New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episodes
Technocracy Now! Part 3: Technocracy in the Private Sector
19 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake societ...
Asim Sajjad Akhter, "The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons" (Pluto Press, 2022)
18 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The collapse of neoliberal hegemony in the western world following the financial crash of 2007-8 and subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarian perso...
Robert P. Crease, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022)
18 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a w...
Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022)
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration? As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster...
Leslie A. Geddes, "Watermarks: Leonardo Da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature" (Princeton UP, 2020)
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, wa...
Geert Lovink, "Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet" (Valiz, 2022)
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We’re all trapped. No matter how hard you try to delete apps from your phone, the power of seduction draws you back. Doom scrolling is the new norma...
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined b...
Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022)
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years...
Christopher Lukman, "Control Machines: Toward a Dispositive Theory of Computer Games" (Lit Verlag, 2022)
11 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Christopher Lukman about his new book Control Machines: Toward a Dispositive Theory of Computer Games (Lit Verlag, 2022). In light...
Technocracy Now! Part 2: Exploring Technocracy through Cybernetics
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies. First, we hear the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political sci...
Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP)
06 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bendin...
Elizabeth Ellcessor, "In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality" (NYU Press, 2022)
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Elizabeth Ellcessor presents a much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives in In Case of Emergency: How Technol...
Technocracy Now! Part 1: Noam Chomsky on Intellectuals and Expertise
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges j...
Social Media and Political Participation in the Philippines
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We are all familiar with the spread of disinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But just when we thought we’...
Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert, "Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)" (Verso, 2022)
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it? We cann...
James Bessen, "The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation" (Yale UP, 2022)
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation (Yale UP, 2022), James Bessen e...
Tripp Mickle, "After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul" (William Morrow, 2022))
28 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative forc...
Digital Lethargy
27 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of High Theory, Tung-Hui Hu talks with Júlia Irion Martins about Digital Lethargy, as part of our High Theory in STEM series. As a mo...
Kathryn Harkup, "Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
26 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
William Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters, and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions – shock, sadness, ...
Kirsti Niskanen and Michael J. Barany, "Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
26 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona. Incarnations and Contestations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Professors Kirsti Niska...
NBN Classic: Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017)
25 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Humans are accustomed to being...
NBN Classic: Mark Bartholomew, "Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing" (Stanford Law Books, 2017)
25 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Advertising is everywhere. By ...
NBN Classic: Jonathan Sadowsky, "The Empire of Depression: A New History" (Polity, 2020)
24 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. When is sorrow sickness? That ...
NBN Classic: Virginia Eubanks, "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (St. Martin's, 2018)
24 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. The State of Indiana denies on...
James Belich, "The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe" (Princeton UP, 2022)
23 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused...
David Max Moerman, "The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
23 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. ...
Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water (Duke UP, 2019) trace...
The Future of Nuclear Weapons: A Conversation with Fred Kaplan
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For much of the Cold War the United States had thousands more nuclear weapons than it needed. And it took decades for American political leaders to re...
Amber Sinha, "The Networked Public: How Social Media is Changing Democracy" (Rupa Publications, 2019)
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Amber Sinha works at the intersection law, technology and society, and studies the impact of digital technologies on socio-political processes and st...
Alex Nathanson, "A History of Solar Power Art and Design" (Routledge, 2021)
19 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Nathanson's book A History of Solar Power Art and Design (Routledge, 2021) examines the history of creative applications of photovoltaic (PV) ...
Stefan Höltgen, "Open History: The Archaeology of Retrocomputing" (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021)
16 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Stefan Höltgen about his book Open History: The Archaeology of Retrocomputing (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021). How can historical co...
Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021)
15 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We know that plants are important. They maintain the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. They nourish other living organisms ...
Felicia Wu Song, "Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age" (InterVarsity Press, 2021)
14 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We're being formed by our devices. Unpacking the soft tyranny of the digital age, Felicia Wu Song combines insights from psychology, neuroscience, soc...
Esther Wright, "Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity" (de Gruyter, 2022)
13 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, ...
Karen Hunger Parshall, "The New Era in American Mathematics, 1920–1950" (Princeton UP, 2022)
12 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The New Era in Mathematics, 1920-1950 (Princeton University Press, 2022) Karen Parshall explores the institutional, financial, social, and politi...
Josh Chin and Liza Lin, "Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
09 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As we build the AI-powered digital economy, how far do we want to go? Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control ...
Elise Vernon Pearlstine, "Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance" (Yale UP, 2022)
08 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Plants have long harnessed the chemical characteristics of aromatic compounds to shape the world around them. Frankincense resin from the genus Boswel...
Georg Striedter, "Model Systems in Biology: History, Philosophy, and Practical Concerns" (MIT Press, 2022)
07 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Biomedical research using various animal species and in vitro cellular systems has resulted in both major successes and translational failure. In Mod...
Lucía Fernández-Amaya, "A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication" (Brill, 2022)
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Digital discourse has become a widespread way of communicating worldwide, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. A Linguisti...
Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022)
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the...
J. Bradford DeLong, "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century" (Basic Books, 2020)
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From one of the world's leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied Before 1870, human...
Truck Nuts: The Political History of Trucks and Trucking
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The pickup truck is the symbol of rural conservative masculinity. So, it often takes centre stage in the tired culture wars between reactionary neo-po...
Jerry C. Zee, "Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System" (U California Press, 2022)
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chine...
The Tamiflu Trials: Profit and Public Health
02 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Before Remdesivir and Hydroxycloroquin there was Tamiflu. To prepare for Swine Flu and Bird Flu, governments spent billions stockpiling this drug call...
88 Underwater Eye: Margaret Cohen explores the Film Aquatic
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Margaret Cohen joins John to discuss The Underwater Eye, which explores "How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy....
Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, "Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of Our Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022)
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about "bad" speech, hate speech, disinformation, propaganda campaigns, incitement of...
The Heroin Clinic
01 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
At Crosstown Clinic, doctors are turning addiction treatment on its head: they’re prescribing heroin-users the very drug they’re addicted to. This...
This is Your Brain on Trial
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine reading or watching The Minority Report and thinking of that as a model for the criminal justice system. Well, plenty of forensic types are ...
Property Technology
30 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of High Theory, Erin McElroy talks with Nathan Kim about Property Technology. This is the first episode in the High Theory in STEM ser...
Pathological: The Work of Dr. Charles Smith
30 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Charles Smith performed autopsies at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, ON. The cops kept turning to him with new corpses, and he kept cla...
Derailed: The Crisis of Forensic Expertise
29 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to complex social problems, us “sensible” types turn to the experts, but what if they don’t actually know what they’re talking a...
Jennifer Jill Fellows and Lisa Smith, "Gender, Sex, and Tech!: An Intersectional Feminist Guide" (Canadian Scholars, 2022)
29 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this timely collection, gender, sex, and technology are explored through an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens. Gender, Sex, and Tech!: An ...
Don’t Hate the Player: The World of E-Sports
26 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode of Darts and Letters, we took a personal journey into virtual sport. Listen in as guest host (and regular lead producer) Jay Cockburn ...
Julie A. Turnock, "The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism" (U Texas Press, 2022)
26 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma...
Cassidy Puckett, "Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Picture a typical computer geek. Likely white, male, and someone you’d say has a “natural instinct” for technology. Yet, after six years teachin...
Enter the Zuckerverse: On the Metaverse and its Corporatization
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The term “metaverse” was coined in a 1993 science fiction novel. Since then, it’s grown from a dystopian literary concept to a reality that corp...
Alfie Bown, "Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships" (Pluto Press, 2022)
24 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new t...
Brett Scott, "Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets" (Harper Business, 2022)
24 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how ...
Gamify Everything: Turning Work Into Play . . . for Better and for Worse
24 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Setting goals for the new year? Learning a language? Going for a run? Delivering food? Picking packages off a warehouse shelf for delivery? There’s ...
Save the Whales: The Addictive Psychology Behind Video Games
23 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We’ll save the Moby Dick puns for the episode itself, but suffice it to say that sinister game developers are on a whale hunt. This episode, origina...
Ann Blair et al., "Information: A Historical Companion" (Princeton UP, 2021)
23 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Information is everywhere. We live in an “Information” Society. We can get more of it faster, quicker, and in more different shapes and sizes than...
Moral Kombat: How Mortal Kombat Caused Moral Outrage
22 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
You can learn much about a media and political culture by examining when it panics, and who it panics about. And we’ve always panicked about video g...
Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
22 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists a...
Adam Nocek, "Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Adam Nocek, Assistant Professor in the Philosophy of Technolo...
Paris Marx, "Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation" (Verso, 2022)
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation (Verso, 2022), Paris Marx identifies two convergent forces in...
Eswar S. Prasad, "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance" (Harvard UP, 2021)
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021) provides...
The Future of Net Zero: A Discussion with Eric Lonergan
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There is no shortage of words written about climate change and the goal of reaching net zero - but there is a shortage of practical suggestions about ...
Joseph Mileti, "Modern Mathematical Logic" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
15 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Joe Mileti, associate professor of mathematics at Grinnell College. Even if you are not "into" math, you will ...
Made of Corn: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 2 of 2)
12 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is part 2 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters. For the final episode of our “Activism & Academia”-themed wee...
Modifying Maize: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 1 of 2)
11 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is part 1 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters. When genetically modified corn was found in the highlands of Mexi...
Christian Wolmar, "British Rail: A New History" (Michael Joseph, 2022)
11 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
You think you know British Rail. But you don't know the whole story. Now, award-winning writer Christian Wolmar provides a new perspective on national...
J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, "The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945" (Harvard UP, 2016)
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth centur...
Twitter, Intellectual Discourse, and Humility
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For this episode of How To Be Wrong, I speak with George Styles, a biochemist and author of the book Contemplation. George is also what we describe t...
Minh-Ha T. Pham, "Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property" (Duke UP, 2022)
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” usi...
M. I. Franklin, "Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural" (Oxford UP, 2021)
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Music sampling has become a predominantly digitalized practice. It was popularized with the rise of Rap and Hip-Hop, as well as ambient music scenes, ...
Lindsay Starkey, "Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond" (Amsterdam UP, 2020)
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What is holding the oceans back from entirely flooding the earth? While a twenty-first century thinker may approach the answer to this question wit...
Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten, "Probability and Forensic Evidence: Theory, Philosophy, and Applications" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Probability and Forensic Evidence: Theory, Philosophy, and Applications (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten address the role ...
Environmental Catastrophe
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode John Yargo speaks with Kim about Environmental Catastrophe. In the episode John quotes Hannah Arendt and N.K. Jemisin, discusses a Sha...
Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, "Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie" (Companyédition PUF/Disclose, 2021)
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the ...
On Online Churches
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Tim Hutchings is a sociologist of digital religion. His Ph.D. (Durham University, 2010) was an ethnographic study of five online Christian churche...
American Chernobyl, Part 2: The Most Poisonous Place in the USA
05 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Hanford is the most-polluted place in America. In our last episode, you heard about the nuclear plant's largely-forgotten history--how it poisoned the...
Daniel Bergner, "The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches" (Ecco, 2022)
04 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches (Ecco, 3033), Daniel Bergner examines the...
Nina Rattner Gelbart, "Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France" (Yale UP, 2021)
04 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (Yale University Press, 2021), Nina Gelbart, Professor of History and Anita ...
America's Chernobyl, Part 1: Living in a Poison Town
04 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Cited: What it means to live in a place where your home can give you cancer. Richland, Washington is a company town that sprang up ...
Ellis Jones, "DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
03 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since the 1970s, there has been a rich, global lineage of broadly guitar-based music scenes which have enacted a political critique of the commercial ...
The Revolution Will Not Be Streamed: The Intellectual Culture of Twitch Streamers
03 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It was billed as “the biggest event in the history of the terminally online.” A debate: socialism vs. capitalism. On your left side, the esteemed ...
Socialise the Series of Tubes: Toward a Democratic Internet
02 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places. So why does o...
Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Techno-utopianism is everywhere. It’s driven by a new tech-bro/crypto culture, supported by online hordes of true believers, and couched in philosop...
Mark Solovey, "Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the 'Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation" (MIT Press, 2020)
01 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is part two of a two part interview. Mark Solovey’s ‘Social Science for What?’ is essential reading for anyone in either the history of sc...
The Science Wars: Post-Truth and the Nature of Science
29 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the final day of our weeklong deep dive into the politics of education. Today, we’ve got another episode of Cited for you. If you haven’...
Erica Gies, "Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
29 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Trouble with water – increasingly frequent, extreme floods and droughts – is one of the first obvious signs of climate change. Meanwhile, urban sp...
Stuart Ellis-Gorman, "The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King" (Pen & Sword Military, 2022)
28 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The crossbow is an iconic weapon of the Middle Ages and, alongside the longbow, one of the most effective ranged weapons of the pre-gunpowder era. Unf...
The Battle of Buxton: Saving a Lighthouse in the Era of Climate Change
28 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor...
Lachlan Fleetwood, "Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
28 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today, the idea that the Himalayas have the world’s tallest peaks—by a large margin—is entirely uncontroversial. Just about anyone can name Moun...
Nic Maclellan, "Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests" (ANU Press, 2017)
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nic Maclellan's book Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests (ANU Press, 2017) is a history of Britain’s 1950s program to test t...
James Steinhoff, "Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) argues that Marxist theory ...
Felix Schniz, "Genre and Video Game: Introducing an Impossible Taxonomy" (Springer, 2021)
26 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Felix Schniz's book Genre and Video Game: Introducing an Impossible Taxonomy (Genre und Videospiel: Einführung in eine unmögliche Taxonomie) expl...
Effective Altruism: What it is, What it Does, and How You Can Help
25 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
80,000 Hours provides research and support to help students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing pro...
Mark Solovey, "Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the 'Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation" (MIT Press, 2020)
25 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is part one of a two part interview. "The social sciences have prospered best in the federal government where they have been included under broad...
Jay Baruch, "Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER" (MIT Press, 2022)
22 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doct...