New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episodes
Emanuel Deutschmann, "Mapping the Transnational World: How We Move and Communicate Across Borders, and Why It Matters" (Princeton UP, 2022)
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Increasingly, people travel and communicate across borders. Yet, we still know little about the overall structure of this transnational world. Is it r...
Erik Lin-Greenberg, "The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft" (Cornell UP, 2025)
19 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft (Cornell UP, 2025), Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of inter...
Jennifer Ott, "Where the City Meets the Sound: The Story of Seattle's Waterfront" (HistoryLink, 2025) This
19 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From canoes on the beach at Dzidzilalich to steamships and piers, Seattle's waterfront was the center of the city's economy and culture for generation...
Luis Felipe Murillo, "Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures" (Stanford UP, 2025)
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A digital world in relentless movement—from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing—has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by S...
Chaim Gingold, "Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine" (MIT Press, 2024)
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Building SimCity explores the history of computer simulation by chronicling one of the most influential simulation games ever made: SimCity. As auth...
Matthew A. Tattar, "Innovation and Adaptation in War" (MIT Press, 2025)
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An analysis of advances in military technology that illustrates the importance of organizational flexibility in both an attacker’s innovations and a...
Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and the Discontinuous in Human Thought" (Allen Lane, 2025)
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world’s most influential philosophers.How do we understand the world and our place in ...
Edward McPherson, "Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View" (Astra House, 2025)
13 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View (Astra House, 2025) by Edward McPherson is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial p...
Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen, "Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley" (Harvard UP, 2025)
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion pe...
Thomas Haigh on the History of “AI” as a Brand
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Thomas Haigh, Professor and Chair of History and affiliate of the Department of Computer Science at Univ...
Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The City and the Hospital (Chicago 2023) focuses on an urban paradox: American hospitals are imagined as sites of healing and care, and yet the peopl...
Reading the Bible with AI?: A Conversation with John Kaag, Philosopher and Co-Founder of Rebind AI
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Rebind combines reading with AI-chat to deepen learning and simulate the experience of conversing with some of the greatest scholars and thinkers. Wit...
Elisabetta Ferrari, "Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist Imaginaries and the Politics of Digital Technologies" (U California Press, 2024)
29 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Activists utilize digital technologies to communicate, coordinate, and organize for social change. In Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist ...
Meg Bernhard, "Wine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Meg Bernhard about her new book Wine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of...
Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
27 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the p...
Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster" (Repeater, 2025)
23 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Once used extensively in schools, hospitals, and housing, asbestos has taken the lives of millions. Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster (Re...
Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)
23 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we bre...
Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, "Videotape" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
22 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind th...
Ivan Franceschini et al., "Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds" (Verso Books, 2025)
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“If I had been enslaved for a year or two, I might not be able to believe in humanity any more.” “I am a victim of modern slavery.” These chi...
Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
19 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the convent...
Cory Doctorow on Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things, host Lee Vinsel and very special guest host, danah boyd, formerly of Microsoft Research, prese...
Hilary Allen, "Fintech Dystopia: A Summer Beach Read about Silicon Valley Ruining Things" (2025)
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Silicon Valley wants to disrupt finance, and it might just succeed. In FinTech Dystopia, professor Hilary Allen offers an accessible, irreverent, and...
Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021)
09 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rura...
The Technological Soul: Alex Priou on Modernity, Ideology, and the Limits of Reason
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny speaks with Alex Priou, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University...
Liam Graham, "Physics Fixes All the Facts" (Springer Nature, 2025)
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Complex systems seem to magically emerge from the interactions of their parts. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules. A living cell from organic mo...
Mimi Abramovitz, "Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present" (Routledge, 2025)
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the fourth edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, drawing on important feminist concep...
Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson, "Dance Dance Revolution" (Boss Fight Books, 2025)
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On September 26, 1998, a video game made its debut in Japanese arcades. It was over seven feet tall and weighed just over 900 pounds. It had no charac...
AI, News, and the State: Reinstitutionalising Journalism in Global China’s Algorithmic Age: A conversation with Dr. Joanne Kuai
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How is artificial intelligence transforming journalism as both a profession and an institution? In this episode, Ning Ao speaks to Dr. Joanne Kuai, ex...
James Elwick, "Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
02 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing (U Toronto Press, 2025) takes historiographic and sociological perspectiv...
Muhammad Atique, "Algorithmic Saga: Understanding Media, Culture, and Transformation in the AI Age" (Atique Mindscape Publishing, 2024)
01 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In an age when digital media permeates every aspect of our lives, understanding its influence is more critical than ever. Algorithmic Saga: Understan...
Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
31 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the ...
Stephen C. Mercado, "Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito's Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War" (Pen & Sword Military, 2025)
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
War, and the threat of war, spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weapons. Imperial Japan, ahead of the Second World War, wa...
Xiao Huang et. al, "GeoAI and Human Geography: The Dawn of a New Spatial Intelligence Era" (Springer, 2025)
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
GeoAI and Human Geography: The Dawn of a New Spatial Intelligence Era (Springer, 2025) outlines a comprehensive journey into how geospatial artifici...
Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland, "The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines" (Basic Books, 2025)
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We find ourselves weighing arguments, or relying on intuition, then reaching a conscious decision...
Rick A López, "Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570-1914" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what ...
Brian Potter, "The Origins of Efficiency" (Stripe Press, 2025)
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Efficiency is the engine that powers human civilization. It's the reason rates of famine have fallen precipitously, literacy has risen, and humans are...
Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the inter...
Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean" (Oxford UP, 2020)
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological ...
Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the inter...
Garrett Hardin’s Tragic Environmentalism
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An ecologist in California claimed that the iron laws of nature locked humanity into destroying our environment. This meant that we must take drastic ...
Roger Moorhouse, "Wolfpack: Hitler’s U-Boat War 1939-45" (HarperCollins, 2025)
26 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Winston Churchill famously remarked that the threat of the German U-Boats was the only thing that had “really frightened” him during World War Two...
Hector Vera, "Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)
25 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its...
Jesse Rodenbiker, "Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China" (Cornell UP, 2023)
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Based on two years of extensive fieldwork, Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (Cornell UP, 2023) exami...
Scott D. Anthony, "Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World" (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025)
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025) arrives at the perfect moment as artificial inte...
Harry Cliff, "Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe" (Doubleday, 2024)
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nothing captivates the human imagination like the vast unknowns of space. Ancient petroglyphs present renderings of the heavens, proof that we have be...
Alice Lovejoy, "Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War" (U California Press, 2025)
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another ta...
Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how.AI’s impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated...
Delia Casadei, "Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound" (U California Press, 2024)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound (University of California Press, 2024) explores the forgotten history of laughter, fro...
José Marichal, "You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem: Renegotiating the Socio-Technical Contract" (Policy Press, 2025)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the age of AI, where personal data fuels corporate profits and state surveillance, what are the implications for democracy? This incisive book Yo...
Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton UP, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief th...
Caleb Scharf, "The Giant Leap: Why Space Is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life" (Hachette UK, 2025)
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A leading astrobiologist "demonstrates how becoming a true space-faring species is more than just humanity's future" (Adam Frank, author of The Littl...
David Eliot, "Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI" (Aevo UTP, 2025)
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The story of AI isn't finished yet. The question is: how will you be part of it? With the unprecedented adoption of artificial intelligence and its f...
Madeleine Chalmers, "French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, ...
Whitney Laemmli on Making Movement Modern
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Whitney Laemmli, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pra...
Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)
12 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and producti...
David Singerman, "Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
11 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long a...
Allen B. Downey, "Probably Overthinking It: How to Use Data to Answer Questions, Avoid Statistical Traps, and Make Better Decisions" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Statistics are everywhere: in news reports, at the doctor's office, and in every sort of forecast, from the stock market to the weather. Blogger, teac...
S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law" (Routledge, 2025)
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Until recently, no one could access the detailed contents of your mind directly the way only you can. This level of protection of our mental data was ...
Anthony J. Knowles, "Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany" (Brill, 2025)
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany (Brill, 2025) reconstructs the industrial histo...
Susannah Fisher, "Sink Or Swim: How the World Needs to Adapt to a Changing Climate" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
07 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The world needs to adapt to climate change – but how? What are the key problems and hard choices that lie ahead for the global community? Sink or S...
Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Selfies are more than fleeting images—across India, they shape how people imagine themselves, connect with others, and inhabit spaces. In this epis...
Carlotta Daro, "The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication" (MIT Press, 2025)
05 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of t...
Daniel K. Sodickson, "The Future of Seeing: How Imaging is Changing the World" (Columbia UP, 2025)
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the centuries, we have learned to peer into what was once invisible. Imaging devices like cameras, telescopes, microscopes, and MRI machines map ...
157 Mangrum's Comical Computation (JP)
02 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to ...
Ashleigh Wade on How Black Girls Use Social Media
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Ashleigh Greene Wade, Assistant Professor of Digital Studies with a joint appointment in Media Studies a...
Cass R. Sunstein, "Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do" (APS Press, 2025)
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Imperfect Oracle is about the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is better than we are at making...
Vanessa Warne, "By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
27 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Vanessa Warne demonstrates how reading by touch n...
Mark Vellend, "Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More than We Think, from Proteins to Politics" (Princeton UP, 2025)
27 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligence Ev...
J. Doyne Farmer, "Making Sense of Chaos" (Yale UP, 2024)
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We live in an age of increasing complexity--an era of accelerating technology and global interconnection that holds more promise, and more peril, than...
Jonas Enander, "Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth" (The Experiment Press, 2025)
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Humanity's relationship with black holes began in 1783 in a small English village, when clergyman John Michell posed a startling question: What if the...
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, "More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy" (Harper, 2025)
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and t...
Stephen A. Harris, "50 Plants That Changed the World" (Bodleian Library, 2025)
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever stopped to think about how your morning cappuccino came to be? From the coffee bush that yielded the beans, to the grass for the cattle ...
Mark Seligman, "AI and Ada: Artificial Translation and Creation of Literature" (First Hill Books, 2025)
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Taking recent spectacular progress in AI fully into account, Mark Seligman's AI and Ada: Artificial Translation and Creation of Literature (Anthem ...
Lucy Sante, "Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022)
14 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware,...
Samuel Arbesman, "The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future" (PublicAffairs, 2025)
13 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the tradition of classics such as The Lives of a Cell, a bold reframing of our relationship with technology that argues code is "a universal force...
The High Frontier: Gerard O’Neill’s Space Utopia
13 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is the first episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their d...
Simon James Copland, "The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online" (Polity, 2025)
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these com...
Jessica Urwin, "Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia" (U of Washington Press, 2025)
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth...
Human Leadership for Humane Technology
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we spoke with Cornelia C. Walther about her three books examining technology's role in society. Walther, who spent nearly two decades...
Dan Roche, "Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing" (MIT Press, 2025)
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing (MIT Press, 2025) is a book about artificial eyes—about the artisans and artists who make them, and ab...
Bénédicte Meillon, "Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2022) tackles the reenchantment process at work in a pa...
Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025)
04 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia Univer...
Anthony Bonato, "Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Can networks unlock secrets of AI or make sense of a social media mess? A behind-the-scenes look at how networks reveal reality. According to mathema...
Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen, "The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination" (Reaktion, 2025)
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination (Reaktion, 2025), nature writers Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen set ...
Tia Sahrakorpi on a Use-Based History of Electricity in Finland
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Tiia Sahrakorpi, Visiting Professor at Weber State University, about her interesting book project, Our ...
Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
31 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Foreca...
Joshua Specht, "Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America" (Princeton UP, 2019)
31 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the h...
Dan Davies, "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For this episode of Liminal Library, I interviewed Dan Davies about The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How t...
Ian Scoones, "Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World" (Polity, 2024)
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the fu...
Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2021)
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Agnes Arnold-Forster's book The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2021) offers the first medical, cultural, and s...
Nick Spencer, "The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What Are We Disagreeing About?" (Oxford UP, 2025)
24 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The relationship between science and religion has long been a heated debate and is becoming an ever more popular topic. The scientific capacity to man...
Jack Buffington, "Environmental Innovation: An Action Plan for Saving the Economy and the Planet by 2050" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)
24 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Environmental sustainability policy has failed due to focusing on symptoms rather than the root cause problems. Through significant research and a det...
Ben Connable, "Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War" (Georgetown UP, 2025)
23 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War (Georgetown UP, 2025) reveals the gritty details of land warfare at the tactical level and challen...
Tim Lenton, "Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the Climate Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2025)
22 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As global change escalates, we are already starting to experience damaging tipping points in the social, ecological and climate systems that we depend...
Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic, "The Future of Memory: Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic" (U of Illinois Press, 2025)
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're pleased to welcome Dr. Jimi Jones and Dr. Marek Jancovic, authors of The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving...
Gary Rivlin, "AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence" (Harper Collins, 2025)
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist shadows the top thinkers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, introducing the breakthroughs and develo...
Noah Giansiracusa, "Robin Hood Math: Take Control of the Algorithms That Run Your Life" (Penguin, 2025)
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Everything we do today is recorded as data that’s sold to the highest bidder. Plugging our personal data into impersonal algorithms has made governm...
Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025)
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and...
Raphael Cormack, "Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult" (Norton, 2025)
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An international history of the uncanny in the 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fak...
Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from M...