New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episodes
Paddy Walker, "War Without Oversight: Why We Need Humans on the Battlefield" (Howgate, 2025)
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Amid the fanfare around AI and autonomous weapons, decision-makers - both military and political - are imagining an augmented future for warfare that ...
John Alekna, "Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society" (Stanford UP, 2024)
06 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscap...
James Boyle Draws the Line Between Humans and AI
05 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press,...
Anna Farro Henderson, "Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments...
Marc Owen Jones, "Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media" (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2021)
02 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, host Raja Aderdor sits down with Marc Owen Jones, associate professor at Northwestern University in Qata...
Rhys Machold, "Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements Across India and Palestine/Israel" (Stanford UP, 2024)
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Homeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though...
Making Radio History
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the Ameri...
Peder Anker, "For The Love of Bombs: The Trail of Nuclear Suffering" (Anthem Press, 2025)
30 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The truism that history is written by its winners reflects the literature about how the bomb came about, with apologetic books most often written by U...
The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
29 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For many, technology offers hope for the future―that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Arti...
Jeremy Black, "A History of Britain's Transport" (Pen and Sword, 2025)
28 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An accessible book to draw on popular interest in transport history, routes, vehicles and experiences. Transport history is social and industrial nati...
Matt Mahmoudi, "Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control" (U California Press, 2025)
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance indus...
Chris Skinner, "Intelligent Money: When Money Thinks for You" (Marshall Cavendish, 2024)
26 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.f...
Sex and Love with Robots and Chatbots
26 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and can you fall in love with ChatGPT? Can, and should, you have sex with a robot? We asked Professor Kate Devlin, a leadin...
Anita Say Chan, "Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future" (U California Press, 2025)
25 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) illuminates the throughline betwe...
The Audiobook's Century-Long Overnight Success
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—...
Jeffrey Lee Funk on Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with retired professor, consultant, Discovery Institute fellow, and a winner of the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science...
Surekha Davies, "Humans: A Monstrous History" (U California Press, 2025)
23 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science in Humans: A Monstrous History (University o...
Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at S...
Brain Rot: How Screens Affect the Minds of Young Adults (4)
16 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode Dr. Karyne Messina, a New Books Network host, and Dr. Harry Gill discussed the negative effects of excessive screen time on young adul...
Mia Consalvo et al., "Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch" (MIT Press, 2025)
14 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstream...
Karl Berglund, "Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor ...
Matthew Fuhrmann, "Influence without Arms: The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
12 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How does nuclear technology influence international relations? While many books focus on countries armed with nuclear weapons, this volume puts the sp...
Leigh Ann Henion, "Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark" (Algonquin, 2024)
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish [darkness] as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented...
M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Maz...
Eleni Kalantidou on Design, Repairability, and Cultures of Repair
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Eleni Kalantidou, Assistant Professor at the Queensland College of Art and Design, about the volume of e...
On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet" (U California Press, 2024)
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What...
Lessons on Living with AI from the Home Computer Revolution: Revisiting Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self”
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common p...
Luis F. Alvarez Leon, "The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism" (U California Press, 2024)
08 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, w...
Jeremy Black, "A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
08 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how peopl...
Eric Dienstfrey, "Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology" (U California Press, 2024)
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fi...
Jorge Goldstein, "Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology" (Georgetown UP, 2025)
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Jorge Goldstein, the author of Patenting Life: The Commercialization of Biology, delves into the critical junction where biotechnolo...
Daniel J. Solove, "On Privacy and Technology" (Oxford UP, 2025)
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Succinct and eloquent, On Privacy and Technology (Oxford UP, 2025) is an essential primer on how to face the threats to privacy in today's age of d...
Simona Valeriani, "The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences" (Brepols, 2024)
05 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences (Brepols, 2024) by Dr. Simona Valeriani takes one of London’s most iconic buildings and decon...
Kyle Orland, "Minesweeper" (Boss Fight Books, 2023)
04 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you had some free time and a Windows PC in the 1990s, your mouse probably crawled its way to Minesweeper, an exciting watch-where-you-click puzzle ...
Sonic AI
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which pr...
Robert Houghton, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that ...
Webb Keane, "Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination" (Princeton UP, 2025)
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Revolutions in technology are fundamentally transforming what it means to be human. Or are they? As Webb Keane points out, before humans consulted C...
Christos Lynteris, "Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography" (MIT Press, 2022)
02 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pa...
Sam Srauy, "Race, Culture and the Video Game Industry: A Vicious Circuit" (Routledge, 2024)
01 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
My guest today Sam Srauy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University, Her res...
Daniel Silverman, "Seeing Is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
28 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Factual misinformation is spread in conflict zones around the world, often with dire consequences. But when is this misinformation actually believed, ...
Sybil Derrible, "The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives" (Prometheus Books, 2025)
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet – all this infrastruct...
Jeff Yoshimi, "Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery" (MIT Press, 2025)
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Can experimenting with game design increase our chances of finding a cure for cancer? Cancer is crafty, forcing us to be just as clever in our efforts...
The Internet, Power, and the Deep State: Zeynep Tufekci on Technology and Democracy Today
26 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As the second Trump administration reshapes the U.S. government and its role in the world, how do technology, media, and political power intersect? In...
Aure Schrock on Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Aure Schrock, an interdisciplinary technology scholar and writing coach and editor at Indelible Voice, a...
In “The Beast,” AI Puts Limits on Human Emotion
22 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and “The Beast” is a 2023 sci fi / romance movie by French director Bertrand Bonello, in which artificial intelligence ...
Peter D. Hershock, "Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
21 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. In Buddhism and Intelligen...
Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky, "Remapping the World in East Asia: Toward a Global History of the 'Ricci Maps'" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
20 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When we think of the sixteenth-century arrival of European missionaries in East Asia, there is a tendency to imagine this meeting as a civilizational ...
Brain Rot: What Our Screen Are Doing to Our Minds (3)
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the third podcast of this series, “Brain Rot: What Our Screen Are Doing to Our Minds,” host Dr. Karyne Messina, psychologist, psychoanalyst and...
The Anxious Generation: A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Madison's Notes, Jonathan Haidt, renowned social psychologist and author, dives deep into the impact of digital saturation on toda...
Nicole Lobdell, "X-Ray" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent w...
Asheesh Kapur Siddique, "The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World" (Yale UP, 2024)
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two ocea...
Ray Brescia, "The Private Is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2025)
17 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As Americans increasingly depend upon their phones, computers, and internet resources, their actions are less private than they believe. Data is routi...
Jessica A. Brockmole, "Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way Into the Driver's Seat" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)
16 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did ca...
Luiz Valério P. Trindade, "Hate Speech and Abusive Behaviour on Social Media: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" (Vernon Press, 2024)
15 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The pernicious social impact of social media platforms is a matter of global concern, as this digital technology has become a breeding ground for the ...
Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
15 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to...
Peter Burke, "Ignorance: A Global History" (Yale UP, 2024)
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of dar...
Brain Rot: What Screens Are Doing to Our Minds (2)
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“Brain Rot,” the 2024 Oxford word of the year captures the essence of our new podcast that is being created as a special series on the New Books N...
Astrid J. Smith, "Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age" (Arc Humanities Press, 2024)
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age (ARC Humanities Press, 2024) ...
Gabriella Coleman on Hackers Cultures (Plural!)
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gal...
Shoumita Dasgupta, "Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins: Lessons on Belonging from Our DNA" (U California Press, 2025)
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Dasgupta is a geneticist and internationally recognized anti-racism educator. In this book, she provides a powerful, science-based rebuttal to com...
Our History with AI is (much) Longer than You Think (with Kevin LaGrandeur)
08 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was relea...
Daniel Oberhaus, "The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum" (MIT Press, 2025)
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access tr...
Marijam Did, "Everything to Play For: An Insider's Guide to How Videogames are Changing Our World" (Verso, 2024)
03 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World (Verso, 2024) by Marijiam Did asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead ...
Mirca Madianou, "Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful" (Polity, 2024)
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are ...
Antonio A. Casilli, "Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings,...
Understanding Disinformation
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do we discern what is factual from what isn’t? In this episode, Dr. Colleen Sinclair joins us to discuss the functions of disinformation, and to...
A.I. is Spielberg & Kubrick’s Dark Twisted Fantasy
28 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, is a strange and profound text on human-AI relations. Ce...
Karenleigh A. Overmann, "The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East" (Gorgias Press, 2024)
28 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What are numbers, and where do they come from? Based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East, Karen...
Marshall Poe on the New Books Network, Technology, and the Future of Academic Communication
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples and Things host, Lee Vinsel, is joined by guest host and Peoples & Things producer, Joe Forte, Media Projects Manager with Virginia Tech Publi...
James Boyle, "The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood" (MIT Press, 2024)
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This conversation includes James Boyle, Duke University; Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, UPR-M; Héctor José Huyke, UPR-M, and Natalia Bustos, UPR-M. This is...
Taylor N. Carlson, "Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
26 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on...
Dario Fazzi, "Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea and the Birth of a Transatlantic Environmental Movement" (Columbia UP, 2023)
26 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. government, military, and industry once saw ocean incineration as the safest and most efficient way to dispose of hazardous chemical waste. B...
Alan Bollard, "Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas" (Oxford UP, 2023)
25 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (Oxford UP, 2023) is an account of the economic drivers and outco...
Michael Tondre, "Oil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to tu...
Brain Rot: What Screens Are Doing to Our Minds (1)
22 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Led by Dr. Karyne Messina, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author and host of NBN’s “New Books in Psychology” and “Psychoanalytic Perspectives ...
Ashish Avikunthak, "Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
21 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a novel ethnographic examination of archaeologi...
Pierre Sokolsky, "The Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star" (Columbia UP, 2024)
21 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks an...
Special Episode: Mike Secasas on the Question of the Human, and the Question of Technology, Live at the Bradley Study Center
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This special episode features a discussion between Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society substack ne...
Listening in the Afterlife of Data
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or ...
Elizabeth King and W. David Todd, "Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend" (Getty, 2023)
19 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object a...
Disability and the History of Science (Osiris, Vol 36)
18 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scienti...
Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the informat...
Mariam Motamedi Fraser, "Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences" (Manchester UP, 2024)
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Do dogs belong with humans? Scientific accounts of dogs' 'species story,' in which contemporary dog-human relations are naturalised with reference to ...
Jesper Juul, "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" (MIT Press, 2024)
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be ...
Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item...
James Malazita, "Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine" (MIT Press, 2024)
12 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studie...
Cordelia Fine, "Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society" (Norton, 2018)
11 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental, diverging force in human development. According to this overly familiar story,...
What Ex Machina Tell Us About Human-AI Psychology
11 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super...
Marina Hassapopoulou, "Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) engages with a multitude of unconventional appr...
Fionna S. Cunningham, "Under the Nuclear Shadow: China's Information-Age Weapons in International Security" (Princeton UP, 2024)
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma ...
David Lyon, "Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2024)
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Surveillance is everywhere today, generating data about our purchasing, political, and personal preferences. Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction ...
Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intellige...
Why Teachers Turn to AI
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Sue Ollerhead. Dr. Ollerhead is currently a Senior Lecturer in L...
Sarah B. Rodriguez, "The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surg...
Joshua Brinkman on American Farming Culture and the History of Technology
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina Stat...
Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, "Twitter: A Biography" (NYU Press, 2020)
04 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool tha...
Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019)
04 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible...
Patrick T. Reardon, "The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago" (Southern Illinois UP, 2020)
03 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every day Chicagoans rely on the loop of elevated train tracks to get to their jobs, classrooms, or homes in the city’s downtown. But how much do th...
Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018)
31 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies...
Charles Foster, "Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)
29 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and natur...