New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episodes
Wade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018)
18 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future...
Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018)
17 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. ...
Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017)
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and gove...
Rachel Z. Arndt, “Beyond Measure” (Sarabande Books, 2018)
12 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now ...
Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018)
11 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful...
Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018)
11 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origin...
Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018)
09 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a stro...
Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
05 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel ex...
Peter Harries-Jones, “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference” (Fordham UP, 2016)
04 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direc...
Byron Reese, “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity” (Simon & Schuster, 2018)
04 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and C...
Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850” (UNC Press, 2018)
03 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Pre...
P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)
02 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, outlines the history of social m...
Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017)
25 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century ...
Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science” (UNC Press, 2017)
18 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
American science and empire have a long mutual history. In American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina...
Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
13 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes t...
Rebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018)
10 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues t...
Megan Ward, “Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character” (OSU Press, 2018)
07 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas ...
N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs, eds., “Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War” (Routledge, 2017)
05 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) deve...
G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018)
29 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence...
Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017)
23 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illness...
Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018)
17 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot co...
Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” (MIT Press, 2017)
15 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to en...
Yves Citton, “The Ecology of Attention” (Polity Press, 2017)
13 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being rec...
Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018)
09 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infecti...
Casey Walsh, “Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico” (U California Press, 2018).
02 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and re...
Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
31 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how...
Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016)
27 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkeni...
Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic” (UNC Press, 2017).
24 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) exa...
David Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social Change” (Chelsea Green, 2015)
20 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also tru...
Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018)
18 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies contro...
Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg” (Princeton UP, 2018)
18 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, ...
Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
16 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activit...
Ari Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body” (Duke UP, 2018)
10 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fas...
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...