New Books in Technology
Episodes
James E. Baker, "The Centaur's Dilemma: US National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution" (Brookings, 2020)
28 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
From facial recognition to online shopping, artificial intelligence has become the backbone of the internet and has led to an unprecedented extraction...
Michael Fisch, "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)
08 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Ea...
Charles R. Acland, "American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder" (Duke UP, 2020)
29 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ben-Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture...
Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
24 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humb...
Eben Kirksey, "The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans" (St. Martin's Press, 2020)
23 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans (St. Martin's Press, 2020), anthropologist Eben Kirksey visits the fronti...
Jeremy Black, "Tank Warfare" (Indiana UP, 2020)
16 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of ...
Virginia Postrel, "The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World" (Basic Books, 2020)
09 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (Basic Books, 2020), Virginia Postrel describes how humans coevolved with textiles. The s...
James D. Stein, "The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive" (World Scientific, 2020)
07 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Can we correctly predict the flip of a fair coin more than half the time -- or the decay of a single radioactive atom? Our intuition, based on a lifet...
Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, "Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It" (FSG Originals, 2020)
07 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (FSG Originals, 2020), the celebrated writers and Logic cofound...
Nicolas Petit, "Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario" (Oxford UP, 2020)
07 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Consumers may love their products and services but, among politicians and activists, the big-technology companies are fast developing a reputation as ...
Richard Seymour, "The Twittering Machine" (Verso, 2020)
03 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. ...
Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
30 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago...
Xiaowei Wang, "Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside" (FSG Originals, 2020)
25 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Most of our discussions about how “technology will change the world” focus on the global cities that drive the world economy. Even when we talk ab...
C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020)
10 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Monopoly, Solitaire, football and Minecraft are all games, but for C. Thi Nyugen they are also an art form – specifically, the art form of agency, o...
Jamie Merisotis, "Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines" (RosettaBooks, 2020)
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Are robots going to be our overlords? In Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines (RosettaBooks, 2020), Jamie Merisotis says they don't have to be. We ...
Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World" (Part 2) (Routledge, 2020)
04 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This is the second episode of a two-part conversation with Hodgson, and in it we pick up our conversation on anticipatory systems and the role they pl...
Doug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping" (U London Press, 2020)
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big da...
Margaret Heffernan, "Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)
12 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today I spoke with Dr Margaret Heffernan about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together (Simon and Schuster, 2020). Mar...
Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020)
07 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, ...
Jon Lindsay, "Information Technology and Military Power" (Cornell UP, 2020)
07 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Many assume that information technology will one day clear away the “fog of war.” But as Jon Lindsay shows in Information Technology and Military ...
Angèle Christin, "Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms" (Princeton UP, 2020)
14 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How are algorithms changing journalism? In Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press), Angèle ...
J. Kim and E. Maloney, "Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education and The Low-Density University" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
21 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Despite stereotypes of colleges and universities still stuck in the age of the blackboard and sage-on-stage lectures, a quiet revolution has been taki...
T. Fischer and C.M. Herr, "Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New" (Springer, 2019)
20 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Those who have followed this podcast in the past, and those who follow developments in cybernetics in the present, will be no strangers to the name Ra...
C. Besteman and H. Gusterson, "Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
18 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How can we understand computerization as a social process? Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, ...
Katie Day Good, "Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education" (MIT Press, 2020)
17 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global...
Nadia Eghbal, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" (Stripe Press, 2020)
12 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Open source is the once-radical idea that code should be freely available to everyone. Open-source software was once an optimistic model for public co...
Orit Kamir, "Betraying Dignity" (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2019)
07 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common? Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, an...
Tanya Kant, "Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)
07 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet? In Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life (Oxford Uni...
Philip Butler, "Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
29 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his book Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Philip Butler explores what might happen if...
Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (MIT Press, 2020)
27 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of Civic Media...
Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures" (Princeton UP, 2020)
20 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate ...
Philip Reid, "The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800" (Brill, 2020)
20 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
To the average landlubber, the merchant ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1800 seem little different from their counterparts two centuries befo...
Jeffery R. Young, "Beyond the MOOC Hype: A Guide to Higher Education’s High-Tech Disruption" (CHE, 2013)
16 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Remember when Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were going to shake higher education to its foundations by giving courses from the world’s most pr...
Lizzie O’Shea, "Future Histories" (Verso, 2019)
13 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In Future Histories: What Ada Love...
Doron Galili, "Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939" (Duke UP, 2020)
02 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With the burst of new technologies in the 1870s, many inventors and visionaries believed that the transmission of moving images was just around the co...
Ainissa Ramirez, "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another" (MIT Press, 2020)
25 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, I talk to Dr. Ainissa Ramirez about her new book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (MIT Press, 2020...
Mariann Hardey, "The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" (Emerald, 2019)
22 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What is the culture of the tech industry? In The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (Emerald, 2019), Mariann Hardey, an Associat...
Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)
02 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for S...
Nick Prior, "Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society" (SAGE, 2018)
18 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Prior—Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Edinburgh—discusses his new book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society (S...
Paul Harkins, "Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies" (Routledge, 2019)
14 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How does technology shape music? In Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies (Routledge, 2019), Paul Harkins, a lecturer in music a...
Andre Brock, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures" (NYU Press, 2020)
01 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular co...
Lee Vinsel, "Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
30 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Cars are among our most ubiquitous technologies; one could say that the cultural lore of the postwar United States is written in tire marks. But as mu...
Jathan Sadowski, "Too Smart" (MIT Press, 2020)
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The ubiquity of technology that collects massive volumes of all kinds of data lends itself to one overarching question: “What?” As in what is the ...
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
28 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. B...
Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)
27 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant...
Thor Magnusson, "Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Thor Magnusson—musician, Professor of Fut...
Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi, "Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground" (Routledge, 2019)
14 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi's book Computer Architectures: Constructi...
Arthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019)
03 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from...
Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Princeton UP, 2020)
03 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020...
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat....
Neil Selwyn, "What is Digital Sociology?" (Polity, 2019)
27 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and...
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "Übermensch: Plädoyer Für Einen Nietzscheanischen Transhumanismus" (Schwabe, 2019)
19 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode I talk Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Stefan teaches philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome. He is director and co-founder of the Beyond ...
Jacob Turner, "Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
12 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Jacob Turner explains why AI is unique, what legal and eth...
Kate Devlin, "Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots" (Bloomsbury, 2018)
05 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of the seductive sex robot is the stuff of myth, legend and science fiction. From the ancient Greeks to twenty-first century movies, robots i...
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "Data Feminism" (MIT Press, 2020)
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power su...
Michael Rechtenwald, "Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom" (New English Review, 2019)
02 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Michael Rectenwald begins and ends his Google Archipelago: The Digital Gul...
David J. Gunkel, "Robot Rights" (MIT Press, 2018)
27 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly import...
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
25 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Philli...
Virginia Eubanks, "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (St. Martin's, 2018)
20 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system inter...
Angela Jones, "Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry" (NYU Press, 2020)
14 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry (NYU Press, 2020), Dr. Angela Jones engages readers in a five-year mixed...
Francesca Minerva, "The Ethics of Cryonics: Is It Immoral to be Immortal" (Palgrave, 2018)
13 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Cryonics―also known as cryopreservation or cryosuspension―is the preservation of legally dead individuals at ultra-low temperatures. Those who und...
Germaine R. Halegoua, "The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place" (NYU Press, 2019)
12 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place (NYU Press, 2019), Germaine R. Halegoua rethinks everyday interactions tha...
Shannon Vallor, "Technology and the Virtues" (Oxford UP, 2016)
06 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that man...
Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019)
03 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting...
Allison Ochs, "Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?" (Amsterdam UP, 2019)
31 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In her new books, Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?: A Modern Guide to Parenting Digital Teens, Derived from Lessons of the Past (Amsterdam Univers...
K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)
30 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. How...
Alexis Elder, "Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves" (Routledge, 2017)
30 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks an...
Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)
24 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys―an ugly death awaitin...
Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
23 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have...
Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019)
20 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars...
James Schwartz, "The Ethics of Space Exploration" (Springer, 2016)
16 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Ethics of Space Exploration (Springer, 2016), edited by James S. J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan, aims to contribute significantly to the understand...
Neil McArthur, "Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications" (MIT Press, 2017)
09 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sexbots are coming. Given the pace of technological advances, it is inevitable that realistic robots specifically designed for people's sexual gratifi...
John Danaher, "Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work" (Harvard UP, 2019)
02 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation b...
Angelina Callahan, "NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
27 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Angelina Callahan talks about the Naval Research Laboratory’s Vanguard Project. While the launch of Vanguard 1 in 1958 was part of the Cold War “S...
Evan Friss, "On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City" (Columbia UP, 2019)
26 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Evan Friss, an associate professor of history at James Madison University, historicizes the bicycle’s place in New York City’s social, economic, i...
Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017)
26 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and...
Steve Fuller, "The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
19 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska's The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) debates the concept of tr...
Laura Cabrera, "Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
12 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Laura Cabrera discusses three possible human...
E. Jones-Imhotep and T. Adcock, "Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History" (UBC Press, 2018)
10 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of peop...
Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists" (Oxford UP, 2019)
09 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Never have so many possessed the means to be so lethal. The diffusion of modern technology (robotics, cyber weapons, 3-D printing, autonomous systems,...
Deborah Lupton, "The Quantified Self" (Polity, 2016)
05 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains...
Lundy Braun, "Breathing Race into the Machine" (U Minnesota Press, 2014)
04 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“We cannot get answers to questions that cannot be asked.” Lundy Braun’s influential book, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Caree...
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, i...
Nir Eyal, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
25 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A former advisor to tech companies on how to make their products habit-forming, Nir Eyal found that his own smartphone use was adversely affecting his...
Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019)
19 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White su...
J. Yates and C. N. Murphy, "Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
14 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Standards are crucial to the way we live—just look around you. A no. 2 pencil, perhaps? That arrived in an 8x8.5x20 shipping container? Standards al...
Margaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
14 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial...
Jonathan Rees, "Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)
14 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Frederic Tudor was the “Ice King” of early nineteenth-century America. It was Tudor who realized that ice, harvested from New England ponds and ri...
Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing
03 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trad...
Elisabeth Köll, "Railroads and the Transformation of China" (Harvard UP, 2019)
28 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Railroads and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2019) looks at the development of railroads in China from the late 19th century t...
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
24 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude t...
Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good" (Columbia UP, 2016)
26 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Personalized healthcare―or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"―is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-...
David Beer, “The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception“ (Sage, 2019)
02 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What is the social role of data? In The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception (Sage, 2019), David Beer, a professor of sociology at the Universi...
Kerim Yasar, "Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945" (Columbia UP, 2018)
28 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity ...
Gökçe Günel, "Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi" (Duke UP, 2019)
24 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human s...
Martin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)
23 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy to take for granted that one can pick up a cell phone and call someone on the other side of the planet. But, until very recently, this had...
Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019)
07 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Medicine has lost its humanity. Doctors no longer have the time to make personal connections with their patients. In his new book Deep Medicine: How A...
Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019)
02 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked with Chris Bernhardt about his book Quantum Computing for Everyone (MIT Press, 2019). This is a book that involves a lot of mathematics...
Crystal Abidin, "Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online" (Emerald Publishing, 2018)
29 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to be famous on the Internet? How do people become Internet celebrities, and what can that celebrity be used to do? Dr. Crystal Abid...
Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018)
18 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that...