New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

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...

Michael Bresalier, "Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890-1950" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

27 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890—1950 (Palgr...

AI: How We Got Here in Three Powerful Tales

26 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This episode is based upon three readings: Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by...

Nick Couldry, "The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't?" (Polity, 2024)

23 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Is human solidarity achievable in a world dominated by continuous digital connectivity and commercially managed platforms? And what if it’s not? Pro...

Matt Beane, "The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines" (HarperCollins, 2024)

23 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As part of our informal series on artificial intelligence, Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Beane, Assistant Professor of Technology...

Josh Spodek, "Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems" (Amplify, 2025)

23 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Josh Spodek disconnected his Manhattan apartment from the electric grid in May 2022. Over time, he has reduced his consumption and contribution to lan...

Lindsay Weinberg, "Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

21 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Lindsay Weinberg evaluates how this latest era ...

Ulises Ali Mejias and Nick Couldry, "Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are gr...

Julien Mailland, "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry" (MIT Press, 2024)

21 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A guide to the fascinating legal history of the videogame industry, written for nonlawyers.  Why did a judge recall FIFA 15, a nonviolent soccer game...

Chelsea Berry, "Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultu...

Luci Pangrazio and Neil Selwyn, "Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data and Everyday Life" (MIT Press, 2023)

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Data has become a defining issue of current times. Our everyday lives are shaped by the data that is produced about us (and by us) through digital tec...

Nina Edwards, "Weeds" (Reaktion, 2024)

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

To most of us, weeds can seem nothing more than intruders in gardens, farms and city streets. But the idea of the weed is a slippery one, constantly c...

Voices Part 3: Dork-O-Phonics

16 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Jonathan Sterne is one of the most influential scholars working on sound and listening. His 2003 book, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound R...

Matthew S. Smith, "EverQuest" (Boss Fight Books, 2024)

15 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

“You’re in our world now.” This bold tagline led Sony’s 1999 ad blitz for EverQuest (Boss Fight Books, 2024), the year’s most anticipated ...

Margaret Ziolkowski, "Mega-Dams in World Literature: Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building" (U of Wyoming Press, 2024)

15 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Margaret Ziolkowski’s Mega-Dams in World Literature: Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building (University of Wyoming Press, 2022) rev...

Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman, "Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie®" (MIT Press, 2024)

14 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and co...

Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in 25 Discoveries: How Scientists Found the Connections Between Climate and Life" (Columbia UP, 2024)

14 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to anot...

Meredith McKittrick, "Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and...

Reem Hilu, "Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers (U Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how the widespread introduction of home computer...

Jeremy Brecher, "The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (U Illinois Press, 2024) offers a visionary program ...

Benjamin J. Shestakofsky on How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality

09 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Benjamin Shestakofsky about his book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, an...

Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)

08 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For man...

Kerry Smith, "Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

07 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Predicting Disasters: Earthquakes, Scientists, and Uncertainty in Modern Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) takes seriously attempts to r...

Bug

07 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of High Theory, Marcello Vitali-Rosati tells us about bugs! A bug can be a small insect, an illness, a spy device, or a digital malfun...

Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)

05 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by ra...

J. Mijin Cha, "A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future" (MIT Press, 2024)

05 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occu...

Yochai Ataria, "Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World" (Magnes Press, 2019)

04 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Yochai's book, Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World (Magnes Press, 2019), examines the meaning of psychology and life based on the premise (...

Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)

26 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing th...

Megan Rae Blakely, "Technology, Intellectual Property Law, and Culture: The Tangification of Cultural Heritage" (Routledge, 2024)

25 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How can we protect diverse cultural expressions in an era of huge technological change? In Technology, Intellectual Property Law and Culture: The Tan...

Katherine C. Epstein, "Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

24 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: ...

Jennifer Denbow, "Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype" (Duke UP, 2024)

24 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype (Duke UP, 2024), Jennifer Denbow examines how the push toward technosci...

Liliana M. Naydan, "Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

23 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Flat-World Fiction: Digital Humanity in Early Twenty-First-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Dr. Liliana Naydan analyses representa...

Jordan S. Carroll, "Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

22 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a hig...

Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, "Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine" (Basilian Media, 2024)

22 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

All We All Cyborgs Now? (Basilian Media, 2024) is a series of 32 short essay-length reflections on "Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine." Now i...

Fiona Smyth, "Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century" (Manchester UP, 2024)

22 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scient...

Thinking Machines: Will Robots Have Rights?

20 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Joanna Bryson’s essay “Robots Should be Slaves....

Anthony Kwame Harrison on Cassette Tapes and Hip Hop Culture

18 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Kwame Harrison, Alumni Distinguished Professor and Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Harrison rec...

Victor P. Petrov, "Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain" (MIT Press, 2023)

18 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernisation, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) examines the history ...

Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)

16 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule o...

Meta-Practice (on Chinese Medicine)

11 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today I sit down with Volker Scheid, an interdisciplinary scholar and longtime practitioner of Chinese medicine. Together, we take an intellectual dee...

Jeremy Black, "Introduction to Global Military History: 1775 to the Present Day" (Routledge, 2018)

09 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Introduction to Global Military History:: 1775 to the Present Day (Routledge, 2018) provides a lucid and comprehensive account of military developmen...

Libuse Hannah Veprek, "At the Edge of AI: Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations" (Transcript, 2024)

08 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How are human computation systems developed in the field of citizen science to achieve what neither humans nor computers can do alone?  In At the Ed...

Artur Gruszczak and Sebastian Kaempf, "Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare" (Routledge, 2023)

06 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This handbook provides a comprehensive, problem-driven and dynamic overview of the future of warfare. The volatilities and uncertainties of the global...

David Rowell, "The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music" (Melville House, 2024)

06 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A veteran music journalist argues that the rise of music streaming and the consolidation of digital platforms is decimating the musical landscape, wit...

Stuart Anderson, "Pharmacopoeias, Drug Regulation, and Empires: Making Medicines Official in Britain's Imperial World, 1618-1968" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2024)

06 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The word "pharmacopoeia" has come to have many meanings, although it is commonly understood to be a book describing approved compositions and standard...

Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction" (Penguin, 2024)

05 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting w...

Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation

04 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern ...

Thinking Machines: The First AI Takeover Story

02 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920)....

Brian Groom, "Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World" (Harpernorth, 2024)

02 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Long before Manchester gave the world titans of industry, comedy, music and sport, it was the cosmopolitan Roman fort of Mamucium. But it was as the ‘...

Richard Moss, "Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games" (Bitmap Books, 2024)

01 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Painstakingly researched and written by football-obsessed writer and experienced game journalist, historian, and documentarian Richard Moss – author...

When We Prioritize Data and Metrics, What Happens to Human Connections?

31 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton University Press, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, whic...

Jamie Hakim, "Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

31 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Queer men's cultures of intimacy have long been sites of fierce contestation. Indeed, debates have raged for decades over issues such as monogamy, saf...

Greg Epstein, "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation" (MIT Press, 2024)

30 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Technology has surpassed religion as the central focus of our lives, from our dependence on smartphones to the way that tech has infused almost every ...

Jia Tan, "Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China" (NYU Press, 2023)

29 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital...

Kostas Kampourakis, "Ancestry Reimagined: Dismantling the Myth of Genetic Ethnicities" (Oxford UP, 2023)

27 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Recent social and political psychological research indicates that increased access to ancestry testing has strengthened the notion of genetic essentia...

Ian Milligan, "Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

26 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-last...

Dolores Albarracin et al., "Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

24 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Conspiracy theories spread more widely and faster than ever before. Fear and uncertainty prompt people to believe false narratives of danger and hidde...

Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

23 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we...

Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018)

23 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist...

Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

23 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we...

Bob Frishman, "Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803" (APS Press, 2024)

23 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Edward Duffield (1730–1803) was a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker, whose elegant brass, mahogany, and walnut timekeepers stand proudly in major Ame...

Anto Mohsin, "Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) tells the story of the entanglement of politi...

Emotional Rescue

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What can sound technologies tell us about our relationship to media as a whole? This is one of the central questions in the research of Phantom Power...

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and c...

Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent b...

William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024)

17 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancem...

Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

17 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These...

Alastair Bonnett, "40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World" (Ivy Press, 2024)

16 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World (Ivy Press, 2024) by Dr. Alistair Bonnett is a meticulously curated selection of 40 maps that spans th...