kits to non-medical professionals, it also became a tool of empowerment.

After recounting the prehistory of naloxone―the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of “reanimatology”―Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists―whom she calls the “protagonists” of her story―Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster.

Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers.

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Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

23 januari 2020 | 89 min

J. L. Anderson, "Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

21 januari 2020 | 59 min

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 provides a history of pigs in America from the first arrival on the continent in the Columbian Exchange to the modern agribusiness of pork production, describing how we have “remade” the animal through breeding, feeding, medicating, legislating, and housing hogs. Despite the contemporary association between pork and the American South, Anderson describes how the centers of pork production and consumption have moved throughout American history in response to market changes, technological innovations, and transportation networks. The diet and housing of pigs has also evolved over time from seasonal free-range foraging in wooded areas (or even urban streets) to living in climate-controlled concrete pens and a non-seasonal diet. Similarly, Anderson describes how the place of pork in the hierarchy of edible meats changes over time. Colonial Americans largely adopted the English meat hierarchy of beef, mutton, and pork, with pork reserved for the working class and enslaved people. Though pork has replaced mutton in popularity, pork has always maintained its reputation as working people’s food. The later chapters of Capitalist Pigs argue that 20th-century Americans’ fear of fat resulted in a dramatic change in the body shape and biological make-up of the modern hog to invent a leaner “white meat.” Ironically, while the industry provided what it thought the market wanted, consumers didn’t change their pork eating habits that much, as the leaner pork was generally a much less desirable product. Trimming the fat from pork has led to the unexpected desirability of fattier cuts like bacon and pork belly in fine dining and the resurgence in “heritage breeds” of pigs with higher fat content. Anderson concludes by discouraging historians from interpreting the story of hogs in America as a success story of “transcending limits” in science, agriculture, and economics. “In short,” Anderson writes, “the success of pigs, pork, producers, and processors is not the whole story.”

Joe Anderson is Associate Dean of Research, Scholarship and Community Engagement and history professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Dr. Anderson teaches a variety of courses from food and diet to the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Joe’s professional experience as a museum educator and administrator has led to a continuing interest in public history, and his recent projects have focused on the history of rural America, particularly as it relates to technology and the environment in the midcontinent. Joe is the past president of the Agricultural History Society and a member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Safi Bahcall, "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries" (St. Martins, 2019)

21 januari 2020 | 58 min

Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019)

20 januari 2020 | 34 min

Daniel Kennefick, "No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity" (Princeton UP, 2019)

17 januari 2020 | 39 min

James Schwartz, "The Ethics of Space Exploration" (Springer, 2016)

16 januari 2020 | 67 min

Jessica Lynne Pearson, "The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa" (Harvard UP, 2018)

15 januari 2020 | 49 min

Rachel Louise Moran, "Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique" (U Penn Press, 2018)

14 januari 2020 | 50 min

Alice Hill, "Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption" (Oxford UP, 2019)

10 januari 2020 | 44 min

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, further significant global climate change is now inevitable. Although we cannot tell with certainty how much average global temperatures will rise, we do know that the warming we have experienced to date has caused significant losses, and that the failure to prepare for the consequences of further warming may prove to be staggering.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption (Oxford University Press, 2019), edited by Alice C. Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz, does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects. While squarely confronting the scale of the risks we face, this pragmatic guide focuses on solutions-some gradual and some more revolutionary-currently being deployed around the globe. Each chapter presents a thematic lesson for decision-makers and engaged citizens to consider, outlining replicable successes and identifying provocative recommendations to strengthen climate resilience.

Between animated discussions of ideas as wide-ranging as managed retreat from coastal hot-zones to biological approaches for resurgent climate-related disease threats, Hill and Martinez-Diaz draw on their personal experiences as senior officials in the Obama Administration to tell behind-the-scenes stories of what it really takes to advance progress on these issues. The narrative is dotted with tales of on-the-ground citizenry, from small-town mayors and bankers to generals and engineers, who are chipping away at financial disincentives and bureaucratic hurdles to prepare for life on a warmer planet. For readers exhausted by today's paralyzing debates on yearly "fluke" storms or the existence of climate change, Building a Resilient Tomorrow offers better ways to manage the risks in a warming planet, even as we work to limit global temperature rise.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Neil McArthur, "Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications" (MIT Press, 2017)

9 januari 2020 | 72 min

Robert Rozehnal, "Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience" (OneWorld, 2019)

8 januari 2020 | 64 min

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) by Robert Rozehnal, a professor of Islamic Studies and South Asian Religions and the founding director of the Center for Global Islamic Studies at Lehigh University. This exhilarating new book explores how the Inayati Order, the oldest Sufi community in the west, under the current leadership of Zia Inayat Khan, utilizes cyber tools in their pedagogical practices, ritual performances, and social engagement. By investigating this one particular American Sufi community’s presence in the digital world (such as on Facebook, webpages, and etc.), Rozehnal highlights how “cyber Sufis” create complex identities both on- and offline, all the while evading any easy categorizations of Sufism, Islam, and new age spirituality. Some of the noted digital transformations unfolding within the Inayati Order are in many ways, not novel, but rather reflective of historical legacies, such as in the case of South Asian Sufism of the Chishtis that influences the Inayati Order. Methodologically, the book is deeply sensitive of and also models how to conduct digital ethnography and highlights the significance of studying digital religions, especially from an Islamic studies perspective. The book is accessible and thus is a great teaching resource for undergraduates, especially for courses on digital religions, ritual studies, media studies, American Islam, and Sufism.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]

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Lydia Barnett, "After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

8 januari 2020 | 45 min

Joe Miller, "US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Alcoholism" (Chicago Review Press, 2019)

7 januari 2020 | 51 min

Leor Halevi, "Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935" (Columbia UP, 2019)

7 januari 2020 | 53 min

Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017)

7 januari 2020 | 47 min

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 historical explanations for the world ecological crises and the global crisis in capitalism. Using the framework of "cheapness," A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2017) takes the reader through the long history of the search for lower production costs, extending from European colonial conquests in the fifteenth century up to present agroindustrial systems. This quest for cheapness originated with European colonists' desire to separate Society—themselves—from Nature—everything else. All forms of "Nature" were categorized by colonist and capitalists so that they could be efficiently used for production. Human beings were often included in this contrived category of Nature. Colonized people, the indigenous, women, and brown people were considered akin to non-human nature. In the process of employing cheapness as a "strategy" across space and time, colonial and capitalist powers have devastated land, destroyed indigenous populations, and exploited workers. Resistance to cheapness is described in the book too, but in Moore and Patel's depiction of the modern world, this resistance seems insignificant compared to the power and momentum of the cheapness strategy. The refusal to pay the true costs of production eventually led to crises because nature was cheap, but never free; debts mounted. “The modern world happened” according to Patel and Moore, “because externalities struck back” (21). Global warming is the best example of these debts but the book exposes many others.

To engage as broad of an audience as possible, the book is structured in a simple way making it useful for researchers, a general audience, and as a teaching text. The introduction begins with the example of the chicken nugget, the production of which exemplifies all seven "cheap things." The chapter then gives an outline of the argument. After the introduction, the reader is walked through relatively self-contained chapters on each of the seven cheap things: cheap nature, cheap money, cheap work, cheap care, cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap lives. Any chapter can be read in isolation as an example of how the concept of cheapness works in different ecological and economic realms but together they give the reader an understanding of the encompassing and destructive power of "cheapness." As Patel explains in the interview, the book was designed to engage an "intersectional" activist audience. Those interested in indigenous rights, class, race, and ecological issues will all find something interesting, and likely infuriating, in this book.

Readers might be disappointed by the brevity of the conclusion however, which attempts to offer some solutions to current global crises. Here Patel and Moore lay out the basic structure for a "reparations ecology" that calls for profound changes, not simply in world economic and political relations, but in humans' attitude towards nature, both human and non-human forms. Hopefully Patel and Moore will elaborate further on the important concept of reparations ecology in their future works. In the meantime, anyone interested in the origins of the most pressing problems facing humanity today must give Patel and Moore's thesis serious consideration.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment.

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Matthew D. O'Hara, "The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico" (Yale UP, 2018)

6 januari 2020 | 36 min

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 other symbols of orthodoxy and fatalism. Specialists too tend to associate Latin America with a deep sense of historicism: the weight of memory – conquest, genocide, state violence – deeply marks the region’s politics and culture. On the other hand, in traditional historical narratives, a cognitive orientation towards the future is the province of northern Europe, the scientific revolution, liberalism, capitalism – in a word, modernity.

In The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018), however, Matthew O’Hara uncovers a vast array of social practices in colonial Mexico that force us to reconsider who owns the future. Noted intellectuals were not the only ones planning ahead; instead, common people managed overlapping temporalities as they negotiated personal finance, heavenly salvation, health, and the climate. In addition to detailing the subjectivities such structures and practices produced, O’Hara also traces a long arc of change over three centuries of Spanish rule. Improvised financial mechanisms, revised modes of discerning natural truths, and personalized notions of spiritual self-improvement transformed the colonial experience of time. But rather than tracking these to European philosophes, O’Hara finds them emerging from the fabric of colonial experience and developing into a unique temporality in which tradition and change were mutually constructive. For any readers interested in time and temporality, The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico will give you much to think with.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Susan Schulten, "A History of American in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press 2018)

3 januari 2020 | 85 min

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, "Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World" (Stanford UP, 2006)

3 januari 2020 | 38 min

John Danaher, "Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work" (Harvard UP, 2019)

2 januari 2020 | 69 min

E. Wakild and M. K. Berry, "A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles" (Duke UP, 2018)

31 december 2019 | 53 min

Joshua Specht, "Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America" (Princeton UP, 2019)

30 december 2019 | 31 min

Angelina Callahan, "NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

27 december 2019 | 34 min

Ajantha Subramanian, "The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India" (Harvard UP, 2019)

27 december 2019 | 65 min

M. Schneider-Mayerson and B. R. Bellamy, "An Ecotopian Lexicon" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

27 december 2019 | 46 min

Benjamin Breen, "The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade" (U Penn Press, 2019)

26 december 2019 | 62 min

Evan Friss, "On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City" (Columbia UP, 2019)

26 december 2019 | 49 min

Darius Sollohub, "Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession" (U Texas Press, 2019)

24 december 2019 | 52 min

Xiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

21 december 2019 | 67 min

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 course, in the US and Great Britain where the field initially began to coalesce. Now, Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) makes a massive contribution to the field by opening up a fascinating new vista for scholars of cybernetics, film studies, literature, media studies, science and technology studies, and beyond.

Liu’s meticulously researched and crisply written book takes us from the heady days of China’s “qi gong craze” and notions of the human body as a transparent medium through which “information waves” could pass, through investment and research into “a theory of metasynthetic wisdom” that could lead to a “global human-machine intelligent system,” the evolution of “expert systems” to provide knowledge and guidance in the absence of human experts, the novel deployment of Ross Ashby’s theory of “ultrastability” to describe China’s supposed resistance to modernization, information aesthetics within a new rising tide of advertising and market activity, and much, much more.

All of this combines to a reveal a China after Mao, vigorously employing the theoretical tools of cybernetics to, not only re-configure its socio-political image on a national scale, but to actually craft a new post-socialist subjectivity at the scale of the individual citizen. Illustrating the profound impacts of, and reactions to, these efforts through provocative samplings from Chinese literature, film, and popular culture writ large, Liu manages, in the words of Oxford’s Margaret Hillenbrand to “entirely reconfigure our understanding of the media landscape in 1980’s China."

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Steve Fuller, "The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

19 december 2019 | 92 min

Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)

18 december 2019 | 70 min

Joshua Sperber, "Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace" (Lexington, 2019)

16 december 2019 | 63 min

Laura Cabrera, "Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

12 december 2019 | 82 min

Thomas Yarrow, "Architects: Portraits of a Practice" (Cornell UP, 2019)

12 december 2019 | 37 min

E. Jones-Imhotep and T. Adcock, "Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History" (UBC Press, 2018)

10 december 2019 | 61 min

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 at today, Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) explores the complex interconnections between science, technology, and modernity in Canada. Edited by Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock, it draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. Organized around three key themes – bodies, technologies, and environments – the book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics as varied as colonial anthropology, scientific expeditions, electrotherapy, the occult sciences, industrial development, telephony, patents, neuroscience, aviation, space science, and infrastructure, the contributors explore Canadians’ modern engagements with science and technology and situate them within larger national and transnational contexts.

The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.

Edward Jones-Imhotep is a cultural historian of science and technology and an associate professor of history at York University. He is the recipient of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology for his book The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War.

Tina Adcock is a cultural and environmental historian of modern Canada and an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists" (Oxford UP, 2019)

9 december 2019 | 48 min

Chet Van Duzer, "Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends" (Springer, 2019)

6 december 2019 | 59 min

Michael R. Boswell, "Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities" (Island Press, 2019)

6 december 2019 | 50 min

Jason Smith, "To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire" (UNC Press, 2018)

6 december 2019 | 37 min

Deborah Lupton, "The Quantified Self" (Polity, 2016)

5 december 2019 | 65 min

Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018)

4 december 2019 | 53 min

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 failing garbage infrastructure—and puts into readers’ senses the smelly, sticky, full-sensory politics of waste management in the Global South.

Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) brings together studies of infrastructure with scholarship on labor to make a case for understanding, not infrastructure and labor, but laboring bodies as infrastructure. The book breaths fresh life into the moribund concept of neoliberalism to show how civic care, like household care, fell unevenly in Dakar on the bodies of women, youths, and economically precarious workers. Their bodies carried the scars, as well as the stigma, of governments’ piecemeal moves over three decades to keep the labor force that was managing waste both flexible and disposable—at times devolving responsibility onto individuals and informal sectors in the name of modernity, community, and Islamic piety.

Garbage Citizenship is based on Fredericks’ political ethnography of Senegal and the book includes vivid, beautiful photos of people, machines, and garbage laboring together—and, at times, collaborating in their refusal to be governed. (Just check out the cover image!) With workers always in mind, Fredericks makes space for hope, tells us where she is working now, and, in this generous interview, suggests how we can give breathing room to social justice, too.

Fredericks is Associate Professor of Geography and Development Studies at New York University. The interview was conducted collaboratively by Laura Stark and students in her Vanderbilt seminar, History of Global Health: Emma Dahill, Savannah Larkin, Andrew Medland, Hailey Silver, Jesse Pullen, Gavin Yuan and Claudia Vial.

For ideas and resources on how to include the New Books Network in your classroom, feel free to email Laura Stark at [email protected] or see Stark’s essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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Lundy Braun, "Breathing Race into the Machine" (U Minnesota Press, 2014)

4 december 2019 | 45 min

“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 (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) documents the history and present-day use of an everyday medical instrument, the spirometer, which measures a person’s lung capacity. The instrument has a long history, but since the 1970s, this common medical device has been built with a switch that forces users to choose: are these the lungs of a person who is Black or a person who is White? In its materiality, the instrument forces racialized and individualized answers to the question: What explains human variation? In doing so, the people who have imagined, built, and refined the instrument have foreclosed structural, political explanations of human difference—and in doing so, foreclosed the possibility of holding governments and corporations accountable, including in recent workers’ compensation lawsuits.

Lundy Braun tells the long history of this instrument as it passed between “knowledge networks” in the United Kingdom, United States, and South Africa within the contexts of medicine, law, and education. Admirably, Braun documents how and in what terms experts (unsuccessfully) questioned the spirometer’s epistemic authority and its racialization, as well as how experts partnered with social justice groups to use the spirometer for liberatory ends. The book emphasizes the contexts of war and industrial labor, the importance of standardization, and, above all, the role of the spirometer in creating and maintaining the “white norm” in the body.

Lundy Braun is Professor of Medical Science in Pathology and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. The interview was conducted collaboratively by Laura Stark [insert www.laura-stark.com] and students in her Vanderbilt seminar, History of Global Health: Omar Amir, Maggie Cox, Bryce Bailey, Donald Fitzgerald, Ashley Hunter, Jillian Jackson, Rohit Kamath, Zoe Mulraine, Liu Lanxi, Madison Noall, Catie O’Reilly, Isabella Schaffer, Katie Swift, Charlotte Whitfield, and Allie Yan.

For ideas and resources to use NBN interviews in your classes, please email Laura Stark at [email protected] or see Stark’s essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

3 december 2019 | 58 min

John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

29 november 2019 | 60 min

Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018)

26 november 2019 | 61 min

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 dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2018). But this isn’t your typical historical monograph. One of the latest volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (with illustrations by Liz Clarke), explores the history of modernization, urbanization, and the spread of epidemic disease in the era of “New Imperialism” in an exciting and highly engaging format.

The remaking of Hanoi as a capital of French empire from the end of the nineteenth century had unintended consequences. In the state-of-the-art sewers of the French/white areas of the city, rats found the perfect home. Then came the Third plague pandemic, the disease that travelled with rats and moved from one site to another around the globe…on railroads, ships, the growing networks of trade and empire. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt mobilizes years of research about this episode in the city’s history, illustrating (literally!) the inherent contradictions of imperialism, and the complexities of domination and resistance in a colonial context. Framed as an undergraduate lecture that features the author as a character throughout the narrative, the book is set up with teaching in mind. In addition to the fascinating story of the rat hunt itself (and all the twists and turns involved), the volume includes a rich selection of primary sources and a series of contextual essays that will allow students to explore this history in a range of productive ways. An accessible book that is at once serious and fun, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt was such a pleasure to read and to talk about. I hope listeners will enjoy my conversation with Mike as much as I did!

*Mike is also a host on New Books in History! Be sure to check out his interviews here on the network.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

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Nir Eyal, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

25 november 2019 | 57 min

Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019)

19 november 2019 | 57 min

Helen Rozwadowski, "Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans" (Reaktion Books, 2018)

15 november 2019 | 33 min

Jonathan Rees, "Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

14 november 2019 | 55 min

Margaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

14 november 2019 | 57 min

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, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasting impact on applied science.

In Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), a richly illustrated comparative study of this transformative period, Margaret E. Schotte charts more than two hundred years of navigational history as she investigates how mariners solved the challenges of navigating beyond sight of land. She begins by outlining the influential sixteenth-century Iberian model for training and certifying nautical practitioners. She takes us into a Dutch bookshop stocked with maritime manuals and a French trigonometry lesson devoted to the idea that "navigation is nothing more than a right triangle." The story culminates at the close of the eighteenth century with a young British naval officer who managed to keep his damaged vessel afloat for two long months, thanks largely to lessons he learned as a keen student.

This is the first study to trace the importance, for the navigator's art, of the world of print. Schotte interrogates a wide variety of archival records from six countries, including hundreds of published textbooks and never-before-studied manuscripts crafted by practitioners themselves. Ultimately, Sailing School helps us to rethink the relationship among maritime history, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of print culture during a period of unparalleled innovation and global expansion.

Lukas Rieppel teaches at Brown University. You can find more about him here, or find him on twitter here.

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J. Yates and C. N. Murphy, "Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

14 november 2019 | 53 min

Wendy Wickwire, "At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging" (UBC Press, 2019)

13 november 2019 | 64 min

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 Columbia Press, 2019). Wendy Wickwire turns this picture upside down, revealing Teit to be a superb ethnographer in his own right and a tireless political activist who advocated for the rights of Indigenous people. Drawing on thirty years of exhaustive research, she shows us that Teit exemplified an 'anthropology of belonging': an anthropology deeply rooted in a place and community, even if it is carried out by a settler. But more than this, At The Bridge uses the thread of Teit's life to weave a truly synthetic story of the history of colonialism and dispossession in British Columbia as a whole.

In this podcast host Alex Golub talks with Wendy Wickwire about Teit, his his life, and the example he offers to anthropologists interested in an anthropology of belonging. They contrast Teit and Boas, and examine how Wickwire's book performs an anthropology of belonging itself, and discuss the how anthropologists can write for communities outside the academy.

Wendy Wickwire is professor emeritus of history and environmental studies at the University of Victoria. She is the author of Stein: The Way of the River (with Michael M’Gonigle), which won the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award at the 1989 BC Book Awards Ceremony, and Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (with Harry Robinson), which won the Roderick Haig-Brown Prize for best regional book at the 1993 BC Book Awards Ceremony

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles.

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Claire Edington, "Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2019)

13 november 2019 | 73 min

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 worked there? What was daily life like in such an institution? How did Western medical experts and the colonized population understand mental illness and its treatment? How did colonial racism impact mental illness? In this episode we chat with Claire Edington, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, about her new book of Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam (Cornell University Press, 2019).

Beyond the Asylum draws from extensive archival research in Vietnam and France. A gifted writer, Edington is particularly good at presenting the life stories of patients, doctors, and workers drawn into French Indochina’s mental health system. She also looks at the families of patients and the Vietnamese language popular press, as they tried to make sense of troubling issues around mental health, including how the French colonizers understood and treated psychological afflictions. More than a history of the asylum as an institution, Edington uses mental health care facilities as a prism to explore crucial transformations of Vietnamese society in the era of high imperialism. This wide-ranging conversation will be of interest to listeners interested in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, imperialism, French history, and the study and treatment of mental illness. The book is an excellent complement to the increasingly rich historiography of colonial Vietnam.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Michael E. Mann, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars : Dispatches from the Front Lines" (2012)

11 november 2019 | 41 min

Cara New Daggett, "Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work" (Duke UP, 2019)

4 november 2019 | 43 min

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 change also requires that we rethink the concept of energy itself. Although a seemingly self-evident and natural scientific object, the idea of energy that informed the development of fossil fueled capitalism is a surprisingly modern invention. In the 19th century, as tinkerers sought to explain mystical steam power, they rehashed this ancient word to conceptualize limitless potential and ceaseless expansion. Daggett demonstrates that not only did this new abstraction explain and empower novel technologies and fields of physics, but also became an ideological fulcrum with which to describe and proscribe the emerging societies of industrial capitalism. The harnessing of energy and maximizing its efficiency became not only the principles of mechanical engineering, but also of workplace organization and worker discipline. At home, energy served as a measure of virtue, self-control, and good citizenship; and abroad agents of empire used it to inculcate colonized peoples with those values and habits of supposed modernity. The historical knotting together of virtue, labor, and fossil fuel power – argues Daggett – means that reimagining the role of energy in society requires a fuller transformation of the politics of work.

Cara New Daggett is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing

3 november 2019 | 40 min

Russell Potter, "Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-year Search" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016)

1 november 2019 | 44 min

Jamie L. Pietruska, "Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

30 oktober 2019 | 39 min

Jeremy Black, "Maps of War: Mapping Conflict through the Centuries" (Conway, 2016)

29 oktober 2019 | 64 min

Andreas Bernard, "Theory of the Hashtag" (Polity, 2019)

25 oktober 2019 | 41 min

Amy Carney, "Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS" (Toronto UP, 2018)

25 oktober 2019 | 42 min

Ann Elias, "Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity" (Duke UP, 2019)

24 oktober 2019 | 46 min

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 of a world without coral. In this cogent and timely work, Ann Elias interrogates how we came to know coral reefs in the way we do and the complicity of this knowing with the forms of modernity that now threaten to destroy them. Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Duke UP, 2019) traces the work and lives of two iconic coral photographers of the interwar period – Frank Hurley and J.E. Williamson – who introduced Western audiences to (respectively) the Great Barrier Reef off Australia and the reefs off the Bahamas. Both self-fashioned men of science and entertainers with an eye for spectacle, Hurley and Williamson not only brought the “flowers of the sea” into consumer life, but also tethered them to the tropical exoticism that underpinned colonialism, racism, and the domination of nature. For audiences in Australia, Europe, and the US, their photographs primed postwar consumption of tropical nature through tourism and entertainment. By unweaving how these images were produced, Elias illustrates that how we know the sea is deeply entwined with the values, ethics, and logics of human politics.

Ann Elias is Associate Professor of the History and Theory of Contemporary Global Art at the University of Sydney.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

24 oktober 2019 | 33 min

Binyamin Appelbaum, "The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society" (Little Brown, 2019)

22 oktober 2019 | 41 min

Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

18 oktober 2019 | 37 min

David Lindsay Roberts, "Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)

17 oktober 2019 | 74 min

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 Roberts, adjunct professor of mathematics at Prince George's Community College, takes a very different approach. His unique book, Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), anchors 20 biographical chapters to a decadal series of events, whose mathematical significance could not often have been anticipated. These short biographies range from the inauguration of military and civil engineering (Sylvanus Thayer) and the textbook industry (Catharine Beecher and Joseph Ray) to the influence of geopolitics during and after the Cold War (Joaquin Basilio Diaz, John F. Nash Jr.), and over the course of the book the subjects witness the professionalization of the research community (Charles H. Davis), radical expansions of educational access (Kelly Miller, Edgar L. Edwards Jr.), and contentious, transgenerational debates over curriculum design (Izaak Wirzsup, Frank B. Allen), among many other themes. Through their professional and institutional connections, the subjects of the chapters form a connected component, providing intriguing narrative hooks across time, geography, and status while evidencing the tightly bound community of American mathematics scholarship. The book can be read as professional history or as a collection of biographical essays, and i expect it to become a charming entry point for mathematical, historical, or not-yet-hooked readers into the forces that have shaped the discipline.

Suggested companion work: David E. Zitarelli, A History of Mathematics in the United States and Canada: Volume 1: 1492–1900.

Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Quantitative Medicine at UConn Health.

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Theodore Dalrymple, "False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine" (Encounter Books, 2019)

17 oktober 2019 | 46 min

David D. Vail, "Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945" (U Alabama Press, 2019)

15 oktober 2019 | 39 min

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, "Allegories of the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019)

15 oktober 2019 | 36 min

While the mainstream discourses on global warming characterize it as an unprecedented catastrophe that unites the globe in a common challenge, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that this apparently cosmopolitan position is in truth a provincial one limited to privileged circles in the Global North. In Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019), she instead elucidates how among post-colonial peoples of the Pacific and Caribbean, who are among the first to suffer the uncompromising rise of sea levels, global warming is not so much a rupture of stability as an impending cataclysm that follows a long history of others. With an eclectic array of allegorical artworks -- including sculptures by Dominican artist Tony Capellán, novels by Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber, and poems from Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Kamau Brathwaite -- DeLoughrey traces how island artists make sense of anthropogenic climate change while continuing to critique the legacies of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism. DeLoughrey also highlights subjectivities of relatedness with the earth and its non-human beings that may provide antidotes to the extractive logics that have clogged the skies with CO2. Stressing the ways that global warming and empire are mutually constitutive, DeLoughrey confirms the critical importance of allegorical art and literature from the Global South in interpreting our unfolding crisis.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Oren Harman, "Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World" (FSG, 2018)

14 oktober 2019 | 66 min

Thomas Hager, "Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine" (Abrams Press, 2019)

14 oktober 2019 | 62 min

Michitake Aso, "Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975" (UNC Press, 2018)

11 oktober 2019 | 83 min

Lucas Richert, “Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs” (McGill-Queens UP, 2018)

11 oktober 2019 | 52 min

Jennifer L. Derr, "The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2019)

10 oktober 2019 | 54 min

Erika Milam, "Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America" (Princeton UP, 2019)

4 oktober 2019 | 41 min

David Sinclair, "LifeSpan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)

4 oktober 2019 | 61 min

Timothy LeCain, "The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

30 september 2019 | 67 min

Timothy LeCain is an award-winning environmental historian whose past work has focused on the connections between open-pit copper mines, technology, and the natural world. LeCain's newest book The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2017) presents a path-breaking approach to the study of the environment and history. In it LeCain argues that humans are inseparable from the material world around them. Living and non-living "things" not only deserve their own histories, according to LeCain, but the history of humans cannot be told without recognition of the autonomy of material things. LeCain’s neo-materialist agenda merges S.T.S. and environmental history, and calls for scholars to consider writing histories of the world in toto.

More than just explaining his approach, LeCain employs it in three case studies, one on longhorn cattle in the American west, another on Japanese silkworms, and finally a history of the copper atom. Viewing the material world as inseparable from humans leads LeCain to challenge the idea of the Anthropocene, suggesting that the term gives humans too much credit. People, according to LeCain can do little without the material things that surround them. Current climatic changes were not solely caused by "anthropo," or humans, but the cause lies with humans working with material things like carbon. Moreover humans cannot solve the problem of climate change without utilizing the unique material properties of the living and non-living world in which they are completely and perpetually embedded within. The Matter of History is an important work for the present moment and is sure to shape future discourse on humans and the environment.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950," is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment and tweets @Jason_L_Newton.

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Mark Monmonier, "Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography" (ESRI Press, 2019)

27 september 2019 | 64 min

Nora Jaffary, "Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905" (UNC Press, 2016)

26 september 2019 | 70 min

Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (University of North Carolina Press. 2016), tracks how medical ideas, practices, and policies surrounding reproduction changed between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in Mexico. Perhaps the most important change analyzed in the book, and discussed extensively in the interview, is the increased interest of the state in controlling childbirth and contraception. Whereas the colonial state was mostly interested in controlling reproduction primarily of Spanish women of the elite, in the republican era—specially in the late nineteenth century—the state expanded its scope in order to reach broader and more popular sectors of women. Abortion and infanticide, treated jointly in the book for people did not draw a distinction between them, came under the purview of communities and the state. We learn that family members, lovers and neighbors started denouncing women more frequently, and that criminal trials rose.

According to Jaffary such change is explained by the emergence of a discourse of sexual honor and virtue that became imperative for a wider sector of women, one that linked reproduction and the creation of a healthy citizenry to the construction of the national state. However, and in spite of the state’s claim in controlling reproduction, this is not a story of an all-powerful state that defined the life and choices of women, nor is this a history of the march of modern medicine (whether that is a good thing or a bad one) in which the state endorsed learned medicine and banished midwives and popular practitioners. As we will learn, this is a much more convoluted story; in spite of the growing interest of the state in reproduction, cases of abortion and infanticide were widely tolerated as were popular healing practitioners, and criminal trials rarely ended in conviction. Judges treated women cautiously and with justice. Moreover, as Jaffary convincingly demonstrates, this unknown history of childbirth and contraception reveals a world of medical pluralism and medical mestizaje—concepts that refer to the somewhat peaceful co-existence, or even collaboration, between a wide range of medical practitioners. In this wonderful book, Jaffary invites us to think about Latin American history in its own terms, to question histories that posit a lineal or teleological progress, and to see that the past, as much as the present, builds its own concepts and ideas that shape how the body is seen, lived, and experienced.

Lisette Varon-Carvajal is a graduate student in history at Rutger’s University.

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Joy McCann, "Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean" (U New South Wales Press, 2018)

13 september 2019 | 36 min

Aaron Hale-Dorrell, "Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2018)

11 september 2019 | 78 min

In Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2018), Aaron Hale-Dorrell re-evaluates Khrushchev’s corn campaign as the cornerstone of his reformation programs. Corn was key to Khrushchev’s promises of providing everyone with the abundance required for achieving communism, which included the introduction of a varied diet rich in meat and dairy (which would be corn fed) following decades of austerity during collectivization and WWII. Khrushchev touted corn as crucial to building a society equal to the US in material abundance. Hale-Dorrell discusses Khrushchev’s plan to implement industrial farming in the collective and state farm system through increased mechanization, adoption of American techniques, a rejection of Lysenkoism, and mass mobilization of the Komsomol and other youth. But still the corn crusade failed to achieve the transformation that Khrushchev promised.

Unlike other historians who have focused on Khrushchev being at fault for this failure, Hale-Dorrell examines the bureaucratic attitudes, lack of resources, and the widespread Soviet campaign mentality frustrated the implementation of Khrushchev’s policies. Regional and local officials interpreted central directives to suit their own needs. Their policies took on a life of their own and a local flavor that often resulted in policies substantially different from and less transformative than Khrushchev had intended. In some places, local and regional officials relied on outright fraud or deception to meet quotas or avoid planting corn. What emerges through all this is a portrait of the Soviet Union that is chaotic, progressive if only slowly and deeply interconnected with other countries through the exchange of trade goods and scientific knowledge, all of which flies in the face of the traditional view of the USSR as isolated, backwards and governed by top down, command style party and state bureaucracy. Listen in!

Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here.

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Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, "Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019)

10 september 2019 | 40 min

This is the third of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my individual interviews with Howe and Boyer about their separate volumes, Ecologics and Energopolitics. In this interview, I talk to both authors together about their experiences with collaborative research and writing, and about the wider significance of their scholarship.

Ecologics and Energopolitics follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced. Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected].

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E. H. Ecklund and D. R. Johnson, "Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think of Religion" (Oxford UP, 2019)

5 september 2019 | 95 min

It is common to see science and religion portrayed as mutually exclusive and warring ways of viewing the world, but is that how actual scientists see it? For that matter, which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Could scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible?

The book we’re looking at today, Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019), aims to answer these questions and more. Scholars Elaine Howard Ecklund, David Johnson, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Kirstin Matthews, Steven Lewis, Robert Thomson Jr, and Di Di collaborated to complete the most comprehensive international study of scientists' attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than 20,000 scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over 600 of them. From this wealth of data, the authors extract the real story of the relationship between science and religion in the lives of scientists around the world. The book makes four key claims: there are more religious scientists then we might think; religion and science overlap in scientific work; scientists––even atheist scientists––see spirituality in science; and finally, the idea that religion and science must conflict is primarily an invention of the West. Throughout, the book couples nationally representative survey data with captivating stories of individual scientists, whose experiences highlight these important themes in the data. Secularity and Science leaves inaccurate assumptions about science and religion behind, offering a new, more nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and how they can be integrated for the common good.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Rice University, as well as founding director of the Religion and Public Life Program there. David Johnson is an assistant professor of higher education leadership at the University of Nevada Reno in the College of Education.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Dominic Boyer, "Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019)

3 september 2019 | 45 min

This is the second of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my interview with Howe about her volume, Ecologics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.

Dominic Boyer’s Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019) and its partner volume, Ecologics, by Cymene Howe, follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.

In Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind development in Mexico to think through how the energy and environmental crises of global warming require new approaches to political theory. Following the windmills upstream from farmers’ fields to regional and national capitals and overseas to international investors and green energy corporations, Boyer provides a unique, full picture of the participants, negotiations, and conflicts involved. In doing so, he arrives at a compelling description of how new energic infrastructures are reshaping political experience.

Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Emily Lakdawalla, "The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job" (Springer, 2018)

30 augusti 2019 | 35 min

Emily Lakdawalla talks about the design and construction of Curiosity, formally known as the Mars Science Laboratory, one of the most sophisticated machines ever built. Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 where it has been conducting research within the ancient Gale Crater.

This book describes the most complex machine ever sent to another planet: Curiosity. It is a one-ton robot with two brains, seventeen cameras, six wheels, nuclear power, and a laser beam on its head. No one human understands how all of its systems and instruments work. This essential reference to the Curiosity mission explains the engineering behind every system on the rover, from its rocket-powered jetpack to its radioisotope thermoelectric generator to its fiendishly complex sample handling system. Its lavishly illustrated text explains how all the instruments work -- its cameras, spectrometers, sample-cooking oven, and weather station -- and describes the instruments' abilities and limitations. It tells you how the systems have functioned on Mars, and how scientists and engineers have worked around problems developed on a faraway planet: holey wheels and broken focus lasers. And it explains the grueling mission operations schedule that keeps the rover working day in and day out.

Lakdawalla is a senior editor at the Planetary Society where she writes and blogs about planetary exploration. She is a frequent guest on Planetary Radio. She is also the author of The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job (Springer, 2018).

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Cymene Howe, "Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019)

27 augusti 2019 | 44 min

This is the first of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019). Also listen to my interview with Boyer about his volume, Energopolitics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.

Cymene Howe’s Ecologics and its partner volume, Energopoltics by Dominic Boyer follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Boyer and Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.

In Ecologics, Howe examines the aborted Mareña Renovables wind park to understand the resistance of indigenous residents to renewable energy development and to analyze the consequences of their exclusion from the decisions that impact their lives. Howe further argues that a full accounting for the dynamics of energy development and its consequences cannot be achieved without including the nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and geophysical forces that shape and are shaped by wind power.

Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Michael Kodas, "Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

23 augusti 2019 | 53 min

Matthew James, "Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin" (Oxford UP, 2017)

16 augusti 2019 | 34 min

Daniel Veidlinger, "From Indra’s Net to Internet: Communication, Technology, and the Evolution of Buddhist Ideas" (U Hawaii Press, 2018)

15 augusti 2019 | 58 min

Lindsey Green-Simms, "Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

15 augusti 2019 | 60 min

David Philip Miller, "The Life and Legend of James Watt" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

13 augusti 2019 | 71 min

Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

12 augusti 2019 | 55 min

Andrew Wright Hurley, "Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth" (Camden House, 2018)

9 augusti 2019 | 36 min

Michael Zakim, "Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

8 augusti 2019 | 78 min

William Gibbons, "Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music" (Oxford UP, 2018)

6 augusti 2019 | 61 min

Video games are a significant part of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century. From Words with Friends to Grand Theft Auto, most people spend at least some of their leisure time with video games. In his book, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), William Gibbons examines the intersection between video games and classical music. From close readings of the scores of specific games to an analysis of games with characters related to classical music, Gibbons asks what happens when highbrow art meets lowbrow entertainment. Often classical music enhances the visual and storytelling elements of a game by sonically marking characters or situations as wealthy or sophisticated, as also happens in film and TV scores. Gibbons finds unexpected connections and layering of signification as video game scores exploit musical references from sources as far flung as Stanley Kubrick’s films to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He ends the book with an account of how orchestras are trying to use the immense popularity of gaming to raise money and attract new audiences by playing concerts of video game music.

William Gibbons is an associate professor of musicology and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University. His research centers on how canonical classical music repertoires function outside their initial time of compositions. In addition to his first book, Building the Operatic Music (University of Rochester Press), he has published numerous journal articles including in American Music, 19th-Century Music Review, and Opera Quarterly, and has co-edited a volume on video game music published in 2014 and another forthcoming later this year both from Routledge Press.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Stefan Al, "Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies" (Island Press, 2018)

5 augusti 2019 | 53 min

Lukas Rieppel, "Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle" (Harvard UP, 2019)

2 augusti 2019 | 56 min

Sharra L. Vostral, "Toxic Shock: A Social History" (NYU Press, 2018)

2 augusti 2019 | 24 min

In 1978, doctors in Denver, Colorado observed several healthy children who suddenly and mysteriously developed a serious, life-threatening illness with no visible source. Their condition, which doctors dubbed ‘toxic shock syndrome’ (TSS) was rare, but observed with increasing frequency over the next few years in young women, and was soon learned to be associated with a bacterium and the use of high-absorbency tampons that had only recently gone on the market. In 1980, the Centers for Disease Control identified Rely tampons, produced by Procter & Gamble, as having the greatest association with TSS over every other tampon, and the company withdrew them from the market. To this day, however, women are frequently warned about contracting TSS through tampon use, even though very few cases are diagnosed each year.

Historian Sharra Vostral’s Toxic Shock: A Social History (NYU Press, 2018) is the first and definitive history of TSS. Vostral shows how commercial interests negatively affected women’s health outcomes; the insufficient testing of the first super-absorbency tampon; how TSS became a ‘women’s disease,’ for which women must constantly monitor their own bodies. Further, Vostral discusses the awkward, veiled and vague ways public health officials and the media discussed the risks of contracting TSS through tampon use because of social taboos around discussing menstruation, and how this has hampered regulatory actions and health communication around TSS, tampon use, and product safety.

A study at the intersection of public health and social history, Toxic Shock brings to light the complexities behind a stigmatized and under-discussed issue in women’s reproductive health. Importantly, Vostral warns that as we move forward with more and more joint replacements, implants, and internal medical devices, we must understand the relationship of technology to bacteria and recognize that both can be active agents within the human body. In other words, unexpected consequences and risks of bacteria and technology interacting with each other remain.

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Sarah Seo, "Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom" (Harvard UP, 2019)

1 augusti 2019 | 35 min

How the rise of the car, the symbol of American personal freedom, inadvertently led to ever more intrusive policing-with disastrous consequences for racial equality in our criminal justice system. When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept-and expect-pervasive police power.

As Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2019) makes clear, this radical transformation in the nature and meaning of American freedom has had far-reaching political and legal consequences. Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the wheel, police departments rapidly expanded their forces and increased officers' authority to stop citizens who violated traffic laws. The Fourth Amendment-the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures-did not effectively shield individuals from government intrusion while driving. Instead, jurists interpreted the amendment narrowly. In a society dependent on cars, everyone-the law-breaking and law-abiding alike-would be subject to discretionary policing. Seo overturns prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court's due process revolution. The justices' efforts to protect Americans did more to accommodate than to limit police intervention, and the new criminal procedures inadvertently sanctioned discrimination by officers of the law. Constitutional challenges to traffic stops largely failed, and motorists "driving while black" had little recourse to question police demands. Seo shows how procedures designed to safeguard us on the road ultimately undermined the nation's commitment to equal protection before the law.

Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and New Jersey. Stephen can be contacted at [email protected].

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Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)

31 juli 2019 | 66 min

Okezi Otovo, "Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945" (U Texas Press, 2016)

30 juli 2019 | 74 min

Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

26 juli 2019 | 37 min

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019).

During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking.

Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life" (W. W. Norton, 2018)

26 juli 2019 | 58 min

Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good" (Columbia UP, 2016)

26 juli 2019 | 23 min

Personalized healthcare―or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"―is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-fits-all" model. Technologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, pharmacogenetically developed therapies in cancer care, private umbilical cord blood banking, and neurocognitive enhancement claim to cater to an individual's specific biological character, and, in some cases, these technologies have shown powerful potential. Yet in others they have produced negligible or even negative results. Whatever is behind the rise of Me Medicine, it isn't just science. So why is Me Medicine rapidly edging out We Medicine, and how has our commitment to our collective health suffered as a result?

In her cogent, provocative book Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good(Columbia University Press, 2016), Dickenson examines the economic and political factors fueling the Me Medicine phenomenon and explores how, over time, this paradigm shift in how we approach our health might damage our individual and collective well-being. Historically, the measures of "We Medicine," such as vaccination and investment in public-health infrastructure, have radically extended our life spans, and Dickenson argues we've lost sight of that truth in our enthusiasm for "Me Medicine."

Dickenson explores how personalized medicine illustrates capitalism's protean capacity for creating new products and markets where none existed before―and how this, rather than scientific plausibility, goes a long way toward explaining private umbilical cord blood banks and retail genetics. Drawing on the latest findings from leading scientists, social scientists, and political analysts, she critically examines four possible hypotheses driving our Me Medicine moment: a growing sense of threat; a wave of patient narcissism; corporate interests driving new niche markets; and the dominance of personal choice as a cultural value. She concludes with insights from political theory that emphasize a conception of the commons and the steps we can take to restore its value to modern biotechnology.

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Tita Chico, "The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2018)

22 juli 2019 | 68 min

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, “Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets” (Cambridge UP, 2019)

22 juli 2019 | 45 min

John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017)

19 juli 2019 | 33 min

Ekaterina Svetlova, "Financial Models and Society: Villains or Scapegoats" (Elgar, 2018)

16 juli 2019 | 28 min

Anthony Ryan Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)

12 juli 2019 | 50 min

Lina del Castillo, "Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia" (U Nebraska Press, 2018)

9 juli 2019 | 66 min

Diana Pasulka, "American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology" (Oxford UP, 2019)

8 juli 2019 | 58 min

Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

4 juli 2019 | 41 min

Greta LaFleur, "The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

4 juli 2019 | 80 min

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

3 juli 2019 | 41 min

David Beer, “The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception“ (Sage, 2019)

2 juli 2019 | 37 min

Daniel Nemser, "Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2017)

28 juni 2019 | 63 min

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 spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, race as well became naturalized. Infrastructures of Race provides essential historical background for present-day interrogations of how infrastructures – from aged water pipes to search engine algorithms – reinforce persistent racial inequalities. The challenges of de-racializing these often unnoticed foundations require a deep understanding of how race became so imbricated with technological environments. Through Nemser’s case studies, we can better apprehend the hundreds of years of oppression that have been built into our material lives.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)

28 juni 2019 | 33 min

Matthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its History" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

25 juni 2019 | 59 min

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 space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include.

In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.

Matthew Edney is the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, 2019) he is the author of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Since 2005, Matthew has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-editor with Mary S. Pedley of Cartography in the European Enlightenment, a massive compilation (at 1,920 pages!) now in press as Volume Four of Chicago’s The History of Cartography series. (Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 6 are already available on open access. Matthew also run a personal blog, Mapping as Process, which features his commentary on the study of map production, circulation, and consumption.

Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado

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Amy Lippert, "Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco" (Oxford UP, 2018)

25 juni 2019 | 118 min

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-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbanization. Amy K. Defalco Lippert, Assistant Professor of American History and the College at the University of Chicago, argues that images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but as representations of people, they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance.

Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that divided diverse groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader cultural transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city's inhabitants and sojourners, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.

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Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017)

24 juni 2019 | 34 min

Paul Ramírez, "Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason" (Stanford UP, 2018)

24 juni 2019 | 57 min

Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality" (Vintage, 2008)

21 juni 2019 | 42 min

Camisha Russell, "The Assisted Reproduction of Race" (Indiana UP, 2018)

20 juni 2019 | 79 min

Terence Keel, "Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science" (Stanford UP, 2018)

17 juni 2019 | 54 min

Heidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945" (Harvard UP, 2019)

17 juni 2019 | 59 min

Jeannette Eileen Jones, "Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936" (U Georgia Press, 2011)

17 juni 2019 | 29 min

Thomas Dodman, "What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

12 juni 2019 | 63 min

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 nostalgia from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Beginning with the coining of the term by a young Swiss medical student in 1688, the book tracks the development of nostalgia as a diagnosis with a specific military medical history. Never exclusive to the French context, the disease garnered more attention there than elsewhere in Europe for various reasons, including the existence of a powerful military force through the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and the specificities of French political, cultural, and medical fields during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rooted at first in the experiences, displacements, and alienation of soldiers far from home, the diagnosis morphed eventually from an illness to a broader set of cultural phenomena and “feels,” acquiring the character of the temporal, memorial sentimentality we think of today.

Bringing together intellectual, military, and medical history with the history of emotions, What Nostalgia Was stays close throughout to the lived experience of those whose pained and/or pleasurable longings for spaces/times distant or lost preoccupied the expert observers and practitioners who sought to help and understand them. Dodman’s examination of historical shifts in understandings of nostalgia is compelling as it builds on both the author’s commitment to archival evidence and sources, and his openness to the insights and approaches of political and cultural theory, philosophy and literary studies. His carefully researched analysis of what nostalgia was and became between Algeria and France is particularly fascinating. The book will give readers (and listeners!) much to think on in terms of why and how nostalgia has moved and affected individuals and cultures for centuries up to and including the present.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected].

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019)

11 juni 2019 | 64 min

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 “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biological fact but as a socially-constructed role that has evolved over time. Historically, given assumed paternal uncertainty, fathers were defined in terms of their behavior (acting like a father) or their relationship to a child’s mother (being married to a woman made a man the father of her offspring). In the twentieth century, paternity testing developed as a way to scientifically determine male progenitors, although these new methods never replaced older ways of reckoning paternity. Milanich describes blood tests and other early techniques proffered by doctors and scrutinized by courts as a way to know the “true” father. Paternity testing, she points out, has been used to different ends in different societies: it could identify an errant progenitor or reveal a mother’s liaison. A certain paternity test result could mean economic security for a child or put a person’s life in jeopardy. Moreover, Milanich reveals the uneven application of paternity testing that has tended to protect the most privileged groups in different societies. Paternity is a transatlantic study that moves from South America to Europe and the United States, and its chapters touch upon the histories of science and medicine, gender and the family, and immigration. The podcast features fascinating case studies set in Brazil and Argentina. This book’s reflections on the making of modern paternity speak to our own time, when, for example, the U.S. government is using DNA testing at the border to separate “real” kin from “fictitious” families, as Milanich explains to podcast listeners. The stakes of knowing the father go far beyond determining biological progenitors, and this book vividly reconstructs the political uses and cultural implications of the paternity test.

Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew).

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Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, "#Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation" (U Michigan Press, 2019)

5 juni 2019 | 62 min

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 dive into multiple perspectives on social media engagement, especially around hashtag activism and the ways that individuals think about and interact with others via Twitter in regard to social movements and political involvement. As the authors note, “#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world.” This text came out of The Color of New Media working group at the University of California at Berkeley and the contributors come from a variety of academic backgrounds and disciplines, making this a particularly interdisciplinary approach to considering and understanding a wide variety of social movements, social engagement, political discourse, and active use of hashtagging and Twitter. The chapters include examinations of the global use of Twitter in India and Africa; the rise of and then subsequent response/backlash to black Twitter; and the way that Twitter has been used to target minoritarian groups who have established connections and communities via Twitter and social media. This is a fascinating and diverse book, bringing together different voices, studies, and analysis, all examining how Twitter and #hashtagging has grown up, evolved, and essentially provided a platform for political rhetoric, engagement, and also silencing. #identity will appeal to scholars in many different disciplines including sociology, political science, media studies, gender and women’s studies, Queer studies, postcolonial studies, African-American Studies, American Studies, global studies, and more.

This book is available open access here.

Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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Scott Wallace, "The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes" (Broadway Books, 2012)

3 juni 2019 | 36 min

Kerim Yasar, "Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945" (Columbia UP, 2018)

28 maj 2019 | 92 min

Gökçe Günel, "Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi" (Duke UP, 2019)

24 maj 2019 | 45 min

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 fiction, but in Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), Gökçe Günel explores the United Arab Emirates’s planned Masdar City, an experimental attempt at designing an emissions-free society. The first parts of Masdar City opened beside the Abu Dhabi airport in 2010 as an oil-wealth funded initiative to establish the UAE as a leader in the renewable energy sector and to begin to prepare the emirates for a low or post-oil economy. Masdar attracted students and researchers from around the world to test, and be test subjects, for innovations including personal rapid transit, energy currencies, carbon capture and storage, and closed-loop resource circuits. Quickly, however, the master plan was abandoned as unworkable; but Masdar City has also not been a failure. Rather, Günel explores the interconnected social, technical, and political ramifications and adaptations involved in this attempt to design a potential fossil fuel-free future. She shrewdly criticizes the limitations of climate change strategies intended to protect the political economic status quo. Yet also, through deep ethnographic fieldwork with participants, Günel demonstrates the valuable role of anthropological insight in social and technological adaptations to a changing climate.

Gökçe Günel is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Martin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

23 maj 2019 | 53 min

Heike Bauer, "The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture" (Temple UP, 2017)

23 maj 2019 | 43 min

F. Grillo and R. Nanetti, "Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

22 maj 2019 | 41 min

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, 2019). Despite the title, it is not strictly a book on China or Italy. It is a visionary contribution to both economics and political theory that reflects on the crisis of the West and the paradoxical success of China.

Is democracy still the best political regime for countries to adapt to economic and technological pressures and increase their level of prosperity? While the West seems to have stagnated in an environment of political mistrust, increasing inequality and low growth, the rise of the East has shown that it may not be liberal democracy that is best at accommodating the social mutations that technologies have triggered.

The cases of China and Italy form the research focus as two extremes in growth performance. China is the star of globalisation in the East, while Italy is the laggard of globalisation in the West and a laboratory of creeping political meltdown now shared by other major Western economies. But is this forever? Introducing the ‘innovation paradox’ as the main challenge to the West and the notion of ‘knowledge democracy’ as key to sustainable growth, this book presents a new side to the debate on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or fifth as the authors argue). It is a vital reading for all those questioning what kind of democracy positively impacts innovation as the force whose speed and direction transforms societies and economies.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

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Matthew Hersch, "Inventing the American Astronaut" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

22 maj 2019 | 38 min

David Bissell, "Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities" (MIT Press, 2018)

20 maj 2019 | 65 min

Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019)

17 maj 2019 | 47 min

Diane Tober, "Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families" (Rutgers UP, 2019)

15 maj 2019 | 53 min

Raul Espejo, "Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions" (Routledge, 2019)

10 maj 2019 | 71 min

Karin Rosemblatt, "The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950" (UNC Press, 2018)

9 maj 2019 | 54 min

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 intellectuals, social and human scientists, and anthropologists applied their ethnographic field work on indigenous and Native American peoples on both sides of the Rio Grande to debates over race, national culture, and economic development. The book’s backdrop—the rise of populist movements and governments in both countries in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the onset of the Great Depression, and the instabilities of the interwar period in both countries—provides an excellent opportunity to explore how scientific thought inflected the social construction of race and influenced policy in the Americas. Rosemblatt’s transnational methodology moves beyond accepting race in terms of comparison by tackling the longstanding notion that race and racial categories tended to be more fluid in Latin America and more rigid in the U.S. She shows how figures such as Manuel Gamio, John Collier, and Laura Thompson participated in transnational scholarly networks where the relationship between indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities to culture and nationalism was questioned and debated. In highlighting these collaborations, she shows how Latin American expertise on indigenous peoples bestowed political capital to social scientists for developing indigenous policies in Mexico, and unexpectedly, the United States in the case of Collier and the “Indian New Deal.” The books firm commitment to taking seriously these scholars’ ideas and social contexts allows it to see the limitations of seemingly pseudoscientific or racist paradigms and the ways fieldwork forced them to rethink their own notions of backwardness and civilization.

Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Clayton Whisnant, "Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945" (Harrington Park Press, 2016)

8 maj 2019 | 69 min

Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019)

7 maj 2019 | 42 min

Peter Daou, "Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace" (Melville House, 2019)

6 maj 2019 | 44 min

Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019)

2 maj 2019 | 56 min

Nikolai Krementsov, "With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia" (Open Book Publishers, 2018)

2 maj 2019 | 82 min

Crystal Abidin, "Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online" (Emerald Publishing, 2018)

29 april 2019 | 50 min

James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016)

24 april 2019 | 69 min

Christof Spieler, "Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit" (Island Press, 2018)

22 april 2019 | 49 min

Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019)

19 april 2019 | 47 min

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 Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk.

Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Emily Dawson, "Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups" (Routledge, 2019)

18 april 2019 | 50 min

Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018)

18 april 2019 | 53 min

Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

17 april 2019 | 51 min

Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

4 april 2019 | 48 min

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 Walgreens. In his excellent new book The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Robert A. Voeks explains that while rainforests may indeed have much to offer in the way of medically useful compounds, the fanfare for tropical miracle medicines and superfoods has been largely in err, counterproductive, and at times prejudicial.

The jungle medicine narrative – the idea that indigenous shamans of the virgin rainforst hold the antidotes to many of humankind’s most pernicious woes – grew widespread in the 1970s after childhood leukemia was all but cured with the Madagascar periwinkle. But the subsequent efforts of pharmaceutical companies to accelerate innovation through bioprospecting had a much deeper historical precedent. Christopher Columbus earmarked West Indian medicinal plants on his first voyage and European imperialists attempted to more systematically appropriate native medical knowledge though the Enlightenment. By tracing this long colonial history, Voeks emphasizes that the hype of the last 50 years has been mostly just that; rather than reflecting the advancement of science, the jungle medicine narrative derives instead from racial ideologies in which indigenous peoples are associated with wild, virgin nature. It is little surprise, then, that blockbuster drugs have proven allusive. If the profits of appropriating medical knowledge have been overblown, so too, writes Voeks, has been the criticism. Examples of exploitative biopiracy can be found, but these are exceptions in what are mostly more complex and dynamic interactions between researchers and healers.

We have much to gain from abandoning the jungle medicine narrative. Without its simplicities, stereotypes, and essentialisms perhaps we can come to a better appreciation the variety of ways that humans make knowledge about the natural world and without its promises of panaceas perhaps we can better understand how this knowledge has and can yet sustain communities in the face of environmental and political changes.

Robert A. Voeks is Professor of Geography and the Environment at California State University, Fullerton.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Tom Wheeler, "From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future" (Brookings, 2019)

27 mars 2019 | 59 min

Tina Sikka, "Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable" (Springer, 2019)

21 mars 2019 | 42 min

Michael C. Desch, "Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security" (Princeton UP, 2019)

19 mars 2019 | 27 min

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing

19 mars 2019 | 32 min

Gregory Dawes, "Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science" (Routledge, 2016)

18 mars 2019 | 47 min

Kartik Hosanagar, "A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives" (Viking, 2019)

12 mars 2019 | 56 min

Kate Ervine, "Carbon" (Polity, 2018)

12 mars 2019 | 51 min

David Colander and Craig Freedman, "Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2018)

11 mars 2019 | 43 min

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 where theoretical abstractions about human behavior (generally but not exclusively about or derived from economics) have been turned into specific and often highly rigid and mechanistic policy guidelines. That's the Chicago model. In Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism(Princeton University Press, 2018), David Colander and Craig Freedman track the transition from the great Classical economists, who went to great lengths to make clear that their abstractions had little direct relevance to policy or would-be policy, to the 20th-century giants at the University of Chicago (Friedman, Stigler, Director), who found themselves responding to aggressive claims from other economists engaged in policy and politics, as well the broader context of ideological challenges to the free market system championed in the West. Their answer was a robust defense of the market and rejection of government involvement in almost all human affairs.

Colander and Freedman stay more or less neutral on the ideology; their topic is the methodology. Is abstract economic thought fit for specific policy application or not? John Stuart Mill thought not. David Ricardo and Adam Smith engaged the issue. The Chicago School said sure to policy prescriptions, especially if they countered government involvement championed by economists of different leanings. Whether or not you are an admirer of the Chicago model, you will want to make sure you understand the methodological transition that brought their Ivory Tower views into your everyday affairs.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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Rick Van Noy, "Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

8 mars 2019 | 50 min

Emily Baum, "The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

8 mars 2019 | 67 min

James Schwoch, "Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier" (U Illinois Press, 2018)

6 mars 2019 | 51 min

Thomas F. Gieryn, "Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe" (U Chicago, 2018)

5 mars 2019 | 64 min

Michael Ruse, "The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2018)

5 mars 2019 | 58 min

Trent MacNamara, "Birth Control and American Modernity: A History of Popular Ideas" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

4 mars 2019 | 53 min

Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

26 februari 2019 | 61 min

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 the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.

Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.

Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.

A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

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Joy Lisi Rankin, "A People’s History of Computing in the United States" (Harvard UP, 2018).

19 februari 2019 | 40 min

Jieun Baek, "North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society" (Yale UP, 2016)

12 februari 2019 | 63 min

Peter Hotez, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

7 februari 2019 | 43 min

Adrienne Mayor, "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology" (Princeton UP, 2018)

6 februari 2019 | 42 min

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 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life―and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, “life through craft.” Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley.

In Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Dr. Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life and reveals how some of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth.

Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar in Classics and History and Philosophy of Science and Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is a folklorist and historian of ancient science who investigates natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions. Her research looks at ancient "folk science" precursors, alternatives, and parallels to modern scientific methods. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, the History Channel, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and National Geographic.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Matthew Longo, "The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

4 februari 2019 | 55 min

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 to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is not simply about the border because, as the book makes clear, borders are in no way simple, and what Longo has pursued in his work is the complexity that encompasses the theoretical idea of the border but also how and why borders are more diverse in understanding than we often ascribe to them. Longo interrogates what a border actually is, noting that the space itself is not quite the thin line between states that we often assume it to be, but a physical area that is co-administered by bordering nations, often collaboratively, thus blurring the line or space of sovereignty. Threaded throughout the book is the ongoing question of what constitutes citizenship, since borders and citizenship are braided together though the structures of the state, and the considerations of who is and is not permitted membership within a state. Longo has also included a substantial exploration of the role of technology and data in the actual understanding of how border security works in practice. This section of the analysis is particularly important to consider because, according to Longo, the focus on the individual and their data profile, shifts the understanding of state sovereignty and the responsibility for definitions of citizenship. This book is incredibly topical in a variety of areas, not least in the way that it contributes to our thinking about the border itself as a space and as a concept, the role of the state, and the growing domain of data and technology and how they are shaping ideas of citizenship.

This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj.

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John Torpey, "The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental" (Rutgers UP, 2017)

30 januari 2019 | 32 min

Jan English-Lueck, "Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition" (Stanford UP, 2017)

28 januari 2019 | 67 min

Is Social Media Killing Democracy? with Regina Rini

22 januari 2019 | 35 min

Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017)

11 januari 2019 | 62 min

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 Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise (University of California Press, 2017), Nicholas Bauch explores the digestive system as a sociomaterial landscape developed from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as run by Dr. John Kellogg. Bauch wants to focus less on Kellogg the man, but rather on Kellogg’s ability to enroll actants (a la Latour) in his geographical digestive network. Kellogg’s religious background as a Seventh-Day Adventist, and his scientific and medical training, made purity and cleanliness his central goals at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Responding to the social and personal problems of indigestion and stagnation, Kellogg instituted a regime of tests, procedures and strict dieting (amongst other restrictions) to cure such prevalent ills. Kellogg thought that natural food was too impure a diet, so instead he turned to highly processed foods as developed in his experimental kitchen, which incidentally was how the first cereal flakes were made. Even with such plain and processed dieting, Kellogg found the human digestive system unable to process substances efficiently on its own. This problem led Kellogg to conceptualize an extended digestive system by developing a sewage system. Eventually, Kellogg became reliant upon industrial farming in rural Michigan. New developments in industrial equipment, such as grain-threshing machines, and industrial chemicals, to enrich the soil, provided a relatively clean and efficient food production process to fulfill the sanitarium’s needs. Before his death, Kellogg thus purified the nature/culture binary of food in favor of scientific approach, and engineered a collective digestive system across Battle Creek and nearby areas.

While some of Kellogg’s ideas seem antiquarian to today’s standards, Bauch makes a compelling argument for why we can see Kellogg’s paradoxical influence on today’s US food production and consumption. While Kellogg railed against the dominant “natural” cuisine of his day in favor of a new approach to processed foods, the new food movements of today are decidedly critical of processed foods; while Kellogg wanted zero bacteria in the gut, today there are numerous products that are probiotics. What the new food movements gain from Kellogg is not his precise views, but rather his focus on the gut and the potential medicinal properties of food.

A Geography of Digestion presents not only a geographical history, but a methodology for exploring sociomaterial processes as landscapes for future researchers to use in other contexts. As such, scholars interested in the relation between science and space, food studies, and materialist approaches to the body will find much use of this recently published work.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters" (MIT Press, 2018)

8 januari 2019 | 57 min

Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, "The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms" (MIT Press, 2017)

8 januari 2019 | 52 min

Julian Gill-Peterson, "Histories of the Transgender Child" (U Minnesota Press, 2018)

8 januari 2019 | 64 min

Lindsey Fitzharris, "The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine" (Scientific American, 2017)

7 januari 2019 | 48 min

Paul A. Offit, "Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural" (Harper, 2014)

28 december 2018 | 52 min

Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

27 december 2018 | 60 min

Perrin Selcer, "The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment" (Columbia UP, 2018)

24 december 2018 | 67 min

Pamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

24 december 2018 | 53 min

Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

19 december 2018 | 44 min

Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018)

17 december 2018 | 69 min

Mark Rice, "Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru" (UNC Press, 2018)

11 december 2018 | 65 min

Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France" (Yale UP, 2018)

6 december 2018 | 56 min

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)

6 december 2018 | 64 min

Alireza Doostdar, "The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny" (Princeton UP, 2018)

5 december 2018 | 62 min

Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018)

3 december 2018 | 56 min

Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

28 november 2018 | 60 min

Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve” (UNC Press, 2018)

21 november 2018 | 38 min

Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

21 november 2018 | 62 min

Steven Shaviro, “Discognition” (Repeater Books, 2016)

20 november 2018 | 68 min

Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, “A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

13 november 2018 | 43 min

David P. Barash, “Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are” (Oxford UP, 2018)

13 november 2018 | 82 min

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. Barash calls this viewpoint a persistent paradigm of our own unique self-importance and argues that it is as dangerous as it is false. In his recent book, Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Barash explores the process by which science has, throughout time, cut humanity “down to size,” and how we have responded. A good paradigm is a tough thing to lose, especially when its replacement leaves us feeling vulnerable and less important.

Barash models his argument around a set of “old” and “new” paradigms that define humanity’s place in the universe. The new emerge from provocative revelations about whether human beings are well designed, whether the universe has somehow been established with our species in mind (the so-called anthropic principle), whether life itself is inherently fragile, whether Homo sapiens might someday be genetically combined with other species, and what this means for our self-image. Rather than seeing ourselves through a glass darkly, as he puts it, science enables us to perceive our strengths and weaknesses brightly and accurately at last, so that paradigms lost become wisdom gained. The result is a bracing, remarkably hopeful view of who we really are.

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Washington. He has written more than 280 peer-reviewed articles and nearly 40 books in addition to penning numerous op-eds in the LA Times, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other highly recognizable titles. He’s joined me today to talk about his latest book …

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Andrew C. A. Elliott, “Is That a Big Number?” (Oxford UP, 2018)

9 november 2018 | 53 min

Anindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader” (Academic Studies Press, 2018)

8 november 2018 | 43 min

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 second half of the 20th century. In her introduction to this volume, Anindita Banerjee outlines the specificity of Russian science fiction literature and cinema and emphasizes transformative effects produced and trigged by the launch of Sputnik in 1957: “Sputnik’s impact—crossing the boundaries of private life and public culture, domestic enthusiasm and international curiosity, technological spectacle and participatory entertainment, contemporary aspirations and historical visions, and, last but not least, the diverse media of print, film, radio, and television—played an instrumental role in transforming science fiction from Russia into a serious object of study” (xii). Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema presents science fiction not only in terms of aesthetic inspirations and experimentations, but also in terms of political contestations and existential crises. When developing in the context of the Soviet supervision, science fiction acquired an ambiguous status: on the one hand, this genre was maintained and encouraged through state decisions; on the other hand, it was controlled and suppressed. As Anindita Banerjee argues, in the Soviet Union science fiction was some kind of an outlet for ideological and political discontents: keeping this genre under supervision was strategic for maintaining some visibility of otherness. The critical reader edited by Anindita Banerjee attempts to embrace multiple ambiguities of science fiction literature and cinema and to outline ethic and aesthetic proliferations that invite the reconsideration of the relationships of self and other.

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Raymond Boyle, “The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways” (Palgrave, 2018)

6 november 2018 | 40 min

Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

5 november 2018 | 57 min

Mike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear” (MIT Press, 2018)

5 november 2018 | 44 min

J. Obert, A. Poe, A. Sarat, eds., “The Lives of Guns” (Oxford UP, 2018)

1 november 2018 | 34 min

Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, “Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics” (Naval Institute Press, 2018)

31 oktober 2018 | 53 min

Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management” (Harvard UP, 2018)

31 oktober 2018 | 39 min

N. M. Sambaluk, “The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security” (Naval Institute Press, 2015)

29 oktober 2018 | 87 min

Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

22 oktober 2018 | 59 min

Lee Humphreys, “The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life” (MIT Press, 2018)

19 oktober 2018 | 27 min

Wade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018)

18 oktober 2018 | 41 min

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 stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.

The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. The series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction.

It’s the first time Roush, who hosts the podcast Soonish and specializes in writing about science and technology, has edited fiction. “The mission of Twelve Tomorrows is to highlight stories that are totally plausible from an engineering point of view,” Roush says.

In “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafur explores how suspicion of new technology can have real life consequences. In this case, plotters against the reformist president of Nigeria try to muster support for a coup by manipulating fears about the president’s new artificial heart, claiming that the organ—which was grown in a Chinese laboratory from plant cells—is powered by witchcraft.

In “The Woman Who Destroyed Us,” SL Huang describes the plight of a mother who wants to exact revenge on a doctor who used deep brain stimulation to treat her son’s behavioral and mental health issues. The changes in her son are so dramatic that the mother feels she’s lost her child, and yet the son is happy with the result, feeling that the treatment has revealed his true self.

If there’s one message Roush hopes readers take from the collection, it’s that people are in the driver’s seat when it comes to building and using new technologies. He hopes the book reminds people “that we do have the power to adopt or shun technology, that we can decide how to bring it into our lives, to what extent we want to use it or not use it. We can even influence the way innovation happens. We can tell scientists and engineers, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough’ or ‘We’re worried about this. We want you to build in more safeguards.’… We have that power.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe.

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Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

17 oktober 2018 | 71 min

Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017)

15 oktober 2018 | 67 min

Rachel Z. Arndt, “Beyond Measure” (Sarabande Books, 2018)

12 oktober 2018 | 31 min

Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018)

11 oktober 2018 | 64 min

Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018)

11 oktober 2018 | 55 min

Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018)

9 oktober 2018 | 41 min

Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

5 oktober 2018 | 42 min

Peter Harries-Jones, “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference” (Fordham UP, 2016)

4 oktober 2018 | 65 min

Byron Reese, “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity” (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

4 oktober 2018 | 73 min

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 technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language; 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare; and 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state. He tells us that we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. His book provides an essential background on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing, such as machine consciousness, automation, changes in employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity.

By asking questions like “Are you a machine?” and “Could a computer feel anything?”, Reese cultivates discussion at the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age and how they’ll transform humanity.

Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the industry-leading technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. He has spent the better part of his life exploring the interplay of technology with human history. Reese has patents, obtained and pending, in disciplines as varied as crowdsourcing, content creation, and psychographics. The websites he has launched, which cover the intersection of technology, business, science, and history, have together received over a billion visitors and he is author of the acclaimed book, Infinite Progress: How Technology and the Internet Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty, and War. He joins me today to talk about his new book, The Fourth Age.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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

3 oktober 2018 | 43 min

P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

2 oktober 2018 | 50 min

Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017)

25 september 2018 | 71 min

Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science” (UNC Press, 2017)

18 september 2018 | 39 min

Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)

13 september 2018 | 34 min

Rebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018)

10 september 2018 | 54 min

Megan Ward, “Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character” (OSU Press, 2018)

7 september 2018 | 35 min

N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs, eds., “Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War” (Routledge, 2017)

5 september 2018 | 122 min

G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

29 augusti 2018 | 35 min

Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017)

23 augusti 2018 | 89 min

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 boxes. She has spent years treating and disentangling why chronic (and particularly auto-inflammatory) conditions seem to be on the rise in kids. She argues that toxicants in our food supply (from pesticides to genetically modified crops) is a major culprit. In What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017), Dr. Perro teams up with medical anthropologist Vincanne Adams, PhD, to explore the complex history of the agrochemical industry and the challenges in studying and regulating the human and health impacts of pesticides, herbicides and agricultural biotechnology. Together, they link case studies of Dr. Perro’s patients to the bigger story of how our foods have potentially also become poisons.

Michelle Perro, MD is a pediatrician with over thirty-five years of experience in acute and integrative medicine. Previously, she attended at New York’s Metropolitan Hospital and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, as well as managing her own practice, Down to Earth Pediatrics. She is currently lecturing and consulting as well as working with Gordon Medical Associates, an integrative health center in Northern California.

Vincanne Adams, PhD is professor and vice-chair of Medical Anthropology, in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has published six books on the social dynamics and politics of health and scientific knowledge including, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (2013), and Metrics: What Counts in Global Health (2016). She is currently editor for Medical Anthropology Quarterly, the flagship journal for the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanaGfield.

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Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018)

17 augusti 2018 | 51 min

Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” (MIT Press, 2017)

15 augusti 2018 | 23 min

Yves Citton, “The Ecology of Attention” (Polity Press, 2017)

13 augusti 2018 | 71 min

Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018)

9 augusti 2018 | 50 min

Casey Walsh, “Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico” (U California Press, 2018).

2 augusti 2018 | 57 min

Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

31 juli 2018 | 37 min

Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016)

27 juli 2018 | 42 min

Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic” (UNC Press, 2017).

24 juli 2018 | 53 min

David Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social Change” (Chelsea Green, 2015)

20 juli 2018 | 47 min

Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018)

18 juli 2018 | 44 min

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 wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of these potent chemicals from a basement filled with jarred nineteenth-century brains to a twenty-first-century hormone clinic in Los Angeles.

Brimming with fascinating anecdotes, illuminating new medical research, and humorous details, Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018) introduces the leading scientists who made life-changing discoveries about the hormone imbalances that ail us, as well as the charlatans who used those discoveries to peddle false remedies. Epstein exposes the humanity at the heart of hormone science with her rich cast of characters, including a 1920s doctor promoting vasectomies as a way to boost libido, a female medical student who discovered a pregnancy hormone in the 1940s, and a mother who collected pituitaries, a brain gland, from cadavers as a source of growth hormone to treat her son. Along the way, Epstein explores the functions of hormones such as leptin, oxytocin, estrogen, and testosterone, demystifying the science of endocrinology.

A fascinating look at the history and science of some of medicine’s most important discoveries, Aroused reveals the shocking history of hormones through the back rooms, basements, and labs where endocrinology began.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at [email protected].

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Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg” (Princeton UP, 2018)

18 juli 2018 | 56 min

Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

16 juli 2018 | 68 min

Ari Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body” (Duke UP, 2018)

10 juli 2018 | 47 min

Gary Bruce, “Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo” (Oxford UP, 2017)

9 juli 2018 | 60 min

Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

4 juli 2018 | 48 min

Christopher G. White, “Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions” (Harvard UP, 2018)

4 juli 2018 | 81 min

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 epistemologies are so divergent that they espouse radically diverse ways of perceiving reality. However, this a rather reductive approach to what is ultimately a complex and nuanced intellectual relationship. Indeed, throughout human history the technological and supernatural, the scientific and the spiritual have repeatedly interacted, informing each other’s respective discourses and reinventing themselves based on encounters with new ideas. In the nineteenth century, when a period of sustained and rapid scientific advancement transformed the human understanding of the universe, new discoveries about the invisible forces that shaped our lives – from the electromagnetic spectrum to soundwaves and the subatomic universe – encouraged many to believe that the invisible realm of the supernatural could be similarly understood through recourse to scientific principles and methodologies.

It is this intersection of the scientific and the supernatural that forms the basis of Christopher G. White’s exciting new publication, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions. Published in 2018 by Harvard University Press, Other Worlds offers a unique insight into the relationship between religion and scientific thought at a time of rapid social, cultural and intellectual change. In the book, White focuses primarily on the imaginative power and pervasive influence of one key scientific concept: the possibly that the universe might hold within it unseen, higher dimensions. Over the course of his study, White analyses how a host of diverse individuals and groups – from scientists and mathematicians to writers, artists and even televangelists – have appropriated the notion of higher dimensions in order to explore, rationalise and explain supernatural phenomena. White maintains that rather than undermining religious beliefs, new scientific ideas, particularly those derived from physics, provided the faithful with a new framework for conceptualising the divine. Undertaking a comprehensive survey of various scientific, spiritual and literary discourses on higher dimensions, White moves from nineteenth-century treatises by Edwin Abbott and C. Howard Hinton to late twentieth-century science-fiction texts like A Wrinkle in Time and The Twilight Zone. In doing so, White shows how rather than opposing intellectual factions, science and spirituality have long been intertwined, with the scientific often providing individuals with new and engaging ways to imagine religious spaces and concepts.

Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture. She blogs about literature and popular culture HERE and can also be found on Twitter.

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Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India” (Harvard UP, 2018)

29 juni 2018 | 50 min

Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records” (Beacon Press, 2017)

28 juni 2018 | 56 min

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 hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start.

Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain

Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanaGfield.

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Joy Rohde, “Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2013)

27 juni 2018 | 49 min

Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017)

27 juni 2018 | 42 min

Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017)

19 juni 2018 | 54 min

Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art” (Penn State UP, 2018)

14 juni 2018 | 61 min

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 (Penn State University Press, 2018) will change the way you think about the contents, forms, and significance of the palette of this critical moment in the history of modernity. Examining the impact of emergent color technologies on French visual culture and landscapes, Color in the Age of Impressionism includes, but moves beyond, a discussion of the works and colors of Impressionist artists to consider color theory, dye manufacture, flower cultivation and gardening culture, fireworks, chromolithographic reproduction and collecting, autochromes and neo-Impressionism. Along the way, this is a history of aesthetics, art, fashion, technical innovation, and the modern markets of hue, tone, contrast, harmony, and shade during the “color revolution” of the decades Kalba explores.

Approaching the history of color in the period with the archival passion and conceptual tools of the historian of visual culture, the book pushes past the discussion and prescription of taste to delve deeper into the social, economic, technological, political, and cultural history of color in a France in the throes of the emergence of a consumer and capitalist society divided by class and other differences. A “bottom-up” history of color, Color in the Age of Impressionism takes seriously the question: How did ordinary French men and women understand realism, abstraction, and fantasy during the decades of the emergence of a modernity that included a spectrum of visuality, imagination, and techniques of representation? A winner of The College Art Association’s 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, the study will be of great interest to anyone fascinated by the histories of art, looking, spectacle, culture, and everyday life in France in the decades before and after the fin-de-siècle.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected].

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

12 juni 2018 | 50 min

Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” (Princeton UP, 2018)

7 juni 2018 | 55 min

Larry Cuban, “The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning” (Harvard Education Press, 2018)

6 juni 2018 | 34 min

Hala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut” (Brill, 2016)

5 juni 2018 | 51 min

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 Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016) is not only a history of the American Protestant mission’s Arabic press in Beirut, which printed books for Ottoman readers during the 19th century, but a window into the world of Arabic printing at large. Auji uses art history to chart the transition between manuscripts and printed books, using a deep appreciation for Islamic art and book-production to highlight rupture and continuity. Text and non-textual elements are used to tell a story that was not local simply to Beirut, but had connections to the entire region and the development of printing in Arabic-language script at large. Part book-history, part art history, part intellectual history, Printing Arab Modernity ebbs between lithography and typography to tell an essential narrative of modern Middle Eastern history.

Hala Auji is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She holds a PhD in art history from Binghamton University, State University of New York, an MA in Art Criticism & Theory from Art Center College of Design, and a BFA in graphic design from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests include: Arabic book and print culture, 19th-century Islamic art and architecture and the| history of modern science in the Islamic world, amongst many more. She can also be found at https://www.halaauji.net/

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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Kyla Schuller, “The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century” (Duke UP, 2017)

1 juni 2018 | 58 min

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 feelings, Kyla Schuller sets up the central conflict of her book. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press, 2017) interrogates the role of sexual difference in the management of racialized populations, making this book a necessary read for understanding the history of such current social movements as Black Lives Matter and the trans* exclusionary “Pussy hat” feminism.

From the very beginning of the book, our conceptions of nineteenth-century science are challenged. For much of the century, many US scientists championed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck over Charles Darwin as their most prominent influence. In their quest to refute determinist theories of heredity, the neo-Lamarckians of the American School of Evolution advocated for a self-directed version of evolution. These scientists argued that Anglo-Saxons have the most adaptable features and impressionable heredity. This impressionability was what made Whites more sentimental and civilized than other races, who were not as impressionable and seen as largely stuck in a prior stage of progressivist evolution, according to E.D. Cope and the American School of Evolution. Whites were also seen as having greater sexual dimorphism than other races, while women of color were not seen as achieving true womanhood. Kyla therefore finds the origin of binary sex enveloped in racialized difference.

Beyond the subject of evolutionary science, this book introduces us to the Black uplift project of Frances Harper, the vagina politics of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Mary Walker, the biophilanthropy of Charles Loring Brace, and the assemblage theories of W.E.B. DuBois. The Biopolitics of Feeling is packed with interesting, and sometimes shocking, historical anecdotes, such as Walker’s sex advice book to men in 1878, E.D. Cope’s sometimes destructive and violent rivalry with O.C. Marsh, and the “orphan trains” that took two hundred thousand kids out West for educational and labor purposes. The breadth of this book shouldd be of interest to a number of scholars interested in the history of science, literature, and medicine. Meanwhile, Kyla’s engagement and challenge to New Materialist theories is likely to be canonical for future Feminist STS scholars.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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Eden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” (MIT Press, 2011)

1 juni 2018 | 65 min

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 president, Salvador Allende, the “father of management cybernetics” (as Norbert Wiener christened Beer) attempted nothing less than the development and implementation of a cybernetic governance system for Chile’s nationalized economy. For decades, we have relied solely on the writings of Beer and his associates for accounts of this amazing techno-political adventure but, thanks to Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, from the MIT press (originally published in 2011 and out in softcover in 2014), we now have a deeply researched scholarly investigation of this extraordinary historical moment in which Beer’s cybernetic Viable System Model was positioned as a tool to enable radical socialist transformation while remaining within Chile’s constitutional democratic framework. Medina deftly guides us through this astonishing odyssey as the utopian visionary Beer and his brilliant and inspired team of local collaborators, facing an invisible US led economic and technological blockade, craft a real-time communications network stretching the entire length of Chile out of two mainframe computers and a warehouse full of unused telex machines and which proves its mettle in response to a wildly disruptive US funded national truck drivers strike. Along the way, we meet a colorful cast of characters including doctor turned Marxist lightning rod, Salvador Allende, wily young political operator and future Silicon valley innovator, Fernando Flores, and of course, the wildly charismatic business guru turned leftist, new age quasi-mystic, Stafford Beer; all wrestling with the struggle to keep their emancipatory egalitarian project of distributed decision making and control from tipping over into centralized technocracy as the entire Chilean socialist project teeters towards its brutal and tragic ending. Seamlessly blending compelling storytelling and astute technological, political, and cultural analysis, Medina’s book stands as a penetrating look at an under-theorized political experiment and a detailed summary of its still hotly debated legacy.

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Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

29 maj 2018 | 56 min

Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015)

18 maj 2018 | 65 min

Jörg Matthias Determann, “Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories, and Nationalism in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2018)

11 maj 2018 | 61 min

Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017)

9 maj 2018 | 44 min

Mark A. McCutcheon, “The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology” (Athabasca UP, 2018)

3 maj 2018 | 79 min

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 Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology, published in 2018 by Athabasca University Press. In this unique and penetrating analysis, McCutcheon argues that Shelley’s 1818 novel essentially reinvented the word “technology” for the modern age, establishing its connections with ominous notions of manmade monstrosity. In the twentieth century, this monstrous, Frankensteinian conception of technology was globalized and popularized largely through Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and its numerous, diverse adaptations in Canadian popular culture. The Medium is the Monster establishes Frankenstein, and its various adaptations, as the originating intertext for a modern conceptualisation of technology that has manifested with a unique potency in Canadian pop culture, informing works as disparate as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the fiction of Margaret Atwood, and even electronic dance music. Furthermore, McCutcheon undertakes an incisive of analysis of how Frankensteinian constructions of technology have shaped real-world discussions of science and industry, an intertextual discourse which he sees as most powerfully encapsulated in the rhetoric associated with the Alberta tar sands industry.

Over the course of the interview, McCutcheon provides some fascinating insights into changing cultural attitudes towards technology, the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the novel’s relationship to McLuhan’s media theory, and the surprising scope of Shelley’s cultural impact.

Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture.

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B.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Back” (Curious Reads, 2017)

3 maj 2018 | 47 min

Sam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” (Little, Brown and Co., 2015)

26 april 2018 | 58 min

Aimi Hamraie, “Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability” (U Minnesota Press, 2017)

25 april 2018 | 44 min

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. In their new book, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Aimi Hamraie takes a “sledgehammer to history” in the spirit of one guerrilla activist group that they track in the archives—among many other people, objects, and historical contexts. Hamraie focuses on work around “access-knowledge”—that is, the forms of expertise that were considered legitimate ways of knowing and responding to disability through design. What has counted as legitimate access-knowledge, Hamraie argues, indicates designers’ goals: Was the aim of design to make productive workers, liberal consumers, or structures that materialized a commitment to spacial belonging? Who were the imagined users and how could new political priorities materialize in worlds already built? Answers to these questions made—and continue to remake—our material world and its frictions. Hamraie brings their training in feminist epistemology to never-before-accessed archival materials, along with an array of historical images and documents. The result is a persuasive, beautiful, and intrepidly researched book. Building Access torques received wisdom in disability studies, history of science, and architectural design, and models how to attend to research, writing, and publishing as a material practice.

Hamraie is Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health & Society, and Director of Vanderbilt’s Critical Design Lab.

This interview was a collective effort among Vanderbilt faculty and graduate students in the course New Approaches to STS. For more information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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David J. Silverman, “Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America” (Harvard UP, 2016)

24 april 2018 | 46 min

Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (UMass Press, 2018)

23 april 2018 | 60 min

“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 against the oppressors.” (Zimmerman, et al. 1972).

Following the 2014 conference, “Science for the People: The 1970s and Today,” Sigrid Schmalze r, Daniel Chard, and Alyssa Botelho, edited a volume of the Science for the People (SftP) movement, curating numerous documents from the group that are as relevant today as when they were published several decades ago. Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) encapsulates the diverse themes, research, and actions of the movement, which included chapters across the US at one time. Emerging from the radical political culture of the 1960s, and predecessor group, Scientists for Social and Political Action, SftP challenged the value-neutrality of science and technology, and instead sought to democratize science by engaging with other political movements and conducting research with non-experts. While much scientific research continues to be funded by the state or by corporations, SftP provided grassroots scientific and technological assistance and education in a multitude of settings. Just to take a few examples from the volume, these efforts included research for social movements, providing electrical power for a Black Panther free medical clinic, promoting the farming technique of intercropping, as well as distributing resources, literature and education to countries such as Vietnam and Nicaragua. The direction of assistance between SftP and other groups was rarely one-sided, as SftP members absorbed knowledge from other movements and places, as documented in the China: Science Walks on Two Legs selection, wherein several SftP members visited China and learned about some of the traditional science and peasant research conducted in the nation. In addition, through working groups and publications, SftP critiqued racist and sexist science, reductionist biology, nuclear power, weapons research, commercial agriculture, US imperialism, and much more. As their many articles and actions show, SftP did more than just critique mainstream science, they attempted to provide alternatives. Finally, SftP had a formative and lasting effect on Science and Technology Studies through its various studies on the social embeddedness of science and its political uses.

Since the 2014 conference, Science for the People has been revitalized through new efforts. Check out https://scienceforthepeople.org/ to see continued and original projects.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. Follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

20 april 2018 | 69 min

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 the Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Drawing upon nearly a hundred interviews including with genetic scientists, social scientists, activists, lawyers and policy makers, Reardon constructs an engaging story detailing accounts of genomic projects from several field sites around the globe. Beyond her ethnographic accounts, Reardon engages with historical antecedents, such as the infamous Tuskegee study and the following Belmont Report, as well as philosophical discussions and insights from the likes of Hannah Arendt and Jean François Lyotard. The result is a reconsideration of genomics in a society vexed by inequality, and a push toward matters of science and justice.

Following the completion of the Human Genome Project, many subsequent genomic related projects (such as the Human Genome Diversity Project, Generation Scotland, and personal genomic projects like 23andMe) had to quibble with issues over labor, interpretation, cost, consent, and diversity. While many well-intentioned scientists hoped to be more inclusive and rebuke activist claims of “genetic colonialism”, these attempts fell through, due in part to problems of consent, structural inequalities, and conflicting points of view between scientists and potential DNA donors regarding the meaning and value of the genome. Other projects, such as Generation Scotland, had to deal with rising cost, and industry push toward more computerized, automated sequencing. For genomic researchers and investors, automation means reduced labor and reduced human error; however, citing Arendt, Reardon argues that such automation could jeopardize the very acts of meaningful speech that bring matters of concern, like the genome, into being. Instead, we should engage with a plurality of stories and gatherings around such matters of care and justice as they may come to constitute a new common world, including a transformed genomic science.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, “Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies” (Georgetown UP, 2017)

18 april 2018 | 54 min

Susan M. Squier, “Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor” (Duke UP, 2017)

17 april 2018 | 46 min

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, graphics) that experts have created to understand development and to communicate without verbal language has shaped—and continues to affect—the worlds in which we live.

Squier’s book takes its title from a set of images from the embryologist C.H. Waddington, all meant to demonstrate his theory of how life developed—as a dynamic process emerging within multiple scales of time and space. The first Epigenetic Landscape was, literally, a landscape painting—thick and confounding—that Waddington commissioned from the artist John Piper. Over the next twenty years, Waddington created two additional images that suggested a less contextual, more individually focused conception of development.

In her creative and persuasive book, Susan Squier follows iterations of the Epigenetic Landscape to spotlight moments of contingency in the new field of epigenetics in the 1960s and 1970s, when scientists had opportunities to follow interdisciplinary approaches, to emphasize multiple scales of time and space, and to take seriously process-oriented knowledge that defied orthodoxies of molecular genetics. Squier argues that attending to visual rhetoric of scientific fields, especially development, is an inroad both to understanding the history of those fields, and to imagining possible, more feminist, futures. In doing so, Squier shows that ways of knowing that have been separated as either “art” or “science” interact more often than is appreciated, and those lines of connection serve as important creative resources. Heeding her own call for transdisciplinary approaches, three chapters document how the Epigenetic Landscape has been used not only into embryology but also landscape design and bioArt.

Squier is Brill Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her previous books include Liminal Lives and The Graphic Medicine Manifesto.

This interview was a collaborative effort among participants in the Vanderbilt graduate seminar, Social Studies of Science & Medicine. For information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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Thomas Morris, “The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations” (Thomas Dunne, 2018)

11 april 2018 | 63 min

Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s” (Columbia UP, 2018)

9 april 2018 | 62 min

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 Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018), is a fine-grained examination of the local reaction to the most serious accident in the history of U.S. nuclear energy. It is also a sweeping study of the construction of arguments for and against nuclear energy and atomic weapons from the end of the World War II to the present. Zaretsky follows that debate through a transformative six-year debate in central Pennsylvania, where conservative activists launched protests that drew heavily from the examples of environmentalism, the antiwar movement, second-wave feminism, the black freedom struggle, and black and women’s health activism. Yet rather than pushing them to the left, their fight with pronuclear forces in industry and government made them more conservative. They articulated an ethnonationalist argument about a threatened nation betrayed by its leaders and illustrated it with ecological images of the damaged bodies of mothers, babies, and the unborn. This “biotic nationalism” helped conservatives paint a convincing picture of the America of the 1970s and 1980s and remains potent today, as visible in the “Crippled America” described by Donald Trump.

Natasha Zaretsky is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of American Decline, 1968-1980 (UNC Press, 2007) and co-editor of Major Problems in U.S. History Since 1945 (4th ed., Cengage, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Women’s History, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Stephen Monteiro, “The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender” (MIT Press, 2017)

6 april 2018 | 28 min

Hanna Engelmeier, “Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900” (Bohlau, 2016)

2 april 2018 | 22 min

Alex Wade, “Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

23 mars 2018 | 50 min

Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

22 mars 2018 | 79 min

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 second-order systems theory to the analysis of literature and media more broadly. The staggering scope of Clarke’s multidisciplinary erudition is on full display in the monograph, Neocybernetics and Narrative, out from University of Minnesota Press in 2014. In picking up Niklas Luhmann’s neologism “neocybernetics” in place of a more standard second-order cybernetic label, Clarke carves out a theoretical continuum for his thinking that runs along a trajectory from Heinz von Foerster’s notions of the observer, through George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition, and right up to, and including, Niklas Luhmann’s controversial extension of autopoiesis theory to metabiotic social systems; a theoretical move most often excluded from more orthodox second-order cybernetic thinking. The formidable theoretical apparatus he has assembled allows Clarke to frame the reader of literary texts as an observer of semantic structures facilitating the psychic construction of possible worlds of meaning, and to examine literary texts themselves as forms of communicative action that continue the autopoiesis of meaning-constituted social systems along the lines of Luhmann’s tripartite process of information, utterance, and understanding. From this launch-pad, Clarke takes us on a stratospheric ride with stops on a variety of fascinating landscapes including the media theory of Friedrich Kittler, the socio-technical explorations of Bruno Latour, and encounters with artistic works as diverse as Virgina Woolf’s iconic modernist novel, Mrs. Dalloway and James Cameron’s quasi-Gaian special effects blockbuster motion picture, Avatar. As a result, Clarke has given arts and humanities scholars an entirely new set of tools with which to think about artistic production, reception, and mediation.

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Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 )

15 mars 2018 | 66 min

Anthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

6 mars 2018 | 53 min

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 the significant efforts of the field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, to distance cybernetics from military research and application, as well as the ethical stances of some of the field’s later leading lights such as Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Herbert Brun, Ranulph Glanville and Larry Richards, it should not be surprising if some contemporary cyberneticians might find the particular combination of words in the books title somewhat disconcerting. However, far from producing a strictly first-order technological study or strategic “how to” manual, Greek military officer Tsirigotis has carried out a decidedly second-order examination of the subject that supplants the mainstream assumption of cyberspace as a set of technologies with a notion of cyberspace as a set of social practices produced, and reproduced, autopoietically through what he calls “cyber discourse.” Grounded in notions of emergence and complexity and employing digital tools of corpus linguistics on policy documents from over the past seven decades, Tsirigotis traces the transformation of such notions as “security” and “threat” in British military circles. The result is a conception of the state, not as a particular bounded geographical region, but as a network of autopoietic social practices; and of a world in which such states do not seek to extinguish external threats through the deployment of hard military power but rather seek to use their networks to adapt to the constant presence of threats in their environment. Along the way, Tsirigotis provides a striking example of what a truly second-order social science, capable of engaging with all manner of social practices beyond the military sphere, might look like.

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Christopher J. Lee, “Jet Lag” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

27 februari 2018 | 50 min

Molly Wright Steenson, “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape” (MIT Press, 2017)

27 februari 2018 | 25 min

Jennifer Hart, “Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation” (Indiana UP, 2016)

23 februari 2018 | 60 min

Michael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018)

20 februari 2018 | 55 min

Howard I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017)

14 februari 2018 | 49 min

James Delbourgo, “Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane” (Allen Lane, 2017)

9 februari 2018 | 92 min

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 collection and last will laid the foundation for the British Museum, the first national, free, public museum.

For Delbourgo, Sloane was for far too long an overlooked figure, who knitted together the interests of a rising empire through methods of botany, natural history and medicine. Overshadowed in part by his counterpart Isaac Newton, Sloane’s life synchronizes with the changes from seventeenth-century England to eighteenth-century Britain. His life and the time are deeply interwoven with slavery and a new world of commerce. It was thanks to this interconnected world and the many intermediaries that Sloane managed to accumulate so many weird and wonderful objects from different places. He collected, catalogued, and exhibited them according to his own belief system, which centered around binaries of enlightenment versus superstition and sober empiricism versus magic.

More than anything, Delbourgo’s book reveals the complex lives and stories around Hans Sloane’s collection and the many different peoples, places and stories that are attached to the silent objects, even today. It raises important historical questions about ownership and authorship of public museums, collections and curatorial practices and makes them relevant for us today.

Ricarda Brosch is a museum assistant (trainee) at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. Her research focuses on Ming and Qing Chinese art & material culture, transcultural interchanges, especially with Timurid and Safavid Iran, as well as provenance research & digital humanities. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via [email protected].

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Andrew Keen, “How To Fix The Future” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018)

6 februari 2018 | 61 min

Nick Montfort, “The Future” (MIT, 2017)

29 januari 2018 | 33 min

Leo Coleman, “A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi” (Cornell UP, 2017)

19 januari 2018 | 53 min

Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017)

9 januari 2018 | 137 min

Liss C. Werner, “Cybernetics: State of the Art” (Tech Uni of Berlin Press, 2017)

9 januari 2018 | 77 min

Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015)

29 december 2017 | 60 min

Chelsea Schelly, “Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America” (Rutgers UP, 2017)

28 december 2017 | 34 min

Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017)

21 december 2017 | 58 min

Jason Josephson-Storm, “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” (U. Chicago, 2017)

21 december 2017 | 65 min

Alfie Bown, “The Playstation Dreamworld” (Polity, 2017)

20 december 2017 | 44 min

Zek Valkyrie, “Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline” (Praeger, 2017)

15 december 2017 | 56 min

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Personal Stereo” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

12 december 2017 | 36 min

Andrew S. Tompkins, “Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany” (Oxford UP, 2016)

28 november 2017 | 56 min

Michelle Murphy, “The Economization of Life” (Duke University Press, 2017)

27 november 2017 | 42 min

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, and, importantly, the lives it has failed to allow under the banner of postwar development projects. In the post-WWII period of decolonization, experts and state planners in the Global North tested in the real-world the hypotheses of Demographic Transition Theory (industrialization leads to few births which leads to “better” lives). In doing so, they repackaged the racist logic of earlier eugenicist definitions of population in the postwar period by harnessing the concept of population, not to environmental limits, but to economic optimization. Murphy show how this postwar “regime of valuation” played out on the ground through an extended study of population management and family planning projects in Bangladesh. Murphy’s work—which combines a new history of the population concept with an original study of lives lived (and not lived) in Bangladesh—demonstrates her broader point: namely that seemingly abstract, large scale elements of late-capitalist infrastructures of industrial production depend upon emotional, affective sensibilities about sex and reproduction.

By telling a history of expert concepts of population, the infrastructures that perform it, the affects that pulse through it, and forms of life it continues to produce and prevent, Michelle Murphy invites readers to speculate towards other worlds—and other words. Murphy teaches us why population is an “intolerable concept” and she does the work of imagining other, more just, more apt words we might use in place of “population.” She suggests that her term “distributed reproduction” might help shift our attention, our thinking, and our practices towards more emancipatory collective responses and responsibilities—given our own existence as part of infrastructures of racism and violence.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University and is Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. Laura’s first book, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research, was published in 2012 by University of Chicago Press. Her current research explores how a market for healthy civilian “human subjects” emerged in law, science, and popular imagination in the post-World War Two period. It is based on a vernacular archive she created with more than 100 “normal control” research subjects and scientists who took part in postwar experiments at the US National Institutes of Health, now archived at Countway Library for the History of Medicine. Overall, Stark’s work uses social theory to map the intersections of science, morality and the modern state in a global context.

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Douglas Hunter, “The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (UNC, 2017)

30 oktober 2017 | 51 min

Michael Wintroub, “The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World” (Cambridge UP, 2017)

4 oktober 2017 | 58 min

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 Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a must read. Simply put, this is a book that will lead you down a path of wonder, and possibly, saddle you with a good head scratch. However, no one ever said that an itch near the cranium translates to feeling lousy; in this instance, what we have here is a richly researched and thought-provoking (no pun intended) piece of scholarship.

Wintroub, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, is interested in how ideas that are commonplace today (like information-gathering, expertise, confidence, scale, and replication) originated over four centuries ago. This is the story of two brothers who were tasked with a monumental, trail-blazing journey from their home in Dieppe, France all the way to Sumatra. How did two humanist ship captains prepare? What did they find along the way in their search for pepper, glory, and God? Part science, part poetry, part architecture, part mind job, this book probes the notion that physical and mental spaces can be traversed if we ask the right questions.

Furthermore, through a connected history that cleverly interprets a letter from an eighty-year-old sailor, snatches the magnifying glass to reconstruct events on a beach in the Indian Ocean, focuses the microscope on a frieze in France, and backs the telescope off from the inner workings of the astrolabe, in this installment of New Books in Science you are in for a tour that will enliven the senses and tug on the heart.

J.N. Campbell is an independent scholar and writer in Houston, Texas. He is the co-author with Steven M. Rooney of How Aspirin Entered Our Medicine Cabinet (Springer, 2017). They have a second book entitled, Numb: A Chemical History of Opioid Epidemic, which is due out in 2018. He has written for the International Journal of the History of Sport, Reviews in History, and is a featured writer for Good Grit Magazine. After receiving an M.A. in History from the University of Kentucky, he fashions himself as a life-long student of history.

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Vincent J. Intondi, “African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement” (Stanford UP, 2015)

3 oktober 2017 | 33 min

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 activists who fought for nuclear disarmament by connecting the nuclear issue with the fight for racial equality. Early on, blacks in America saw the use of atomic bombs as a racial issue, asking why such enormous resources were being spent building nuclear arms instead of being used to improve impoverished communities. Black activists’ fears that race played a role in the decision to deploy atomic bombs only increased when the U.S. threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam a decade later. For some, the nuclear issue was connected to colonialism the U.S. obtained uranium ore used to produce fissile material from the Belgian controlled Congo and the French tested their nuclear weapons in the Sahara.

By expanding traditional research in the history of the nuclear disarmament movement the author reveals the links between the black freedom movement in America and issues of global peace. From Langston Hughes through Lorraine Hansberry to President Obama, African Americans Against the Bomb offers an eye-opening account of the continuous involvement of African Americans who recognized that the rise of nuclear weapons was a threat to the civil rights of all people.

Author Vincent Intondi is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Race, Justice, and Community Engagement at Montgomery College, and formerly the Director of Research for American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute. His academic research focuses on the intersection of race and nuclear weapons. In 2016, Intondi began working with the Union of Concerned Scientists exploring new efforts to expand the nuclear disarmament movement to include more diverse voices, specifically from the black community. Beyond African Americans Against the Bomb, Intondi is currently working on a new book project, which will examine the famous June 12, 1982 nuclear disarmament march in New York City.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at [email protected].

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Brian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives” (Icon Books, 2017)

19 september 2017 | 55 min

Allison Perlman, “Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television” (Rutgers UP, 2016)

11 september 2017 | 53 min

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 trying to influence television’s portrayal of those values by securing access to and a voice in the medium. Allison Perlman‘s Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television (Rutgers University Press, 2016) examines some these efforts, including those among African Americans, women, and parents among others, between the 1940s and the early 2000s. Perlman, an associate professor of film and media students and history at the University of California, Irvine, thus, shows that media law and regulation was an important site of debate and activism. Social activists recognized television’s power and that ensuring their own views, voices, and identities were represented on the screen could be influential in promoting their cause. Both conservative and liberal activists worked hard to use existing laws to shape television ownership and programing. In the process, activists also worked to shape the definition of the public and weighed in on questions surrounding how to define and promote the “public interest,” as required by law. By the 1980s, deregulation reshaped the landscape, but did not end the importance of the arena for activists.

In this episode of New Books in History, Perlman discusses Public Interests and this history of media advocacy. She tells listeners about some of these social activists’ campaigns to influence FCC policies nationally as well as about more localized efforts to shape television programing. She also explains why these battles were important in shaping the broadcasting environment even if they did not always achieve their stated goal. She discusses the importance of deregulation in later media regulation advocacy. Perlman makes clear that a simple declension story is inaccurate even in this later period and discusses these battles’ continued relevance today.

Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected].

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Iwan Rhys Morus, ed.,”The Oxford Illustrated History of Science” (Oxford UP, 2017)

7 september 2017 | 59 min

Nicholas C. Kawa, “Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, and Forests” (U. Texas Press, 2016)

5 september 2017 | 27 min

Ron Edwards, “The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau” (Oxford UP, 2016)

25 augusti 2017 | 57 min

Eric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017)

2 augusti 2017 | 55 min

David Beer, “Metric Power” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

2 augusti 2017 | 34 min

Claire D. Clark, “The Recovery Revolution” (Columbia UP, 2017)

28 juli 2017 | 66 min

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 illness. The trouble was that doctors had no effective way to treat drug addiction. Their best idea–Federal “narcotics farms,” one in Kentucky and one in Texas–kept junkies clean, but only by keeping them away from the drugs those junkies craved. In that sense, they were no more effective than prisons, though in fairness drug farms offered various treatment regimens that enabled some addicts to get and stay clean. Other than locking them up, the medical establishment had no good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?” Essentially, then, junkies (who could not spontaneously “kick,” and a lot do) usually ended up in one of three places: on the street, behind bars, or dead.

Enter Charles Dederich. In 1958, Dederich, a veteran of AA and ex-drug addict, decided that addicts should take their treatment into their own hands, much like Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had done with AA in the late 1930s. He took what he learned in AA, adapted it, and created a long-term residential “therapeutic community” expressly for addicts and run by addicts. He called it Synanon, and with it he started what Claire D. Clark calls “the recovery revolution.”

In her terrific book, The Recovery Revolution: The Battle Over Addiction Treatment in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2017), Clark tells the story of Dederich and those who followed him (literally and chronologically) in trying to find a way to treat narcotics addiction. It’s a tale of ebbs and flows, successes and failures, enthusiasm and exhaustion lasting sixty years. Clark makes clear that the “recovery revolution” is not over by any means–we are still groping toward a good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?”

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Simone Muller, “Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks” (Columbia UP, 2016)

10 juli 2017 | 55 min

Melvin R. Adams, “Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation” (Washington State University Press, 2016)

10 juli 2017 | 60 min

Thomas Hazlett, “The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology” (Yale UP, 2017)

30 juni 2017 | 46 min

Brian Clegg, “The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe” (Icon Books, 2017)

29 juni 2017 | 52 min

Neil M. Maher, “Apollo in the Age of Aquarius” (Harvard UP, 2017)

20 juni 2017 | 53 min

Beau Lotto, “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently” (Hatchette Books, 2017)

30 maj 2017 | 47 min

Britt Rusert, “Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture” (NYU Press, 2017)

26 maj 2017 | 46 min

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, 2017), uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. The author chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims.

Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields–from astronomy to physiology–to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture.

Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on African American literature, American literatures to 1900, speculative fiction, the history of race and science, U.S. print cultures, and critical theory. She is currently working on a book-length research study of William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. She is also editing W.E.B. Du Bois short genre fiction with scholar Adrienne Brown. Their edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ fantasy story, “The Princess Steel,” was recently published in PMLA, the journal of Modern Language Association of America. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture is her first book.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Sharrona Pearl, “Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

18 maj 2017 | 68 min

Different Medias with Eric Alterman

18 maj 2017 | 30 min

Willliam Rankin, “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

17 maj 2017 | 42 min

Kate Daloz, “We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America” (PublicAffairs, 2016)

14 maj 2017 | 55 min

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) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in the 1960s across the country who, like her parents, wanted to return to the land. Her subjects are Judy and Larry (her parents), the place they moved to, and the community they helped found.

One of many interesting discoveries in this book is the fact that the back to the land movement took place around the country, within the same demographic, and during the same two-to three-year period in the 1970s.

The causes? One was the growing concern with pollution described in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Another, which deserves fuller examination, is the apocalyptic mood stemming from the atomic threat of the 1960s. Baby boomers remember, with no small amount of incredulity, schoolroom bomb practice (“How would going under my desk protect me?”).

The answers that adults had were not reassuring, or they were naive. The younger generation felt imperiled, and adults were responsible. Cities weren’t safe either. By returning to the land, a person could face an uncertain future in a community of like-minded people, in home they had built themselves and that expressed their values.

So move this group did, but not all to become hippies. Some formed communes that rejected middle class baggage (monogamy, capitalism, child rearing). Others had advanced degrees, found professional work, and considered themselves “square.” Live in a rural setting and you adopt rural culture: community barn raising (even if it is a geodesic dome), self-generated work (Christmas trees farms, organic produce), shared resources.

The author shows that the effects of these communities since the 1970s have permeated throughout American culture. A new kind of fresh food market like Whole Foods and community food co-ops got their starts in such settings. So did recycling (a mainstay of farming culture). Whatever the circumstances that brought them into being, the results have reached far beyond their boundaries and continue to expand our lives.

Kate Daloz’s essays have been published in periodicals such as American Scholar. She is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Manhattanville College and a consultant at the College Writing Center, Baruch College, CUNY.

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Sophia Roosth, “Synthetic: How Life Got Made” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

13 maj 2017 | 72 min

Tara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science” (MIT Press, 2016)

11 maj 2017 | 36 min

Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

8 maj 2017 | 35 min

Lisa Messeri, “Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds” (Duke UP, 2016)

4 maj 2017 | 64 min

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)

29 april 2017 | 50 min

Tania Munz, “The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)

25 april 2017 | 63 min

Democracy and Dialogue Online with Joshua Cohen

20 april 2017 | 37 min

Grace Davie, “Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

19 april 2017 | 61 min

Donna Freitas, “The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost” (Oxford UP, 2017)

18 april 2017 | 24 min

In The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford University Press, 2017), Donna Freitas investigates the darker side of social media use and explains how pressure to appear happy and successful online can actually make people less happy in the real world. Using the stories of college students she interviewed as a framework, Freitas builds a dynamic argument and offers concrete tools for how teachers, parents, and society as a whole can help young people take control of their smartphones and of their own happiness. Donna Freitas is a Nonresident Research Associate at the University of Notre Dames Center for the Study of Religion and Society, and when she is not traveling for research she teaches in the Honors Colleges at Hofstra University. She is the author of Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as several novels for young adults. A regular contributor to Publisher’s Weekly, she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT, 2014)

18 april 2017 | 58 min

Rebecca Scales, “Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

13 april 2017 | 61 min

What did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the nature and significance of French auditory culture in the years between the two world wars? These are two of the central questions that Rebecca Scales pursues in her new book, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). This is not a book focused on the institutional history or content of French radio during this period, however. Rather, Scales examines closely a range of ideas about sound and the development of what she calls the “radio nation,” a space of listening, cultural identity, and citizenship. Access to the airwaves, the “right to listen,” and the question of whether radio did or did not reflect the nation and its different members became vital areas of discussion and debate in the 1920 and 30s.

Radio and the Politics…explores the dynamic history of radio at a critical juncture in modern French political and cultural history. Its chapters explore the perspectives of sound producers and consumers, including broadcasters, politicians, educators, medical professionals, radio amateurs, disabled veterans, and a variety of other listeners throughout France. The book considers the broad space of the radio soundscape from Paris to the provinces, and the movement of sound waves beyond/across the borders of “metropolitan” France, in Algeria, and to and from other nations. Along the way, the book delves into a range of themes: postwar recovery, class and political differences, the relationship of individual bodies to the national body, tensions between public and private spaces and interests, and state control and surveillance. At once a history of the senses and technology, of French politics, culture and everyday life, this compelling book will be of great interest to readers (and listeners!) across multiple fields.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/

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Eugene Raikhel, “Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic” (Cornell UP, 2016)

11 april 2017 | 59 min

Democracy and Social Media with Michael Lynch

5 april 2017 | 27 min

Raz Chen-Morris, “Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility” (Penn State UP, 2016)

29 mars 2017 | 63 min

Colleen Derkatch, “Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)

29 mars 2017 | 64 min

What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the criteria of the sciences amenable to healing practices that are touted for their focus on singularity, rather than uniformity? Colleen Derkatch‘s Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016) investigates how boundaries between traditional and novel are erected at the level of medical rhetoric.

Derkatch analyzes both expert and popular literature on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), an umbrella term designed to encompass homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine, among other things. Demand for alternative treatments by patients has produced an uncertain situation in which clinical frameworks are used for practices traditionally seen as being outside the realm of biomedicine. Through concerted engagement with different genres of medical communication, Derkatch’s rhetorical cultural approach allows the reader to see the extent to which the boundaries of what counts as biomedicine or not rest on conceptions of evidence and categorization schemes promoted by allopathic medical professionals. With a keen eye turned to communication strategies and assumptions, Derkatch shows the subtle ways in which the norms of biomedicine are challenged and strengthened by attempts to reduce other treatments to processes that can be evaluated on the basis of standards of evidence and efficacy.

This is the second of a pair of interviews on alternative medicine: for a historical consideration of naturopathy as an alternative to allopathic medicine, look out for my interview with Susan Cayleff on her book, Nature’s Path.

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Marie Hicks, “Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing” (MIT Press, 2017)

28 mars 2017 | 30 min

Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, “Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible” (Fordham UP, 2015)

28 mars 2017 | 71 min

Susan E. Cayleff, “Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)

28 mars 2017 | 58 min

Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco, “The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture” (Routledge, 2016)

27 mars 2017 | 51 min

Kathleen McAuliffe, “This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society” (Mariner Books, 2017)

21 mars 2017 | 40 min

Meredith K. Ray, “Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in 17th-Century Italy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

13 mars 2017 | 61 min

Ericka Johnson, ed. “Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

24 februari 2017 | 35 min

On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies. From an Alzheimers disease study that relied on the process of sexing flies, to the pharamceuticalized prostate, to the medical experiences of transgender children, Part 1 uses the body as subject to disrupt the binaries of male/female, human/non-human and healthy/unhealthy. In Part 2, titled Creating Subjectivities for Patients in Advertising, the book expands its analysis to the commercial images and discourses used in marketing and prescribing relational subjectivities. Observing the way pharmaceuticals insert themselves into familial and romantic relationships, the HPV vaccine is used as an example of drugs as non-human participants in the parent-child partnership. Through an international lens, Part 3 provides three comparative case studies of the way that knowledge about HPV is produced in Columbia, the U.K. and Austria.

In perhaps the most poignant contribution to feminist research agendas, across disciplines, Johnson concludes our interview by explaining her unique metaphor of refraction. Noting the notorious difficulty of seeing and articulating discursive power structures, Johnson recognises that the ability to articulate what is being said to us or about us, and identifying who is doing that saying, is a cornerstone to feminist scholarship as it allows us to identify against whom can we protest, deny, and challenge. Her metaphor of refraction is thus a way of thinking about material objects, once they have become tropes, such as the HPV vaccine across national contexts, and being able to see it as a prism that refracts the discourses within which it was originally entangled. This image of refraction forces us to think of a material object like the HPV vaccine as creating a spectrum of visible actors, concerns and values. And it is these visible things that help us to articulate discourses – which then allow us to protest and possibly erase their problematic power structures.

Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture.

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Matthew James Crawford, “The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016)

23 februari 2017 | 64 min

Stacy Alaimo, “Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016)

21 februari 2017 | 37 min

Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, eds “Digital Sociologies” (Policy Press, 2016)

9 februari 2017 | 31 min

John Hadley, “Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals” (Lexington Books, 2015)

9 februari 2017 | 56 min

John Hadley’s Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals (Lexington Books, 2015) presents a novel approach to addressing habitat and biodiversity loss: extending liberal property rights to wildlife. Hadley argues that a guardianship system could effectively protect the rights of wild animals to resources in the territories they inhabit. In turn, the guardians of particular animals or a particular species could challenge land use plans that might threaten the ability of these animals to meet their basic needs.

Though grounded in philosophical theory, Hadley’s focus is pragmatic. He is interested in producing an institutional design that could be effectively incorporated into policy and practice. His proposal also aims to solve some key problems in wildlife conservation. It bridges the seemingly divergent interests of environmentalists focused on the protection of the collective (e.g., ecosystems) and those of animal rights proponents focused on the survival of individuals. Here, common ground is found in habitat protection, a shared value that reconciles the differences between these groups. Hadley’s proposal also ensures animals become vocal stakeholders in land use and conservation initiatives, able to compete with agendas that might be incompatible with animal or habitat protection. It also begins to overcome the anthropocentrism that (perhaps inevitably) pervades conservation practice. By determining animal property rights boundaries on the basis of territorial behavior, Hadley’s proposal privileges animal actions and interactions over human-centric interests. Although their rights would be advocated by a human guardian in a person-centered legal system, if implemented, this theory would ensure the interests of wild animals are taken seriously. This is a book of critical relevance to those interested in issues of human-wildlife conflict, biodiversity protection, and human/nonhuman relationships.

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Randy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)

4 februari 2017 | 63 min

Matthew L. Jones, “Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

23 januari 2017 | 65 min

Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science: (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

16 januari 2017 | 66 min

Joshua Howe, “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming” (U. Washington Press, 2016)

10 januari 2017 | 35 min

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especially among Republican lawmakers. But why?

In his recent book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (University of Washington Press, 2016), historian Joshua Howe seeks to answer this question. Howe traces the history of climate change from a scientific oddity in the late 1950s to a topic of fierce debate among politicians and environmental activists who fear that failure to tackle global warming will lead to stronger storms, fiercer wildfires, and rising seas. Scientists knew the most about the nuances of climate change, yet seemed unable to convince policy makers or the public to tackle the problem. Howe sees the climatologists narrow focus on the science of global warming as a partial reason for the inaction. Part history of science, part history of environmentalism, Behind the Curve is a provocative book exploring one of the most vexing issues of our time.

Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson is also a former visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.

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Dave Karpf, “Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy” (Oxford UP, 2016)

9 januari 2017 | 32 min

Nicholas A. John, “The Age of Sharing” (Polity Press, 2016)

6 januari 2017 | 47 min

Scott Selisker, “Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016)

18 december 2016 | 60 min

Robert Aronowitz, “Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)

9 december 2016 | 71 min

Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though they were misled by numbers intended to lend a modicum of certainty to the complex calculus of modern life. But while election predictions come and go, the “empire of chance” lays siege to more and more aspects of daily life, alongside increasing possibilities for technological intervention–nowhere, perhaps, is this more clear than in medicine. Robert Aronowitz’s Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is both a nuanced and accessible exploration of the historical transformation of risk in modern biomedicine. Through a series of case studies and broader reflections on the ways in which modern medicine has become “risky,” Aronowitz teases out salient features of an increasingly complex system of interventions and indicators.

In the book, Aronowitz defines three key aspects of our modern “risky medicine.” The first one discussed is a converged experience of risk and disease, exemplified in cancer screening in which bodies-at-risk can be subject to similar treatment and prevention regimes as those marked by a chronic condition or trying to prevent remission. Another aspect is the notion of risk reduction standing in place of efficacy for the psychological and social work it performs, which provides some explanation for the costliness of American medicine relative to the outcomes it achieves. Finally, Aronowitz argues that risk interventions have been driven by expansion of the medical market, and calls upon policymakers to become aware of the control pharmaceutical companies have in the generation of new health risks and the data to support them.

One way of understanding Aronowitz’s contribution is to contextualize it within the trajectory of sociological work on risk in modern society. Originally published in 1986 (in German), Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity was a watershed book for the understanding of modernity and technological change. Much of Beck’s account is concerned with environmental risks; the book came out on the heels of the Three Mile Island and Bhopal disasters. However, Beck’s take on medicine is somewhat lacking. Beck presciently calls attention to the “reflexive market strategy” of pharmaceutical companies, in which they profit from self-produced risks–echoing the third aspect of “risky medicine’–but misses its more immediate social and psychological dimensions, stating merely that the rise of chronic disease is evidence of a divergence of diagnosis and therapy. Aronowitz’s case studies suggest even more immediate consequences at hand. The importance of Risky Medicine is evident in how it disaggregates the changing landscape of health and medicine from an inexorable creep of modernity, spelling out the logic subjecting more bodies to greater interventions and recovering the relationship between experience and an ambivalent, anticipatory social order.

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Ruth Rogaski, “Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China” (U. California Press, 2014 reprint)

7 december 2016 | 49 min

Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fields ranging from history of medicine to East Asian history. It is easy to see why. Set in the Chinese treaty port of Tianjin, the book follows Chinese elites over the tumultuous decades that spanned the middle of the nineteenth century to World War Two. Chinese elites in Tianjin engaged British, French, and, importantly, Japanese imperialists and traders in their midst, creating what Rogaski thinks is best called a “hypercolony.” Simultaneously, Chinese elites pressed their own nation-building projects, working to distinguish themselves both from the foreigners and also from the masses they ruled. To do so, they adopted, adapted, and cultivated particular ways of building a modern nation in the final years of the Qing dynasty, which hung, importantly, on practices of hygiene. These ideal ways of being hygienic, thus modern, fundamentally rearranged the urban landscape of Tianjin and the practice of everyday life.

Rogaski writes wonderfully and leads the way through tricky historical evidence, pointing out how Chinese elites modernizing projects were apparent in the changed meaning of weisheng. In the early nineteenth century, the term referred to individual ways of guarding health and a century later had come explicitly to refer to government-directed public hygiene measures–“hygienic modernity”–without ever shedding its earlier inflections. The book shows that modernity is not so much a time period, but an aspiration and a process–always incomplete, seemingly right around the washroom corner. Creatively designed and insightfully analyzed, this study defies any simple binaries of colonizer and colonized, or of indigenous and scientific medicine. Rogaski wears her theory lightly and has plenty new to show–not least to historians of medicine who may be most familiar with the stories of colonial medicine from Africa and India.

Ruth Rogaski is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and generously agreed to a live faculty-student interview as part of a collaborative final project for Laura Starks course History of Global Health.

To learn more about using the New Books Network for classroom projects, see Laura Stark’s essay “Can new media save the book?” in the Fall 2015 issue of Contexts.

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Carol Upadhya, “Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy” (Oxford UP, 2016)

23 november 2016 | 41 min

Robert Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U. of Washington Press, 2015)

12 november 2016 | 69 min

Sally Engle Merry, “The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016)

7 november 2016 | 57 min

Quantification is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when hearing or reading about the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR). Yet in the 21st century, a wide range of policy and advocacy agendas begin with numbers. Those numbers become indicators, composites, standards, and measurement tools, which then get adopted in advocacy rhetoric or policy practice.

In The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Sally Engle Merry combines ethnography, human rights, and science and technology studies to explore how people living in vulnerable situations across the globe are represented by the numbers designed to both name and support them. While numbers do not have agency, and cannot help or hurt on their own, Merry dedicates most of the book to untangling the politics and practice of developing standards and indicators, and interpreting the realities that come with “governance by numbers.” The genealogy of these indicators and standards are given as much space as their application, as Merry describes their highly political origins and a process of their subtle acceptance as normalover time.

With roots in colonial authority and population management, indicators have been developed and used for a range of purposes in governance: to manage people, resources, planning, dissent, and reputations among others. Merry explores indicators and indices from legal, anthropological, historical, and genealogical perspectives, describing a range of unexpected stewards from short-term United Nations consultants to U.S. State Department officials to computer algorithms. While the book focuses on the globalization of definitions, measurements, and management techniques, it simultaneously explores the widely varied phenomena of gender violence, human rights, and human trafficking. On a set of topics that have been broadly fetishized, the overlay of quantified assessments and accompanying responses to them raises many questions about voice, politics, and international policy-making among many other topics.

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Robert Peckham, “Epidemics in Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

6 november 2016 | 50 min

Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once broad in sweep and nuanced in analysis, Peckham’s work explores a series of world-changing disease outbreaks across from the eighteenth century through the present.

Organized around five themes (Mobility, Cities, Environment, War, and Globalization), the book looks at the interrelationship between disease and human society at both the particular and hemispheric level. In doing so, the book challenges old assumptions about Asia as a pre-modern hotspot and site of contamination, as well as the narrative of triumphant progress of western medicine east. Instead, Peckham examines how disease, infection, and epidemic are translated across divides of culture and power in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. This innovative study is an essential read for a number of audiences. Whether readers are interested in the lasting impacts of intersections between colonial and indigenous peoples, the history of world capitalism and trade, the development of bureaucratic structures and government power, and/or the demographic and environmental impacts of the rise of the modern world, Epidemics in Modern Asia presents a powerful revisionist interpretation, bringing the history of epidemics to the center of the frame.

Robert Peckham is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. He had edited two previous volumes, Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (Hong Kong: University Press, 2014) and Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (New York: Routledge: 2014). He also is co-editer, with David M. Pomfret, of Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2014), as well as the author of a rich body of articles on Asian history and the history of medicine.

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J.D. Trout, “Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science” (Oxford UP, 2016)

15 oktober 2016 | 70 min

McKenzie Wark, “Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene” (Verso, 2015)

10 oktober 2016 | 63 min

Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

30 september 2016 | 47 min

Marc Raboy, “Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World” (Oxford UP, 2016)

21 september 2016 | 67 min

E.R. Truitt, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

21 september 2016 | 55 min

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embraces writers, travelers, and natural philosophers ranging from Liudprand of Cremona (c. 920 972), Pope Sylvester II (c. 946 1003) and Fr. William of Rubruck (c. 1220 1293), to Sir John Mandeville, witness of marvels mechanical and divine, and a Charlemagne whose stay in Constantinople brings him face to face with a pagan rulers powers of astral science that test the potentials of Charlemagne’s piety.

Our conversation about Truitt’s comprehensively researched and highly readable book ranges over C-3PO’s medieval forebears in the alabaster chamber, the religious rehabilitation of disembodied talking heads, the role of clocks and clockwork in the discourse shift from natural philosophy to mechanical engineering, and the political significance of lewd mechanical monkeys covered in rotting badger pelts.

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Mary Chayko, “Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life” (SAGE, 2016)

13 september 2016 | 36 min

George Couros, “The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity” (Dave Burgess Consulting, 2015)

13 september 2016 | 55 min

Caroline Ford, “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France” (Harvard UP, 2016)

12 september 2016 | 56 min

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, “The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line” (Prometheus Books, 2016)

11 september 2016 | 56 min

Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

7 september 2016 | 70 min

William Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016)

29 augusti 2016 | 53 min

James Rodger Fleming, “Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology” (MIT Press, 2016)

26 augusti 2016 | 64 min

Simanti Dasgupta, “BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India” (Temple UP, 2015)

17 augusti 2016 | 46 min

Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015)

2 augusti 2016 | 62 min

Peter Wade, et. al. “Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke UP, 2014)

2 augusti 2016 | 62 min

Benjamin Peters, “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” (MIT Press, 2016)

16 juli 2016 | 64 min

Vanessa Ogle, “The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950” (Harvard UP, 2015)

13 juli 2016 | 75 min

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 unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism, Beirut’s plurality of time was less an exception than it was a quandary to later advocates who aimed to organize time along geographical lines.

In The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), Vanessa Ogle excavates 19th century movements to reform and standardize time: summer time, calendar time, time zones, religious time, and national time among others. Ogle questions the inevitability of 21st century time, demonstrating that it was the object of active creation for nearly two centuries prior. The rise of nationalism, the consolidation of colonial practice, along with autonomous religious reform movements simultaneously gave rise to, and were in turn, molded by advocacy focused on time. New communications technologies, such as the telegraph, and time-keeping devices, such as city clock towers, similarly served as the infrastructure around which time-keeping debates became organized.

Written as a historical account, time becomes a central character in this book: casting a common lens over otherwise disconnected places and people, raising controversy, and shifting between the center and the periphery of a broader story of 19th century transformation.

Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science and technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan.

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Phaedra Daipha, “Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

9 juli 2016 | 67 min

Noriko Manabe, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima” (Oxford UP, 2015)

9 juli 2016 | 66 min

Ronald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

8 juli 2016 | 61 min

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 machines of loving grace.

– Richard Brautigan, 1967

By the time Richard Brautigan distributed his fifth collection of poetry, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, on the streets of San Francisco, his reference to “a cybernetic ecology” was not an obscurantist metaphor so much as a direct nod to a pervasive and generative intellectual discourse. In The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015), historian of technology Ron Kline traces the emergence of this protean discourse, along with the shifting demarcations occurring within and around it as cybernetics worked its way between technology and theorization of the social world. In doing so, he provides perhaps the most comprehensive and incisive history to date of American cybernetics and information theory.

While cybernetics began as a distinctly postwar science of communication and control, Kline shows how it was linked to but split off from discussions of the physical definition of information. Cyberneticians’ emphasis on circular causality was a major influence on mid-century social science, and cybernetic theory was a common frame through which electronic computers were discussed in the media. As the subtitle suggests, Kline also grapples with the coherence of the term ‘information age,’ whose advocates departed from cybernetics yet, as he argues, remained under its shadow. Through historicizing cybernetics as a ‘moment,’ Kline characterizes the activities of its larger-than-life adherents with a sociologist’s eye, while unearthing both the material and conceptual artifacts left in its wake.

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Sabine Arnaud, “On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

5 juli 2016 | 67 min

Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016)

1 juli 2016 | 65 min

Samuel Morris Brown, “Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human” (Oxford University Press, 2016)

29 juni 2016 | 70 min

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)

26 juni 2016 | 70 min

Saul J. Weiner and Alan Schwartz, “Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care” (Oxford University Press 2016)

22 juni 2016 | 66 min

Gabriel Mendes, “Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry” (Cornell University Press, 2015)

15 juni 2016 | 103 min

Michael F. Robinson, “The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent” (Oxford UP, 2016)

3 juni 2016 | 71 min

Katie Gentile, ed., “The Business of Being Made” (Routledge, 2015)

28 maj 2016 | 52 min

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 appearing in The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2015). It is striking that while personhood amendments proliferate and sovereignty over the reproductive body shifts frighteningly more and more to the State, a global, bio-medical industrial complex has arisen comprising ARTs, surrogate pregnancy, egg/sperm donation and the like. Gentile points out the rise of the post-9/11 fetishization of the fetus a receptacle for all our vulnerabilities which must be protected at all costs in the face of the hyper-object: the threat of global catastrophe looming large. ARTs and its associated industries manufacture hope and optimism in conceiving babies at any cost (for those of privilege) while serving to further elevate, protect and fetishize the fetus. It’s a space of repro-futurity in which life is constructed around achieving reproductive milestones. ARTs have become another neoliberal trope to imagine life without limits as they have been subsumed into ordinary medicine for all women. With ARTs there is often no space to acknowledge loss, shame, uncertainty and the sexual re-traumatization that often occur during the process. On the plus side, ARTs offer the promise and opportunity of biological parenthood to marginalized people (for example, trans men) resulting in diverse family configurations. Gentile asks can other spaces be nurtured so that babies are not the main focus of generativity, especially for women? How can we better theorize childfree lives of creativity that are not seen as displaced parenting but generativity for its own pleasure?

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Rebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015)

27 april 2016 | 56 min

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 traveled and the tale of a forgotten future. The book is anchored around the story of Harvard-trained social scientist Bert Kaplan, who embarked on, in her words, a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture peoples dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank. While unique in scope, Kaplan’s project can be characterized as the culmination of efforts to apply techniques of personality capture–projective testing, dream analysis, and life history–in cross-cultural research on indigenous peoples, an effort to account for the full spectrum of human life amidst the encroachment of modernity upon cultures based, for example, in oral traditions.

Richly documenting the entanglements of Kaplan and others in their attempts to render subjects as data, Lemov throws the transactional nature of anthropology into relief. A data point for an ethnographer can be many things for a research subject: cash for buying American niceties, a beer, a dream lost in the act of recounting, even a permanent mark of distrust. The book is also a history of a technology which never came to fruition: the futuristic reader for Kaplan’s Microcards was never realized, and the boxes of cards became dispersed and lost their value as a total archive of human personality. Lemov argues that we would do well to regard the fate of Kaplan’s database as a parable for our age by calling attention to the information loss upon which the technologies of documentation that saturate our present rely. What, then, will become of our compressed audio files, forgotten social media accounts, and backup hard drives stashed in the back corners of drawers?

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Mark Carrigan, “Social Media for Academics” (Sage, 2016)

27 april 2016 | 42 min

David J. Meltzer, “The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past” (U Chicago Press, 2015)

26 april 2016 | 64 min

David Grazian, “American Zoo: A Sociological Safari” (Princeton UP, 2015)

20 april 2016 | 42 min

Eben Kirksey, “Emergent Ecologies” (Duke UP, 2015)

18 april 2016 | 70 min

Alfie Bown, “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism” (Zero Books, 2015)

18 april 2016 | 31 min

Sigrid Schmalzer, “Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China” (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

11 april 2016 | 82 min

Benjamin Castleman, “The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

3 april 2016 | 58 min

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 Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) urges educators to meet teens on their must-have device.

Author Benjamin Castleman of the University of Virginia shows how text messaging combined with insights from behavioral scienceâ€•more specifically the fields of behavioral economics and social psychologyâ€•can be leveraged to help students complete assignments, perform to their full potential on tests, and choose schools and colleges where they are well positioned for success.

In his own research, Castleman has studied how to use personalized text messages to reduce “summer melt,” in which up to 40 percent of high school graduates who have been accepted to college, mostly from underserved communities, fail to show up for the fall semester.

Behavioral strategies extend beyond texting and even beyond smartphone technology. By focusing on behavioral changes, Castleman demonstrates that small tweaks in how we ask questions, design applications, and tailor reminders can lead to better decision making and have remarkable impacts on student and school success. The 160-Character Solution makes a broader case for employing these behavioral strategies to improve educational outcomes from preschool all the way to college.

John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at [email protected].

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Adam Kucharski, “The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling” (Basic Books, 2016)

31 mars 2016 | 53 min

Jonathan Donner, “After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet” (MIT Press, 2015)

14 mars 2016 | 66 min

Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Gut Feminism” (Duke UP, 2015)

7 mars 2016 | 64 min

Justin E. H. Smith, “Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2015)

2 mars 2016 | 78 min

Jeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015)

22 februari 2016 | 43 min

Carin Berkowitz, “Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

16 februari 2016 | 65 min

Paul R. Josephson, “Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

29 januari 2016 | 61 min

Dale Jamieson, “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future” (Oxford UP, 2014)

21 januari 2016 | 66 min

Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, “Enjoying Machines” (MIT 2015)

6 januari 2016 | 35 min

Peter J. Gloviczki, “Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015)

30 december 2015 | 34 min

Nathan Altice, “I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer-Entertainment System Platform” (MIT Press, 2015)

23 december 2015 | 38 min

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 humanist exploration of digital media from the perspective of the platform itself. That is, this approach contemplates the social, economic and cultural influence and significance of the technology. Although more formally identified by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort in 2007 at the Digital Arts and Cultures Conference, the decades old platform studies discipline affords an understanding of the material manifestations of culture and creative work produced by computing systems.

In his new book, I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer Entertainment System Platform (MIT Press, 2015), Nathan Altice, a digital media creator and scholar, studies the NES system and the Family Computer, it’s precursor. More than considering the NES as a single entity, the author investigates the platform as a “network of objects and texts,” that go beyond a “stable configuration of hardware and software.” In this way, Altice dives deep to unearth the code and design decisions that shape the creative affordances of the NES, how users choose to play using the platform, and how the system was received outside of Japan.

The NES’s cultural reception is foundational for grasping a key theme throughout the book, that of “translation.” For Altice, translation produces errors – “new meanings, new expressions, new bodies, and new objects.” That is, the flaws in hardware and software, including the translation of language from Japanese to English, are not necessarily negative objects to be overcome. Instead, these bugs in the machine add to the performance of the games and the platform, and have very real social, economic, and cultural consequences.

I Am Error is one book in the Platform Studies series from MIT Press.

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Natasha Myers, “Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter” (Duke UP, 2015)

21 december 2015 | 66 min

Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 )

15 december 2015 | 72 min

Anna L. Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (Princeton UP, 2015)

6 december 2015 | 63 min

Stephen Macekura, “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

4 december 2015 | 75 min

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: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores this question by connecting three of the most important aspects of the twentieth century: decolonization, the rise of environmentalism, and the pursuit of economic development and modernization in the Third World. Macekura, who is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University, demonstrates how environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attempted to promote environmental protection in the post-colonial world, then, after failing to do so, challenged the economic development approaches of the United States, World Bank, and United Nations. The book reveals how environmental activists initially conceived of “sustainable development” as a way to link environmental protection with Third World concerns about equality and justice in the global economy, but how, over time, the phrase’s meaning moved far away from this initial conception.

In addition to exploring the idea of “sustainable development,” Macekura also examines the growth and limits of the environmental movement’s power. He pays close attention to how international political disputes have scuttled major global treaties over issues such as climate change; he also documents the evolution of international development politics and policy since 1945. In sum, Of Limits and Growth offers a new history of sustainability by elucidating the global origins of environmental activism, the ways in which environmental activists challenged development approaches worldwide, and how environmental non-state actors reshaped the United States’ and World Bank’s development policies.

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Nick Hopwood, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

30 november 2015 | 47 min

Jorg Matthias Determann, “Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2015)

29 november 2015 | 64 min

Dan Bouk, “How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

23 november 2015 | 44 min

Megan Prelinger, “Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age” (Norton, 2015)

19 november 2015 | 70 min

Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015)

15 november 2015 | 39 min

Peter A. Shulman, “Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

9 november 2015 | 72 min

Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

4 november 2015 | 66 min

Colin Milburn, “Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter” (Duke UP, 2015)

27 oktober 2015 | 74 min

Eugene Raikhel, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr, “Somatosphere.net”

13 oktober 2015 | 62 min

James E. Strick, “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” (Harvard UP, 2015)

6 oktober 2015 | 69 min

Joseph M. Reagle, “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” (MIT Press, 2015)

2 oktober 2015 | 32 min

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, “Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship” (Oxford UP, 2015)

28 september 2015 | 25 min

Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee, “Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine” (Oxford UP, 2015)

26 september 2015 | 52 min

Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan” (U of Chicago, 2015)

22 september 2015 | 76 min

Ryan Craig, "College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education" (Palgrave McMillan, 2015)

21 september 2015 | 43 min

Dana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

15 september 2015 | 64 min

Kristin Peterson, “Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria” (Duke UP, 2015)

10 september 2015 | 65 min

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. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmaceutical landscape. Peterson pays special attention to the Idumota market, an area that was strictly residential in the 1970s and has since become one of the largest West African points of drug distribution for pharmaceuticals and other materials from all over the world. Peterson looks at the consequences of major local and global historical factors in that transformation, including civil war in the late 1960s and migration that followed, a 1970s oil boom and bust, and changes in the global pharmaceutical market in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, Nigeria was deep into an economic crisis that had profound implications for the production, circulation, and marketing of pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry remade itself by becoming tied to the speculative marketplace, with wide-ranging implications that included the rise of new professional relationships & market formations in Nigeria, new relationships with firms in China and India, new forms of speculation, and new questions about the ontology of markets. Peterson demonstrates that these transformations continue to have important consequences for the bodies of individual Nigerians, including major problems with drug resistance and a mismatch between existing drug therapies and existing diseases. The book avoids the usual discourse of corporate greed, instead focusing on the “structural logics of pharmaceutical capital through which corporate practices can be understood.” It is a timely and fascinating study.

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Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

4 september 2015 | 74 min

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 and diversity – and in doing so it allows us to animate them in new kinds of relationships and shows that objectivity and certain forms of diversity can be mutually supportive. Harding does this in two major ways: by considering specific cases where science has been shaped by social values and interests and drawing conclusions about the “logical positivist legacy” from them; and by locating these issues within particular historical contexts. Though the “social” tends to be treated as an impediment to scientific research rather than a source of new resources and pathways, social and political movements have deeply shaped the practices and philosophy of science. Ch. 1 offers a historical context in which to understand the approaches that dominate today’s analytic philosophy of science, describing and analyzing the ways in which the social conditions for scientific research and its philosophy were created in two eras of significant institutional change: the postwar era of the 1940s-1950s, and the 1960s-1970s. Three science studies research fields that have emerged since the 1960s – science studies, postcolonial STS, and feminist STS – show that sciences and their societies co-produce and co-constitute each other and they deeply influence the project of the book and its remaining chapters. Ch. 2 – 7 explore six major arguments for the claim that the “social norm of diversity and the epistemic norm of objectivity can provide mutual support for each other” and they introduce helpful case studies that both illustrate Harding’s arguments and model a methodology for bringing about the kind of integration of philosophy and socially-aware STS that the book advocates. It’s a wonderful, clear read and is highly assignable in undergraduate and graduate courses devoted to science, policy, philosophy, and/or STS!

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Liz McFall, “Devising Consumption Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending” (Routledge, 2014)

2 september 2015 | 47 min

Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

30 augusti 2015 | 69 min

Shellen Wu, “Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920” (Stanford UP, 2015)

25 augusti 2015 | 62 min

Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015)

25 augusti 2015 | 70 min

Stefan Ecks, “Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India” (NYU Press, 2013)

19 augusti 2015 | 80 min

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 those doctors use the medical terminology they themselves use – which might not be immediately understandable to their patients – or should they translate the description into terms more comfortable and familiar to the patient? And what are the practical and ethical consequences of each decision? Stefan Ecks‘ new book carefully considers these problems in the context of health-related practices in modern Calcutta. Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India (NYU Press, 2013) looks successively at the different and overlapping medical and healing contexts that together make up a significant part of the medical marketplace in Calcutta. Ch. 1 treats popular notions that include the importance of the belly as the “somatic center of good health,” the power of the mind to regulate good health, and the connection between modernity and pollution as causes of illness. Ch. 2 looks at Ayurvedic practices in Calcutta. It reflects on some of the most important ways that Ayurveda is changing in India – especially at the levels of practitioner training, language, and the patient-physician relationship – despite the fact that the centrality of food and digestion has remained constant. Ch. 3 looks closely at homeopathy, the second most popular type of medicine in Bengal, and focuses on the principles, histories, and pluralities of homeopathic practices in Calcutta. Ch. 4 looks at the ways that Calcutta psychiatrists position themselves with respect to popular beliefs about psychopharmaceuticals, general physicians, practitioners of non-biomedical treatments, and the pharmaceutical industry. This chapter pays special attention to how Bengali doctors use metaphors to help patients understand and respond to psychiatric diagnoses, with comparisons to nature, the Ganges river, fairytales, everyday over-the-counter drugs, diabetes, and food. The conclusion explores a key argument of the book, proposing that “patients’ suspicions of psychopharmaceuticals are based on suspicions of biomedicine’s ‘magic bullet’ model of drug effects,” looking at the implications of this conclusion, and considering the possible broader impacts of this study beyond Calcutta. It’s a fascinating study of potential interest to historians and anthropologists of medicine and healing, as well as readers interested in learning more about the medical marketplace of modern India and anyone interested in modern psychopharmaceuticals.

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Candis Callison, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke UP, 2014)

14 augusti 2015 | 66 min

Alexandra Minna Stern, “Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)

10 augusti 2015 | 70 min

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 associated with genetic individuals–before the future, what gets passed on to later generations. However, public understanding of genetics did not merely radiate from laboratories, as Alexandra Minna Stern‘s book, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University, 2012) shows. Before the age of genetic sequencing and mass-produced tests, physicians from various specialties provided genetic counseling on an ad-hoc basis, most of which took the form of reproductive advice. Medical genetics had only been established in the 1960s, with the shadow of eugenics still looming large over a field that was now more inclined toward description of heritable conditions than prescription of reproductive sanctions and sterilization. The founding of the first master’s program in genetic counseling in 1969 established the institutional and intellectual basis for a new kind of health care professional, one that would further the reorientation of medical genetics toward patient-centered care.

Stern’s book connects this emergent professional identity to the broader history of genetic and eugenic programs in the United States. So, while this is a history focused on how the distinct profession of genetic counseling emerged as an alternative to traditional medical authority, it is firmly situated within the conflicts that have persistently plagued the development and application of human genetic knowledge. This orientation toward fundamental tensions is reflected by the book’s structure. While she begins with a historical overview of genetic counseling as a profession, the rest of the book is organized around issues; genetic risk and the questionable efficacy of disease apprehension; the politics of race inherent in population knowledge; the fundamental role played by disability in the understanding of inherited disorders; the gender politics of genetic counseling as a challenge to the medical establishment; therapeutic ethics; and the emergence of prenatal testing.

This highly readable whirlwind tour through the complex ethical and historical landscape of genetic counseling rewards those new to the history of genetics by virtue of its accessibility, along with those more familiar through the vast amounts of new source material it blends in seamlessly with broader frames. If you enjoy this book, look out for a new edition of Eugenic Nation, Stern’s first book on the politics of eugenics.

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Janet Vertesi, “Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

10 augusti 2015 | 67 min

Eva Hemmungs Wirten, “Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information” (U of Chicago, 2015)

1 augusti 2015 | 66 min

Raf De Bont, “Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

24 juli 2015 | 62 min

Jonathan Coopersmith, “Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)

17 juli 2015 | 63 min

Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015)

8 juli 2015 | 63 min

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 incredible women, Meredith K. Ray‘s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks both at women’s practical engagements with science and with their literary engagements with natural philosophy.

Ch. 1 brings us to the Romagna, and to the formidable Caterina Sforza’s experiments with alchemical recipes as compiled in a manuscript that exists today in only a single manuscript copy. Both recipes and secrets were forms of currency in this context, and Ch. 2 looks at the vogue for printed “books of secrets” in sixteenth century Italy. This chapter pays special attention to the influential Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont (1555) and the Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese, while also exploring the influence of books of secrets on other early modern literary genres including vernacular treatises, dialogues, and letter collections. Ch. 3 look at the literature of debate over women, or querelle des femmes that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looking particularly closely at the intertwining discourses about women and science in Moderata Fonte’s writing of chivalric romance and dialogue, and in Lucrezia Marinella’s epic poetry and pastoral writing. Ch. 4 moves us to Padua and Rome, where women had begun, by the early seventeenth century, to participate in scientific discourse in more formal ways. Here, Ray looks closely at Camilla Erculiani’s letters on natural philosophy (1584) that defended women’s aptitude for science, and at her networking with scientific communities in Poland and her eventual questioning by the Inquisition. The chapter then turns to Margherita Sarrocchi’s work, her epic poem Scanderbeide, and her fascinating relationship with Galileo. It is a fascinating book that will be of interest to readers eager to learn more about the history of science, literature, and/or women in early modernity. If you listen closely to the interview, you’ll also hear me comparing Caterina Sforza to Doritos. Enjoy!

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James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

3 juli 2015 | 67 min

Jonathan Eig, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” (Norton, 2014)

3 juli 2015 | 50 min

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

15 juni 2015 | 72 min

Jenifer Van Vleck, “Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy” (Harvard UP, 2013)

14 juni 2015 | 37 min

Nick Sousanis, “Unflattening” (Harvard UP, 2015)

12 juni 2015 | 67 min

Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013)

8 juni 2015 | 74 min

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 embryonic stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century, drawing important implications for the possible futures of stem cell research by looking carefully at its past and developing an approach to what Thompson calls “good science.” The book compellingly argues that “a high level of political attention to the ethics of the life sciences and biomedicine…is a good thing for science and democracy,” especially as we have now reached “the end of the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research.”

Part I of the book (Stem Cell Biopolitics) explores early attention to the embryo debate. Ch. 2 looks at stem cell research as it’s widely understood to engage ethical concerns, describing the “pro-curial frame” of stem cell research in the period under scrutiny, when promoting stem cell innovation involved aspirations to be pro-cure and there was an ethical focus on the procurement of stem cells and cell lines for research. Pt. II of the book (Stem Cell Geopolitics) looks at what happened domestically as the debate over stem cells moved from the federal to the state levels and back in the US, and then turns to consider transnational circuits that were crucial to those practices and conversations. Ch. 3 looks at three phases that made up the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research in the US: the time around President Bush’s 2001 policy, the period when states “seceded” from that policy (exemplified by California’s Proposition 71), and the period around Obama’s 2009 policy. Ch. 4 looks at the transnational geopolitics of stem cell research in an era when stem cell research became increasingly international and research advocates were deeply concerned with international competition and “brain drain.” Thompson takes readers into laboratory environments in South Korea and Singapore in order to undermine a popular rhetorical binary of East/West that contrasted an “East” that had a pro-science spirit and lack of concern with the moral status of the embryo, and a “West” that had been taken over by anti-science religious fanatics and technophobes.

Pt. III of the book (Thinking of Other Lives) looks carefully at questions of research subjecthood. Ch. 7 focuses on human-human relationships and practices of donation at a time when a number of norms came under renewed scrutiny – including altruism, anonymity, and the alienation of tissue from donors – and this led to the conclusion that the old model for donation wasn’t working. In this context, there were increasing demands for reciprocity in various forms, and Thompson considers various models in California that rethought the relationships between donor/recipient and biomaterial/bioinformation. Ch. 6 focuses on the logic of using animals as substitutive research subjects for human-focused research, and calling for a move away from using animals as research subjects and toward using in vitro systems instead.

To do all of this, Thompson develops a methodology she calls “triage” which we talk about early in the interview. Good Science is a wonderful and critical book, and well worth reading and teaching widely!

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John Sharp, “Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art” (MIT Press, 2015)

1 juni 2015 | 39 min

Greg Siegel, “Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity” (Duke UP, 2014)

26 maj 2015 | 67 min

Jon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015)

25 maj 2015 | 33 min

Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

19 maj 2015 | 68 min

Myles W. Jackson, “The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race” (MIT Press, 2015)

18 maj 2015 | 39 min

Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014)

10 maj 2015 | 68 min

Lu Zhang, “Inside China’s Automobile Factories” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

10 maj 2015 | 65 min

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 autoworkers with increased bargaining power. At the same time, China entered the global competition in mass-producing automobiles at a stage when the level of that competition was very high and profit margins were very thin. The state, as a consequence, has restructured the industry and increased competition since the late 1990s, and this has forced Chinese automakers to move toward a “leaner & meaner work regime,” according to Lu Zhang‘s new book. The result for autoworkers has been an increased intensity of work, reduced job security, stagnant wages, a lack of opportunities to advance, and an inferior status in a very hierarchical factory social order. Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores one important consequence of this transformation, the emergence of “labor force dualism” (a divide between formal and temporary workers) as a central component of labor relations in the Chinese auto industry. Lu Zhang’s book is the fruit of 20 months of ethnographic research inside seven large auto assembly factories in six cities in China between 2004-2011 – spending at least two months in each factory – in addition to interviews with a range of workers and managers from those factories and archival research. She reminds us of the importance of reading this ethnography with a sensitivity to the specificity of China’s condition as a “state-led, late-industrializing nation with strong revolutionary and state-socialist legacies.” Tracing the roots and mechanics of labor unrest as it has emerged from those conditions, the book argues that widespread grassroots protests among autoworkers in China have succeeded, on some level: they’ve won workers wage increases, improved conditions on the shop floor, and pressured the government into enacting new labor laws and policy changes. Still, there is work to be done, and the book concludes by considering possible future scenarios for Chinese auto labor relations in the context of labor force dualism.

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Timothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015)

5 maj 2015 | 52 min

Naomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015)

1 maj 2015 | 39 min

Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013)

27 april 2015 | 66 min

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 practice during the decolonization of European empires in Africa in the mid-twentieth century. His story follows the transcultural Nigerian psychiatrists who tried to transform the discourse around and treatment of mental illness in both their local contexts and in global psychiatric circles. The decolonization of psychiatry, Heaton argues, had an “intensely cross-cultural, transnational, and international character that cannot be separated from local, regional, and national developments” (5). Heaton shows how, amid these contexts and changes, Nigerian psychiatrists actively participated in negotiating postcolonial modernity and the place of global psychiatry within it. The book begins by tracing the larger story from colonialism to postcolonialism: the first chapter offers an essential, incisive account of “Colonial Institutions and Networks of Ethnopsychiatry”; the second chapter lays out the decolonizing of psychiatric institutions and networks in the 1950s and 1960s, a story told mainly through the fascinating figure of Thomas Adeoye Lambo. In the remaining four chapters, Heaton narrows the aperture of historical lens to explore particular cases: Nigerian migrants in the UK who experienced psychiatric issues; debates about culture-bound syndromes such as “brain fag disease” and universality of psychiatric diseases; encounters between psychotherapists and “traditional” healers; and the ambivalence around the use and meaning of drug therapies by Nigerian psychiatrists. Black Skin, White Coats persuasively shows us that postcolonial psychiatry in particular and postcolonial modernity more broadly are best understood in terms of connectivity and interrelatedness rather than provincial dichotomies. In so doing, he also succeeds in bringing together scholarly areas such as African Studies, the history of medicine and psychology, and postcolonial studies.

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Christine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015)

20 april 2015 | 37 min

Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014)

17 april 2015 | 64 min

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 Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields.

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Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014)

13 april 2015 | 43 min

Casey O’Donnell, “Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators” (MIT Press, 2014)

6 april 2015 | 41 min

A. Mark Smith, “From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

21 mars 2015 | 62 min

Nick Wilding, "Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge" (U Chicago Press, 2014)

16 mars 2015 | 72 min

Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo's 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian's role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family's mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a "rich, old, slightly batty widow" in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of "intermediaries and go-betweens" in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits.

There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.)

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Orit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014)

9 mars 2015 | 75 min

Lisa Stevenson, “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic” (University of California Press, 2014)

5 mars 2015 | 68 min

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 story from Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun (as the king), listening to these voices can potentially transform our notion of listening itself, as well as our understanding of what a “self” is and could be. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) shows us this by exploring formulations and practices of life, death, and care in a history and ethnography of Canadian policies and attitudes toward the Inuit during two epidemics, a tuberculosis epidemic (1940s-early 1960s) and a suicide epidemic (1980s-present). In juxtaposing those two cases, the book considers different forms of “care,” bureaucratic and otherwise. In her archival and ethnographic research, Stevenson works as a collector of images, paying careful attention to the ways that they give meaning to life itself, even and especially amid conditions of uncertainty and confusion. The first three chapters of the book trace the practices of anonymous care that characterized the two epidemics in question, considering how the Canadian North has functioned as a massive laboratory for transforming Inuit into Canadian citizens. Whether the biopolitical project operated on tubercular or suicidal subjects, Inuit people were conceptualized as serialized bodies that needed to be brought back to health. Life Beside Itself shows that despite this, Inuit were never fully made into biopolitical subjects: instead, we come to know the friends and acquaintances that animate Stevenson’s work as they cultivate multiple forms of life and of care. This is a beautiful and thoughtful book that will reward a wide range of readers, whether they come to it with an interest in health care and its histories, in the Canadian North, in forms of life and death, or simply in a moving and generously narrated story.

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Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America” (U Chicago Press, 2014)

23 februari 2015 | 66 min

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 America (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women’s rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to answer the eternal “woman question.” Hamlin’s fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women’s rights in the home and society. Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women’s equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin’s theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As “reform Darwinists,” Hamlin’s subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women’s subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of “woman’s experience” against claims of scientific men.Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science.

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Kristina Kleutghen, “Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces” (U of Washington Press, 2015)

20 februari 2015 | 73 min

Ann C. Pizzorusso, “Tweeting Da Vinci” (Da Vinci Press, 2014)

18 februari 2015 | 69 min

Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

10 februari 2015 | 68 min

“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 electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95), on the other hand, busied himself at “delivering sermons from tree stumps” as a young boy, before joining the navy, studying jellyfish, eventually launching an assault against the Anglican Church and gaining world renown as the biologist who was “Darwin’s Bulldog.”

Matthew Stanley’s wonderful new book introduces us to Maxwell and Huxley as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice of science that began to diverge relatively late and in very particular historical circumstances. Beginning at a point when Maxwell’s theistic science was the “standard” and Huxley was the “challenger,” and ending at the point when Huxley “won,” Stanley goes on to guide readers through some of the major topics of debate that characterized Victorian science (including the nature of miracles and of consciousness, the limits of science, the origin of the universe, the question of intellectual freedom, the morality of education, the possibility of free will) to show the gradual divergence of perspectives that were always rooted in concerns about scientific practice, and to consider the ramifications of this history for how we understand and conduct debates over Intelligent Design and related issues today.

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Nicolas Rasmussen, “Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)

30 januari 2015 | 65 min

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)

16 januari 2015 | 71 min

Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015)

24 december 2014 | 53 min

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014)

14 december 2014 | 39 min

Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014)

11 december 2014 | 66 min

Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

9 december 2014 | 70 min

Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

3 december 2014 | 65 min

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 Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine code and screen interface. Using a methodology called “media archaeology” that is informed by the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Kittler, Heidegger, Stiegler, and others, Chromatic Algorithms traces a transformation of color from optics to algorithms. The chapters trace a history of synthetic color in Western aesthetics and philosophy, the rise of Day-Glo, the aesthetics of color in video art from the 1960s and 1970s, the technology of color TVs, the connection between color and notions of transcendence and utopia, “democratic color” and Salvador DalÃ’s urinated-upon pen, the early history of art/engineering at Bell Labs, the technology of digital infrared visualization, the aesthetics of “Photoshop cinema,” bioart and its glow-in-the-dark bunnies, and the work of some amazing artists including Lillian Schwartz, Jeremy Blake, and many many others. It is a gorgeous and fascinating study of color, technology, visualization, the digital, and beyond.

As you work through the book, I highly recommend searching the Web for some of the amazing work described in its chapters. I’m based in Canada and so some of the following links may not work for you: in that case, just try searching on your own for the title:

The rock opera Battle for Milkquarious! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDMhwq3pcA

Jeremy Blake, Winchester Redux http://vimeo.com/16485005

Zbigniew RybczyÅ„ski, Tango http://vimeo.com/9033947

Paper Rad: http://www.paperrad.org/

This site has some clips from Lillian Schwartz’z Proxima Centauri: http://lillian.com/kinetic/

You can browse video clips from WGBH’s New Television Workshop here: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/

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Janet K. Shim, “Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease” (NYU Press, 2014)

27 november 2014 | 76 min

William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)

13 november 2014 | 69 min

Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014)

7 november 2014 | 45 min

Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013)

6 november 2014 | 48 min

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 Zuckerman argues in Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (Norton, 2013), just because a connection is possible does not mean disparate voices are being heard. Instead, things and not ideas have become more connected; we now live in a world where is easier to get a bottle of water from a tropical island halfway around the world than it is to get (let alone comprehend) news from that island.

Zuckerman, a media scholar and activist based at MIT, suggests despite our perceived “connectedness,” the wired world is actually becoming more provincial and narrow, as we shift from professionally curated news and information, to search engines and algorithmically selected information based on previous “likes” and those of our homogeneous social circles. In other words, we are getting more and more of what we already know we want with ever-greater efficiency, but not what we need to be informed participants in a global world.

In an expansive analysis that takes on everything from the global response to modern pandemics, to Greek philosophy, to the “Arab Spring,” to musical hybridization across cultures, Zuckerman calls for a world of “digital cosmopolitans,” where those who can bridge between communities are called upon to foster deeper, more nuanced conversations around the globe in ways that fulfill the promise of expanding technological opportunities.

At once a thoughtful analysis, an engaging history, and a bold call to arms, Rewire offers readers a deep understanding of how media is evolving to shape and be shaped by global voices. As such, it has vast implications at both personal and geopolitical levels for the future of information, technology.

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Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)

5 november 2014 | 70 min

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)

30 oktober 2014 | 73 min

Kara W. Swanson, “Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2014)

20 oktober 2014 | 67 min

Hugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014)

9 oktober 2014 | 42 min

Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014)

2 oktober 2014 | 75 min

Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

1 oktober 2014 | 85 min

Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

11 september 2014 | 62 min

John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

5 september 2014 | 73 min

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 Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) narrates the emergence of a new image of the machine, a new concept of nature, a new theory of knowledge, and a new political orientation through a series of chapters that each use the work of a single figure to open up a world of romantic machines.

Part 1 of the book looks at the work of physical scientists whose model of precision experiment and math was transformed by an encounter with romantic philosophy and aesthetics, and introduces the electro-magnetic work of physicist AndreMarie Ampre, the instrumental practices of Prussian geophysical researcher Alexander von Humboldt, and the labor theory of knowledge in relation to the instruments of astronomer and politician Francois Arago. Part 2 looks at the impact of technology on theories of the self and the human, focusing on the fantastic arts and public spectacles featuring new discoveries in optics, mechanics, and natural history. (Readers will find lively discussions of dioramas, hallucinatory opera, symphonies, museums, magic shows, and expositions, here.) Part 3 treats the utopian thinkers and engineer-scientists of the late Restoration and the July Monarchy, looking at religiously-inflected social technologies of conversion, communication, and temporal coordination in the work and thought of Saint-Simon and his followers, printer and literary critic Pierre Leroux’s work and theories, and Auguste Comte’s instruments of thought and paper. It is a rich, elegantly argued work that offers not just a history of science and technology, but also a tracing of the roots of some contemporary continental philosophy, as well.

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John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

22 augusti 2014 | 69 min

Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

16 augusti 2014 | 71 min

Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)

16 augusti 2014 | 71 min

David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)

6 augusti 2014 | 74 min

William E. Connolly, “The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism” (Duke UP, 2013)

30 juli 2014 | 74 min

Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013)

29 juli 2014 | 31 min

Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam” (University of California Press, 2014)

22 juli 2014 | 69 min

Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)

14 juli 2014 | 69 min

Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT Press, 2014)

9 juli 2014 | 39 min

Lisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents” (Duke UP, 2014)

9 juli 2014 | 66 min

“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 thinking about documents as tools for creating bodily experience, and as material objects situated within hierarchies and relationships of labor. Working beautifully at the intersection of media studies and history, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a thoughtful and inspiring collection of moments from the expansion of a modern “scriptural economy.” The case studies explore fill-in-the-blank forms in the context of late nineteenth century job printing, typescript books and scholarly communication in the 1930s, photocopies and photocopying in the 1960s and 1970s, and PDF files in the 1990s and beyond. The final chapter is a fascinating exploration of what it might look like to write a situated history of amateurdom and the figure of the “amateur,” a theme that recurs throughout the preceding chapters. Though all of these cases are carefully rooted within a US context, the insights gleaned from them potentially apply to a much wider and trans-local conversation about the documentary media of writers and readers. It is a history of documenting as an epistemic practice and documents as instruments, and that history is consistently and productively entangled with concerns about reproduction, access, labor, and the emergence of a bureaucratic self. Along the way, Paper Knowledge helpfully opens up some persistent historiographical notions that benefit from such opening, such as “print culture,” “digital humanities,” “authorship,” and other categories that have defined the history of and with communication, and that animate contemporary debates within academia and beyond.

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Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

4 juli 2014 | 71 min

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 Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) explores this world via the work of Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur and his vast and varied networks of correspondents, assistants, colleagues, and co-naturalists. As we read, we follow this loose network across the bakeries, gardens, tidepools, hedges, studies, academies, kitchens, poultry yards, specimen collections, and other spaces of quotidian life and their associated practices of natural history. As these men and women observed, chased, collected, dissected, preserved, painted, described, and tested, they practiced the production of knowledge about the natural world as a part of their intimate, daily lives. The chapters of Terrall’s book observe them as they in turn observe aphids, mayflies, sea anemones, chickens, and other creatures as a means to understand larger questions about the nature of generation, metamorphosis, reproduction, and other lived behaviors and processes. They feed material from inside the quills of young pigeon feathers to spiders in order to study spider silk and its commercial potential. They glue glass to cocoons to create windows into the metamorphoses of the butterflies inside. They use hog bristles to turn tiny polyps inside-out and observe how they responded. They draw, they incubate, and they incorporate practices and materials from the physical sciences to do so. Catching Nature in the Act contributes thoughtfully to several interrelated historiographical threads in the history of science – the histories of practice and place, the importance of the household as a space of observation and experiment, the role of networks of correspondence and collaboration, the relationship between natural science and theology – and offers helpful revisions of dominant approaches to each of those historiographies of science and its histories. It is a must-read for historians of science, and a fascinating narrative for any interested reader.

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Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard University Press, 2014)

20 juni 2014 | 71 min

Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life” (Harvard UP, 2014)

12 juni 2014 | 74 min

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 assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies and opinions. Jane Maienschein‘s new book is a model of the kind of careful, balanced, and beautifully written history of science that makes a significant contribution not just to the historiography of science, but also to the public understanding of science and its lived consequences. Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life (Harvard University Press, 2014) traces the historical transformations in the observation and observability of the earliest stages of developing life. Maienschein’s account is a focused and thoughtfully organized book that gradually reveals aspects of the history of early stages of life, carefully curating the elements of her narrative such that they collectively inform broader debates over embryo-related policy in the contemporary United States. Readers follow animal and human embryos in their metamorphoses from hypothetical to observed entities, seeing them sequentially transform into experimental, computational, and engineered objects. The final chapter considers the implications of the story in light of recent debates on topics such as fetal pain, paying special attention to the distinction between making policy decisions based on metaphysics vs. science. Embryos Under the Microscope is equally well-suited to academic historians of science wanting a clear introduction to the history of developmental biology, general readers seeking an introduction to a crucial topic of social and political debate, and teachers interested in assigning one or more of the chapters in relevant undergraduate courses. Enjoy!

You can find the related Embryo Project Encyclopedia, a wonderful digital and open access resource, here.

Listeners might also be interested in this recent article on slate.com.

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David Nemer, “Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology” (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013)

5 juni 2014 | 39 min

Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

2 juni 2014 | 69 min

Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014)

29 maj 2014 | 38 min

Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

23 maj 2014 | 60 min

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 centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that this work was read and rendered in modern Arabic-language contexts. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) invites us into a late nineteenth-century moment when the notions of “science” and “civilization” mutually transformed one another, and offers a thoughtful and nuanced account of the ways that this played out for scholars working and writing in Syria and Egypt. The early chapters of Elshakry’s book focus on the central role played by popular science journals like Al-Muqtataf (The Digest) in translating and disseminating Darwin’s ideas. We meet Ya’qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr, young teachers at the Syrian Protestant College who were instrumental in translating scientific works into Arabic there and, later, in Egypt. An entire chapter looks closely at Isma’il Mazhar’s work producing the first verbatim translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic, but the book also looks well beyond Darwin to consider broader Arabic discourses on the relationship between science and society, as those discourses were shaped by engagements with the work of Herbert Spencer, and many others. Elshakry pays special attention to the ways that this story is embedded in the histories of print culture, the politics of empire, and debates over educational reform, materialism, and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and concludes with a consideration of the continuing reverberations of these issues into late twentieth century Egypt and beyond. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the entanglements of science, translation, and empire in the modern world, and it will change the way we understand the place of Arabic interlocutors in the history of modern science.

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Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies” (Ballentine, 2014)

18 maj 2014 | 49 min

Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

14 maj 2014 | 71 min

danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014)

12 maj 2014 | 45 min

Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

26 april 2014 | 68 min

Robert Mitchell, “Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)

16 april 2014 | 73 min

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)

14 april 2014 | 34 min

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

10 april 2014 | 72 min

David Kaiser, “How the Hippies Saved Physics” (W.W. Norton, 2012)

2 april 2014 | 73 min

Andrew L. Russell, “Open Standards in the Digital Age” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

27 mars 2014 | 52 min

Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

23 mars 2014 | 74 min

Sarah Franklin, “Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship” (Duke University Press, 2013)

9 mars 2014 | 67 min

Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

23 februari 2014 | 71 min

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 or actants, we worry about our relationships to them and their relationships to each other. We wonder if humans and their objects are really so different, or whether we are all octopuses shrinking behind our own ink.

In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Timothy Morton offers a way of thinking with and about hyperobjects, particular kinds of things of which we see only pieces at any given moment. (Though by the end of the book, Morton invites us to consider that perhaps every object is a hyperobject.) Hyperobjects have a number of qualities in common, and the first half of Morton’s book introduces and explores them: they stick to other beings, and they potentially transform our taken-for-granted notions of time, space, locality, causality, and the possibility of ever being “away.” How this all happens is explained in a wonderfully personal and engaging narrative voice that ranges from Heidegger to The Lord of the Rings to the Tardis to Op Art, and the second half of the book introduces some of the consequences of and opportunities created by thinking with hyperobjects. It is about global warming and intimacy and object-oriented ontology and modern art and the possibilities of a phenomenology after we get rid of any notion of “the world” as something out-there and beyond-us. For those who are interested in STS and its environs, it offers a very different and very thoughtful language for articulating narratives beyond a simple “object agency” frame or a human/object binary. It’s also a great pleasure to read.

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Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

19 februari 2014 | 55 min

Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013)

9 februari 2014 | 71 min

Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

31 januari 2014 | 77 min

Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

21 januari 2014 | 62 min

Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013)

14 januari 2014 | 75 min

“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.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electricity, but also in a series of public lectures that generated very strong, furious responses, du Bois-Reymond galvanized (ha! see what I did there? galvanized? electricity?) nineteenth century publics of all sorts. In Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany (MIT Press, 2013), Finkelstein considers how someone so famous and so important could end up so forgotten, and he does a masterful job in rectifying that situation. The book traces du Bois-Reymond’s life and work, from a childhood in Berlin, to an early life and schooling in Bonn, and then back to Berlin and beyond in the course of a mature career in laboratories and lecture halls. We meet the scientist as teacher, as writer, and as public and university intellectual, and follow his transformation from Romantic to Lucretian and his dual existence as simultaneously staunch individual and product of his class and culture. The chapters are beautifully written, and range from exploring diary pages and love letters to laboratory equipment, with stopovers to consider frog pistols and hopping dances of joy along the way. Whether du Bois-Reymond was accepting the advice of his friends (as offered above) or avoiding his underwear-proffering mother-in-law (of which you’ll hear more in the conversation), he emerges here as not just an important historical figure, but also a fascinating person who’s a joy to read about. Enjoy!

The author suggests the following links for interested listeners who would like to learn more:

* A short description of the book on the MIT Press website.

* A Q & A that goes into more detail about the book that John Horgan published on “Cross-Check,” his blog for Scientific American.

* Another Q & A with Andreas Sommer at Cambridge University for his blog “Forbidden Histories“.

* Du Bois-Reymond’s “frog pistol,” as featured in the current exhibition “Mind Maps” at the Science Museum in London.

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Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

7 januari 2014 | 71 min

Conevery Bolton Valencius, “The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

28 december 2013 | 66 min

Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

27 november 2013 | 60 min

Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, eds., “Addiction Trajectories” (Duke UP, 2013)

26 november 2013 | 77 min

Todd H. Weir, “Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview” (Palgrave, 2012)

25 november 2013 | 53 min

Kim TallBear, “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

23 november 2013 | 60 min

Thomas Bey William Bailey, “Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society” (Belsona Books, 2012)

22 november 2013 | 56 min

Ian Jared Miller, “The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo” (University of California Press, 2013)

10 november 2013 | 80 min

Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012)

10 november 2013 | 61 min

William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012)

3 november 2013 | 68 min

Sienna R. Craig, “Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine” (University of California Press, 2012)

3 november 2013 | 74 min

Ian Bogost, “Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing” (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

26 oktober 2013 | 70 min

“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 Marcus, “What is it like to be a bat?”, carpentry, cyborg homes, sugar granules, and The Wire.

What you’ve just read (assuming that you’ve gotten here via the list above) is a very particular form of knowledge-making. It is a list, a catalogue, a community of things. It is also a kind of travelogue, a “Latour litany” that maps some of the objects populating Ian Bogost‘s beautifully written and wonderfully stimulating new book, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Opening with a piece of a They Might Be Giants song and ending with a part of a poem by Charles Bukowski, Bogost’s book introduces readers to the field of object-oriented ontology by asking us to consider a fundamental question: why do we ignore “stuff” in scholarship, poetry, science, or business as anything more than a way to continue talking about humans? Is there a way to think and live with stuff in the world that doesn’t reduce it to that which concerns people, but instead considers and lives with it on its own terms? Alien Phenomenology helps us explore this question and understand the stakes of the problem in five chapters that each introduce a key concept informing a discussion of the being of objects in our world: “tiny ontology” as a model for thinking with things, ontography as a means of mapping them as parts and wholes, metaphorism as a way of getting at the experiences of nonhumans, carpentry as a philosophical practice, and wonder. Though it will be of special interest to readers with an interest in literature, philosophy, and the humanities, the book itself speaks beyond any single disciplinary frame. From the perspective of science studies or STS, it offers a way of moving with and beyond the language of Actor-Network Theory and “agency” of the non-human world, potentially helping us to reframe our questions about objects and the narratives of science, medicine, technology, and modernity in innovative ways. (At the very least, it has been transformative for this historian of science.) Not only is it thoughtfully argued and elegantly (at times, gorgeously) written, but it’s also a lot of fun.

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Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)

26 oktober 2013 | 71 min

Marga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

19 oktober 2013 | 73 min

Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2012)

3 oktober 2013 | 63 min

Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

27 september 2013 | 73 min

John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)

27 september 2013 | 85 min

Ian Samson, “Paper: An Elegy” (Harper Collins, 2012)

24 september 2013 | 35 min

Tim Maudlin, “Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time” (Princeton UP, 2012)

17 september 2013 | 57 min

Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

8 september 2013 | 71 min

Rachel Prentice, “Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education” (Duke UP, 2013)

28 augusti 2013 | 69 min

Hannah S. Decker, “The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry” (Oxford UP, 2013)

23 augusti 2013 | 69 min

David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012)

29 juli 2013 | 69 min

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, eds., “Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History” (Harvard UP, 2012)

29 juli 2013 | 69 min

Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013)

18 juli 2013 | 65 min

Nathaniel Comfort, “The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine” (Yale UP, 2012)

5 juli 2013 | 70 min

“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 of the twentieth century. Based on a rich documentary and oral history archive, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale University Press, 2012) reframes the histories of early and contemporary human genetics. Rather than treating eugenics as “a contaminant of good, honest biomedicine,” the book shows that early human genetics had many of the same basic goals – human improvement and the relief of suffering – as genetic medicine today. At the same time, contemporary genetic medicine emerges as much less benign than it has often been depicted.

All of this is accomplished through a sensitive historical tracing of two major approaches to understanding human heredity through the twentieth century: a Galtonian approach characterized by a concern with quantification, public health, and populations; and a Garrodian approach characterized by an interest in conceptualizing the human as individual, and in synthesizing heredity with other forms of knowledge. As we follow these threads along with Comfort, he introduces us to a bookful of colorful, vibrant characters from the history of medical genetics: the idealistic inventor of a “Gumption Reviver,” the sanitarium-operator who was fond of prescribing yogurt-enemas, and the medical geneticist with a talent for boogie-woogie piano, among others. These figures are embedded in an exceptionally carefully-wrought narrative of the spaces, practices, and events by which medicine became genetic, genetics became molecular, and molecules made the engineering of humanity possible in a new way.

In the course of our discussion, we talked about the importance, for Comfort, of paying careful attention to elements of the writer’s craft when composing a historical work. The John McPhee essay on narrative structure that was mentioned in that part of the interview can be found here (A subscription to the New Yorker is required to read the full piece.)

The Oral History of Human Genetics Project can be found here.

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Nicco Mele, “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013)

24 juni 2013 | 37 min

Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012)

22 juni 2013 | 70 min

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 19th-Century Japan (Stanford University Press, 2012), the zograscope not least among them. The book opens with Fukuoka’s account of stumbling upon a manuscript of a botanical work called the Honzo shasin (1826) while on a trip to Leiden to see a Japanese zograscope, a device that enhanced the sense of depth when looking through it at otherwise flat pictures. Much of the book centers on the history and work of a small community of nineteenth-century scholars called the Shohyaku-sha, the group that produced the Honzo shashin and were interested in the study of materia medica. This focused case study allows Fukuoka to simultaneously stay anchored while opening up to an expansive history of transformations in modes of understanding visuality and evidence of knowledge of the natural world in Tokugawa Japan. As the book guides readers through the changing meanings of the word shashin, a term used to mean “photography” in contemporary Japanese, it demonstrates how knowledge of the spheres of textual knowledge, visual illustration, and physical plant specimens mutually reinforced one another while practitioners of the visual arts sought to define and secure relationships of “fidelity” among these very different media. This fundamentally trans-disciplinary book offers much of interest to historians of East Asia, of science, and of art: histories of public exhibitions, of natural history, of photography, of anatomical dissection, of translation and typography, and much more can be found within the pages of The Premise of Fidelity. And if I haven’t already mentioned it, there’s also a zograscope. What more reason would you need to read it?

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Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013)

20 juni 2013 | 34 min

Dominic Pettman, “Human Error” (UMinnesota, 2011)/”Look at the Bunny” (Zero Books, 2013)

31 maj 2013 | 76 min

Joseph November, “Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012)

14 maj 2013 | 63 min

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 United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Joe November mobilizes this ecology of instruments and objects, people and programs, in a story that maps out the early years of the introduction of computers to biology and medicine from 1955 to 1965. As computing technology was gradually integrated into different spaces of biomedicine that were characterized by agents with very different agendas (a set of processes not without significant contestation), biomedicine and computing transformed one another. Life itself was changed as a result, as the objects of biomedical computing were translated into the kinds of system-entities that computers could describe. The historian of technology who reads November’s book will find fascinating stories of machines like LINC, ENIAC, and UNIVAC. The historian of science will find accounts of the ways that military funding shaped the computerization of biomedicine, windows into the mid-century work supported by the NIH, stories of the transformation of diagnostic medicine in the US, and chapters from the history of crystallography and molecular biology. The historian of networks and computing will find analyses of the importance of operations research, expert systems, and transdisciplinary research practices to the work of some of the central figures in the history of the computational sciences. In addition to all of this, November’s book can also be read as a history of the modern personal computer. (There are also men in RNA-themed neckties sprinkled throughout the early part of the story.) Enjoy the interview, and imagine as you listen that you’re here with me at the National Humanities Center, Skyping with Joe as a thunderstorm booms overhead, rain falls loudly outside the window, and brilliant humanities scholars share excited conversation about their work outside the door. It was a special afternoon.

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Paul Barrett, “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” (Broadway, 2013)

2 maj 2013 | 54 min

Alexandra Hui, “The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910” (MIT Press, 2013)

30 april 2013 | 74 min

Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

1 april 2013 | 71 min

Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

28 mars 2013 | 70 min

Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

18 mars 2013 | 65 min

Matthew Wisnioski, “Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America” (MIT Press, 2012)

26 februari 2013 | 69 min

E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

18 februari 2013 | 66 min

Deborah R. Coen, “The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

11 februari 2013 | 49 min

Audra J. Wolfe, “Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America” (Johns Hopkins, 2013)

4 februari 2013 | 51 min

Joel Isaac, “Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn” (Harvard UP, 2012)

28 januari 2013 | 73 min

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 of academic institutions and academic life. There is a world between the grains, however – a world of unofficial, accidental, and trans-departmental conversations and inspirations. And it is within that “interstitial academy” that some of the most remarkable work in the history of modern social and humanistic thought has been born.

In Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard University Press, 2012), Joel Isaac takes readers into the interstitial academy of Harvard University in the middle of the twentieth century. Isaac traces a kind of early history of interdisciplinarity in the American academy in the course of an elegantly wrought argument for situating one of the most pivotal texts of the history and philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, within the emergence of what have become known as the human sciences. Twentieth century philosophers and social scientists sought to replace Kant’s transcendental notions with concepts more firmly rooted in the activities of working scientists and mathematicians, creating an epistemology that was deeply rooted in social practices. Maturing in this context and coming of intellectual age largely in the interstitial academy, Kuhn developed a notion of scientific paradigms that were “revealed in its textbooks, lectures, and laboratory exercises,” grounding his philosophy in a fundamental concern with pedagogical practices. At the same time, Isaac’s book is about so much more than Kuhn: it treats the history of American universities, the sociology of Pareto, the development of the case method in legal education, the changing disciplinary relationships between philosophy and psychology, the development of an idea of “social sciences,” among many other themes and stories. It is an exceptionally rich and persuasive story, and well worth reading – be it on the beach or elsewhere.

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Christopher I. Beckwith, “Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012)

22 januari 2013 | 82 min

Alec Foege, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great" (Basic Books, 2013)

17 januari 2013 | 52 min

From its earliest years, the United States was a nation of tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw. Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work, and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with the inventions that laid the foundations for America's economic dominance. Recently, Americans have come to question whether our tinkering spirit has survived the pressures of ruthless corporate organization and bottom-line driven caution. But as Alec Foege shows in The Tinkerers, reports of tinkering's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Through the stories of great tinkerers and inventions past and present, Foege documents how Franklin and Edison's modern-day heirs do not allow our cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity to interfere with their passion and creativity. Tinkering has been the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations such as the personal computer and Ethernet, and smaller scale inventions with great potential, such as a machine that can make low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in impoverished countries and a device that uses lasers to shoot malarial mosquitoes out of the sky. Some tinkerers attended the finest engineering schools in the world; some had no formal training in their chosen fields. Some see themselves as solo artists; others emphasize the importance of working in teams. What binds them together is an ability to subvert the old order, to see fresh potential in existing technologies, and to apply technical know-how to the problems of their day.

As anyone who has feared voiding a warranty knows, the complexity of modern systems can be needlessly intimidating. Despite this, tinkerers can – and do – come from anywhere, whether it's the R&D lab of a major corporation, a hobbyist's garage, or a summer camp for budding engineers. Through a lively retelling of recent history and captivating interviews with today's most creative innovators, Foege reveals how the tinkering tradition remains, in new and unexpected forms, at the heart of American society and culture.

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Michael D. Gordin, “The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

15 januari 2013 | 71 min

Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

9 januari 2013 | 62 min

Janice Neri, “The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

13 december 2012 | 68 min

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 the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern period. Inspired by the archaeology of Foucault but using an approach that spans the history of science, art history, and visual studies, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) identifies a “specimen logic” through which images of insects were removed from their habitats, decontextualized, and mobilized into networks of regional and global exchange and circulation. Part I of the book traces the emergence of insects as subject matter for artistic representation, looking in turn at the work of Joris Hoefnagel, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Thomas Moffet, and still-life painters from 1580-1620. The choices made by these artists contributed to the transformation of ideas about nature as controllable and commodifiable. Part II shifts our attention to the later seventeenth century, and considers how the work of artists such as Robert Hooke and Maria Sibylla Merian helped visualize insects (as well as their own professional identities) anew across several media. Neri’s work urges us to reconsider some common binaries that tend to characterize thinking and writing about images in history: art/science, professional/amateur, image/object.

To see some of the images that we talked about in the interview, check out the following links:

Hoefnagel images can be found here, and the stag beetle is here.

Digitized images from Aldrovandi’s work can be navigated to from here [site is in Italian].

The Van Der Ast image can be found here.

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Signe Rousseau, “Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet” (AltaMira Press, 2012)

13 december 2012 | 54 min

Sally Smith Hughes, “Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

3 december 2012 | 66 min

Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

26 november 2012 | 67 min

David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline” (University of Chicago, 2012)

20 november 2012 | 67 min

Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600” (Oregon State University Press, 2011)

26 oktober 2012 | 66 min

Catherine Jami, “The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722)” (Oxford UP, 2012)

19 oktober 2012 | 70 min

Minsoo Kang, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2011)

4 oktober 2012 | 78 min

Laura Stark, “Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

27 september 2012 | 59 min

Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

19 september 2012 | 55 min

Janet Kourany, “Philosophy of Science After Feminism” (Oxford UP, 2010)

10 september 2012 | 68 min

Helene Mialet, “Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

4 september 2012 | 66 min

Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order” (University of California Press, 2011)

29 augusti 2012 | 71 min

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, “Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare” (Churchill Livingstone, 2011)

25 augusti 2012 | 65 min

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 to bring scholars and practitioners of East Asian medicine together in a common dialogue that also informs and is shaped by cutting-edge work in Science Studies. Not a typical conference volume, the book is instead the result of years of continuing collaboration among the editors and authors, and celebrates the spirit of collaborative work in every aspect of its structure and material. The chapters collectively explore some key ideas that thread through the work and are of broad relevance to the histories and practices of health and healing: the nature of “authenticity” in alternative and complementary health practices; the problem of standardization; learning through best practices and best practitioners; and the changing and plural nature of evidence and proof in the contemporary world. The material covered in the book is extended and deepened in a series of vignettes that each illustrate exemplary phenomena, texts, settings, or concepts relevant to the chapters in which they are embedded.

I had the opportunity to speak with both co-editors about the book, the larger intellectual and practical goals that inform it, and the history and potential futures of their collaboration. It was a very enjoyable conversation about a fascinating project, and I hope you’ll enjoy!

* A quick note: You’ll notice that there’s an echo on this one due to a rare circumstance with a three-way Skype call during which not all participants had earphones handy. Because there was a lot of good material, we decided to post it regardless of the echo. Apologies for that! We’re working on trying to reduce the incidence of this kind of audio issue for future interviews, to the extent possible. Thanks for listening!

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Avner Ben Zaken, “Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)

11 augusti 2012 | 69 min

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 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), Avner Ben Zaken introduces readers to a wonderfully diverse cast of characters and texts to show how fundamental notions of modern science (and modernity in general) were established in cross-cultural exchanges across the globe. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 is a study of the ways that early modern science traveled among localities and cultures and was constituted by those travels, focusing on the example of post-Copernican cosmologies. In the course of this fascinating study, Ben Zaken considers what it means to talk about “incommensurable” cultures, and champions the historical power of the mundane and the marginal. Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism traces the composition, travels, and translation of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan as a way get at a history of debates about autididacticism in twelfth-century Marrakesh, fourteenth-century Barcelona, Renaissance Florence, and seventeenth-century England. This is an elegantly written and exhaustively researched world history of a single text on wildness, childhood, and nature, among many other themes that emerged and transformed in the very different contexts that the Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan was studied and engaged.

Since these two books represent parts of a coherent intellectual project in progress, we spoke about them in both in terms of the broader issues that underpin Avner’s scholarly work. We talked a great deal about the craft of historical writing. Topics ranged from the opportunities and challenges of working at different historical scales and bringing micro- and macro-history into the same project, to how academic training leads young historians to study local cultures in a particularly monadic way. It was a very stimulating conversation for me, and I hope you’ll enjoy!

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Anjan Chakravartty, “A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable” (Cambridge UP, 2007)

27 juli 2012 | 68 min

P. Kyle Stanford, “Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives” (Oxford UP, 2006)

17 juli 2012 | 82 min

Hanna Rose Shell, “Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance” (Zone Books, 2012)

9 juli 2012 | 66 min

David A. Kirby, “Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema” (MIT Press, 2011)

2 juli 2012 | 65 min

Sherine Hamdy, “Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt” (University of California Press, 2012)

20 juni 2012 | 61 min

Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise” (UNC Press, 2011)

15 juni 2012 | 34 min

Philip Kitcher, “Science in a Democratic Society” (Prometheus Books, 2011)

9 juni 2012 | 62 min

John Cheng, “Astounding Wounder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

1 juni 2012 | 77 min

Jim Endersby, “Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

23 maj 2012 | 70 min

D. Graham Burnett, “The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

15 maj 2012 | 68 min

Helen Tilley, “Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950” (University of Chicago, 2011)

1 maj 2012 | 66 min

Christopher Mole, “Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology” (Oxford UP, 2011)

27 april 2012 | 71 min

Lawrence Busch, “Standards: Recipes for Reality” (MIT Press, 2011)

16 april 2012 | 62 min

David Edwards, “The Lab: Creativity and Culture” (Harvard University Press, 2010)

2 april 2012 | 53 min

Marshall Poe, “A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet” (Cambridge UP, 2011)

26 mars 2012 | 82 min

Ann M. Blair, “Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age” (Yale University Press, 2010)

7 mars 2012 | 75 min

Suman Seth, “Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926” (MIT Press, 2010)

24 februari 2012 | 81 min

Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011)

1 februari 2012 | 97 min

Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011)

24 januari 2012 | 86 min

Tong Lam, “A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949” (University of California Press, 2011)

22 december 2011 | 83 min

Andrew F. Jones, “Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture” (Harvard UP, 2011)

30 november 2011 | 67 min

Daqing Yang, “Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)

15 november 2011 | 75 min

Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010)

1 november 2011 | 73 min

Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010)

17 december 2010 | 62 min

What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and foremost, understanding the human body. Naturally, then, the philosophes and their successors paid close attention to the body. They cut it up, took it apart, measured it and attempted to see how it worked. They were most interested in one part in particular–the human head. It was the seat of the human characteristic the Enlightenment scientists admired most: intelligence. If one could get a handle on the human cranium, then one would understand what it meant to be human. Or at least so they thought.

In her fascinating new book The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Ann Fabian introduces us to a group of American philosophes who began to collect and study human crania in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, they took most of their cues from their European counterparts. They did, however, adapt craniology to a peculiar American context. Living in a social order in part built on supposed racial difference, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Africans mattered. Their work could support the suppositions of slavery, or not. Moreover, living in a social order that was at the very time they were working involved in a quasi-genocidal campaign against indigenous peoples, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Native Americans mattered as well. Their work might buttress the movement for Indian removal, or it might not. And being people of the “New World,” the American skull collectors knew that they were looked down upon by many of their European colleagues. They needed to collect skulls aggressively in order to establish craniology as an American science.

As one might expect, the American skull collectors were, by our lights, a strange bunch. Racists, imperialists, and nationalists to be sure. But also scientists, curators, and founders of physical anthropology. Thanks to Ann for bringing them to us in all their contradictory richness.

Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010)

20 oktober 2010 | 63 min

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers (over 10,000 of them) and proceeded to make war on the heavens. The idea was to “seed” clouds with silver iodide before they got to Beijing and rained on the Chinese parade. Or maybe the idea was to frighten the rain gods. Who knows? In any case, none of it worked: the massive, loud, and surely expensive operation had, according to most experts, no measurable effect on the weather around the Chinese capital.

You might say you can’t blame them for trying. But according to James Rodger Fleming, you can. In his incisive new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia UP, 2010), Fleming shows that although people have always dreamed of controlling the weather, and many have tried to do so, no one has ever succeeded. The reason is simple: the atmosphere of the Earth is not like your refrigerator or oven. It’s just too big and complex to be man-handled by any known or even realistically imagined technology. But, as Fleming demonstrates, there are always desperate people who refuse to accept this intuitive fact. So we are presented with a gallery of rain-making mountebanks, charlatans, and swindlers ever-ready to part rain-seeking fools and their rain-seeking money. In Fleming’s excellent telling, the story is entertaining though a bit sad. It’s sadder still that the weather-controlling con is still being run by seemingly well-intentioned people who claim they can “fix” global warming by means of some out-sized, outrageous, and out-of-this-world engineering scheme. Fleming, who both knows the science and has looked at the history, is more than dubious. The only way we can “fix” the sky is to leave it alone and hope for the best. It turns out, however, that leaving the sky alone is hard. It’s actually easier to attack it, proclaim victory, and continue as before. Just ask the Chinese.

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New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Interviews with Scholars of Science, Technology, and Society about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.

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