New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episodes
M. Alper Yalcinkaya, “Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
15 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
What were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science? In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. ...
Jenifer Van Vleck, “Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy” (Harvard UP, 2013)
14 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
[Re-posted with permission from Who Makes Cents?] Today’s guest discusses the history of aviation and how this provides a lens to interpret the hist...
Nick Sousanis, “Unflattening” (Harvard UP, 2015)
12 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and kn...
Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013)
08 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “...
John Sharp, “Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art” (MIT Press, 2015)
01 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
That games, particularly video games, could be viewed as art should come as no surprise. And yet, a debate exists over what is and should be considere...
Greg Siegel, “Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity” (Duke UP, 2014)
26 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Greg Siegel‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging and meticulously researched account of a dual tendency in modern technological life: treating foren...
Jon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015)
25 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
That privacy in the digital age is an important concept to be discussed is axiomatic. Cameras in mobile phones make it easy to record events and post ...
Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
19 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, than...
Myles W. Jackson, “The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race” (MIT Press, 2015)
18 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when you allow human materials to become property? More specifically, how does granting monopoly rights over genetic material affect the ...
Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014)
10 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others co...
Lu Zhang, “Inside China’s Automobile Factories” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
10 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
China’s automobile industry has grown considerably over the past two decades. Massive foreign investment and an increased scale and concentration of...
Timothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015)
05 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital...
Naomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015)
01 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of conten...
Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013)
27 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heat...
Christine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015)
20 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the pr...
Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014)
17 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really need...
Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014)
13 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (Un...
Casey O’Donnell, “Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators” (MIT Press, 2014)
06 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (MIT Press, 2014), Casey O’Donnell, an assistant professor in the dep...
A. Mark Smith, “From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
21 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Moder...
Nick Wilding, "Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge" (U Chicago Press, 2014)
16 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowled...
Orit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014)
09 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book...
Lisa Stevenson, “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic” (University of California Press, 2014)
05 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Lisa Stevenson‘s new book opens with two throat-singing women and one listening king. Whether we hear them sitting down to a normal night’s dinner...
Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
23 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwi...
Kristina Kleutghen, “Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces” (U of Washington Press, 2015)
20 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Impe...
Ann C. Pizzorusso, “Tweeting Da Vinci” (Da Vinci Press, 2014)
18 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing ...
Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
10 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew i...
Nicolas Rasmussen, “Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
30 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockey...
Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, “Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
16 Jan 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain‘s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science educati...
Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015)
24 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promot...
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014)
14 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter...
Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
11 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology.Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Productio...
Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
09 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Pet...
Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)
03 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics...
Janet K. Shim, “Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease” (NYU Press, 2014)
27 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other thi...
William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
13 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Tu...
Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014)
07 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-1...
Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013)
06 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one an...
Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)
05 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination...
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)
30 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reas...
Kara W. Swanson, “Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2014)
20 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the...
Hugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014)
09 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. ...
Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014)
02 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 ...
Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
01 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of te...
Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
11 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the ...
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
05 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid ninet...
John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
22 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up n...
Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
16 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worl...
Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)
16 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the s...
David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
06 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the sam...
William E. Connolly, “The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism” (Duke UP, 2013)
30 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Bill Connolly‘s new book proposes a way to think about the world as a gathering of self-organizing systems or ecologies, and from there explores th...
Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013)
29 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French ...
Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam” (University of California Press, 2014)
22 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Select...
Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
14 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Bas...
Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT Press, 2014)
09 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), Amit Prasad, an ...
Lisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents” (Duke UP, 2014)
09 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…” From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelm...
Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
04 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the e...
Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
20 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, ...
Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life” (Harvard UP, 2014)
12 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also hel...
David Nemer, “Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology” (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013)
05 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Inherently problematic in most mainstream discussions of the impact of technology is the dominant western or global northern perspective. In this way,...
Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
02 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind....
Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014)
29 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to sa...
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
23 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach ...
Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies” (Ballentine, 2014)
18 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (Ballentine Books, 2014), Lawrence Goldstone recounts the discover...
Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
14 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, a...
danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014)
12 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, ...
Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
26 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold...
Robert Mitchell, “Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
16 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds,...
Paul-Brian McInerney, “From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market” (Stanford UP, 2014)
14 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Paul-Brian McInerney is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is the author of From Social Movement to Moral Mark...
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
10 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug r...
David Kaiser, “How the Hippies Saved Physics” (W.W. Norton, 2012)
02 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
David Kaiser‘s recent book is one of the most enjoyable and informative books on the history of science that you’ll read, full-stop. The deservedl...
Andrew L. Russell, “Open Standards in the Digital Age” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
27 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possi...
Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
23 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (a...
Sarah Franklin, “Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship” (Duke University Press, 2013)
09 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that...
Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
23 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
So much of Science Studies, of STS as a field or a point of engagement, is deeply concerned with objects. We create sociologies and networks of and wi...
Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
19 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you...
Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013)
09 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a f...
Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
31 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical an...
Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
21 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biol...
Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013)
14 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most importa...
Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
07 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Lif...
Conevery Bolton Valencius, “The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
28 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The story begins with Davy Crockett and his hunting dogs chasing a bear in 1826. The bear gets caught in an earthquake crack, an effect of the great M...
Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
27 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man ...
Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, eds., “Addiction Trajectories” (Duke UP, 2013)
26 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Addiction has recently emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry. In a wonderful, focused volume of ethnographies of addiction in a wide range o...
Todd H. Weir, “Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview” (Palgrave, 2012)
25 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, yo...
Kim TallBear, “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
23 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might j...
Thomas Bey William Bailey, “Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society” (Belsona Books, 2012)
22 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He i...
Ian Jared Miller, “The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo” (University of California Press, 2013)
10 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature...
Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012)
10 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uran...
William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012)
03 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
How does conducting fieldwork on another planet, using a robot as a mobile laboratory, change what it means to be a scientist? In Working on Mars: Vo...
Sienna R. Craig, “Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine” (University of California Press, 2012)
03 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is ef...
Ian Bogost, “Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing” (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
26 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
“Particle Man”, Charles Bukowski, Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Atari, Ace of Cakes, aliens, tiny ontology, Bruno Latour, ontography, E.T.: ...
Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)
26 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japa...
Marga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
19 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that...
Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2012)
03 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Brumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican ca...
Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
27 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. Th...
John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)
27 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. ...
Ian Samson, “Paper: An Elegy” (Harper Collins, 2012)
24 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches. Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from t...
Tim Maudlin, “Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time” (Princeton UP, 2012)
17 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Maudlin‘s Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press, 2012) is a clear, approachable, and engaging introduction to the ph...
Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
08 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesi...
Rachel Prentice, “Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education” (Duke UP, 2013)
28 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel Prentice‘s new book blends methodological approaches from science studies and anthropology to produce a riveting account of anatomical and su...