New Books in Technology

Grant Tavinor, "The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality" (Routledge, 2021)

28 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality...

Stephanie A. Martin, "Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump" (U Alabama Press, 2021)

27 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Stephanie (Sam) A. Martin’s new book, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (U Alabama Pre...

73 Teletherapy with Hannah Zeavin (High Theory Crossover, Saronik)

27 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Crossover Month at Recall this Book ends with a glance sideways at the doings of our pals Saronik and Kim, hosts of the delightfully lapidary podcast ...

Juan Manuel del Nido, "Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires" (Stanford UP, 2021)

25 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats...

Helga Nowotny, "In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms" (Polity, 2021)

20 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021). One of the ...

Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel, "Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Science" (SIAM, 2019)

17 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

A true understanding of the pervasive role of software in the world demands an awareness of the volume and variety of real-world software failures and...

Janneke Adema, "Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities" (MIT Press, 2021)

22 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021), Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and co...

Joseph Reagle on H. G. Wells's "World Brain" (1937)

22 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In a series of talks and essays in 1937, H. G. Wells proselytized for what he called a World Brain, as manifested in a World Encyclopedia--a repositor...

Jessica Hurley, "Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

20 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that...

Andrew Piper, "Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

14 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge UP, 2020) by Andrew Piper tackles the problem of generalization with...

Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray, "Technology in World Civilization" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Technology in World Civilization represents a milestone history of technology. First published in 1990 and now revised and expanded in light of rece...

Winka Dubbeldam, "Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms" (Actar, 2022)

09 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The object as solid, having three dimensions, is not just a different formal trend, but a paradigm shift; a reconceiving of how the architectural obje...

Herbert Lin, "Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons" (Stanford UP, 2021)

22 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What does America’s growing dependence on modern information technology systems mean for the management of its nuclear weapons? In his new book, Cy...

Kenneth O'Reilly, "Asphalt: A History" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

22 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In Asphalt: A History (U Nebraska Press, 2021), Kenneth O’Reilly provides a history of this everyday substance. By tracing the history of asphalt—...

Chinese Digital Vigilantism: The Mediated and Mediatised Justice-Seeking

19 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is digital vigilantism? How do Chinese citizens seek justice online? How does digital vigilantism reflect contemporary Chinese technological and ...

68 Martin Puchner: Writing and Reading from Gilgamesh to Amazon

18 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Book Industry Month continues with a memory-lane voyage back to a beloved early RtB episode. This conversation with Martin Puchner about the very or...

Gabriella Lukács, "Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy" (Duke UP, 2020)

18 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan as new sites ...

Robert Brooks, "Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers" (Columbia UP, 2021)

15 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons...

Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever, "Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations" (Oxford UP, 2021)

11 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In their open-access publication, Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2021), Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever ...

Jeffrey J. Hall, "Japan's Nationalist Right in the Internet Age: Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism" (Routledge, 2021)

11 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Japan's nationalist right have used the internet to organize offline activism in increasingly visible ways. Jeffrey J. Hall, investigates the role of...

Andrew Leigh, "What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics" (MIT Press, 2021)

10 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Did you know that you're more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic e...

Sima Shakhsari, "Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan" (Duke UP, 2020)

10 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 2000s, mainstream international news outlets celebrated the growth of Weblogistan—the online and real-life transnational network of Ira...

Yuri Kostenko, "Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament: A History" (HURI, 2020)

09 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Yuri Kostenko’s Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2020) is a meticulous account of how the Ukraini...

67 Everything and Less: Mark McGurl on Books in the Age of Amazon

04 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What do you make of Amazon: The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a paperback in your mailbox, a Kindle edition on your t...

Caitlin Ring Carlson, "Hate Speech" (MIT Press, 2021)

29 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Hate speech can happen anywhere - in Charlottesville, Virginia, where young men in khakis shouted, "Jews will not replace us"; in Myanmar, where the ...

Roberto J. González, "Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network" (U California Press, 2020)

26 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network (U California Press, 2020) is the true story of how, against all odds, a remote Me...

Alex Pentland and Alexander Lipton, "Building the New Economy: Data As Capital" (MIT Press, 2021)

25 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Data is now central to the economy, government, and health systems—so why are data and the AI systems that interpret the data in the hands of so few...

Ashley Hinck, "Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World" (LSU Press, 2019)

22 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World (Louisiana State Press, 2019) examines what Ashley Hinck calls “fan-base...

Rebecca L. Stein, "Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2021)

20 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bys...

Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, "Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath" (NewSouth, 2021)

19 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Matthew Ricketson joins to discuss how newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic...

Katherine Chandler, "Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

19 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned...

Catherine Knight Steele, "Digital Black Feminism" (NYU Press, 2021)

18 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How have Black women lead a digital revolution? In Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press, 2021), Catherine Knight Steele, an assistant professor of co...

Luci Marzola, "Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System" (Oxford UP, 2021)

13 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Luci Marzola's book Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building Studio System (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells...

Cait McKinney, "Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies" (Duke UP, 2020)

08 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't wan...

Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld, "Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization" (Princeton UP, 2021)

07 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When Google announced that it planned to digitize books to make the world's knowledge accessible to all, questions were raised about the roles and res...

Paul Thagard, "Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?" (MIT Press, 2021)

06 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favo...

Paul Milgrom, "Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints" (Columbia UP, 2017)

06 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Neoclassical economic theory shows that under the right conditions, prices alone can guide markets to efficient outcomes. But what if it it’s hard t...

Jaap-Henk Hoepman, "Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths: Achieving Privacy Through Careful Design" (MIT Press, 2021)

05 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We are tethered to our devices all day, every day, leaving data trails of our searches, posts, clicks, and communications. Meanwhile, governments and ...

Elaine Yuan, "The Web of Meaning: The Internet in a Changing Chinese Society" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

01 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is the impact of Internet technology communication in China? How do Chinese people view "privacy" differently from the western perspective? How i...

Eric. S. Hintz, "American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D" (MIT Press, 2021)

28 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Wonder how America's individual inventors persisted alongside corporate R&D labs as an important source of inventions beginning at the turn of the ea...

Chris Bleakley, "Poems That Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms" (Oxford UP, 2020)

27 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As algorithms become ever more significant to and embedded in our everyday lives, ever more accessible introductions to them are needed. While several...

Shannon Mattern, "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences" (Princeton UP, 2021)

24 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficienci...

Ruth Aylett and Patricia A. Vargas, "Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know" (MIT Press, 2021)

21 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There's a lot of hype about robots; some of it is scary and some of it utopian. In this accessible book, two robotics experts reveal the truth about w...

Firmin DeBrabander, "Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

20 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As governments and corporations mine our “entrenched culture of sharing” to invade privacy (down to Target creating an algorithm to figure out whi...

Caitlin Petre, "All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists" (Princeton UP, 2021)

10 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past 15 years, journalism has experienced a rapid proliferation of data about online reader behavior in the form of web metrics. These newsro...

Angelica Malin, "She Made It: The Toolkit for Female Founders in the Digital Age" (Kogan Page, 2021)

09 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Angelica Malin about her new book She Made It: The Toolkit for Female Founders in the Digital Age (Kogan Page, 2021). Female entre...

Silvia Casini, "Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology" (MIT Press, 2021)

09 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Make...

Audrey Watters, "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" (MIT Press, 2021)

07 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Contrary to the claims of many of today’s advocates of computerized instruction and online learning, efforts to use technology to improve the educat...

Andrew Flachs, "Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India" (U Arizona Press, 2019)

27 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India by Andrew Flachs (University of Arizona Press, ...

Craig Robertson, "The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

20 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet i...

Carol Anderson, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

20 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second Amend...

Matthew Flisfeder, "Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media" (Northwestern UP, 2021)

20 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

One of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is that much of it is lived on and through social media. We create profiles, post pictures, update ...

James W. Cortada, "IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon" (MIT Press, 2019)

18 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Retired from life after 38 years in several roles at IBM, the prolific academic production of James W. Cortada now continues telling his side of the s...

P. J. Boczkowski and E. Mitchelstein, "The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now" (MIT Press, 2021)

17 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic w...

James Ladyman and K. Wiesner, "What Is a Complex System?" (Yale UP, 2020)

30 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

While i find it pretty easy to recognize when i'm reading articles in complexity science, i've never been satisfied by definitions of complexity and r...

Rahul Mukherjee, "Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty" (Duke UP, 2020)

23 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke UP, 2020), Rahul Mukherjee explores how the media coverage of nucl...

John Troyer, "Technologies of the Human Corpse" (MIT Press, 2020)

19 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination--not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that...

Thomas D. Mullaney et al., "Your Computer Is on Fire" (MIT Press, 2021)

09 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking ...

Nathan R. Johnson, "Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age" (U Alabama Press, 2020)

06 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the pa...

Sandeep Mertia, "Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India" (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020)

05 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020) maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big d...

Stuart Walker, "Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures" (Routledge, 2021)

30 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures (Routledge, 2021) examines the philosophical context of our current situation and its impl...

Javier Guerrero C., "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave, 2020)

15 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Javier Guerrero's "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) is about the encounter...

S. Livingstone and A. Blum-Ross, "Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children's Lives" (Oxford UP, 2020)

03 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this interview, I talked with Professor Sonia Livingstone about her book Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shap...

Carla Diana, "My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human" (Harvard Business, 2021)

03 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Carla Diana about her new book My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human (Harvard Business Review Press...

Amy D. Finstein, "Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-interstate America" (Temple UP, 2020)

02 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets;...

Mikiya Koyagi, "Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway" (Stanford UP, 2021)

01 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Completed in 1938, the Trans-Iranian Railway connected Tehran to Iran's two major bodies of water: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf i...

Zahi Zalloua, "Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

31 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The figure of the human looms large of the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks speculating about featherless bipeds to contemporary program...

Alex Wellerstein, "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

24 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ...

Ellen Helsper, "The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities" (Sage, 2021)

21 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What are digital inequalities? In The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities (Sage, 2021), Ellen Helsper, a...

Rob Kitchin, "Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World" (Policy Press, 2021)

20 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The word ‘data’ has entered everyday conversation, but do we really understand what it means? How can we begin to grasp the scope and scale of our...

Aaron Shapiro, "Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

19 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph.D. takes readers on a b...

L. Ayu Saraswati, "Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie" (NYU Press, 2021)

19 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Social media has become the front-and-center arena for feminist activism. Responding to and enacting the political potential of pain inflicted in acts...

Zoetanya Sujon, "The Social Media Age" (Sage, 2021)

18 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How has social media shaped contemporary society? In The Social Media Age (Sage, 2021), Zoetanya Sujon, a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director i...

Moya Bailey, "Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance" (NYU Press, 2021)

17 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny. When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways ...

T. Sanders et al., "Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020)

10 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Providing one of the first comprehensive, cross-cultural examinations of the dynamic market for sexual services, this book presents an evidence-based ...

Tetyana Lokot, "Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)

10 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Tetyana Lokot's new book Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) examines how citizens use digit...

Pallavi Guha, "Hear #metoo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

07 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Hello Everyone, and welcome to New Books in Gender and Sexuality, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m your host, Jana Byars, and I’m here toda...

Jillian C. York, "Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism" (Verso Book, 2021)

06 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond th...

Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, "Twitter: A Biography" (NYU Press, 2020)

06 May 2021

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...

Daniel Greene, "The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope" (MIT Press, 2021)

03 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that we need to learn to code--or else? In The Promise of Access: Technolo...

Douglas M. O'Reagan, "Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

23 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In his new book Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Dou...

Joel Waldfogel, "Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture" (Princeton UP, 2020)

21 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Digitization is reshaping creative industries. Old gatekeepers in music, publishing, television, movies, and other industries no longer play such an i...

Carolyn J. Heinrich, et al., "Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education" (Harvard Education Press, 2020)

20 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The COVID19 pandemic has profoundly changed the landscape of K-12 education in our society. Last March, many states closed their brick-and-mortar scho...

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are" (HarperCollins, 2017)

15 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Economist, data journalist, and best-selling author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz uses data from the internet to gain new insights into the human psyche....

Can We Fix Social Media?: A Discussion with Christopher A. Bail

15 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We ...

David Wills, "Prosthesis" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

15 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, I interview David Wills, professor of French Studies at Brown University, about his book, Prosthesis, recently republished for its 2...

Jürgen P. Melzer, "Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation" (Harvard UP, 2020)

15 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Jürgen Melzer’s Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation (Harvard UP, 2020) traces the history of Japanese aviation...

Maria San Filippo, "Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media" (Indiana UP, 2021)

13 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New dist...

Philip N. Howard, "Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives" (Yale UP, 2020)

12 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social m...

Edward Ashford Lee, "The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines" (MIT Press, 2020)

02 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020),...

Katherine E. Standefer, "Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life" (Little, Brown Spark, 2020)

30 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As the push for a Universal Healthcare system in the United States becomes more and more popular among the American people, we’re beginning to have ...

John Durham Peters et al., "Action at a Distance" (Meson Press, 2020)

26 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediali...

Gascia Ouzounian, "Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts" (MIT Press, 2021)

16 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As common as it is today to speak of the relative “height” of musical pitches or of the sense of “vocal space” as it opened up by particular r...

Evan Friss, "The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

05 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today on New Books in History, Dr. Evan Friss, associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the US to talk...

Roland T. Rust and Ming-Hui Huang, "The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)

04 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Ming-Hui Huang about her book (coauthored with Roland T. Rust), The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the ...

Ronald J. Deibert, "Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society" (House of Anansi, 2020)

26 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organi...

Teresa Berger, "@Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds" (Routledge, 2018)

26 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Digital dualism, or a sharp division between online and offline activity as "virtual" or "real" has long been a feature of liturgical studies and disc...

L. Vinsel and A. L. Russell, "The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most" (Currency, 2020)

24 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a...

Nicole Perlroth, "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

18 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For years, cybersecurity experts have debated whether cyber-weapons represent a destabilizing new military technology or merely the newest tool in the...

Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean" (Oxford UP, 2020)

16 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological ...