New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Polina Dimova, "At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism" (Penn State UP, 2024)

06 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, an...

Tom Griffiths, "The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind" (Henry Holt and Co., 2026)

04 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind (Henry Holt and Co., 2026) is an exploration of the quest to use mathematic...

Jennifer Vail, "Friction: A Biography" (Harvard UP, 2026)

03 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Friction, the force that resists motion, is synonymous with difficulty and complication. If you’ve ever replaced tires worn smooth by the road or re...

John L. Rudolph, "Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should)" (Oxford UP, 2023)

31 Jan 2026

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 ...

LiLi Johnson, "Technologies of Kinship: Asian American Racialization and the Making of Family" (NYU Press, 2025)

28 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Delving into the complex interplay of race, kinship, and technology, Technologies of Kinship: Asian American Racialization and the Making of Family ...

Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (Public Affairs, 2021)

26 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942...

Michelle Henning, "A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

22 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire (U Chicago Press, 2026), Professor Michelle Henning presents an environmental history...

Alex Wellerstein, "The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age" (Harper, 2025)

21 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II was, arguably, the most controversial decision of the 20th century. The responsibility for that...

Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, "The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

21 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Gius...

The Friends of Attention, "Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement" (Crown, 2026)

20 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

“You are correct: something is seriously wrong.” So begins Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown, 2026) writte...

Robert Dorschel, "The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism" (MIT Press, 2025)

20 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Who are the people staffing the digital economy? In The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism (MIT Press, 2025) Rob...

Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World" (Little, Brown, 2023)

19 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesize...

Steve Ramirez, "How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past" (Princeton UP, 2025)

19 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain...

Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media" (Princeton UP, 2023)

19 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that tradit...

Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)

18 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America,...

Ines Prodöhl, "Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900–1950" (Routledge, 2023)

18 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950 (Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soy...

Caroline Peyton, "Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

17 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

How and why did the South’s history, culture, and politics shape the region’s nuclear and energy industries? And how is that history linked to bro...

Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich, "The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air" (Yale UP, 2025)

13 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air (Yale UP, 2025) by Dr. Bruno J. Strasser and Dr. Thomas Schlich presents a history of masks protecting again...

Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

10 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim ...

Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us" (HarperCollins, 2021)

09 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

An astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoir...

Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

08 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and e...

Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)

07 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving forc...

Rachel Midura, "Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2025)

07 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP...

Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)

06 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond...

Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)

06 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a foren...

David Morris, "Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia" (Watkins Media, 2025)

05 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX...

Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)

05 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observatio...

Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)

01 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking sp...

Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)

01 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of...

Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

31 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel...

James Welsh et al., "Weathering Space" (American Scientist 114:1 2026)

31 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Past human space missions were protected by Earth’s magnetic field and a measure of luck, but future missions beyond the Earth–Moon system will fa...

Jeremy Black, "A History of Artillery" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

29 Dec 2025

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...

Colin Williamson, "Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

25 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent sc...

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...