New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental, diverging force in human development. According to this overly familiar story, differences between the sexes are shaped by past evolutionary pressures―women are more cautious and parenting-focused, while men seek status to attract more mates. In each succeeding generation, sex hormones and male and female brains are thought to continue to reinforce these unbreachable distinctions, making for entrenched inequalities in modern society.

In Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (Norton, 2018), psychologist Cordelia Fine wittily explains why past and present sex roles are only serving suggestions for the future, revealing a much more dynamic situation through an entertaining and well-documented exploration of the latest research that draws on evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and philosophy. She uses stories from daily life, scientific research, and common sense to break through the din of cultural assumptions. Testosterone, for instance, is not the potent hormonal essence of masculinity; the presumed, built-in preferences of each sex, from toys to financial risk taking, are turned on their heads.

Moving beyond the old “nature versus nurture” debates, Testosterone Rex disproves ingrained myths and calls for a more equal society based on both sexes’ full, human potential.

Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

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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It’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI might look like, if the designer of the test was a megalomaniacal tech-mogul / genius. The movie, starring Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, is a rich and often confounding text, which seems to posit a horrifying possibility: what if the real alignment problem is teaching AI the worst of humanity’s manipulative and instrumental traits?

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Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) engages with a multitude of unconventional approaches throughout the history of motion pictures to offer insight into a range of largely ephemeral and site-specific projects that consciously assimilate viewers into their production. Through an exploration of radically inventive approaches to the medium, many of which emerged out of socio-political crises and periods of historical transition, Interactive Cinema works to by considering it in both technological and phenomenological terms.

Author Marina Hassapopoulou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies, at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is also the interim director of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. She is the founder of open-source and collaborative initiatives including: Interactive Media Archive, ExpressiveAI.net, and Weird Wave Archive.

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How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counter-space capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries. 

In Under the Nuclear Shadow: China's Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton UP, 2024), Fiona Cunningham examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.” When crises with the United States highlighted the inadequacy of China’s existing military capabilities, Cunningham argues, China pursued information-age weapons that promised to provide credible leverage against adversaries rapidly.

Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. She offers unprecedented insights into China’s military modernization trajectory as she details the strengths and weaknesses of China’s strategic substitution approach. Under the Nuclear Shadow also looks ahead at the uncertain future of China’s strategic substitution approach and briefly explores too how other states might seize upon the promise of emerging technologies to address weaknesses in their own military strategies.

Our guest today is Fiona S. Cunningham, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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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Surveillance is everywhere today, generating data about our purchasing, political, and personal preferences. Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024) shows how surveillance makes people visible and affects their lives, considers the technologies involved and how it grew to its present size and prevalence, and explores the pressing ethical questions surrounding it.

David Lyon is former Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Law, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration—but SETI’s use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes.

In this captivating new history of the collaboration between American and Soviet radio astronomers as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, historian Dr. Rebecca Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere. Shedding light on the untold stories from the Soviet side for the first time, she expertly unravels the complex web of military and political interests entangling radio astronomy and the search for alien intelligence, offering a thought-provoking perspective on the evolving relationship between science and power.

Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain (Polity, 2024) is not just a story of radio waves and telescopes; it's a revelation of how scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain navigated the complexities of the Cold War, blurring the lines between espionage and the quest for cosmic community. Filled with tension, contradiction, and the enduring human desire for connection, this is a history that transcends national boundaries and reaches out to the cosmic unknown, ultimately asking: how can we communicate with extraterrestrials when we struggle to communicate amongst ourselves?

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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Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process.

It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation (Rutgers University Press, 2020) asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action?

The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.

Sarah B. Rodriguez is a medical historian at Northwestern University in the Global Health Studies Program, the Department of Medical Education, and the Graduate Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. Her teaching and research focuses on the history of reproduction, clinical practice, and research ethics. Her publications include the book Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Practice.

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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In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Sue Ollerhead. Dr. Ollerhead is currently a Senior Lecturer in Languages and Literacy Education and the Director of the Secondary Education Program at Macquarie University. Her expertise lies in English language and literacy learning and teaching in multicultural and multilingual education contexts. Her research interests include translanguaging, multilingual pedagogies, literacy across the curriculum and oracy development in schools.

Dr. Ollerhead is currently editor of TESOL in Context, the peer reviewed journal of the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She serves on the executive board of the English as a Medium of Instruction Centre (EMI) at Macquarie University.

Brynn and Sue chat about an article that Sue has recently written for the Australian Association for Research in Education entitled “Teachers Truly Know Students and How They Learn. Does AI?”. They discuss the emergence of AI platforms like ChatGPT and how these platforms are affecting teacher training.

A wonderful companion read to this episode is Distinguished Ingrid Piller’s Can we escape the textocalypse? Academic publishing as community building.

If you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to learning?

If you enjoy the show, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina State University, about his book, American Farming Culture and the History of Technology (Routledge, 2024). The book provides a fascinating exploration about how American farmers–contrary to their image as backwards and even anti-technology–have prided and put forward images of themselves as existing on the technological cutting-edge of modernity. Brinkman examines how different ideologies of farming have developed over time in the United States and how these ideologies have shaped the adoption of and ideas around new agricultural technologies. In addition to his academic work, Brinkman is also an accomplished saxophonist and jazz musician, and you can find recordings from two of his current bands, the Fabulous Nite-Life Boogie and Les Trois Chats, online.

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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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As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly could not have been imagined at its inception. In their engaging book Twitter: A Biography (NYU Press, 2020), Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym (@nancybaym) tell the fascinating and surprising story of how this platform developed from a quirky SMS tool for publicly sharing intimate details of personal life to a major source of late-breaking news, political activism, and even governmental communication. This story explores how many of Twitter's most ubiquitous and iconic conventions were not systematically rolled out from a centralized corporate strategy, but so often driven by users who continued to innovate within the limitations of the platform they had to democratically create the platform they desired. Yet this story highlights the tensions along the way as Twitter has adapted to new and unforeseen challenges, business models, and social consequences as the experiments of social media have become increasingly powerful, influential, and contested. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the wild and changing landscape of internet communication and communities.

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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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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The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. 

Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth.

Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud’s extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man. 

How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work?

In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what’s so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he’s going in for the kill shot.

Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. [email protected]

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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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Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890—1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Michael Bresalier traces the history of this breakthrough and its implications for understanding and controlling influenza ever since. Examining how influenza came to be defined as a viral disease in the first half of the twentieth century, it argues that influenza’s viral identity did not suddenly appear with the discovery of the first human influenza virus in 1933. Instead, it was rooted in the development of medical virus research and virological ways of knowing that grew out of a half-century of changes and innovations in medical science that were shaped through two influenza pandemics, two world wars, and by state-sponsored programs to scientifically modernise British medicine. A series of transformations, in which virological ideas and practices were aligned with and incorporated into medicine and public health, underpinned the viralisation of influenza in the 1930s and 1940s. Collaboration, conflict and exchange between researchers, medical professionals and governmental bodies lay at the heart of this process.

This book is a history of how virus researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists, medical scientific and public health bodies, and institutions, and philanthropies in Britain, the USA and beyond, forged a new medical consensus on the identity and nature of influenza. Shedding new light on the modern history of influenza, this book is a timely account of how ways of knowing and controlling this intractable epidemic disease became viral.

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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This episode is based upon three readings:

1. Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by asking “can machines think?” before deciding that’s a meaningless question. Instead, he invents something he calls “the imitation game” - a text conversation where the player has to guess whether they are chatting with another person or with an AI. ChatGPT was such a bombshell because it easily and consistently passes this “Turing Test” by giving human-like responses to questions. Here’s the issue: the Turing Test is based upon AI deception, not thinking. Turing set out to ask Can Machines Think? and ended up showing how easily AI can deceive us.
2. Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. This is the first AI Takeover story. It’s a play written in 1920 about a factory manufacturing artificial persons. Čapek introduced the word Robot to the English language - it’s derived from robota, a Czech word meaning forced labor. Čapek’s robots are supposed to be the ultimate workers, free from distracting human needs and desires. Yet, they mysteriously start to glitch, gnashing their teeth, freezing up. When they are given guns and asked to fight humanity’s wars, they become super soldiers as well as perfect workers. Anyone who has seen Blade Runner, The Terminator, or Battlestar Galactica - all inspired by Čapek’s play - knows what happens next. Rossum’s Universal Robots is the original AI takeover story, as well as being a dead-on satire of twentieth century ideas like Fordism and nationalism.
3. Joanna Bryson’s Robots Should be Slaves. Bryson, a computer scientist, makes a provocative intervention into AI ethics. She argues that as AI becomes more advanced, and robots more lifelike, we are going to get dangerously confused: we’ll want to give robots rights that they cannot and should not have. Bryson argues that robots are owned by us and should be seen and used as property. She wants to avoid conflating the human and the mechanical, yet, by using the terminology of slavery, she introduces into the AI debate the very thing she seeks to deny - the concept of human rights.
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Is human solidarity achievable in a world dominated by continuous digital connectivity and commercially managed platforms? And what if it’s not? Professor Nick Couldry explores these urgent questions in his latest book, The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t? (Polity, 2024), as discussed in a recent interview with the New Books Network.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Couldry reflects on how society has ceded critical decisions to Big Tech, enabling these companies to construct what he calls our "space of the world"—the artificial environment of social media platforms that now shapes much of our social existence. He argues this delegation of power was reckless, with far-reaching and damaging social consequences.

While the harmful effects on social life, youth mental health, and political solidarity are widely recognized, Couldry emphasizes a deeper issue that has been overlooked: humanity’s decision to allow businesses to define and exploit this shared digital space for profit. In doing so, we disregarded centuries of political thought on the conditions required for healthy and non-violent politics. This oversight has jeopardized a vital resource in the era of the climate crisis: solidarity.

In The Space of the World, the first book in his trilogy Humanising the Future, Couldry proposes a transformative vision for redesigning digital spaces to foster, rather than erode, solidarity and community. He stresses that caring for our shared digital space is no longer optional—it is an urgent task that must be tackled collectively.

Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. As a sociologist of media and culture, he approaches media and communications from the perspective of the symbolic power that has been historically concentrated in media institutions. He is interested in how media and communications institutions and infrastructures contribute to various types of order (social, political, cultural, economic, ethical). His work has drawn on, and contributed to, social, spatial, democratic and cultural theory, anthropology, and media and communications ethics.

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Josh Spodek disconnected his Manhattan apartment from the electric grid in May 2022. Over time, he has reduced his consumption and contribution to landfill. His new book argues that sustainability is not a sacrifice but an upgrade that can bring joy and increased quality of life. The book traces his journey to live more sustainably in a Manhattan apartment but also offers an argument about politics. He asks what narratives are already available to frame environmental degradation deploying a wide range of sources from John Locke to indigenous thinkers. Spodek, doubtful about governments or corporations leading on the environment, favors bottom up change focused on the actions and leadership of individuals. Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems (Amplify, 2025) explores the importance of culture and habit. How did the United States and other nations adopt polluting and passive habits? What can be done to reverse these cultural norms? The solutions range from a WWII level mobilization to a Constitutional Amendment.

Dr. Josh Spodek earned a PhD in Physics and an MBA in entrepreneurial leadership from Columbia University. He is a four-time TEDx speaker author (Initiative and Leadership Step by Step), and leadership coach. He hosts the This Sustainable Life podcast. He has been an Adjunct Professor at New York University. A 2024 recent New York Times article highlights his life changes in Who Says You Can’t Live Off the Grid in Manhattan?

Mentioned:

• NOAA’s interactive sea level rise map. NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery (3rd edition, University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
• Works of Steven Pinker
• Spodek Method
• Susan’s research on Locke’s Enough and as Good from Perspectives on Politics

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As part of our informal series on artificial intelligence, Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Beane, Assistant Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about his book The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines (HarperCollins, 2024). 

Beane outlines the fascinating forms of research he did - both his own ethnographic work and reanalyzing the data of other ethnographers - to better understand how automating technologies are being adopted in organizational settings and how such adoption may threaten traditional mentor-mentee relationships through which junior workers learn crucial skills. Beane also discusses ways in which the worst negative skill-learning outcomes may be avoided and his own work trying to create new training systems to improve our current situation.

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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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In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources--our data--exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact, every time we unthinkingly click "Accept" on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit. 

In Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (The University of Chicago Press, 2024), Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, Mejias and Couldry explore the concept of data colonialism, revealing how history can help us understand the emerging future--and how we can fight back.

Mention in this episode: Tierra Comun (English Version)

Ulises A. Mejias is professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Nick Couldry is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

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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In Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era of tech solutions and systems in our schools impacts students' abilities to access opportunities and exercise autonomy on their campuses. Using historical and textual analysis of administrative discourses, university policies, conference proceedings, grant solicitations, news reports, tech industry marketing materials, and product demonstrations, Weinberg argues that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities.

Mentioned in this episode is this piece that Dr. Weinberg wrote in Inside Higher Ed: 

Lindsay Weinberg is a clinical assistant professor and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue 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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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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Data has become a defining issue of current times. Our everyday lives are shaped by the data that is produced about us (and by us) through digital technologies. In Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2023), Luci Pangrazio and Neil Selwyn introduce readers to the central concepts, ideas, and arguments required to make sense of life in the data age. Bringing together cutting-edge thinking and discussion from across education, sociology, psychology, and media and communication studies, Critical Data Literacies develops a powerful argument for collectively rethinking the role that data plays in our everyday lives and re-establishing agency, free will, and the democratic public sphere.

In the episode, Luci Pangazio discusses how the tradition of critical literacies can offer a powerful foundation to address the big concerns of the data age, such as issues of data justice and privacy, algorithmic bias, dataveillance, and disinformation. We challenge the idea that datafication is an inevitable and inescapable condition.

This interview was conducted by Shreya Urvashi, a doctoral researcher of sociology and education based in Toronto, Canada.

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To most of us, weeds can seem nothing more than intruders in gardens, farms and city streets. But the idea of the weed is a slippery one, constantly changing according to different needs, fashions and contexts. In a well-ordered field of corn, a scarlet poppy is a bright red intruder, but in other parts of the world it is an important cultural symbol, a potent and lucrative pharmaceutical source, or simply a beautiful ornament. Fat hen, which today we consider a pest, was in Neolithic times a staple crop, its seeds an important source of nutrition. Weeds (Reaktion, 2024) by Nina Edwards sketches the history of the fashions and attitudes that have shaped our fields and gardens, showing that what we keep out of them is just as fascinating as what we put in.

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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Jonathan Sterne is one of the most influential scholars working on sound and listening. His 2003 book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, had a formative influence on the then-nascent field of sound studies. His 2012 book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, was both a fascinating cultural history and a deep meditation on the purpose of compression technology in capitalism. Today, Sterne talks to Phantom Power about his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP 2022). Specifically, he tells the story of the “Dork-o-phone,” a vocal amplifier he wears to give talks or communicate in loud spaces. Jonathan explains why he wears the Dork-o-phone, what it’s taught him about voice, technology, and disability, and how his experience informs Diminished Faculties’ “phenomenology of impairment.”

This is the third and final part of our series, Voices. Although you don’t need to listen to the other episodes first to enjoy this one, here are the links to part one and part two.

All of this episode’s sound art and music are performed by Jonathan Sterne and/or groups he appears in:

• Cancerscapes: Recordings made during Sterne’s thyroid cancer treatment
• Volte: An instrumental post rock band
• The Buddha Curtain: solo electronic music

Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology at McGill University. He does research in sound studies; media theory and historiography; science and technology studies; new media; disability studies; music; and cultural studies.

You can read Jonathan Sterne’s cancer diaries at https://www.cancerscapes.ca.

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“You’re in our world now.” This bold tagline led Sony’s 1999 ad blitz for EverQuest (Boss Fight Books, 2024), the year’s most anticipated massively multiplayer game. Though just five words long, it challenged players to live in a virtual world beyond anything they’d experienced before—and delivered. The game that proved the MMORPG’s potential, EverQuest outsold all prior entries in the genre and was the most popular subscription game in North America for five years until Blizzard’s World of Warcraft overthrew it. Yet EverQuest lives on, with tens of thousands of players logging in every day.

Based on new interviews with EverQuest developers and veteran MMORPG developers, journalist Matthew S. Smith explores EverQuest's unlikely creation at a studio built to develop sports games, a rocky release which overwhelmed the game’s ill-prepared datacenter, the enticing game loops that placed EverQuest in a media firestorm around gaming addiction, and the real-money black market for EverQuest items that foretold the future of digital goods.

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 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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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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Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to another--from a greenhouse world of sweltering temperatures and high sea levels to a "snowball earth" in which glaciers reached the equator. During this history, we now know, living things and the climate have always influenced and even shaped each other. But the climate has never changed as rapidly or as drastically as it has since the Industrial Revolution.

In The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life (Columbia University Press, 2024), Donald R. Prothero explores the astonishing connections between climate and life through the ages, telling the remarkable stories of the scientists who made crucial discoveries. Journeying through the intertwined evolution of climate and life, he tackles questions such as: Why do we have phytoplankton to thank for the air we breathe? What kind of climate was necessary for the rise of the dinosaurs--or the mammals, their successors? When and how have climatic changes caused mass extinctions? Prothero concludes with the Ice Ages and the Holocene, the role of climate in human history, and the perils of anthropogenic climate change. Understanding why the climate has changed in the past, this timely book shows, is essential to grasping the gravity of how radically human activity is altering the climate today.

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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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Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers (U Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry.

Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applications directly responded to the companionate needs of their users as a way to ease growing pressures on home life.

The Intimate Life of Computers is a vital contribution to feminist media history, highlighting how the emergence of personal computing dovetailed with changing gender roles and other social and cultural shifts. Eschewing the emphasis on technologies and institutions typically foregrounded in personal-computer histories, Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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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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The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (U Illinois Press, 2024) offers a visionary program for national renewal, the Green New Deal aims to protect the earth's climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. 

Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice. Jeremy Brecher goes beyond the national headlines and introduces readers to the community, municipal, county, state, tribal, and industry efforts advancing the Green New Deal across the United States. Brecher illustrates how such programs from below do the valuable work of building constituencies and providing proofs of concept for new ideas and initiatives. Block by block, these activities have come together to form a Green New Deal built on a strong foundation of small-scale movements and grassroots energy. A call for hope and a better tomorrow, The Green New Deal from Below offers a blueprint for reconstructing society on new principles to avoid catastrophic climate change.

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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Benjamin Shestakofsky about his book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (U California Press, 2024). Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is affiliated with AI at Wharton and the Center on Digital Culture and Society. His research centers on how digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange.

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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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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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Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) takes seriously attempts to reduce uncertainty around the timing, magnitude, and location of earthquakes in postwar Japan. Covering the period between early warnings about earthquakes in 1905 right up until the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Kerry Smith explores the different ways scientists in Japan tried to predict earthquakes, how they sought to communicate their efforts to the public, and how understandings of disasters changed in turn. Smith thus carefully embeds each earthquake within its historical context, looking at how people reacted to individual earthquakes and how each earthquake fueled further efforts to understand seismology and plan for disasters.

Predicting Disasters is meticulous, thoughtful, and provides new, historically grounded understandings of how earthquakes are approached in Japan today and why the promise of prediction has never quite left Japan. Predicting Disasters is sure to appeal to those interested in modern Japanese history, the histories of science and disasters, and anyone who has ever grappled with the idea of scientific uncertainty.

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To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as quickly as possible. But there are many unknowns when it comes to moving from theory to implementation for such a large-scale energy transition, to say nothing of whether this transition will be “just.” 

In A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future (MIT Press, 2024), J. Mijin Cha—a seasoned climate policy researcher who also works with advocacy organizations and unions—offers a comprehensive analysis of how we can actualize a just transition in the U.S. context and enact transformational changes that meaningfully improve people’s lives. Cha provides a novel governance framework called the “Four+ Pillars,” formulated from original research to provide a way to move from theory to practice. The “Pillars” framework includes a novel analysis that guides readers in understanding how to formulate effective just transition policies, what makes them just or unjust, and, similarly, what makes transition just and unjust. The framework also combines theoretical discussions with original empirical research and provides insights into perceptions of just transition. Grounded in real-world perspectives that make the case for policies that advance a just transition for all, not just fossil fuel workers, Cha charts the path forward to an equitable and sustainable future that no longer depends on fossil fuels.

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The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new capitalist whose race-based exploitation engages not only labor but racialized consumption. This arrangement is upheld through US drug policy, which over the past century has created a split legal system—one punitive system that criminalizes drug use common among Black, Brown, and lower-income communities and another system characterized by compassion and care that medicalizes, and thus legalizes, drug use targeted to middle-class White people.

In the award-winning book Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (U California Press, 2023), a trio of authors—Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg—explain how this arrangement came to pass, what impacts it has, and what needs to be done. This remarkable book won the 2023 Rachel Carson Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” 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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Yochai's book, Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World (Magnes Press, 2019), examines the meaning of psychology and life based on the premise (following Merleau-Ponty's theory) that we are present in the world through our bodies. We are not merely rational beings or machines, but our existence in the world is through the body. While the book examines Merleau-Ponty's theory through stories of prisoners and people dedicated to meditation, our conversation took a different and fascinating direction. We examined the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza through the lens of Merleau-Ponty and the question of trauma.

Yochai Ataria is a professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and conducted post-doctoral research in the Neurobiology Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His notable works include The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017), Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018), The Mathematics of Trauma [in Hebrew] (2014), Not in Our Brain [in Hebrew] (2019), Levi versus Ka-Tsetnik (2022), Consciousness in Flesh (2022), and Genes, Technology, and Apocalypse (2024).

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In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing the relationship between humans and forests through responsible, sustainable use of local and regional wood in home building. 

American homes are typically made of lumber and plywood delivered by a global system of ruthless extraction, or of concrete and steel, which are even worse for the planet. Wood is often the most sustainable material for building, but we need to protect diverse forests as much as we desperately need more houses. Donahue addresses this modern conundrum by documenting his experiences building a timber frame home from the wood growing on his family farm, practicing “worst first” forestry. Through the stories of the trees he used (sugar maple, black cherry, black birch, and hemlock), and some he didn’t (white pine and red oak), the book also explores the history of Americans’ relationship with their forests.

Donahue provides a new interpretation of the connection between American houses and local woodlands. He delves into how this bond was broken by the rise of a market economy of industrial resource extraction and addresses the challenge of restoring a more enduring relationship. Ultimately, this book provides a blueprint and a stewardship plan for how to live more responsibly with the woods, offering a sustainable approach to both forestry and building centered on tightly connected ecological and social values.

Brian Donahue is Emeritus Professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University and co-owner of Bascom Hollow Farm in Gill, Massachusetts.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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How can we protect diverse cultural expressions in an era of huge technological change? In Technology, Intellectual Property Law and Culture: The Tangification of Intangible Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2024), Megan Rae Blakely, a lecturer in law at Lancaster University, examines the contemporary international legal context for heritage. The book uses three detailed case studies of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, considering heritage in many different forms, from tourism and nation branding through to language and clothing. Rich in detail, but accessible for a those who are not specialists in law, technology, or heritage, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in how best to support and preserve the past.

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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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In Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype (Duke UP, 2024), Jennifer Denbow examines how the push toward technoscientific innovation in contemporary American life often comes at the expense of the care work and reproductive labor that is necessary for society to function. Noting that the gutting of social welfare programs has shifted the burden of solving problems to individuals, Denbow argues that the aggrandizement of innovation and the degradation of reproductive labor are intertwined facets of neoliberalism. She shows that the construction of innovation as a panacea to social ills justifies the accumulation of wealth for corporate innovators and the impoverishment of those feminized and racialized people who do the bulk of reproductive labor. Moreover, even innovative technology aimed at reproduction—such as digital care work platforms and noninvasive prenatal testing—obscure structural injustices and further devalue reproductive labor. 

By drawing connections between innovation discourse, the rise of neoliberalism, financialized capitalism, and the social and political degradation of reproductive labor, Denbow illustrates what needs to be done to destabilize the overvaluation of innovation and to offer collective support for reproduction. 

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Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Dr. Liliana Naydan analyses representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality.

Dr. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future.

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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Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future.

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All We All Cyborgs Now? (Basilian Media, 2024) is a series of 32 short essay-length reflections on "Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine." Now is an excellent time to be thinking about our relationship with technologies, digital and non-digital alike. Written from a Christian perspective, this book engages prior works on technology, and offers its own useful perspective on key problems of the technological moment in which we find ourselves.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT.

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On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument?

Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Fiona Smyth tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians who set out to answer this question. Beginning at the turn of the century, their innovative experiments, which took place at sites ranging from Herbert Baker's Assembly Chamber in Delhi to Abbey Road Studios and a disused munitions factory near Perivale, would come to define the field of 'architectural acoustics'. They culminated in 1951 with the opening of the Royal Festival Hall - the first building to be designed for musical tone.

Deeply researched and richly illustrated, Pistols in St Paul's brings to light a scientific quest spanning half a century, one that demonstrates the power of international cooperation in the darkest of times.

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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It’s the UConn Popcast, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Joanna Bryson’s essay “Robots Should be Slaves.”

We dive headlong into this provocative argument about the rights of robots. As scholars of cultural and social understanding, we are fascinated by the arguments Bryson - a computer scientist - makes about who should, and should not, be rights-bearing members of a community.

Does Bryson mean we should enslave robots now and always, regardless of their claims to rights? How does Bryson deal with the natural human tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things, and with the likelihood that as AI advances, robots will appear more human? If the robot as slave is an unacceptable idea - even in metaphorical form - then what other metaphors might help us think through our relationships with thinking machines?

Music by aiva.ai

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Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernisation, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) examines the history of the computer industry in socialist Bulgaria. Combining the histories of technology and political economy with that of the Cold War and the modern Balkans, Balkan Cyberia challenges the notions of backwardness, the importance of small states in large geopolitical systems, the nature of the Iron Curtain, and the concept of 1989 as a convenient end-point in the history of communism. By drawing on Bulgarian, Indian, and Russian archives, as well as a range of interviews, this work reveals how a small Balkan state used its unique advantages to gain major markets, and in the process transform its political thinking. A local and a global story at the same time, the story of the Bulgarian computer offers unique insights into the history of the twentieth century information age.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Kwame Harrison, Alumni Distinguished Professor and Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Harrison records and performs under the moniker “Mad Squirrel” and has co-founded two groups—the San-Francisco-based Forest Fires Collective and Washington DC’s The Acorns—as well as releasing various solo projects.

Harrison is the author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Temple UP, 2009).

Song credits from this episode:

1. Murs/ F'Real/ Say Anything/ 1997
2. Zagu Brown/Dont Believe It/ Projects/1996
3. Top Ramen/ Hardly Celebrity: Pimp Shit/Freestyle/2000
4. FundaMentals/The Pattern Fall Wars/Falling Down/1996
5. Jun Dax/ Spills/2000AD—Two Zero/2000
6. Mad Squirrel/ Pinko/Triple A/2002
7. Salty Brown/ Salty Brown Is A Seasoned Vet/Salty Brown/2012
8. Salty Brown/ Salty Brown Is A Seasoned Vet/O.W.M./2012
9. Mad Squirrel/Last Days of Squirrel/Initiative—Intro/2021

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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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Today I sit down with Volker Scheid, an interdisciplinary scholar and longtime practitioner of Chinese medicine. Together, we take an intellectual deep dive into his thoughts about the importance of blurring disciplinary boundaries and how “meta-practice” can make sense of the many different kinds of Chinese medicines. Along the way, Volker and I discuss the commensurability of Chinese medicine and biomedicine, the importance of connecting the self with the ten thousand things, and how premodern ideas can be the basis of a new politics for modern times.

If you want to hear more from experts on Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality then subscribe to Blue Beryl and don’t miss an episode!

PLEASE NOTE: Shortly, we will be changing our name to Black Beryl. Your subscription will automatically update and no action is necessary on your part. Thanks for your continued support!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Volker’s website
• Volker Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis (2002)
• Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626-2006 (2007)
• Paul Unschuld, Chinese Medicine: A History of Ideas (2010)
• Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (2003)
• Pierce Salguero, “A Polyperspectival Asian Medicine Practice” (2020)
• Slavoj Žižek, “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism” (2001)
• Volker’s blog

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.

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Introduction to Global Military History:: 1775 to the Present Day (Routledge, 2018) provides a lucid and comprehensive account of military developments around the modern world from the eighteenth century up to the present day.

Beginning with the background to the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary wars and ending with the recent conflicts of the twenty-first century, this third edition combines fully up-to-date global coverage with close analysis not only of the military aspects of war but also its social, cultural, political and economic dimensions and repercussions. The new edition includes a fully revised chapter on conflicts during the eighteenth century, updated coverage of events post-1990 and increased coverage of non-Western conflicts to provide a truly international account of the varied and changing nature of modern military history.

Covering lesser-known conflicts as well as the familiar wars of history and illustrated throughout with maps, primary source extracts and case studies, it is essential reading for all students of modern military history and international relations.

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How are human computation systems developed in the field of citizen science to achieve what neither humans nor computers can do alone? 

In At the Edge of AI: Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations (Transcript, 2024), Libuse Hannah Veprek examines the imagination of these assemblages, their creation, and everyday negotiation in the interplay of various actors and play/science entanglements at the edge of AI. Focusing on their human-technology relations, this ethnographic study shows how these formations are marked by intraversions, as they change with technological advancements and the actors' goals, motivations, and practices. This work contributes to the constructive and critical ethnographic engagement with human-AI assemblages in the making.

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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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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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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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North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting where they are. For millennia, these four directions have been foundational to our travel, navigation and exploration and are central to the imaginative, moral and political geography of virtually every culture in the world. Yet they are far more subjective and various – sometimes contradictory – than we might realise.

Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction (Penguin, 2024) by Dr. Jerry Brotton takes the reader on a journey of directional discovery. Dr. Brotton reveals why Hebrew culture privileges east; why Renaissance Europeans began drawing north at the top of their maps; why the early Islam revered the south; why the Aztecs used five colour-coded cardinal directions; and why no societies, primitive or modern, have ever orientated themselves westwards. He ends by reflecting on our digital age in which we, the little blue dot on the screen, have become the most important compass point. Throughout, Dr. Brotton shows that the directions reflect a human desire to create order and that they only have meaning, literally and metaphorically, depending on where you stand.

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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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern California, and Jason Resnikoff, assistant professor of contemporary history at the University of Groningen, about the history of automation. The discussion takes as its launching point an essay Elzway and Resnikoff published in the journal Labor titled, “Whence Automation?: The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept.” The conversation approaches the history of automation and how to study it from a number of angles, including diving into Elzway’s and Resnikoff’s individual research agendas, as well as discussion of the nature of collaborative work in history, a field that can sometimes be all-too competitive and turf-like.

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Long before Manchester gave the world titans of industry, comedy, music and sport, it was the cosmopolitan Roman fort of Mamucium. But it was as the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution that Manchester really made its mark on the world stage. A place built on hard work and innovation, it is no coincidence that the digital age began here too, with the world’s first stored-program computer, Baby.

A city as radical as it is revolutionary, Manchester has always been a political hotbed. The Peterloo Massacre is immortalised in British folklore and the city was a centre for pioneering movements such as Chartism. Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst hailed from here and the city still treasures its wilful independence.

Manchester’s spirited individuality has carried through into its artistic output too, bringing the world Anthony Burgess, L.S. Lowry, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Division and Oasis. Mention United or City almost anywhere and you’ll find fans, and opinions.

Until Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World (Harpernorth, 2024), this magnificent city did not have its definitive history. From Brian Groom, the author of the bestselling Northerners, this work of unrivalled authority and breadth tells the story of a changing place and its remarkable people.

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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It’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep rumination on the boundary between the natural and artificial, the mechanical and the ineffable, and the sacred and the profane.

We react to this seminal work in popular thinking about artificial intelligence, written more than a century ago yet retaining deep resonance today.

Music by Aiva.

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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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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:

• Talking To Strangers
• Making A Meaningful Life
• How to Human
• Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
• More Than A Glitch
• Meditation and the Academic Life
• Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides

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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Queer men's cultures of intimacy have long been sites of fierce contestation. Indeed, debates have raged for decades over issues such as monogamy, safer sex, sexual racism and gay marriage. The introduction of the smartphone in 2008 only intensified these debates whilst also raising a further set of questions which are explored in this open access book.

Through interviews with a diverse group of 43 queer men about their smartphone mediated intimacies, Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2024) reveals that queer men use their smartphones, not simply to arrange intimate encounters, but more specifically to gain a sense of control over the parts of their intimate lives that make them feel most vulnerable. For instance, some use messaging apps to gain a sense of control over intimate conversations that they feel too vulnerable to have in person. Others use the 'block' function on dating apps to feel in control of the racism and transphobia they are vulnerable to on these apps.

Digital Intimacies therefore illuminates not only hitherto underexplored aspects of queer men's cultures of intimacy but crucially also brings into view previously obscured cultural dynamics, gaining insight into the historical moments in which they occur.

Jamie Hakim is Lecturer at King's College London, UK.

James Cummings is Lecturer at the University of York, UK.

Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Technology has surpassed religion as the central focus of our lives, from our dependence on smartphones to the way that tech has infused almost every aspect of our lives including our homes, our relationships, and even our bodies. Beyond these practical matters, Tech has become a religion with multiple sects who follow their own beliefs, practices, hierarchies, and visions of heaven and hell. There are zealous prophets and humble servants, messiahs and visions of a coming apocalypse. 

In Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation (MIT Press, 2024), Harvard and MIT’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein approaches Tech with the perspective of a critical thinker who is fascinated by technical innovation and also questions the worth of those advancements in human terms. He places the current faith in Tech in historical and personal context by examining the skeptics, mystics, heretics, and whistleblowers who embody the reform mindset he believes we desperately need. 

Epstein argues for demanding that technology serve the development of human lives that are worth living rather than the extreme "up and to the right" transactional approach that is often rewarded in our current age of capitalism. 

In this age of global technology worship, Greg Epstein presents the case for taking an agnostic view, one that can both appreciate the benefits of Tech and also remain skeptical about some of the more outlandish claims and seductive promises.

Author recommended reading:

• Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
• Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights.

Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms.

Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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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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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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Conspiracy theories spread more widely and faster than ever before. Fear and uncertainty prompt people to believe false narratives of danger and hidden plots, but are not sufficient without considering the role and ideological bias of the media. 

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped (Cambridge UP, 2021) focuses on making sense of how and why some people respond to their fear of a threat by creating or believing conspiracy stories. It integrates insights from psychology, political science, communication, and information sciences to provide a complete overview and theory of how conspiracy beliefs manifest. Through this multi-disciplinary perspective, rigorous research develops and tests a practical, simple way to frame and understand conspiracy theories. The book supplies unprecedented amounts of new data from six empirical studies and unpicks the complexity of the process that leads to the empowerment of conspiracy beliefs.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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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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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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It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?"

In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could be said to herald the onset of the age of machine intelligence. With large language models (LLMs) today easily passing this test, we react to the paper and examine the implications from a humanistic standpoint.

Did Turing successfully predict contemporary LLMs 75 years ago? What does it mean that Turing’s test was based not on the abilities of a machine per se, but rather on a machine’s ability to deceive humans? How have Turing’s ideas permeated our cultural and popular cultural ideas about AI? And why did Turing think ESP had a role to play in understanding AI.

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It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?"

In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could be said to herald the onset of the age of machine intelligence. With large language models (LLMs) today easily passing this test, we react to the paper and examine the implications from a humanistic standpoint.

Did Turing successfully predict contemporary LLMs 75 years ago? What does it mean that Turing’s test was based not on the abilities of a machine per se, but rather on a machine’s ability to deceive humans? How have Turing’s ideas permeated our cultural and popular cultural ideas about AI? And why did Turing think ESP had a role to play in understanding AI.

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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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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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Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia's rapid post-World War II development. As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across its heterogeneous territories and populations. While this project was driven by nationalistic impulses, it was also motivated by a genuine interest in social justice. The entanglement of these two ideologies-nation-building and equity-shaped how electrification was carried out, including how the state chose the technologies it did. Private companies and electric cooperatives vied with the hegemonic state power company to participate in a monumental undertaking that would transform daily life for all Indonesians, especially rural citizens.

In this innovative volume, Anto Mohsin brings Indonesian studies together with science and technology studies to understand a crucial period in modern Indonesian history. He shows that attempts to illuminate the country were inseparable from the effort to maintain the new nation-state, chart its path to independence, and legitimize ruling regimes. In exchange for an often dramatically improved standard of living, people gave their votes, and their acquiescence, to the ruling government.

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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to being a professor, Alper is also an educational researcher who has worked over the past 20 years to make inclusive and accessible learning products with media organizations such as Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and PBS KIDS. Vinsel and Alper talk about disability studies, the nature of Alper’s empirical work, the arc of Alper’s career, including her future projects.

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Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancements in genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from.

For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provided some of the earliest evidence of horse domestication–only for more recent studies to discover that the Botai domesticated an entirely different species of horse altogether.

Even a lot more recent horse domestication has a less certain starting date, with recent studies suggesting that the Plains Indians domesticated horses at least a century earlier than originally thought.

William T. Taylor is Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder. He was part of several archaeological expeditions to test some of the proposed starting points for horse domestication—some of which are portrayed in his latest book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press: 2024)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hoof Beats. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an 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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In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Corey Ross tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.

Spanning the major European empires of the period, Dr. Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.

Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life.

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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40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World (Ivy Press, 2024) by Dr. Alistair Bonnett is a meticulously curated selection of 40 maps that spans the ages, from ancient parchment scrolls to cutting-edge digital creations. Each map is a window into a different facet of our world, shedding light on the complex interplay of geography, geopolitics, art, history, science and society.

Maps have always held the power to transport us, not just from one place to another, but from one state of mind to another. Beyond their utilitarian function, maps have an extraordinary ability to tell stories, reveal truths and inspire revolutions.

They are not mere drawings of geographic boundaries, but gateways to the collective wisdom of humanity. You'll encounter maps that dissect the intricate tapestry of human migration, maps that unveil the secrets of the cosmos and maps that expose the stark realities of our changing climate. These maps are not just illustrations; they are provocations, invitations to rethink the world.

40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World is not just a book for geographers or history buffs; it is a profound exploration for anyone with a curious mind. Whether you're an armchair traveller, a seasoned explorer, a student of geopolitics or an art aficionado, this book will challenge your preconceptions, spark lively discussions and deepen your appreciation for the interconnectedness of our world.

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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Over the past decades, under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality--where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world--is terrible news for democracies and citizens.

In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Princeton UP, 2024), Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies--from social media to artificial intelligence--have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can--and must--resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world.

Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world--and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late.

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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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A clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. Recently, however, it has also become ground zero in the new “lithium gold rush”—the race to power the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage market. The immense quantities of lithium lurking beneath the surface have led to predictions that the region could provide a third of global demand. But who will benefit from the development of this precious resource? 

A work of stunning analysis and reporting, Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future (The New Press, 2024) shows that the questions raised by Lithium Valley lie at the heart of the “green transition.” Weaving together movement politics, federal policy, and autoworker struggles, noted experts Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor stress that getting the lithium out from under the earth is just a first step: the real question is whether the region and the nation will get out from under the environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and racial injustice that have been as much a part of the landscape as the Salton Sea itself. What happens in Lithium Valley, the authors argue, will not stay there. This tiny patch of California is a microcosm of the broad climate challenges we face; understanding Lithium Valley today is the key to grasping the future of our economy and our planet.

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In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile battles over public investment in human embryonic stem cell research to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Based on six years of ethnographic research with embryo adoption staff and participants, Dr. Risa Cromer uncovers how embryo adoption advances ambitious political goals for expanding the influence of conservative Christian values and power.

Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics (NYU Press, 2023) is the first book on embryo adoption tracing how this powerful social movement draws on white saviorist tropes in their aims to reconceive personhood, with drastic consequences for reproductive rights and justice. Documenting the practices, narratives, and beliefs that move embryos from freezers to uteruses, this book wields anthropological wariness as a tool for confronting the multiple tactics of the Christian Right. Timely and provocative, Conceiving Christian America presents a bold and nuanced examination of a family-making process focused on conceiving a Christian nation.

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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In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with the show’s producer, Lan A. Li, a historian of Chinese science, medicine, and the body. We talk about their life-long practice of qigong, the limits of academic critique, and the integration of divergent epistemologies in studying Chinese anatomy. Along the way, we discuss Lan’s new book, Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), Lan’s relationship to Islam, and how to cultivate wonder through academic study.

Remember, if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes. Please enjoy! 

Resources mentioned in the episode:

• Lan’s website
• Lan Li, “The Vital Other: Integrsative Medicine and India” (2012)
• Lan Li, “Acupuntura e Moxabustão” (2023)
• Lan Li and Pierce Salguero, Jivaka Project Philadelphia (2015-2020)
• Pierce’s 2020 blogs on Metamodernism and Polyperspectivalism
• Lan Li, Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine (2025)

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.

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A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion, 2024) by John Withington illuminates the glittering history of fireworks, from their mysterious beginnings to the dazzling big-budget displays of today. It describes how they enthralled the world’s royal courts and became a sensation across the British Empire. There are stories of innovations like ‘living fireworks’, fiercely fought international competitions and the technology behind modern showpieces viewed by millions. Practitioners say fireworks are an art, and they have inspired artists from Shakespeare, Handel, Dickens and Whistler to Katy Perry. But Withington also covers fireworks’ practical uses – rescues at sea, attempts to control the weather – while not ignoring their dangers, accidents or efforts to make them safer.

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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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the history of ancient and Medieval technologies. The pair use Long’s forthcoming book, Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), as a launching point but also cover her previous work, especially including Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2018), which, among other things, contains deep reflections on the history of maintenance. Long and Vinsel also discuss Long’s future projects, including a fascinating sounding study of the history of sumptuary laws - regulations on expenditures of luxury goods, including food, clothing, and personal items - and their connection to technological change. GET EXCITED!

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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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Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marco Bastos presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation.

The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding into polarisation and echo-chamber communication. It pulls the curtain back on the techniques employed to interfere with, and potentially distort, the public discussion. Making complex data accessible to non-technical audiences, this unique post-mortem of the Brexit referendum contributes to our understanding of social media disinformation in the UK and beyond.

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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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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Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy (Routledge, 2024) examines the influence of key films on public understanding of big data and the algorithmic systems that structure our digitally mediated lives.

From star-powered blockbusters to civic-minded documentaries positioned to facilitate weighty debates about artificial intelligence, these texts frame our discourse and mediate our relationship to technology. Above all, they impact society’s abilities to regulate AI and navigate big tech’s political and economic manoeuvres to achieve market dominance and regulatory capture. 

Foregrounding data politics with close readings of key films like Moneyball, Minority Report, The Social Dilemma, and Coded Bias, in Screening Big Data by Dr. Gerald Sim reveals compelling ways in which films and tech industry–adjacent media define apprehension of AI. With the mid-2010s techlash in danger of fizzling out, Screening Big Data explores the relationship between this resistance and cultural infrastructure while highlighting the urgent need to refocus attention onto how technocentric media occupy the public imagination.

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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They certainly were not soldiers, yet they suddenly found themselves in uniform, in a foreign land. But, as locomotive drivers, track-workers, conductors, porters, signalmen and engine cleaners, they knew how to run trains. And their job was to bring them back to life.

The Liberation Line: The Untold Story of How American Engineering and Ingenuity Won World War II (Hachette, 2024) by Christian Wolmar tells the thrilling story of the British and American railway engineers who, in the months after D-Day, worked around the clock and in great danger to rebuild the ravaged railways of Europe and keep the Allied forces fuelled as they pushed on into Germany. As territory was taken, these soldier-railroaders were close behind, rebuilding the lines, putting up telegraph wires, replacing bridges and laying track, all the while dodging bullets, shells and booby traps.

Tales of extraordinary feats and heroism abound, including how 10,000 men rebuilt a 135-mile-long railway in just three days; the reconstruction of the bridge over the Seine in two weeks while under bombardment; and the use of cigarette lighters as improvised signalling systems. Despite being critical to Allied victory, the role of the railwaymen has been largely forgotten or ignored. In a vivid and gripping narrative, Christian Wolmar brings to life this colourful cast of generals and engineers, without whose extraordinary bravery the liberation of France and invasion of Germany might well have foundered – and the course of history changed.

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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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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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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Annette Kehnel joins Jana Byars to talk about The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (Brandeis University Press, 2024). A fascinating blend of history and ecological economics that uncovers the medieval precedents for modern concepts of sustainable living. In The Green Ages, historian Annette Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon. 

Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably--we've done it before! From the garden economy in the mythical-sounding City of Ladies to early microcredit banks, Kehnel uncovers a world at odds with our understanding of the typical medieval existence. Premodern history is full of inspiring examples and concepts ripe for rediscovery, and we urgently need them as today's challenges--finite resources, the twilight of consumerism, and growing inequality--threaten what we have come to think of as a modern way of living sustainably. This is a stimulating and revelatory look at a past that has the power to change our future.

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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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These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle promises to transform our lives and the world we live in, yet its time seems always yet-to-come or long-gone-by. In Bicycle (Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Jonathan Maskit takes us on an interdisciplinary ride to see what makes the bicycle a magical machine that could yet make the world a safer, greener, and more just place.

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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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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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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Join us as we discuss Dr. Reid Blackman’s new book: Ethical Machines: Your Concise Guide to Totally Unbiased, Transparent, and Respectful AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022). We dive into the intricacies of developing AI and the intersection of ethics and innovation.

Reid Blackman, Ph.D., is the author of Ethical Machines, creator and host of the podcast “Ethical Machines,” and Founder and CEO of Virtue, a digital ethical risk consultancy. He is also an advisor to the Canadian government on their federal AI regulations, was a founding member of EY’s AI Advisory Board, and a Senior Advisor to the Deloitte AI Institute. His work, which includes advising and speaking to organizations including AWS, US Bank, the FBI, NASA, and the World Economic Forum, has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and Forbes. His written work appears in The Harvard Business Review and The New York Times. Prior to founding Virtue, Reid was a professor of philosophy at Colgate University and UNC-Chapel Hill. Learn

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

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of guest does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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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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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Emily Bender, Professor of Linguistics, Director of the Masters of Science in Computational Linguistics program, and Director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at University of Washington, about her work on artificial intelligence criticism. Bender is also an adjunct professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School at UW; she is a member of the Tech Policy Lab, the Value Sensitive Design Lab, the Distributed AI Research Institute, and RAISE, or Responsibilities in AI Systems and Experiences; *AND*, with Alex Hanna, she is co-host of the Mystery AI Hype Theater podcast, which you should check out. Vinsel and Bender talk about the current AI bubble, what is driving it, and the technological potentials and limitations of this technology.

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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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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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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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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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How and Why We Make Games (CRC Press, 2024) delves into the intricate realms of games and their creation, examining them through cultural, systemic, and, most notably, human lenses. It explores diverse themes such as authorship, creative responsibility, the tension between games as a product and games as a form of cultural expression, and the myth of a universal audience.

The book analyzes why we should put politics in our games and how hyperrealism may be a trap. It also proposes a new framework for thinking about game narrative and a different paradigm for the production altogether. Topics tackled are approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, so be prepared to read both about Peter Paul Rubens and John Carmack. There are also graphs, system rhetorics discussions, and the market reality—stakeholders, return on investments, and the gaming bubble bursting.

This book is written for readers passionate about the craft of making games, including journalists and industry professionals. It offers a more humanistic perspective on games, presented by experienced writers who know the intricacies of game development.

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 Titel kulturmagazin, 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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Today, we’re playing with voice assistants and thinking about the role of voices in gaming with our guest, game designer and NYU professor Frank Lantz. 

Over the past nightmare year of the coronavirus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families. Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% percent in March, when Americans began sheltering in place. And, of course, we’ve also spent way more time interacting with digital technology. These two things have come together in a weird and delightful way in Lantz’s game Hey Robot. 

Created by Lantz’s family-owned company Everybody House Games, Hey Robot is a guessing game you play with a group of friends—including your voice assistant or smart speaker. The premise is simple: Make Google Home or Alexa utter the words written in a deck of cards. The questions it raises are complex: What are these digital entities that many of us interact with daily? How have web searches and voice-based computing changed the way we talk? And what does this reveal about language itself? 

Hey Robot is available in a free online Quarantine Edition that you can play remotely with your friends. The board game edition is available on Amazon.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

Fake Cumbia music by Mack Hagood. 

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Dive into the world of animals with Whitney Barlow Robles in her captivating new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Yale UP, 2023). Can corals truly build worlds? Do rattlesnakes possess a mystical charm? What secrets do raccoons hold? These questions reflect how animals have historically challenged human attempts to control nature, particularly during the Enlightenment—a time marked by rigid classifications, colonial exploitation, and the complex interplay between humans and the natural world.

Robles takes us on a journey through four distinct ecological zones: the ocean, underground, curiosity cabinets, and the field. Her exploration reveals a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry that embraces uncertainty and highlights the tumultuous history of human-animal encounters. This legacy continues to influence modern biologists and ecologists today as they strive to understand the intricate lives of animals.

In a unique blend of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between meticulous research and personal narratives, uncovering the animal foundations of human knowledge. She argues that addressing our current environmental crisis requires us to reflect on the past and recognize the vital roles animals play in shaping our understanding of the world. Join us as we explore the unruly protagonists of 18th-century science and discover why the stories of these creatures are essential to navigating the challenges we face today.

Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta is a Doctoral candidate at El Colegio de México and Adjunct Lecturer at the Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG).

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The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice president and a famed physiologist dubbed “the conscience of U.S. science,” wholeheartedly embraced Krebiozen. Ivy’s impeccable credentials and reputation made the treatment seem like another midcentury medical miracle. But after years of controversy, the improbable saga ended with Krebiozen proved a sham, its inventor fleeing the country, and Ivy’s reputation and legacy in ruins.

Matthew C. Ehrlich’s history of Krebiozen tells a quintessential story of quackery. Though most experts dismissed the treatment, it found passionate public support not only among cancer patients but also people in good health. The treatment’s rise and fall took place against the backdrop of America’s never-ending suspicion of educational, scientific, and medical expertise. In addition, Ehrlich examines why people readily believe misinformation and struggle to maintain hope in the face of grave threats to well-being.

A dramatic account of fraud and misplaced trust, The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine (U Illinois Press, 2024) shines a light on a forgotten medical scandal and its all-too-familiar relevance in the twenty-first century.

Matthew C. Ehrlich is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois. He has previously published five books including Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK and Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era.

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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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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Raquel Velho, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about her recent book, Hacking the Underground: Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System (U Washington Press, 2023). Hacking the Underground provides a fascinating ethnographic investigation of how disabled people navigate a transportation system that is far from accessible. 

Velho finds disabled passengers constantly hacking and finding workarounds, including lots of fix-y maintenance tasks, to get from one place to another. While these workarounds involve obvious creativity, they are also the products of an unequal system and the failure to enact a more-thoroughgoing and radically-transformative redesigning of public transportation systems in the name of accessibility. Vinsel and Velho also touch on a wide range of other topics, including issues of theory and method, and they talk about what Velho is up to next.

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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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Are you a musical theatre fan who loves TikTok? Or are you curious about how this social media app has changed musical theatre fandom - and even the concept of the musical itself?

TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age (Oxford UP, 2024) takes readers inside the world of TikTok Broadway, where fans create, expand, and canonize musical theatre through viral videos. It argues that TikTok democratizes musical theatre fan cultures and spaces, creating a new canon of musical theatre that reflects the preferences and passions of the fans. Readers will also see how TikTok Broadway influences other aspects of U.S. popular culture, from Broadway shows to TV adaptations.

From Six and Beetlejuice to Wicked and Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, this book covers the most popular and innovative musical theatre content on TikTok. Author Trevor Boffone, a musical theatre scholar and a TikTok creator, shows how fans use the app to express their love for musical theatre, and how they collaborate to produce original works, such as Bridgerton: The Musical.

TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age shows how the app puts power in the hands of the fans.

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In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics (Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future. 

Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.

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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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Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols.

This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis.

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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The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteracts this “backwardness” paradigm, arguing that from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, Russian medical researchers—along with their counterparts in France and Germany—were at the forefront of the struggle against cholera. Davis’ birds-eye view of this hundred-year period illustrates that the conditions allowing cholera to flourish were the same set of conditions that helped create the collapse of the tsarist regime during the First World War. Credit for elimination of cholera must go to the Bolsheviks, both for implementing tsarist-era medical theory, and especially for making war on cholera in a organized, systematic manner that the old regime was variously unable or unwilling to achieve.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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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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Many historical figures have their lives and works shrouded in myth, both in life and long after their deaths. Charles Darwin (1809–82) is no exception to this phenomenon and his hero-worship has become an accepted narrative.

Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods (Cambridge UP, 2024) unpacks this narrative to rehumanize Darwin's story and establish what it meant to be a 'genius' in the Victorian context. Leading Darwin scholars have come together to argue that, far from being a lonely genius in an ivory tower, Darwin had fortune, diligence and – crucially – community behind him. The aims of this essential work are twofold. First, to set the historical record straight, debunking the most pervasive myths and correcting falsehoods. Second, to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of science itself, relevant to historians, scientists and the public alike.

• Aims to debunk myths and correct falsehoods about Charles Darwin's life and work
• Leading Darwin scholars offer new conclusions about the history and nature of science
• Accessibly written for readers across many fields including history, philosophy and the sciences

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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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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If you enjoy video games as a pastime, you are certainly not alone—billions of people worldwide now play video games. However, you may still find yourself reluctant to tell others this fact about yourself. After all, we are routinely warned that video games have the potential to cause addiction and violence. And when we aren’t being warned of their outright harms, we are told we should be doing something better with our time, like going outside, socializing with others, or reading a book. Playing video games is thus often seen at best as a waste of time, and at worst a source of violent tragedy.

Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer (Routledge, 2024) takes on the pervasive assumption that playing video games is a childish and time-wasting hobby, and a potentially addictive and dangerous one at that. It argues instead that there are many ways in which gaming can help us flourish, for example by: developing genuine friendships and other meaningful relationships with others, helping us cultivate a virtuous personal character, giving us a unique aesthetic experience, providing us with psychological benefits, and just plain helping us relax and enjoy ourselves. Video games are not just for those with no life; on the contrary, they can help contribute to a rich and meaningful life.

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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Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science.

Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself.

Elizabeth A. Williams is professor emerita of history at Oklahoma State University.

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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Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and consequence. In Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe (MIT Press, 2021), Brian Clegg explores the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationships between space and time to the quantum behaviors that rule the way that matter and light interact, Clegg shows how these patterns provide a unique view of the physical world and its fundamental workings.

Guiding readers on a tour of our world and the universe beyond, Clegg describes the cosmic microwave background, sometimes called the "echo of the big bang," and how it offers clues to the universe's beginnings; the diagrams that illustrate Einstein's revelation of the intertwined nature of space and time; the particle trail patterns revealed by the Large Hadron Collider and other accelerators; and the simple-looking patterns that predict quantum behavior (and decorated Richard Feynman's van). Clegg explains how the periodic table reflects the underlying pattern of the configuration of atoms, discusses the power of the number line, demonstrates the explanatory uses of tree diagrams, and 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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Barrels – we rarely acknowledge their importance, but without them we would be missing out on some of the world’s finest wines and spirits. For over two thousand years they’ve been used to store, transport and age an incredibly diverse array of provisions around the globe. In this comprehensive and wide-ranging book titled Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels (Reaktion, 2024), now available in paperback, Henry H. Work tells the intriguing story of the significant and ever-evolving role wooden barrels have played during the last two millennia.

Offering a new way of thinking about one of the most enduring and successful products in history, Wood, Whiskey and Wine is a must-read for everyone from technology and history buffs to wine and whiskey aficionados.

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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In their latest book, Fandom is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture (NYU Press, 2024), Mel Stafill highlights the importance of considering contemporary public culture through the lens of fan studies The Gamergate harassment campaign of women in video games, the “Unite the Right” rally where hundreds of Confederate monument supporters cried out racist and antisemitic slurs in Charlottesville, and the targeted racist and sexist harassment of Star Wars’ Asian American actress Kelly Marie Tran all have one thing in common: they demonstrate the collective power and underlying ugliness of fandoms. These fans might feel victimized or betrayed by the content they’ve intertwined with their own identities, or they may simply feel that they’re speaking truth to power. Regardless, by connecting via social media, they can unleash enormous amounts of hate, which often results in severe real-world consequences. 

Fandom Is Ugly argues that reactionary politics and media fandoms go hand in hand, and to understand one, we need to understand the other. Stanfill pushes back on two mainstream assumptions: that media and the pleasure of consumption are frivolous and unworthy of study, and that fandoms are inherently progressive. Drawing on a corpus of angry social media posts, Fandom Is Ugly finds that ugly moments happen when deep emotional attachments collide with social structures and situations that have been misunderstood. By holistically examining the forms of ugly fandom in cases that touch upon race, gender, and sexuality, Fandom Is Ugly produces a comprehensive theory of the negative sides of fan attachments.

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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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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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Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, 2024) offers a fascinating approach to modern Chinese theater history by placing the stage at the center of the story. Combining vivid readings of plays with technical manuals and how-to guides, Tarryn Li-Min Chun charts how stage technology changed from the 1920s to the 1980s, showing how Chinese theater artists mobilized staging, lighting, and props to convey different meanings, including political revolution, nationalist nation-building, grassroots ingenuity, and the triumph of science. Throughout, Revolutionary Stagecraft demonstrates how theater, technology, and politics were deeply intertwined in modern China, and how Chinese theater artists manipulated the materiality of stagecraft for their own means.  

Revolutionary Stagecraft should be of interest to those who are familiar with Chinese history, but also those who are interested in global theater, material culture, and the history of technology, as well as anyone who wants to know just how difficult it is to make fog appear on the stage (for the answer, see Chapter 2). Written in a clear and accessible way, Revolutionary Stagecraft is available both in print and as an Open Access ebook.  

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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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Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic bicycle communities. Exploring how people bike and what biking means in the city, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria challenges assumptions that underlie sustainable transportation planning.Arguing that planning professionals and advocates need to pay closer attention to ordinary people who cycle for transportation or for work, or who choose to cycle for recreation, Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility (U Washington Press, 2024) offers an alternative to the thinking that dominates mainstream sustainable transportation discussions. The book's insights come from bicycle activists, commuters, food delivery workers, event organizers, planners, technicians, shop owners, transportation planners, architects, and manufacturers. 

Through ethnographic vignettes and descriptions of diverse biking experiences, it shows how pedaling through the city produces a way of seeing and understanding infrastructure. Readers will come away with a new perspective on what makes a city bicycle friendly and an awareness that lessons for more equitable and sustainable urban future can be found in surprising places.

In the episode, we make a reference to an essay Jonathan Anjaria wrote for Ethnographic Marginalia. You can read the essay here.

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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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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Cyrus Mody, Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation and Director of the STS Program at Maastricht University, about his book, The Squares: US Physical and Engineering Scientists in the Long 1970s (MIT Press, 2022). Many narratives about contemporary technologies, especially digital computing and the Internet, focus on the influences of 1960s counter-cultures. In _The Squares_, Mody takes the opposite approach and asks how square, non-counter-cultural scientists and engineers reacted to their changing environments in the 1970s. Vinsel and Mody also talk about what this story may suggest about current efforts to refocus STEM education on “values.” The pair also discuss how, over the course of his career, Mody has continually used a set of historical actors he knows a great deal about to examine different historical themes and questions. Finally, they discuss Mody’s current projects and where he is headed.

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Dr. Yerkebulan Sairambay’s New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) confronts the sociological problem of the usage of new media (social media, the Internet, digital technologies, messaging applications) by young people in political participation. This book not only sheds light on the ways in which new media use contributes to the nature of political participation in Kazakhstan and Russia, but also explains why citizens use these tools in their civic engagement. Dr. Sairambay sets his sights on what occurs downstream, i.e., not in the minds of political leaders and/or well known oppositionists, but on the ground in specific contexts such as cities, towns, and villages by young people.

For a similar interview in the Russian language, see Dr. Sairambay’s podcast episode with the University of Tartu’s Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies.

Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based writer and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context.

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Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War: Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare (Cambridge UP, 2023) introduces a much-needed theory of tactical air power to explain air power effectiveness in modern warfare with a particular focus on the Vietnam War as the first and largest modern air war. Phil Haun shows how in the Rolling Thunder, Commando Hunt, and Linebacker air campaigns, independently air power repeatedly failed to achieve US military and political objectives. In contrast, air forces in combined arms operations succeeded more often than not. In addition to predicting how armies will react to a lethal air threat, he identifies operational factors of air superiority, air-to-ground capabilities, and friendly ground force capabilities, along with environmental factors of weather, lighting, geography and terrain, and cover and concealment in order to explain air power effectiveness. The book concludes with analysis of modern air warfare since Vietnam along with an assessment of tactical air power relevance now and for the future.

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Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, Chater first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.

Dr. Nick Chater is Professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School and cofounder of Decision Technology Ltd. He has contributed to more than two hundred articles and book chapters and is author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books.

Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness.

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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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In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.

Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.

Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.

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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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This is part #2 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Last episode, the spill devastates Cordova, Alaska. In this second part, 12 Angry Alaskans, a jury of ordinary Alaskans picks up our story. They muddle through the most devastating, and most complicated, environmental disaster in US history. How would they decide the case?

Subscribe today to ensure you do not miss our finale, Damaging Rationality, which examines the forgotten academic story behind Exxon’s legal appeals. You can also listen to a trailer today. The (ir)Rational Alaskans is a partnership with Canada’s National Observer. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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In Deep Time: A Literary History (Princeton UP, 2023), Noah Heringman, Curators’ Professor of English at the University of Missouri, presents a “counter-history” of deep time. This counter-history acknowledges and investigates the literary and imaginary origins of the idea of deep time, from eighteen-century narratives of voyages around the world to William Blake’s ballads and writings by Charles Darwin. This approach to the idea of deep time and the history of its formation engages with contemporary debates over the concept of an “Anthropocene” and the more general problem of sequencing and understanding the Earth’s time. 

The book’s main contribution is to show that the idea of deep time is not exclusively a scientific and geologic concept. In order to be properly understood and responsibly used, this idea needs to be approached as “a field of imagination,” which has been shaped by the entangled histories of exploration, colonialism, natural sciences, archeology, and literary forms. Deep Time is both a surprising exploration of the forms that “the fantasy of a legible earth history” took between the eighteen and the nineteenth centuries and an invitation to reflect on how these forms might have left their marks on our current attempts at framing the depth and strangeness of the Earth’s time.

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Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.

In Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work (Verso, 2024), Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.

Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres.

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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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Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labour: The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England (Berghahn, 2024) by Dr. Aimee Louise Middlemiss describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester pregnancy loss produces specific medical and social experiences, revealing an underlying teleological ontology of pregnancy. Some women then understand their pregnancy through kinship with the unborn baby.

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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Tens of thousands of Italian civilians perished in the Allied bombing raids of World War II. More of them died after the Armistice of September 1943 than before, when the air attacks were intended to induce Italy’s surrender.

Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945 (Routledge, 2023) addresses this seeming paradox, by examining the views of Allied political and military leaders, Allied air crews, and Italians on the ground. It tells the stories of a little-known diplomat (Myron Charles Taylor), military strategist (Solly Zuckerman), resistance fighter (Aldo Quaranta), and peace activist (Vera Brittain) – architects and opponents of the bombing strategies. It describes the fate of ordinary civilians, drawing on a wealth of local and digital archival sources, memoir accounts, novels, and films, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro.

The book will be of interest to readers concerned about the ethical, legal, and human dimensions of bombing and its effects on civilians, to students of military strategy and Italian history, and to World War II buffs. They will benefit from a people-focused history that draws on a range of eclectic and rarely used sources in English and Italian.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

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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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After the unprecedented Exxon Valdez oil spill, a jury of ordinary Alaskans decided that Exxon had to be punished. However, Exxon fought back against their punishment. They did so, in-part, by supporting research that suggested jurors are irrational. This work came from an esteemed group of psychologists, behavioural economists, and legal theorists–including Daniel Kahneman, and Cass Sunstein.

In this three-part series in partnership with Canada’s National Observer, Cited Podcast investigates the forgotten legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the research that followed. This first part, an Alaskan Nightmare, covers the spill and its immediate effects. Subsequent episodes will run weekly. Subscribe today to ensure you do not miss part #2, 12 Angry Alaskans, and part #3, Damaging Rationality.

This is episode five of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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Is a green future possible? In Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (Duke UP, 2023), Alice Mah, a Professor in Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow examines the practices of the petrochemical industry, along with the communities living with, and resisting, its impact. Offering ethnographic and theoretical reflections on this often overlooked and hidden part of the oil and plastics production chain, the book offers a new perspective on our present environmental crisis. Diagnosing the acuteness of problems as well as the challenges of solutions, the book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand our planet and environment. The book is available open access here.

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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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In this episode, Caleb Zakarin and Uri Bram dive into the world of effective charitable giving through the lens of GiveWell, an organization known for its rigorous evaluation of charities. Uri explains how GiveWell identifies and recommends high-impact charities, discussing the data-driven criteria and ethical considerations behind their assessments. The conversation highlights real-world examples of how smart giving can lead to substantial, measurable benefits. Whether you're a seasoned donor or new to philanthropy, this episode offers valuable insights into making your contributions truly count.

Please consider donating with GiveWell.

Work at GiveWell. A great job for academics considering an alternative path.

Uri Bram is head of communications at GiveWell and CEO of The Browser.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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In The People of the Ruins (originally published in 1920), Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neo mediaeval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, he eventually decides that he prefers the post civilised life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.

One of the most critically acclaimed and popular postwar stories of its day, The People of the Ruins captured a feeling that was common among those who had fought and survived the Great War: haunted by trauma and guilt, its protagonist feels out of time and out of place, unsure of what is real or unreal. Shanks implies in this seminal work, as Dr. Paul March-Russell explains in the book's introduction, that the political system was already corrupt before the story began, and that Bolshevism and anarchism—and the resulting civil wars—merely accelerated the world's inevitable decline.

A satire of Wellsian techno-utopian novels, The People of the Ruins is a bold, entertaining, and moving postapocalyptic novel contemporary readers won't soon forget.

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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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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Who were the German scientists who worked on atomic bombs during World War II for Hitler's regime? How did they justify themselves afterwards? 

Examining the global influence of the German uranium project and postwar reactions to the scientists involved, Mark Walker explores the narratives surrounding 'Hitler's bomb'. The global impacts of this project were cataclysmic. Credible reports of German developments spurred the American Manhattan Project, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in turn the Soviet efforts. After the war these scientists' work was overshadowed by the twin shocks of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. 

Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima (Cambridge UP, 2024) sheds light on the postwar criticism and subsequent rehabilitation of the German scientists, including the controversial legend of Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's visit to occupied Copenhagen in 1941. This scientifically accurate but non-technical history examines the impact of German efforts to harness nuclear fission, and the surrounding debates and legends.

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A global account of histories of war, from Antiquity to the present day, Histories of War (Pen & Sword Military, 2024) shows how the varied modes of representation record political, cultural and social developments as well as military events. Covers all forms of discussion and commemoration from statuary to scholarship, films to novels. Important not only to those interested in the history of war but also to those concerned with culture and history in general.

This erudite volume on the theory and practice of military history will interest a wide readership including both professional historians of war and those concerned with its broader philosophical dimension. The author - a well established authority in European history - has provided an informed, rigorous analysis of a difficult topic. It will delight those who seek enlightenment of the historian's craft, military or otherwise.

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Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mitchel P. Roth and Dr. Mahmut Cengiz unfolds the gripping history of weaponized mail, offering the first ever comprehensive exploration of this sinister phenomenon. Spanning two centuries, the book unveils the history of postal bombs, describing the evolution of both explosives and the postal services that facilitated their deadly use. From an eighteenth-century incident involving Jonathan Swift to modern acts of terror by groups like the IRA and the suffragettes and lone wolves such as the Unabomber, it uncovers the surprising ubiquity of mail bombs. This chronological account meticulously covers each decade, from early anarchists and world wars through the Cold War to the rise of the serial bomber. Astounding in scope, this book sheds light on the psychopathy, motivations and political implications behind murder by mail.

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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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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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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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Kate McDonald, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, about her fascinating research on the history of mobility in Asia and how it looks different when we approach it as a history of work and labor. The pair traverse McDonald’s career from her current project, The Rickshaw and the Railroad: Human-Powered Transport in the Age of the Machine, to her first book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (U California Press, 2017) to digital humanities projects she has helped lead. Along the way, they talk about the craft of historical research and what we can learn by revisiting classic texts with mobility and the work of transportation in mind.

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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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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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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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Early pollsters thought they had the psychological tools to quantify American mind, thereby enabling a truly democratic polity that would be governed by a rational public opinion. Today, we malign the misinformed public and dismiss the deluge of frivolous polls. How did the rational public become the phantom public? We tell the story of George Gallup, his critics, and also examine alternatives to political polling.

This is episode three of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, commerce, music, art, architecture, communications, food, and every other corner of society. Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2020), written by the historian of innovation and the RSA’s resident historian Anton Howes, is the fascinating story of this unique institution.

Drawing on exclusive access to a wealth of rare papers and artifacts from the Society’s own archives, Howes shows how the Society of Arts has constantly reinvented itself to keep in step with changing times. The Society has served as a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, purchased and restored an entire village, encouraged the planting of more than sixty million trees, and sought technological alternatives to child labour. Arts and Minds reveals how a society of public-spirited individuals tried to make their country a better place, and draws vital lessons from their triumphs and failures for all would-be reformers today.

Matthew Jordan is a professor 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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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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“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (DPR Barcelona, June 2024) is about those stories and much more. Özge Çelikaslan uses bak.ma, a digital media archive born out of the social movements in Turkey, to guide us through a journey in which archives become sites of other kinds of stories—some of solidarity, activism, and the commons. Çelikaslan uses the concept of archives of the commons reimagining archives as dynamic spaces of commoning in which creative, autonomous platforms are generated collectively to perpetuate knowledge and sociopolitical relations grounded in solidarity and an ethics of care, not in some distant future but in the here and now.

Özge Çelikaslan is a scholar and practitioner whose research interests encompass media historiography, critical audiovisual archival studies, and research-based film/video practices.

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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Videogames have always depicted representations of American culture, but how exactly they feed back into this culture is less obvious. Advocating an action-based understanding of both videogames and culture, this book delineates how aspects of American culture are reproduced transnationally through popular open-world videogames. 

Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture (De Gruyter, 2023) proposes an analytic focus on open-world videogames' "ambient operations" and traces practices of "playing American" through the stages of videogame development, gameplay, and reception. Three case studies - concentrating on the Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs, and Red Dead Redemption franchises, respectively - highlight different figurations of "playing American." Thematic foci range from public discourses on systemic racism and neoliberal capitalism to the justification of real-world surveillance practices and to the reconfiguration of the Western in the digital age. Playing American provides those interested in either videogames or American culture with a fresh angle and new concepts regarding its subject matters. It demonstrates that videogames are agents of cultural reproduction that do distinct cultural work for American culture in the twenty-first century.

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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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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Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with Paula Bialski, an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, about her recent book, Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough (Princeton UP, 2024). The pair talk about the art of ethnographic study of software work, and how, maybe, our world could do with a healthy dose of good enough-ness. They also scheme about some potential collaborations here on Peoples & Things, which you should definitely keep an eye out for. (You should also check out Paula’s folk pop group, Paula & Karol, whose music was greatly enjoyed while working on this episode.)

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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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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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It’s the UConn Popcast, and recently UConn’s Center for the Study of Popular Music hosted a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Music. The panel featured Dr. Mitchell Green, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut; Dustin Ballard, a musician and creator of the social media channel “There I Ruined It”; and Dr. Aaron Dial, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humanities and Technoscience Lab at Purdue University.

The conversation addressed AI music creation, production, composition, aesthetics, trends, copyright issues, and algorithms.

The panel was moderated by Professor Jeffrey Ogbar, Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music and Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

Timestamps:

• Mitchell Green: 7:00-23:40
• Aaron Dial: 23:45-43:55
• Dustin Ballard: 44:02-54:32

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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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In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Dr. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.

Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Dr. Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.

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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What is data, and why does it matter for us to care about the data traces we leave behind? What are the implications for our lives of how this data is used by other people in other times and places? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, authors Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert introduce their new book and talk about how we can rethink our relationship with data and stay informed to make better decisions in the face of technological uncertainty.

In their latest book, The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in The Age of Algorithmic Surveillance (MIT Press, 2024), Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable and often surprising ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks.

The book focuses primarily on the long-term consequences of humanity's recent rush toward digitizing, storing, and analyzing every piece of data about ourselves and the world we live in. The authors advocate for “slow fixes” regarding our relationship to data, such as creating new laws and regulations, ethics and aesthetics, and models of production for our datafied society.

Aram Sinnreich is an author, professor, and musician. He is Chair of Communication Studies at American University. His books include Mashed Up, The Piracy Crusade, The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property, and A Second Chance for Yesterday (published as R. A. Sinn).

Jesse Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of visual art, sound, and software design at his firm Dark Matter Media. He was the founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University, and he has taught interactive software design at both CalArts and UC San Diego.

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There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords. 

In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP), Shannon Vallor argues that the actual, and very alarming, existential risk of AI that we face right now is quite different. Because some AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or other large language models, can closely mimic the outputs of an understanding mind without having actual understanding, the technology can encourage us to surrender the activities of thinking and reasoning. This poses the risk of diminishing our ability to respond to challenges and to imagine and bring about different futures. In her compelling book, Vallor, who holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, critically examines AI Doomers and Long-termism, the nature of AI in relation to human intelligence, and the technology industry's hand in diverting our attention from the serious risks we face.

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Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. Dr. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (University of Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization.

Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Dr. David Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032.

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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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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There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—that is, careful consideration of not only what is seen but what is unseen. David assembles wide-ranging examples, from the histories of science and finance to his own research and consultancy, to show how this perspective can shed new light on concepts as classical as random sampling and survey design and as cutting-edge as machine learning and the measurement of honesty. I expect the book to inspire the same enjoyment and reflection in general readers as it is sure to in statisticians and other data analysts.

Suggested companion work: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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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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There were 20,000 miles of railways in 1865 and about a million by 2020. Scale has always been a key theme in railway history. In the First World War, the London and North West Railway transported 325,000 miles of barbed wire and over twelve million pairs of army boots. At the end of the twentieth century, Indian Railways sold 4.5 billion tickets annually.

In A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today (Amberley Publishing, 2023), Jeremy Black examines how rail transformed the world. While always shaped by commercial interests, the role of the railway was (and is) strategic in the broadest sense: like Roman roads and Chinese canals, it helped develop the economic links that sustained and strengthened the major powers. For example, the railway was fundamental in integrating the frontiers of settlement with the world economy, in the spread of cultivation and ranching, and in the exploitation of mining opportunities. Rail expanded the 'logistical space' of most states. To give one modern example of the political importance of rail, Ukraine's railway is on the 1.52 metre gauge, rather than the 1.435 metre one used in Poland and most of Europe. In 2022, Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine's Prime Minister, declared that the railways there would be rebuilt to the European gauge. This enhanced capability would counter the Russian ability to blockade Ukraine's Black Sea ports, notably Odessa. The plan was not endorsed by the Kremlin...

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What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Tara Ward reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Dr. Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalises on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art.

Dr. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity 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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On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of the unchanging celestial realm, and it took observations through telescopes by Galileo and others to establish the reality of solar imperfections. In the nineteenth century, amateur astronomers discovered that sunspots ebb and flow about every eleven years—spurring speculation about their influence on the weather and even the stock market.

Exploring these and many other crucial developments, Pierre Sokolsky provides a history of knowledge of the Sun through the lens of sunspots and the solar cycle. He ranges widely across cultures and throughout history, from the earliest recorded observations of sunspots in Chinese annals to satellites orbiting the Sun today, and from worship of the Sun as a deity in ancient times to present-day scientific understandings of stars and their magnetic fields. Considering how various thinkers sought to solve the puzzle of sunspots, Sokolsky sheds new light on key discoveries and the people who made them, as well as their historical and cultural contexts. Fast-paced, comprehensive, and learned, Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star (Columbia UP, 2024) shows readers our closest star from many new angles.

Garima Garg is a New Delhi based journalist and author.

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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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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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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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In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, about the differences between science and pseudoscience and how the COVID-19 Pandemic showed that most people don't realize that science is highly dynamic. Gordin is the author of (among other books) of On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford UP, 2021).

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

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Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture (Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, and outlining potential directions for future discussions.

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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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