New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episodes
Jieun Kiaer, "Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Jieun Kiaer provides an in-depth discussion of emoji use in a glo...
Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Geologists in the field climb hills and hang onto craggy outcrops; they put their fingers in sand and scratch, smell, and even taste rocks. Beginning ...
Scott Skinner-Thompson, "Privacy at the Margins" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Limited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In P...
Benjamin Y. Fong, "Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge" (Verso, 2023)
15 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Benjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July,...
How Uber Disrupted Washington, D.C.: A Conversation with Katie Wells and Kafui Attoh
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Katie Wells, a Postdoctoral Fritz Fellow with Georgetown University's Tech and Society Initiative, and Kafui Attoh, Associate Professor of Urban Studi...
The Future of Underground/Sea Cables: A Discussion with Henry Farrell
12 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How much of US power is underground? We hear a lot about the US military assets used on land, on the sea, and in the air - but not much about what’s...
Satsuki Takahashi, "Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape" (U Washington Press, 2023)
12 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anth...
Michael Ruse, "Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017)
11 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including human...
Chris Wiggins and Matthew L Jones, "How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms" (Norton, 2023)
10 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From facial recognition―capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents―to automated decision systems that inform wh...
Renny Thomas, "Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment" (Routledge, 2022)
10 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2022) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context...
Idolatry and Idle Hands (with Jacob Howland)
10 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Philosophy professor Jacob Howland applies the lessons of Greek classics and Jewish scripture to this our curious moment at the inception of Artificia...
Cory Doctorow, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" (Verso, 2023)
09 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Big Tech locked us into their systems by making their platforms hard to leave by design. The impossibility of staying connected to people on their pla...
Daniel Foliard, "The Violence of Colonial Photography" (Manchester UP, 2022)
08 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in whic...
Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile
07 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Gretchen Sorin, Director and Distinguished Professor of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York - Oneonta, talks about he...
Flora Samuel, "Housing for Hope and Wellbeing" (Routledge, 2022)
07 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Housing and neighborhoods have an important contribution to make to our wellbeing and our sense of our place in the world. Housing for Hope and Wellb...
Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)
06 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex...
The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games
06 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video ga...
Christine Keiner, "Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
05 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Atlantic-Pacific Central American sea-level canal is generally regarded as a spectacular failure. However, Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbu...
The Future of Space Travel: A Discussion with Douglas C. Ligor
05 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The expansion of space travel is much discussed but always seems subject to delay. Why is that and when will it happen on a much larger scale? Dougla...
Robot Futures
04 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond...
Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation
03 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and...
The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us
02 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science...
Kathryn Cramer Brownell, "24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated...
Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In July 1969, ninety-four percent of American televisions were tuned to coverage of Apollo 11's mission to the moon. How did space exploration, once t...
Powering American Farms: A Conversation with Richard Hirsh
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Hirsh, Professor of History at Virginia Tech, talks about his book, Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification ...
Betty Adamou, "Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success" (Kogan Page, 2018)
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Games are the most engaging medium of all time: they harness storytelling and heuristics, drive emotion and push the evolution of technology in a way ...
Alice E. Marwick, "The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media" (Yale UP, 2023)
30 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Online privacy is under constant attack by social media and big data technologies. But we cannot rely on individual actions to remedy this—it is a m...
Jade E. Davis, "The Other Side of Empathy" (Duke UP, 2023)
30 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Other Side of Empathy (Duke UP, 2023), Jade E. Davis contests the value of empathy as an affective or critical tool. Whether focusing on tech...
Rob Eschmann,, "When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2023)
29 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, on...
Jeremy Black, "A History of Artillery" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
28 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jeremy Black's book A History of Artillery (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) traces the development of artillery through the ages, providing a thorough s...
Nina Lager Vestberg, "Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization" (MIT Press, 2023)
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization (MIT Press, 2023) focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, ...
The Science of Science: A Discussion with Aaron Clauset
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Aaron Clauset, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in the BioFrontiers Institute. ...
Vincanne Adams, "Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move" (Duke UP, 2023)
25 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Vincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology th...
US History in 15 Foods: A Conversation with Anna Zeide
24 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Anna Zeide, Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech, talks about her book, US History in 15 Foods (Bloomsbury, 2023), with Peoples & Things ...
Yi-Tang Lin, "Statistics and the Language of Global Health: Institutions and Experts in China, Taiwan, and the World, 1917-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
21 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Yi-Tang Lin received her BA in sociology at National Taiwan University and MA in MA Interdisciplinary Practices of Humanities and Social Sciences, Éc...
Usha Raman and Sumana Kasturi, "Childscape, Mediascape: Children and Media in India" (Orient BlackSwan, 2023)
21 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Children are considered to be a group of special interest by media scholars and advocates, especially because they are seen as a vulnerable group whos...
Heidi Hausse, "The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany" (Manchester UP, 2023)
21 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Heide Hausse's book The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Manchester University Press, 2023) uses amputatio...
Aaron A. Reed, "50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon" (2023)
19 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon is an extensively researched book chronicling the first half-century of interactive fiction...
Lin Zhang, "The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the Chinese Digital Economy" (Columbia UP, 2023)
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvent...
African American Women on the American Railroad: A Conversation with Miriam Thaggert
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Miriam Thaggert, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, talks about her book, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Ra...
Juliet Schor, "After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back" (U California Press, 2021)
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, auton...
Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
16 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Victoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration...
Jenna Grant, "Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh" (U Washington Press, 2022)
15 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Ph...
Janna Levin, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is the universe infinite or just really big? With this question, cosmologist Janna Levin announces the central theme of this book, which established h...
Tom Mustill, "How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication" (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)
13 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill—the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty‑ton humpback whale breach...
Randall Patnode, "The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
12 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Randall Patnode traces the histo...
Palo Alto: A Conversation with Malcolm Harris
10 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This is the second Peoples & Things episode featuring a guest host. In this case, it is M. R. “Mols” Sauter, an assistant professor of information...
Quinn Eastman, "The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Sleepiness" (Columbia UP, 2023)
07 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sleep was taking over Anna's life. Despite multiple alarm clocks and powerful stimulants, the young Atlanta lawyer could sleep for thirty or even fift...
Simon N. Whitney, "From Oversight to Overkill: Inside the Broken System That Blocks Medical Breakthroughs--And How We Can Fix It" (Rivertowns Books, 2023)
04 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Medical research saves lives-yet all too often, it is thwarted by a review system supposed to safeguard patients that instead creates needless delays ...
The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University
01 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plag...
The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age
30 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible...
Mary Beltrán, "Latino TV: A History" (NYU Press, 2022)
29 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, our host Lucila Rozas discusses the book Latino TV: A History (2022) by Mary Beltrán. You’ll hear about: A brief trajectory ...
Helle Porsdam, "Science as a Cultural Human Right" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
28 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, So...
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
27 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation t...
The Singer Sewing Machine in Spain and Mexico: Multinational Business, Gender, and Technologies
26 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez talks about her book, Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850-...
Josh Shepperd, "Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
26 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Despite uncertain beginnings, public broadcasting emerged as a noncommercial media industry that transformed American culture. In Shadow of the New D...
Metadata
25 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered ...
Brian Cummings, "Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022)
25 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damage...
Tom Higham, "The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins" (Yale UP, 2021)
24 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was not the only species of humans in the world. There were also Neanderthals in what is now Europe, the Near...
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
24 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies...
Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web
23 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some co...
Andrew Jones, "How Kant Matters for Biology: A Philosophical History" (U Wales Press, 2023)
23 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kant denied biology the status of a proper science, yet his account of the organism profoundly influenced a range of intellectual disciplines. Andre...
Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games,...
James Hannam, "The Globe: How the Earth Became Round" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Globe: How the Earth Became Round (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. James Hannam presents a history of how we came to know that the earth is round, rathe...
Catherine Carstairs, "The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As recently as fifty years ago most people expected to lose their teeth as they aged. Few children benefited from braces to straighten their teeth, an...
Lars de Wildt, "The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
22 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques or temples. Lars de Wild...
John L. Rudolph, "Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should)" (Oxford UP, 2023)
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to John L. Rudolph about his book Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should) (Oxford UP, 2023). Few people question the importance of ...
The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby
20 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
By providing capital to back the ideas and efforts of others, venture capitalists can make absurd amounts of money. But there is another way of lookin...
David A. Banks, "The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America" (U California Press, 2023)
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to explore how our cities gentrify b...
The History of the American Shopping Mall and Its Cultures
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Writer and design critic Alexandra Lange talks about her book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Shopping Mall (Bloombury, 2023), w...
Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, "The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life" (U California Press, 2023)
18 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (U of California Press, 2023), Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen b...
Chris Manias, "The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development, and Paleontology in the Long Nineteenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
17 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When people today hear "paleontology," they immediately think of dinosaurs. But for much of the history of the discipline, dramatic demonstrations of ...
Brett Brehm, "Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature" (Fordham UP, 2023)
16 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Tec...
Chris Impey, "Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity" (MIT Press, 2023)
16 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitab...
The Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a...
Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise...
Peter Baldwin, "Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All" (MIT Press, 2023)
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities. Open access (OA) could one day put th...
Doctor Ex Machina: AI in Medicine and its Pitfalls
13 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Could an artificial intelligence diagnosis what ails you? Medical futurists offer a techno-utopian vision of perfect personalized risk assessments, di...
The Future of Politicized Narratives: A Discussion with Andreas Krieg
13 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The word "narrative" is now so frequently heard that some think it over used. Perhaps its ubiquity results from it being so relevant – what used to ...
J. P. Daughton, "In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism" (Norton, 2021)
13 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
J. P. Daughton's In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (W. W. Norton, 2021) examines the complex...
Stephen G. Gross, "Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change" (Oxford UP, 2023)
13 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in so...
Payal Arora et al., "Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
12 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of thos...
Red Team Blues and the Social Dimensions of Technology
12 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is a first for the Peoples & Things podcast: it features a guest host. It is something you will be seeing more of in the future. Guest ho...
Zhouxiang Lu, "A History of Competitive Gaming" (Routledge, 2022)
12 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Competitive gaming, or esports - referring to competitive tournaments of video games among both casual gamers and professional players - began in the ...
Brendan Keogh, "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production" (MIT Press, 2023)
11 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American,...
Drone: Remote Control Warfare
10 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Drone Warfare is the first comprehensive analysis of one of the fastest growing--and most secretive--fronts in global conflict: the rise of robot war...
Amanda L. Van Lanen, "The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
09 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the nineteenth century, most American farms had a small orchard or at least a few fruit-bearing trees. People grew their own apple trees or purchas...
Lawrence Freedman, "Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2022)
08 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Command in war is about forging effective strategies and implementing them, making sure that orders are appropriate, well-communicated, and then obeye...
Athene Donald, "Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)
07 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why are girls discouraged from doing science? Why do so many promising women leave science in early and mid-career? Why do women not prosper in the sc...
Amy Brady, "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
06 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses ...
Erik J. Dahl, "The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough" (Georgetown UP, 2023)
06 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warn...
The History of 19th-Century Quarantine Politics: A Conversation with David S. Barnes
05 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David S. Barnes, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about his book, Lazaretto: How Phil...
Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, "The Smartness Mandate" (MIT Press, 2023)
04 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last half century, "smartness"—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, ec...
Jen Ross, "Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies" (Routledge, 2022)
04 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What is the future of education? In Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies (Routledge, 2022), Jen Ross, a senior lecturer...
Gender and Equality in Art and Exploration
03 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Featured episode from Between Art and Science, a new podcast from Leonardo. This episode, hosted by Erica Hruby, features a conversation between two a...
Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023)
02 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the...
Amber Knight and Joshua Miller, "Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice" (Oxford UP, 2023)
01 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The routinization of non-invasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) raises urgent questions about disability rights and reproductive justice. Supporters...
Orly Lobel, "The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future" (PublicAffairs, 2022)
31 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The fear of algorithmic decision-making and surveillance capitalism dominate today's tech policy discussions. But instead of simply criticizing big da...
Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, "The 'Third' United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think" (Oxford UP, 2021)
31 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss' book The "Third" United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the T...
John D. Aber, "Less Heat, More Light: A Guided Tour of Weather, Climate, and Climate Change" (Yale UP, 2023)
29 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change is one of the most hotly contested environmental topics of our day. To answer criticisms and synthesize available information, scientis...