New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episodes
Gary Bruce, “Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo” (Oxford UP, 2017)
09 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the Universi...
Christopher G. White, “Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions” (Harvard UP, 2018)
04 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irrecon...
Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
04 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a pecul...
Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India” (Harvard UP, 2018)
29 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives...
Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records” (Beacon Press, 2017)
28 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to s...
Joy Rohde, “Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2013)
27 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses th...
Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017)
27 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Pres...
Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017)
19 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture ...
Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art” (Penn State UP, 2018)
14 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of...
Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
12 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed ...
Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” (Princeton UP, 2018)
07 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Sha...
Larry Cuban, “The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning” (Harvard Education Press, 2018)
06 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban...
Hala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut” (Brill, 2016)
05 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printin...
Kyla Schuller, “The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century” (Duke UP, 2017)
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. How...
Eden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” (MIT Press, 2011)
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics. In t...
Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
29 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bournevill...
Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015)
18 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describe...
Jörg Matthias Determann, “Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories, and Nationalism in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2018)
11 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Ar...
Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017)
09 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigr...
Mark A. McCutcheon, “The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology” (Athabasca UP, 2018)
03 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. ...
B.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Back” (Curious Reads, 2017)
03 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes...
Sam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” (Little, Brown and Co., 2015)
26 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, loboto...
Aimi Hamraie, “Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability” (U Minnesota Press, 2017)
25 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design”...
David J. Silverman, “Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America” (Harvard UP, 2016)
24 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), David J. Silverman ...
Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (UMass Press, 2018)
23 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put...
Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
20 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic ...
George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, “Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies” (Georgetown UP, 2017)
18 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies (Georgetown University Press, 2017), edited by George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, uses analogies to conv...
Susan M. Squier, “Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor” (Duke UP, 2017)
17 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017) is about development— biological and ecologic...
Thomas Morris, “The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations” (Thomas Dunne, 2018)
11 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate o...
Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s” (Columbia UP, 2018)
09 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation...
Stephen Monteiro, “The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender” (MIT Press, 2017)
06 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sewing, knitting, quilting, the crafts related to fabric making, are usually not what we think about when we consider our digital communications devic...
Hanna Engelmeier, “Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900” (Bohlau, 2016)
02 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The relationship between humans and apes has been discussed for centuries. That discussion took a new turn with the publication and reception of Darwi...
Alex Wade, “Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
23 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his book Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Alex Wade examines the culture of bedroom coding, arcades, ...
Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
22 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbrea...
Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 )
15 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to ano...
Anthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
06 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfa...
Christopher J. Lee, “Jet Lag” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
27 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the l...
Molly Wright Steenson, “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape” (MIT Press, 2017)
27 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architect...
Jennifer Hart, “Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation” (Indiana UP, 2016)
23 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest today was Dr. Jennifer Hart who talked to us about her recently published book Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transpo...
Michael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018)
20 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to ...
Howard I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017)
14 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and conseque...
James Delbourgo, “Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane” (Allen Lane, 2017)
09 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and contro...
Andrew Keen, “How To Fix The Future” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018)
06 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you rea...
Nick Montfort, “The Future” (MIT, 2017)
29 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a fu...
Leo Coleman, “A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi” (Cornell UP, 2017)
19 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We take electricity for granted. But the material grids and wires that bring light to homes and connect places are also objects of moral concern, poli...
Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017)
09 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese i...
Liss C. Werner, “Cybernetics: State of the Art” (Tech Uni of Berlin Press, 2017)
09 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital conne...
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015)
29 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided ...
Chelsea Schelly, “Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America” (Rutgers UP, 2017)
28 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Technology is a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use...
Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017)
21 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the In...
Jason Josephson-Storm, “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” (U. Chicago, 2017)
21 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to think of ourselves—our modern selves–as disenchanted. We have traded magic, myth, and spirits for science, reason, and logic. But this ...
Alfie Bown, “The Playstation Dreamworld” (Polity, 2017)
20 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Profe...
Zek Valkyrie, “Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline” (Praeger, 2017)
15 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Zek Valkyrie teaches at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. His new book, Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Of...
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Personal Stereo” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
12 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and exper...
Andrew S. Tompkins, “Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany” (Oxford UP, 2016)
28 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and Fra...
Michelle Murphy, “The Economization of Life” (Duke University Press, 2017)
27 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle Murphy pulls apart the late modern concept of “population” to show the lives ...
Douglas Hunter, “The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (UNC, 2017)
30 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Douglas Hunter examines...
Michael Wintroub, “The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
04 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintro...
Vincent J. Intondi, “African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement” (Stanford UP, 2015)
03 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press, 2015)...
Brian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives” (Icon Books, 2017)
19 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that...
Allison Perlman, “Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television” (Rutgers UP, 2016)
11 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Since its infancy, television has played an important role in shaping U.S. values and the American sense of self. Social activists recognized this pow...
Iwan Rhys Morus, ed.,”The Oxford Illustrated History of Science” (Oxford UP, 2017)
07 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What is science? A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilli...
Nicholas C. Kawa, “Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, and Forests” (U. Texas Press, 2016)
05 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age...
Ron Edwards, “The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau” (Oxford UP, 2016)
25 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford Univers...
Eric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017)
02 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it ...
David Beer, “Metric Power” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
02 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
How do metrics rule the social world? In Metric Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) David Beer, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, outlines t...
Claire D. Clark, “The Recovery Revolution” (Columbia UP, 2017)
28 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had somethin...
Simone Muller, “Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks” (Columbia UP, 2016)
10 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb accoun...
Melvin R. Adams, “Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation” (Washington State University Press, 2016)
10 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incid...
Thomas Hazlett, “The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology” (Yale UP, 2017)
30 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What better way to explore the history of media regulation than to go on a journey with the former chief economist of the FCC? Prior to introduction o...
Brian Clegg, “The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe” (Icon Books, 2017)
29 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Clegg is one of England’s most prolific and popular writers on science. His latest work, The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Un...
Neil M. Maher, “Apollo in the Age of Aquarius” (Harvard UP, 2017)
20 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock...
Beau Lotto, “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently” (Hatchette Books, 2017)
30 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
We may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. I...
Britt Rusert, “Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture” (NYU Press, 2017)
26 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early Afric...
Sharrona Pearl, “Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)
18 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2...
Different Medias with Eric Alterman
18 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
How can we as consumers distinguish between the many different political medias? Eric Alterman is CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journa...
Willliam Rankin, “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)
17 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, a...
Kate Daloz, “We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America” (PublicAffairs, 2016)
14 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a...
Sophia Roosth, “Synthetic: How Life Got Made” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
13 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historica...
Tara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science” (MIT Press, 2016)
11 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, War...
Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)
08 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. ...
Lisa Messeri, “Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds” (Duke UP, 2016)
04 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific ...
J. C. McKeown, “A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome” (Oxford UP, 2017)
29 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quo...
Tania Munz, “The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)
25 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as e...
Democracy and Dialogue Online with Joshua Cohen
20 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Joshua Cohen is a faculty member of Apple University, and is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the School of Law, the Department of Philosophy, and the ...
Grace Davie, “Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
19 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century ea...
Donna Freitas, “The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost” (Oxford UP, 2017)
18 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford University Press, 2017), Donna Freitas investi...
Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT, 2014)
18 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Amit Prasad is widely admired for using Postcolonial Studies to explore questions about science, technology and medicine. In Imperial Technoscience: T...
Rebecca Scales, “Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
13 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the natur...
Eugene Raikhel, “Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic” (Cornell UP, 2016)
11 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it...
Democracy and Social Media with Michael Lynch
05 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Social Media rewards snap judgments and blind conviction. Michael Lynch finds this troubling. Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy and Direct...
Raz Chen-Morris, “Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility” (Penn State UP, 2016)
29 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical mot...
Colleen Derkatch, “Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)
29 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their ...
Marie Hicks, “Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing” (MIT Press, 2017)
28 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
How did gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry...
Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, “Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible” (Fordham UP, 2015)
28 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most interesting, but largely overlooked silent films, is Haxan, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Using documentary methods as...
Susan E. Cayleff, “Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
28 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Susan Cayleff’s Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers a fascinating alternativ...
Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco, “The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture” (Routledge, 2016)
27 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The wish to transcend one’s mortality, and the anxiety associated with being unable to do so, are universal human experiences. People deal with thes...
Kathleen McAuliffe, “This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society” (Mariner Books, 2017)
21 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Kathleen McAuliffe‘s This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society (Mariner Books, 2017) unveils the...
Meredith K. Ray, “Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in 17th-Century Italy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
13 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and...
Ericka Johnson, ed. “Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
24 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Pal...