New Books in Technology
Episodes
Carly A. Kocurek and Matthew Payne, "Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role-Playing Game" (Amherst College Press, 2024)
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game (Amherst College Press, 2024) is the first scholarly book to focus exclusively on the...
Trans Technologies
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can technology creates new possibilities for transgender people? How do trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology? Tran...
Ben Snyder on Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this 100th episode (!!!) of Peoples & Things, host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Benjamin H. Snyder, Associate Professor of Sociology at Williams College...
Jean J. Ryoo and Jane Margolis, "Power On!" (MIT Press, 2022)
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An interview with Jean Ryoo and Jane Margolis about Power On! A diverse group of teenage friends learn how computing can be personally and political...
John Horn, "Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success" (MIT Press, 2023)
31 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success (MIT Press, 2023) offers a roadmap to help leaders...
Alex Davies, "Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
27 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car (Simon & Schuster, 2022), Alex Davies tells the enlightening and significant story of the effort ...
From Hal to Siri: How Computers Learned to Speak
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Cul...
Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia MacDonald, "The Rise of Unmanned Warfare: Origins of the Us Autonomous Military Arsenal" (Oxford UP, 2023)
14 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Rise of Unmanned Warfare: Origins of the Us Autonomous Military Arsenal (Oxford UP, 2023) tells the fascinating story of the people, processes, ...
Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)
13 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil libe...
Beaty Rubens, "Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home" (Bodleian Library, 2025)
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by wh...
Darryl Campbell, "Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software" (W. W. Norton, 2025)
09 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A tech insider explains how capitalism and software development make for such a dangerous mix. Software was supposed to radically improve society. Ou...
Peter Krapp, "Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation" (MIT Press, 2024)
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Krapp, the author of Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (MIT Press, 2024), to the New Books Netw...
Radiophilia
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest is Carolyn Birdsall, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. If you’re a scholar of sound or radio, you like...
Melissa Villa-Nicholas, "Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants" (U California Press, 2023)
26 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Uncle Sam is watching, whether you like it or not. And the surveillance program the United States is building has as its foundation immigrants who hav...
Peter B. Kaufman, "The Moving Image: A User's Manual" (MIT Press, 2025)
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is vid...
Daniel J. Solove, "On Privacy and Technology" (Oxford UP, 2025)
23 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Data and privacy have emerged as critical issues in our digitally interconnected era, profoundly influencing individual rights, societal norms, and de...
Lauren E. Bridges on Fantasies and Realities of Digital Transformation and the Data Center Industry
22 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Lauren Bridges, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, about her work on t...
Will AI Transform What it Means to be Human in the Next Ten Years?
19 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and what impact will AI have on being human in the next decade? Elon University’s Center for Imagining the Digital Future...
Anita Say Chan, "Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future" (U California Press, 2025)
15 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a common refrain: AI is neither good nor bad because that depends on how its used. Professor Anita Say Chan begs to differ. Chan is the author ...
Ysabel Gerrard, "The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life" (U California Press, 2025)
13 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, ...
Jeremy Braddock on "Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums"
08 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Jeremy Braddock, Associate Professor of Literatures in English and Coordinator of the Media Studies Init...
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 ...
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,...
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...
The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
27 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...
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...
Chris Skinner, "Intelligent Money: When Money Thinks for You" (Marshall Cavendish, 2024)
25 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...
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—...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Ken Wilcox, "The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice" (John Wiley & Sons, 2024)
01 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice (Wiley, 2024) describes former CEO of Silicon Valley Ba...
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...
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...
Tim Harris, "In Pursuit of Unicorns: A Journey Through 50 Years of Biotechnology" (Cold Springs Harbor, 2024)
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Modern biotechnology--genetic engineering and cell manipulation--originated with the 1973 demonstration that genes from different organisms could be r...
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...
Jerry Brotton, "Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 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)....
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Marietje Schaake, "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley" (Princeton UP, 2024)
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past decades, under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power ...
John Withington, "A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day" (Reaktion, 2024)
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion, 2024) by John Withington illuminates the glittering history of fireworks, fr...
Pamela O. Long on the Long, Long, Long History of Technology
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the histo...
Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024)
06 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Brist...
Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)
05 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the mom...
Gerald Sim, "Screening Big Data: Films That Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy" (Routledge, 2024)
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy (Routledge, 2024) examines the influence of key films on public understanding of big da...
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we assume that computers always get it right? Today’s book is: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press,...
Jordan Minor, "Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977" (Abrams, 2023)
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Pong. The Legend of Zelda. Final Fantasy VII. Rock Band. Fortnite. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. For each of the 40 years of video game history, ther...
Ethical Machines: A Conversation with Reid Blackman
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Join us as we discuss Dr. Reid Blackman’s new book: Ethical Machines: Your Concise Guide to Totally Unbiased, Transparent, and Respectful AI (Harv...
Emily M. Bender on AI Hype
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Emily Bender, Professor of Linguistics, Director of the Masters of Science in Computational Linguistics p...
Gergely Gosztonyi, "Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices" (Springer, 2023)
22 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering...