New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation Nov 04, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern California, and Jason Resnikoff, assistant professor of contemporary history at the University of Groningen, about the history of automation. The discussion takes as its launching point an essay Elzway and Resnikoff published in the journal Labor titled, “Whence Automation?: The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept.” The conversation approaches the history of automation and how to study it from a number of angles, including diving into Elzway’s and Resnikoff’s individual research agendas, as well as discussion of the nature of collaborative work in history, a field that can sometimes be all-too competitive and turf-like.

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Thinking Machines: The First AI Takeover Story Nov 02, 2024

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). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep rumination on the boundary between the natural and artificial, the mechanical and the ineffable, and the sacred and the profane.

We react to this seminal work in popular thinking about artificial intelligence, written more than a century ago yet retaining deep resonance today.

Music by Aiva.

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Brian Groom, "Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World" (Harpernorth, 2024) Nov 02, 2024

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 ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution that Manchester really made its mark on the world stage. A place built on hard work and innovation, it is no coincidence that the digital age began here too, with the world’s first stored-program computer, Baby.

A city as radical as it is revolutionary, Manchester has always been a political hotbed. The Peterloo Massacre is immortalised in British folklore and the city was a centre for pioneering movements such as Chartism. Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst hailed from here and the city still treasures its wilful independence.

Manchester’s spirited individuality has carried through into its artistic output too, bringing the world Anthony Burgess, L.S. Lowry, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Division and Oasis. Mention United or City almost anywhere and you’ll find fans, and opinions.

Until Made in Manchester: A People's History of the City That Shaped the Modern World (Harpernorth, 2024), this magnificent city did not have its definitive history. From Brian Groom, the author of the bestselling Northerners, this work of unrivalled authority and breadth tells the story of a changing place and its remarkable people.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Richard Moss, "Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games" (Bitmap Books, 2024) Nov 01, 2024

Painstakingly researched and written by football-obsessed writer and experienced game journalist, historian, and documentarian Richard Moss – author of Bitmap's own The Secret History of Mac Gaming – A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games stays keenly on the ball as it shares the rich and influential history of video game football – or 'soccer', for our American readers – striving to understand the very best the genre has to offer; and those releases that go a little wide of their target.

A Tale of Two Halves takes you on a fascinating journey from the very first examples of the form all the way through to the genre's 2000s' heyday. It hits the back of the net with expert analysis of over 400 football games, including Sensible Soccer, Kick Off, Match Day, FIFA, Pro Evolution Soccer, This Is Football, Championship Manager, Premier Manager, and both old-school and new-school Football Manager. Gathered together in a single volume, that remarkable spread of releases presents a surprising variety of interpretations of the beautiful game, showcasing one of the medium's most creative, beguiling realms.

A Tale of Two Halves primarily focuses on footy gaming's formative years – meaning from around 1980 to 2010 – and carefully divides the genre into two distinct halves, taking a considered look at each. As such, the first half is dominated by the fast and simple 2D action of icons like Kick Off, International Soccer, and Nintendo’s Soccer. Then, following the half-time whistle, it turns its attention to the increasingly realistic 3D outings defined by icons like FIFA, Pro Evo, and Virtua Striker.

Across its 628 pages, A Tale of Two Halves also features a foreword by legendary commentator Clive Tyldesley, hundreds of meticulously realised screenshots, and 13 interviews with pioneering football game developers. Inside you'll also find a series of illustrations from James Reynolds' 'Unlicensed FC' project – which celebrates Pro Evo's unusual takes on players' real names – as well as perfectly pitched pixel art from the team at 8-Bit Football. Numerous gaming platforms are covered, from the Atari 2600 and C64 to the Collecovison, via the Amiga line, PlayStation 1, Xbox 360, Arcades, and many more.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Titel kulturmagazin, radio host of “Replay Value”, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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When We Prioritize Data and Metrics, What Happens to Human Connections? Oct 31, 2024

Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World(Princeton University Press, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Dr. Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works. Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.

Our guest is: Dr. Allison Pugh, who is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the 2024-25 Vice President of the American Sociological Association. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New Republic.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Jamie Hakim, "Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Oct 31, 2024

Queer men's cultures of intimacy have long been sites of fierce contestation. Indeed, debates have raged for decades over issues such as monogamy, safer sex, sexual racism and gay marriage. The introduction of the smartphone in 2008 only intensified these debates whilst also raising a further set of questions which are explored in this open access book.

Through interviews with a diverse group of 43 queer men about their smartphone mediated intimacies, Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis(Bloomsbury, 2024) reveals that queer men use their smartphones, not simply to arrange intimate encounters, but more specifically to gain a sense of control over the parts of their intimate lives that make them feel most vulnerable. For instance, some use messaging apps to gain a sense of control over intimate conversations that they feel too vulnerable to have in person. Others use the 'block' function on dating apps to feel in control of the racism and transphobia they are vulnerable to on these apps.

Digital Intimacies therefore illuminates not only hitherto underexplored aspects of queer men's cultures of intimacy but crucially also brings into view previously obscured cultural dynamics, gaining insight into the historical moments in which they occur.

Jamie Hakim is Lecturer at King's College London, UK.

James Cummings is Lecturer at the University of York, UK.

Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Greg Epstein, "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation" (MIT Press, 2024) Oct 30, 2024

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 aspect of our lives including our homes, our relationships, and even our bodies. Beyond these practical matters, Tech has become a religion with multiple sects who follow their own beliefs, practices, hierarchies, and visions of heaven and hell. There are zealous prophets and humble servants, messiahs and visions of a coming apocalypse.

In Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation (MIT Press, 2024), Harvard and MIT’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein approaches Tech with the perspective of a critical thinker who is fascinated by technical innovation and also questions the worth of those advancements in human terms. He places the current faith in Tech in historical and personal context by examining the skeptics, mystics, heretics, and whistleblowers who embody the reform mindset he believes we desperately need.

Epstein argues for demanding that technology serve the development of human lives that are worth living rather than the extreme "up and to the right" transactional approach that is often rewarded in our current age of capitalism.

In this age of global technology worship, Greg Epstein presents the case for taking an agnostic view, one that can both appreciate the benefits of Tech and also remain skeptical about some of the more outlandish claims and seductive promises.

Author recommended reading:

Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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Jia Tan, "Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China" (NYU Press, 2023) Oct 29, 2024

Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China(NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights.

Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms.

Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Kostas Kampourakis, "Ancestry Reimagined: Dismantling the Myth of Genetic Ethnicities" (Oxford UP, 2023) Oct 27, 2024

Recent social and political psychological research indicates that increased access to ancestry testing has strengthened the notion of genetic essentialism among some groups, or the idea that our biology ties us to particular ethnic identities. This can boost a sense of cultural pride and prosocial behaviors among communities that are perceived to be similar. In the worst-case scenarios, however, this phenomenon can contribute to deeper social woes like misinformation, anti-science agendas, and even social hatred among those who believe in racial superiority.

Using research from both the social sciences and the genetics literature as support, Ancestry Reimagined: Dismantling the Myth of Genetic Ethnicities(Oxford University Press, 2023)establishes realistic expectations about what we can learn from our DNA as a foundation for examining the psychological impact of ancestry testing, including the differences between how this information is perceived versus its reality. With this book, Dr. Kampourakis flexes his muscles as an esteemed interdisciplinary science educator and author to challenge these traditional social constructs, using the current genetic testing science as a myth busting tool.

Kampourakis argues that DNA ancestry testing cannot reveal a person's true ethnic identity because ethnic groups are socially and culturally constructed. In 10 accessible chapters, he explains the assumptions underlying the scientific study of ancestry, and the resulting paradoxes that are often overlooked. What the study of human DNA mostly shows is that human DNA variation is continuous, and it is not possible to clearly delimit ethnic groups based on DNA data. As a result, we all are members of a huge, extended family, and not of genetically distinct ethnic groups. What ancestry tests can provide are probabilistic estimations of similarities between the test-takers and particular reference populations. This does not devalue the results of these tests, however, because they can indeed provide some valuable information to people who may not know much about their ancestors. In fact, what the tests are very good at doing is finding close relatives, and this is perhaps why the whole enterprise should be rebranded as family, not ancestry, testing. Ultimately, this book reveals that genetic essentialism, biological ethnic identities, racial superiority, and similar social constructs are scientifically unsupported

Kostas Kampourakis is the author and editor of several books about evolution, genetics, philosophy and history of science, as well as the editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Understanding Life. He teaches biology and science education courses at the University of Geneva

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Ian Milligan, "Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024) Oct 26, 2024

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-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age (John Hopkins University Press, December 2024) explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today.

By the mid-1990s, the specter of a "digital dark age" haunted libraries, portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence, deletion, and apathy. People around the world worked to solve this impending problem. In San Francisco, technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit, Internet Archive, filling tape drives with internet content. Elsewhere, in Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, and Stockholm, librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage.

Cataloging worries among librarians, technologists, futurists, and writers from WWII onward, through early practitioners, to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks, Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how the web gained a long-lasting memory. By understanding this history, we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts.

Ian Milligan is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as an associate vice president in the Office of Research. Milligan is the author of The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Dolores Albarracin et al., "Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Oct 24, 2024

Conspiracy theories spread more widely and faster than ever before. Fear and uncertainty prompt people to believe false narratives of danger and hidden plots, but are not sufficient without considering the role and ideological bias of the media.

Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped (Cambridge UP, 2021) focuses on making sense of how and why some people respond to their fear of a threat by creating or believing conspiracy stories. It integrates insights from psychology, political science, communication, and information sciences to provide a complete overview and theory of how conspiracy beliefs manifest. Through this multi-disciplinary perspective, rigorous research develops and tests a practical, simple way to frame and understand conspiracy theories. The book supplies unprecedented amounts of new data from six empirical studies and unpicks the complexity of the process that leads to the empowerment of conspiracy beliefs.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Bob Frishman, "Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803" (APS Press, 2024) Oct 23, 2024

Edward Duffield (1730–1803) was a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker, whose elegant brass, mahogany, and walnut timekeepers stand proudly in major American museums and collections. Duffield, unlike other leather-apron ‘mechanics,’ was born rich and owned a country estate, Benfield, and many more properties. He was deeply involved in civic and church affairs during crucial years in American history—his lifelong close friend, Benjamin Franklin, was staying at Duffield’s Benfield estate when Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams first discussed the Declaration of Independence. Sally, Franklin’s daughter, brought her family there for extended periods during the Revolution and Franklin’s wife, Deborah, was best friends for fifty years with Duffield’s mother-in-law. Duffield was even one of three executors of Franklin’s will.

In Edward Duffield: Philadelphia Clockmaker, Citizen, Gentleman, 1730-1803 (American Philosophical Society Press, 2024), Bob Frishman catalogs and describes seventy-one known Duffield clocks and instruments and reveals how, during the mid-eighteenth century, they largely were not fabricated from scratch by isolated individuals. He contends that Duffield and his fellow clockmakers were not furniture-makers; they were mechanical artisans whose complex metal machines rang the hours and steadily ticked inside wooden cases made by others. Existing books on Philadelphia clocks have focused on these artifacts as furniture, including their woodwork, cabinetmakers, and decorative aspects. However, Frishman, a professional horologist for nearly four decades, brings his vast expertise to bear on this first comprehensive study of Duffield’s life and work.

Far more than a treatise on pre-industrial horological timekeeping, this book tells the compelling stories of a man, a city, and an era, while deepening our appreciation for Duffield’s stately sentinels—often a colonial American family’s most valuable possession—and the times and places in which their makers lived.

Bob Frishman has professionally repaired nearly 8,000 timepieces and sold more than 1,700 vintage clocks and watches. As a scholar of horology, and assisted by a personal library of 900 books on the subject, he has published more than 100 articles and reviews in Maine Antique Digest, Watch & Clock Bulletin, and elsewhere. Learn more at his website.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75 Oct 23, 2024

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 revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?"

In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could be said to herald the onset of the age of machine intelligence. With large language models (LLMs) today easily passing this test, we react to the paper and examine the implications from a humanistic standpoint.

Did Turing successfully predict contemporary LLMs 75 years ago? What does it mean that Turing’s test was based not on the abilities of a machine per se, but rather on a machine’s ability to deceive humans? How have Turing’s ideas permeated our cultural and popular cultural ideas about AI? And why did Turing think ESP had a role to play in understanding AI.

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Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018) Oct 23, 2024

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 project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2018). But this isn’t your typical historical monograph. One of the latest volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (with illustrations by Liz Clarke), explores the history of modernization, urbanization, and the spread of epidemic disease in the era of “New Imperialism” in an exciting and highly engaging format.

The remaking of Hanoi as a capital of French empire from the end of the nineteenth century had unintended consequences. In the state-of-the-art sewers of the French/white areas of the city, rats found the perfect home. Then came the Third plague pandemic, the disease that travelled with rats and moved from one site to another around the globe…on railroads, ships, the growing networks of trade and empire. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt mobilizes years of research about this episode in the city’s history, illustrating (literally!) the inherent contradictions of imperialism, and the complexities of domination and resistance in a colonial context. Framed as an undergraduate lecture that features the author as a character throughout the narrative, the book is set up with teaching in mind. In addition to the fascinating story of the rat hunt itself (and all the twists and turns involved), the volume includes a rich selection of primary sources and a series of contextual essays that will allow students to explore this history in a range of productive ways. An accessible book that is at once serious and fun, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt was such a pleasure to read and to talk about. I hope listeners will enjoy my conversation with Mike as much as I did!

*Mike is also a host on New Books in History! Be sure to check out his interviews here on the network.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75 Oct 23, 2024

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 revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?"

In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could be said to herald the onset of the age of machine intelligence. With large language models (LLMs) today easily passing this test, we react to the paper and examine the implications from a humanistic standpoint.

Did Turing successfully predict contemporary LLMs 75 years ago? What does it mean that Turing’s test was based not on the abilities of a machine per se, but rather on a machine’s ability to deceive humans? How have Turing’s ideas permeated our cultural and popular cultural ideas about AI? And why did Turing think ESP had a role to play in understanding AI.

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Anto Mohsin, "Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) Oct 21, 2024

Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development(U Wisconsin Press, 2023) tells the story of the entanglement of politics and technology during Indonesia's rapid post-World War II development. As a central part of its nation-building project, the Indonesian state sought to supply electricity to the entire country, bringing transformative socioeconomic benefits across its heterogeneous territories and populations. While this project was driven by nationalistic impulses, it was also motivated by a genuine interest in social justice. The entanglement of these two ideologies-nation-building and equity-shaped how electrification was carried out, including how the state chose the technologies it did. Private companies and electric cooperatives vied with the hegemonic state power company to participate in a monumental undertaking that would transform daily life for all Indonesians, especially rural citizens.

In this innovative volume, Anto Mohsin brings Indonesian studies together with science and technology studies to understand a crucial period in modern Indonesian history. He shows that attempts to illuminate the country were inseparable from the effort to maintain the new nation-state, chart its path to independence, and legitimize ruling regimes. In exchange for an often dramatically improved standard of living, people gave their votes, and their acquiescence, to the ruling government.

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Emotional Rescue Oct 21, 2024

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‘s host, Mack Hagood. To find its answer, he studies devices that get little attention from media scholars: noise-cancelling headphones, white noise machines, apps that make nature sounds, tinnitus maskers–even musical pillows. The story these media tell is rather different from the standard narrative, in which media are conveyors of information and entertainment. In his book Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, Mack argues that media are the way we control how–and how much–we let the world affect us.

On Phantom Power, Mack has always focused on presenting the ideas of other scholars and sound artists. However, during our summer break we thought we’d share a piece by Mack that appeared in another podcast, the audio edition of Real Life, a razor-sharp magazine on digital culture. “Emotional Rescue” begins with the odd example of pillow-based audio technology to make the point that media are really about something more intimate than information:

The cozy conflation of content and comfort… is not a recent digital development. Nor is it, I would argue, a quirky edge case of media use. In fact, this is what media are: tools for altering how the body feels and what it perceives, controlling our relationship to others and the world, enveloping ourselves, and even disappearing ourselves.

Misunderstanding the true nature of our media use isn’t merely of academic concern–it has had disastrous effects on our politics and social cohesion.

The article was written for the Real Life website, then subsequently dropped in podcast form. Writing for the eye is quite different from writing for the ear, but podcast producer and narrator Britney Gil is amazing at elucidating written prose for the listener. If you listen to nonfiction audiobooks and/or want to hear a great narrator reading insightful takes on digital life, be sure to subscribe to Real Life: Audio Edition.

“Emotional Rescue” by Mack Hagood.

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Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age Oct 21, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to being a professor, Alper is also an educational researcher who has worked over the past 20 years to make inclusive and accessible learning products with media organizations such as Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and PBS KIDS. Vinsel and Alper talk about disability studies, the nature of Alper’s empirical work, the arc of Alper’s career, including her future projects.

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Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Oct 21, 2024

News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and coastal communities. The baseline for these measurements—sea level—may seem unremarkable, a long-familiar zero point for altitude. But as Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveals, the history of defining and measuring sea level is intertwined with national ambitions, commercial concerns, and shifting relationships between people and the ocean.

Sea Level: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg provides a detailed and innovative account of how mean sea level was first defined, how it became the prime reference point for surveying and cartography, and how it emerged as a powerful mark of humanity’s impact on the earth. With Dr. Hardenberg as our guide, we traverse the muddy spaces of Venice and Amsterdam, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Panama and Suez canals, and the Himalayan foothills. Born out of Enlightenment studies of physics and quantification, sea level became key to state-sponsored public works, colonial expansion, Cold War development of satellite technologies, and recognizing the climate crisis. Mean sea level, Hardenberg reveals, is not a natural occurrence—it has always been contingent, the product of people, places, politics, and evolving technologies. As global warming transforms the globe, Hardenberg reminds us that a holistic understanding of the ocean and its changes requires a multiplicity of reference points.

A fascinating story that revises our assumptions about land and ocean alike, Sea Level calls for a more nuanced understanding of this baseline, one that allows for new methods and interpretations as we navigate an era of unstable seas.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024) Oct 17, 2024

Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancements in genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from.

For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provided some of the earliest evidence of horse domestication–only for more recent studies to discover that the Botai domesticated an entirely different species of horse altogether.

Even a lot more recent horse domestication has a less certain starting date, with recent studies suggesting that the Plains Indians domesticated horses at least a century earlier than originally thought.

William T. Taylor is Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder. He was part of several archaeological expeditions to test some of the proposed starting points for horse domestication—some of which are portrayed in his latest book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press: 2024)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hoof Beats. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024) Oct 17, 2024

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 sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Corey Ross tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.

Spanning the major European empires of the period, Dr. Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.

Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Alastair Bonnett, "40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World" (Ivy Press, 2024) Oct 16, 2024

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 the ages, from ancient parchment scrolls to cutting-edge digital creations. Each map is a window into a different facet of our world, shedding light on the complex interplay of geography, geopolitics, art, history, science and society.

Maps have always held the power to transport us, not just from one place to another, but from one state of mind to another. Beyond their utilitarian function, maps have an extraordinary ability to tell stories, reveal truths and inspire revolutions.

They are not mere drawings of geographic boundaries, but gateways to the collective wisdom of humanity. You'll encounter maps that dissect the intricate tapestry of human migration, maps that unveil the secrets of the cosmos and maps that expose the stark realities of our changing climate. These maps are not just illustrations; they are provocations, invitations to rethink the world.

40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World is not just a book for geographers or history buffs; it is a profound exploration for anyone with a curious mind. Whether you're an armchair traveller, a seasoned explorer, a student of geopolitics or an art aficionado, this book will challenge your preconceptions, spark lively discussions and deepen your appreciation for the interconnectedness of our world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Marietje Schaake, "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley" (Princeton UP, 2024) Oct 15, 2024

Over the past decades, under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality--where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world--is terrible news for democracies and citizens.

In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Princeton UP, 2024), Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies--from social media to artificial intelligence--have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can--and must--resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world.

Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world--and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late.

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Wes Marshall, "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion That Science Underlies Our Transportation System" (Island Press, 2024) Oct 12, 2024

In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them in 1899. The numbers are getting worse in recent years, yet we continue to accept these deaths as part of doing business. There has been no examination of why we engineer roads that are literally killing us.

In Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System (Island Press, 2024), civil engineering professor Dr. Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture.

Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, Killed by a Traffic Engineer shows how traffic engineering “research” is outdated and unexamined (at its best) and often steered by an industry and culture considering only how to get from point A to B the fastest way possible, to the detriment of safety, quality of life, equality, and planetary health. Dr. Marshall examines our need for speed and how traffic engineers disconnected it from safety, the focus on capacity and how it influences design, blaming human error, relying on faulty data, how liability drives reporting, measuring road safety outcomes, and the education (and reeducation) of traffic engineers.

Killed by a Traffic Engineer is ultimately hopeful about what is possible once we shift our thinking and demand streets engineered for the safety of people, both outside and inside of cars. It will make you look at your city and streets—and traffic engineers— in a new light and inspire you to take action.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, "Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future" (The New Press, 2024) Oct 09, 2024

A clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. Recently, however, it has also become ground zero in the new “lithium gold rush”—the race to power the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage market. The immense quantities of lithium lurking beneath the surface have led to predictions that the region could provide a third of global demand. But who will benefit from the development of this precious resource?

A work of stunning analysis and reporting, Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future (The New Press, 2024) shows that the questions raised by Lithium Valley lie at the heart of the “green transition.” Weaving together movement politics, federal policy, and autoworker struggles, noted experts Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor stress that getting the lithium out from under the earth is just a first step: the real question is whether the region and the nation will get out from under the environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and racial injustice that have been as much a part of the landscape as the Salton Sea itself. What happens in Lithium Valley, the authors argue, will not stay there. This tiny patch of California is a microcosm of the broad climate challenges we face; understanding Lithium Valley today is the key to grasping the future of our economy and our planet.

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Risa Cromer, "Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics" (NYU Press, 2023) Oct 09, 2024

In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile battles over public investment in human embryonic stem cell research to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Based on six years of ethnographic research with embryo adoption staff and participants, Dr. Risa Cromer uncovers how embryo adoption advances ambitious political goals for expanding the influence of conservative Christian values and power.

Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics (NYU Press, 2023) is the first book on embryo adoption tracing how this powerful social movement draws on white saviorist tropes in their aims to reconceive personhood, with drastic consequences for reproductive rights and justice. Documenting the practices, narratives, and beliefs that move embryos from freezers to uteruses, this book wields anthropological wariness as a tool for confronting the multiple tactics of the Christian Right. Timely and provocative, Conceiving Christian America presents a bold and nuanced examination of a family-making process focused on conceiving a Christian nation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John Withington, "A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day" (Reaktion, 2024) Oct 08, 2024

A History of Fireworks from: Their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion, 2024) by John Withington illuminates the glittering history of fireworks, from their mysterious beginnings to the dazzling big-budget displays of today. It describes how they enthralled the world’s royal courts and became a sensation across the British Empire. There are stories of innovations like ‘living fireworks’, fiercely fought international competitions and the technology behind modern showpieces viewed by millions. Practitioners say fireworks are an art, and they have inspired artists from Shakespeare, Handel, Dickens and Whistler to Katy Perry. But Withington also covers fireworks’ practical uses – rescues at sea, attempts to control the weather – while not ignoring their dangers, accidents or efforts to make them safer.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Critique, Wonder, and Chinese Anatomy, with Lan A. Li Oct 08, 2024

In this episode of the Blue Beryl Podcast, Dr Pierce Salguero sits down with the show’s producer, Lan A. Li, a historian of Chinese science, medicine, and the body. We talk about their life-long practice of qigong, the limits of academic critique, and the integration of divergent epistemologies in studying Chinese anatomy. Along the way, we discuss Lan’s new book, Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine(Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), Lan’s relationship to Islam, and how to cultivate wonder through academic study.

Remember, if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhism, Asian medicine, and embodied spirituality, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes. Please enjoy!

Resources mentioned in the episode:

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.

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Pamela O. Long on the Long, Long, Long History of Technology Oct 07, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MacArthur “Genius Prize” winning historian Pamela Long about her long career writing about the history of ancient and Medieval technologies. The pair use Long’s forthcoming book, Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), as a launching point but also cover her previous work, especially including Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2018), which, among other things, contains deep reflections on the history of maintenance. Long and Vinsel also discuss Long’s future projects, including a fascinating sounding study of the history of sumptuary laws - regulations on expenditures of luxury goods, including food, clothing, and personal items - and their connection to technological change. GET EXCITED!

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Marco Bastos, "Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation" (Bristol UP, 2024) Oct 06, 2024

Dissecting 45 million tweets from the period that followed the Brexit referendum, Brexit, Tweeted: Polarization and Social Media Manipulation (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marco Bastos presents an extensive analysis of social media manipulation.

The book examines emerging changes in partisan politics, nationalist and populist values, as well as broader societal changes that are feeding into polarisation and echo-chamber communication. It pulls the curtain back on the techniques employed to interfere with, and potentially distort, the public discussion. Making complex data accessible to non-technical audiences, this unique post-mortem of the Brexit referendum contributes to our understanding of social media disinformation in the UK and beyond.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Alan F. Blackwell, "Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI" (MIT Press, 2024) Oct 06, 2024

Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn’t happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional—doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here?

In Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI (MIT Press, 2024), Alan Blackwell argues that there is a fundamental flaw in the research agenda of AI. What humanity needs, Blackwell argues, is better ways to tell computers what we want them to do, with new and better programming languages: More Open Representations, Access to Learning, and Control Over Digital Expression, in other words, MORAL CODE. Blackwell draws on his deep experiences as a programming language designer—which he has been doing since 1983—to unpack fundamental principles of interaction design and explain their technical relationship to ideas of creativity and fairness. Taking aim at software that constrains our conversations with strict word counts or infantilizes human interaction with likes and emojis, Blackwell shows how to design software that is better—not more efficient or more profitable, but better for society and better for all people. Covering recent research and the latest smart tools, Blackwell offers rich design principles for a better kind of software—and a better kind of world.

Alan F. Blackwell is Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge University department of Computer Science and Technology. He is a Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge, cofounder with David Good of the Crucible Network for Research in Interdisciplinary Design, and with David and Lara Allen the Global Challenges strategic research initiative of the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024) Oct 05, 2024

When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Gerald Sim, "Screening Big Data: Films That Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy" (Routledge, 2024) Oct 03, 2024

Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy (Routledge, 2024) examines the influence of key films on public understanding of big data and the algorithmic systems that structure our digitally mediated lives.

From star-powered blockbusters to civic-minded documentaries positioned to facilitate weighty debates about artificial intelligence, these texts frame our discourse and mediate our relationship to technology. Above all, they impact society’s abilities to regulate AI and navigate big tech’s political and economic manoeuvres to achieve market dominance and regulatory capture.

Foregrounding data politics with close readings of key films like Moneyball, Minority Report, The Social Dilemma, and Coded Bias,in Screening Big Data by Dr. Gerald Sim reveals compelling ways in which films and tech industry–adjacent media define apprehension of AI. With the mid-2010s techlash in danger of fizzling out, Screening Big Data explores the relationship between this resistance and cultural infrastructure while highlighting the urgent need to refocus attention onto how technocentric media occupy the public imagination.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Christian Wolmar, "The Liberation Line: The Untold Story of How American Engineering and Ingenuity Won World War II" (Hachette, 2024) Oct 02, 2024

They certainly were not soldiers, yet they suddenly found themselves in uniform, in a foreign land. But, as locomotive drivers, track-workers, conductors, porters, signalmen and engine cleaners, they knew how to run trains. And their job was to bring them back to life.

The Liberation Line: The Untold Story of How American Engineering and Ingenuity Won World War II (Hachette, 2024) by Christian Wolmar tells the thrilling story of the British and American railway engineers who, in the months after D-Day, worked around the clock and in great danger to rebuild the ravaged railways of Europe and keep the Allied forces fuelled as they pushed on into Germany. As territory was taken, these soldier-railroaders were close behind, rebuilding the lines, putting up telegraph wires, replacing bridges and laying track, all the while dodging bullets, shells and booby traps.

Tales of extraordinary feats and heroism abound, including how 10,000 men rebuilt a 135-mile-long railway in just three days; the reconstruction of the bridge over the Seine in two weeks while under bombardment; and the use of cigarette lighters as improvised signalling systems. Despite being critical to Allied victory, the role of the railwaymen has been largely forgotten or ignored. In a vivid and gripping narrative, Christian Wolmar brings to life this colourful cast of generals and engineers, without whose extraordinary bravery the liberation of France and invasion of Germany might well have foundered – and the course of history changed.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Paola Bertucci, "In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) Oct 01, 2024

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science.

In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola Bertucci's In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour(Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) brilliantly reveals the mysteries of Nollet's journey, uncovering a subterranean world of secretive and ambitious intelligence gathering masked as scientific inquiry.

The advent of electricity was a pivotal phenomenon not only in the history of physical experimentation, but also in the cultivation of popular scientific interest. Nollet's journey was supposedly inspired by the need to investigate, and subsequently report on, claims of the use of electrified "medicated tubes" by their Italian inventor Gianfrancesco Pivati. Motivated by economic interests in the silk industry, Nollet's journey was in fact an undercover mission commissioned by the French state to discover the secrets of Italian silk manufacture and possibly supplant its international success. The event that sparked the medical controversy—the unusual cure of a bishop—was a complete fabrication.

Bertucci insightfully contrasts published accounts of the event with private documents and discusses how eighteenth-century scientists published fictional events and results to bolster their careers, ultimately leading to long-lasting misrepresentations of scientific practice and enduring stereotypes. In the Land of Marvels reveals the constellation of historical actors, from reputed physicists to travel writers and electrical amateurs, who manipulated information to gain authority and prestige.

Paola Bertucci (NEW HAVEN, CT) is a professor in the department of history at Yale University. She is the author of the award-winning Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Amos C. Fox, "Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare" (Howgate, 2024) Sep 30, 2024

If you seek a compelling exploration of contemporary armed conflict, then Conflict Realism: Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare(Howgate Publishing, 2024) by Amos C. Fox is for you. It delves into the intricate web of causation to unveil five pivotal trends shaping the landscape of war and warfare - urban warfare, sieges, attrition, precision strike strategy, and proxy wars - revealing a stark reality: wars remain far more attritional than anticipated by policymakers, military practitioners, and analysts alike. What’s more, just as attritional wars are becoming quite common, conflict elongation – wars of extended duration – are also becoming the norm. Through insightful analysis and a keen understanding of geopolitical intricacies, Amos Fox navigates the reader through the intricate interplay of these trends, shedding light on their profound implications for global security. This riveting work challenges conventional wisdom, offering readers a thought-provoking perspective on the contemporary nature of armed conflicts, ultimately urging a reconsideration of strategies and policies in the face of an ever-evolving battlefield.

Amos C. Fox, PhD, is a Fellow with Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative. Amos is also a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. He hosts the Revolution in Military Affairs, Soldier Pulse and WarCast podcasts, serves as an editorial board member with the Journal of Military Studies and is a senior editor with Small Wars Journal. Amos is also a retired US Army officer, where he served more than 24 years, retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Annette Kehnel, "The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability" (Brandeis UP, 2024) Sep 29, 2024

Annette Kehnel joins Jana Byars to talk about The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (Brandeis University Press, 2024). A fascinating blend of history and ecological economics that uncovers the medieval precedents for modern concepts of sustainable living. In The Green Ages, historian Annette Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon.

Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably--we've done it before! From the garden economy in the mythical-sounding City of Ladies to early microcredit banks, Kehnel uncovers a world at odds with our understanding of the typical medieval existence. Premodern history is full of inspiring examples and concepts ripe for rediscovery, and we urgently need them as today's challenges--finite resources, the twilight of consumerism, and growing inequality--threaten what we have come to think of as a modern way of living sustainably. This is a stimulating and revelatory look at a past that has the power to change our future.

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Jason Weiss, "Listenings" (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) Sep 29, 2024

Listenings (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) is a collection of meditations on the art of experiencing sound. The writings reflect Jason Weiss's passion for illuminating details, momentary experiences, and the most subtle and brief of auditory stimulations to consider their role in thought and emotion. The chapter-sections, each on a particular subtheme, invite us to visit concerts, to analyze music, to interpret sounds far and near, from friends, parents, relatives, and strangers, and to appreciate and esteem them as a key part of the human condition.

Listenings summons readers to reflect but also to consider listening as an artform, a dialogue, and a locus of experiences – to make music by listening. Jason Weiss adroitly argues that to listen is not merely to perceive sound as a stimulus but to interpret, to participate, to reflect, to engage in an activity that can shift from a passive one toward a new creative beginning.

This conversation includes Jason Weiss, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo of the Departamento de Humanidades at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M). They discuss listening as a creative resource; the importance of listening in memory; Weiss’s precise and harmonious approach to linking language, sound and listening; the role of technology how we interpret sound; and the role of listening in the author’s life, experiences and creative process.

This interview, our podcast, and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes were made possible by generous support from the Mellon Foundation.

This is our second episode on Listenings - the first, on New Books Network en español, is available here.

Topics discussed in the interview:

Listening in translingual environments.
Music, performance, concerts.
Travel, distance, and new language contexts.
Technology and sound.
When Jason Weiss met Jorge Luis Borges in Paris.
The circumstances surrounding Roland Barthes’s death.
Jason Weiss’s book The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Literature in Parisand our podcast episode on that title.

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Jonathan Maskit, "Bicycle" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Sep 29, 2024

These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle promises to transform our lives and the world we live in, yet its time seems always yet-to-come or long-gone-by. In Bicycle (Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Jonathan Maskit takes us on an interdisciplinary ride to see what makes the bicycle a magical machine that could yet make the world a safer, greener, and more just place.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World Sep 26, 2024

Why do we assume that computers always get it right?

Today’s book is: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press, 2019), in which Professor Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right. Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it's just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can't pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.

Our guest is: Professor Meredith Broussard, who is Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of Artificial Unintelligence, and of More Than A Glitch. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Economist, and more. She appears in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias and serves on the advisory board for the Center for

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.

For listeners who want to learn more:

More Than A Glitch

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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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) Sep 26, 2024

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, there is a defining game, a game that captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed. Through a series of entertaining, informative, and opinionated critical essays, author and tech journalist Jordan Minor investigates, in chronological order, the most innovative, genre-bending, and earth-shattering games from 1977 through 2022. Exploring development stories, critical reception, and legacy, Minor also looks at how gaming intersects with and eventually influences society at large while reveling in how uniquely and delightfully bizarre even the most famous games tend to be.

From portly plumbers to armor-clad space marines and the speedy rodents in between, 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) paints individual portraits that, as a whole, give readers a stronger appreciation for the vibrant variety and long-lasting impact of this fresh, exciting, and massively popular art form. Illustrated throughout with retro-inspired imagery and featuring contributions from dozens of leading industry voices, including New York Times bestselling author Jason Schreier, Max Scoville, Rebekah Valentine, Blessing Adeoye Jr., and Devindra Hardawar, this year-by-year anthology is a loving reflection on the world’s most popular art form.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Ethical Machines: A Conversation with Reid Blackman Sep 25, 2024

Join us as we discuss Dr. Reid Blackman’s new book: Ethical Machines: Your Concise Guide to Totally Unbiased, Transparent, and Respectful AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022). We dive into the intricacies of developing AI and the intersection of ethics and innovation.

Reid Blackman, Ph.D., is the author of Ethical Machines, creator and host of the podcast “Ethical Machines,” and Founder and CEO of Virtue, a digital ethical risk consultancy. He is also an advisor to the Canadian government on their federal AI regulations, was a founding member of EY’s AI Advisory Board, and a Senior Advisor to the Deloitte AI Institute. His work, which includes advising and speaking to organizations including AWS, US Bank, the FBI, NASA, and the World Economic Forum, has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and Forbes. His written work appears in The Harvard Business Review and The New York Times. Prior to founding Virtue, Reid was a professor of philosophy at Colgate University and UNC-Chapel Hill. Learn

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of guest does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Max Hirsh and Till Mostowlansky, "Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2022) Sep 24, 2024

In the twenty-first century, infrastructure has undergone a seismic shift from West to East. Once concentrated in Europe and North America, global infrastructure production today is focused squarely on Asia.Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (U Hawaii Press, 2022) investigates the deeper implications of that pivot to the East. Written by leading international infrastructure experts, it demonstrates how new roads, airports, pipelines, and cables are changing Asian economies, societies, and geopolitics—from the Bosporus to Beijing, and from Indonesia to the Arctic. Ten tightly interwoven case studies powerfully illustrate infrastructure’s leading role in three global paradigm shifts: climate change, digitalization, and China’s emergence as a superpower.

Combining social science methods with mapping techniques from the design professions, Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia establishes a dialogue between academic research on infrastructure and the professional insights of those responsible for infrastructure’s planning, production, and operation. By applying that mixed method to transport, energy, telecommunication, and resource extraction projects across Asia, the book synthesizes research on infrastructure from six academic fields, while making those insights accessible to a wider audience of students, professionals, and the general public.

Max Hirsh is managing director of the Airport City Academy and a research fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds a PhD in urban planning from Harvard and is the author of Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia. Max's research investigates the relationship between air travel and urban form.

Till Mostowlansky is a Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the Principal Investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project “Quiet Aid: Service and Salvation in the Balkans-to-Bengal-Complex”. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Jason A. Josephson Storm, "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" (U Chicago Press, 2017) Sep 23, 2024

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences(U Chicago Press, 2017) dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Professor Storm is a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly. At the heart of his work, lies an attempt to challenge conventional narratives in the study of religion and science.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Emily M. Bender on AI Hype Sep 23, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Emily Bender, Professor of Linguistics, Director of the Masters of Science in Computational Linguistics program, and Director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at University of Washington, about her work on artificial intelligence criticism. Bender is also an adjunct professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School at UW; she is a member of the Tech Policy Lab, the Value Sensitive Design Lab, the Distributed AI Research Institute, and RAISE, or Responsibilities in AI Systems and Experiences; *AND*, with Alex Hanna, she is co-host of the Mystery AI Hype Theater podcast, which you should check out. Vinsel and Bender talk about the current AI bubble, what is driving it, and the technological potentials and limitations of this technology.

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Gergely Gosztonyi, "Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices" (Springer, 2023) Sep 22, 2024

In many countries, censorship, blocking of internet access and internet content for political purposes are still part of everyday life. Will filtering, blocking, and hacking replace scissors and black ink? This book argues that only a broader understanding of censorship can effectively protect freedom of expression.

For centuries, church and state controlled the content available to the public through political, moral and religious censorship. As technology evolved, the legal and political tools were refined, but the classic censorship system continued until the end of the 20th century. However, the myth of total freedom of communication and a law-free space that had been expected with the advent of the internet was soon challenged. The new rulers of the digital world, tech companies, emerged and gained enormous power over free speech and content management. All this happened alongside cautious regulation attempts on the part of various states, either by granting platforms near-totalimmunity (US) or by setting up new rules that were not fully developed (EU). China has established the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield as a third way.

In Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices(Springer, 2023), particular attention is paid to developments since the 2010s, when Internet-related problems began to multiply. The state’s solutions have mostly pointed in one direction: towards greater control of platforms and the content they host. Similarities can be found in the US debates, the Chinese and Russian positions on internet sovereignty, and the new European digital regulations (DSA-DMA). The book addresses them all.

This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the complexities of social media’s content regulation and moderation practices. It makes a valuable contribution to the field of freedom of expression and the internet, showing that, with different kinds of censorship, this essentially free form of communication has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years.

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Amber Billey et al., "Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches" (ALA Editions, 2024) Sep 22, 2024

Filling a gap in the literature, Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches (ALA Editions and Core, 2024) provides librarians and catalogers with practical approaches to reparative cataloging as well as a broader understanding of the topic and its place in the technical services landscape. As part of the profession's ongoing EDISJ efforts to redress librarianship’s problematic past, practitioners from across the field are questioning long-held library authorities and standards. They’re undertaking a critical and rigorous re-examination of so-called “best” practices and the decisionmakers behind them, pointing out heretofore unscrutinized injustices within our library systems of organization and making concrete steps towards progressive change. In this conversation, co-editors Billey Albina (Amber Billey), Elizabeth Nelson, and Rebecca Uhl discuss their work to bring together chapters that detail the efforts of librarians who are working to improve our systems and collections, in the process inspiring those who have yet to enact change by demonstrating that this work is scalable, possible, and necessary.

From this book, readers will gain an understanding of the theoretical underpinning for the actions that create our history and be challenged to reconsider their perspectives; learn about the important role of the library catalog in real-world EDISJ initiatives through examples ranging from accessibility metadata and gendered information to inclusive comics cataloging and revising LC call numbers for Black people and Indigenous people; discover more than a dozen case studies drawn from a variety of contexts including archives, academic and public libraries, and research institutions; and see ways to incorporate these ideas into their own work, with a variety of sample policies, “how to” documents, and other helpful tools provided in the text.

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Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Sep 21, 2024

Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. In evidence throughout the country, but especially the West, the pattern is a hallmark of American life. One might consider it an administrative convenience—an easy way to divide land and lay down streets—but it is not. The colossal grid carved into the North American continent, argues historian and writer Dr. Amir Alexander, is a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning.

In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it.

From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2024) tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty’s Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Marta Fijak and Artur Ganszyniec, "How and Why We Make Games" (CRC Press, 2024) Sep 18, 2024

How and Why We Make Games(CRC Press, 2024) delves into the intricate realms of games and their creation, examining them through cultural, systemic, and, most notably, human lenses. It explores diverse themes such as authorship, creative responsibility, the tension between games as a product and games as a form of cultural expression, and the myth of a universal audience.

The book analyzes why we should put politics in our games and how hyperrealism may be a trap. It also proposes a new framework for thinking about game narrative and a different paradigm for the production altogether. Topics tackled are approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, so be prepared to read both about Peter Paul Rubens and John Carmack. There are also graphs, system rhetorics discussions, and the market reality—stakeholders, return on investments, and the gaming bubble bursting.

This book is written for readers passionate about the craft of making games, including journalists and industry professionals. It offers a more humanistic perspective on games, presented by experienced writers who know the intricacies of game development.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Titel kulturmagazin, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Hey, Robot! Sep 16, 2024

Today, we’re playing with voice assistants and thinking about the role of voices in gaming with our guest, game designer and NYU professorFrank Lantz.

Over the past nightmare year of the coronavirus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families. Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% percent in March, when Americans began sheltering in place. And, of course, we’ve also spent way more time interacting with digital technology. These two things have come together in a weird and delightful way in Lantz’s game Hey Robot.

Created by Lantz’s family-owned company Everybody House Games, Hey Robot is a guessing game you play with a group of friends—including your voice assistant or smart speaker. The premise is simple: Make Google Home or Alexa utter the words written in a deck of cards. The questions it raises are complex: What are these digital entities that many of us interact with daily? How have web searches and voice-based computing changed the way we talk? And what does this reveal about language itself?

Hey Robot is available in a free online Quarantine Edition that you can play remotely with your friends. The board game edition is available on Amazon.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

Fake Cumbia music by Mack Hagood.

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Whitney Barlow Robles, "Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History" (Yale UP, 2023) Sep 13, 2024

Dive into the world of animals with Whitney Barlow Robles in her captivating new book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (Yale UP, 2023). Can corals truly build worlds? Do rattlesnakes possess a mystical charm? What secrets do raccoons hold? These questions reflect how animals have historically challenged human attempts to control nature, particularly during the Enlightenment—a time marked by rigid classifications, colonial exploitation, and the complex interplay between humans and the natural world.

Robles takes us on a journey through four distinct ecological zones: the ocean, underground, curiosity cabinets, and the field. Her exploration reveals a forgotten lineage of empirical inquiry that embraces uncertainty and highlights the tumultuous history of human-animal encounters. This legacy continues to influence modern biologists and ecologists today as they strive to understand the intricate lives of animals.

In a unique blend of history and nature writing, Robles alternates between meticulous research and personal narratives, uncovering the animal foundations of human knowledge. She argues that addressing our current environmental crisis requires us to reflect on the past and recognize the vital roles animals play in shaping our understanding of the world. Join us as we explore the unruly protagonists of 18th-century science and discover why the stories of these creatures are essential to navigating the challenges we face today.

Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta is a Doctoral candidate at El Colegio de México and Adjunct Lecturer at the Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG).

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Greg Eghigian, "After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon" (Oxford UP, 2024) Sep 11, 2024

Roswell, 1947. Washington, DC, 1952. Quarouble, 1954. New Hampshire, 1961. Pascagoula, 1973. Petrozavodsk, 1977. Copley Woods, 1983. Explore how sightings of UFOs and aliens seized the world's attention and discover what the fascination with flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors says about our changing views on science, technology, and the paranormal.

In the summer of 1947, a private pilot flying over the state of Washington saw what he described as several pie pan-shaped aircraft traveling in formation at remarkably high speed. Within days, journalists began referring to the objects as "flying saucers." Over the course of that summer, Americans reported seeing them in the skies overhead. News quickly spread, and within a few years, flying saucers were being spotted across the world. The question on everyone's mind was, what were they? Some new super weapon in the Cold War? Strange weather patterns? Optical illusions? Or perhaps it was all a case of mass hysteria? Some, however, concluded they could only be one thing: spacecrafts built and piloted by extraterrestrials. The age of the unidentified flying object, the UFO, had arrived.

Greg Eghigian tells the story of the world's fascination with UFOs and the prospect that they were the work of visitors from outer space. While accounts of great wonders in the sky date back to antiquity, reports of UFOs took place against the unique backdrop of the Cold War and space age, giving rise to disputed government inquiries, breathtaking news stories, and single-minded sleuths.

After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon(Oxford UP, 2024) traces how a seemingly isolated incident sparked an international drama involving shady figures, questionable evidence, suspicions of conspiracy, hoaxes, new religions, scandals, unsettling alien encounters, debunkers, and celebrities. It examines how descriptions, theories, and debates about unidentified flying objects and alien abduction changed over time and how they appeared in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Russia. And it explores the impact UFOs have had on our understanding of space, science, technology, and ourselves up through the present day.

Replete with stories of the people who have made up the ufology community, the military and defense units that investigate them, the scientists and psychologists who have researched these unexplained encounters, and the many novels, movies, TV shows, and websites that have explored these phenomena, After the Flying Saucers Came speaks to believers and skeptics alike.

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Matthew C. Ehrlich, "The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine" (U Illinois Press, 2024) Sep 11, 2024

The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice president and a famed physiologist dubbed “the conscience of U.S. science,” wholeheartedly embraced Krebiozen. Ivy’s impeccable credentials and reputation made the treatment seem like another midcentury medical miracle. But after years of controversy, the improbable saga ended with Krebiozen proved a sham, its inventor fleeing the country, and Ivy’s reputation and legacy in ruins.

Matthew C. Ehrlich’s history of Krebiozen tells a quintessential story of quackery. Though most experts dismissed the treatment, it found passionate public support not only among cancer patients but also people in good health. The treatment’s rise and fall took place against the backdrop of America’s never-ending suspicion of educational, scientific, and medical expertise. In addition, Ehrlich examines why people readily believe misinformation and struggle to maintain hope in the face of grave threats to well-being.

A dramatic account of fraud and misplaced trust, The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine(U Illinois Press, 2024) shines a light on a forgotten medical scandal and its all-too-familiar relevance in the twenty-first century.

Matthew C. Ehrlich is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois. He has previously published five books including Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK and Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era.

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Raquel Velho on Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System Sep 09, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Raquel Velho, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, about her recent book, Hacking the Underground: Disability, Infrastructure, and London's Public Transport System(U Washington Press, 2023). Hacking the Underground provides a fascinating ethnographic investigation of how disabled people navigate a transportation system that is far from accessible.

Velho finds disabled passengers constantly hacking and finding workarounds, including lots of fix-y maintenance tasks, to get from one place to another. While these workarounds involve obvious creativity, they are also the products of an unequal system and the failure to enact a more-thoroughgoing and radically-transformative redesigning of public transportation systems in the name of accessibility. Vinsel and Velho also touch on a wide range of other topics, including issues of theory and method, and they talk about what Velho is up to next.

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Michael Gavin, "Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies" (Stanford UP, 2022) Sep 09, 2024

Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies (Stanford UP, 2022), Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies.

Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.

Michael Gavin is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of The Invention of English Criticism, 1650-1760 (2015)

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2024) Sep 08, 2024

Are you a musical theatre fan who loves TikTok? Or are you curious about how this social media app has changed musical theatre fandom - and even the concept of the musical itself?

TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age(Oxford UP, 2024) takes readers inside the world of TikTok Broadway, where fans create, expand, and canonize musical theatre through viral videos. It argues that TikTok democratizes musical theatre fan cultures and spaces, creating a new canon of musical theatre that reflects the preferences and passions of the fans. Readers will also see how TikTok Broadway influences other aspects of U.S. popular culture, from Broadway shows to TV adaptations.

From Six and Beetlejuice to Wicked and Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, this book covers the most popular and innovative musical theatre content on TikTok. Author Trevor Boffone, a musical theatre scholar and a TikTok creator, shows how fans use the app to express their love for musical theatre, and how they collaborate to produce original works, such as Bridgerton: The Musical.

TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age shows how the app puts power in the hands of the fans.

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Jess Whatcott, "Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics" (Duke UP, 2024) Sep 07, 2024

In Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics(Duke UP, 2024), Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future.

Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.

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James M. Scott, "Black Snow: Curtis Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb" (Norton, 2024) Sep 06, 2024

In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. Scott discusses the principles and personalities involved in the most destructive air attack in history.

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed.

Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight “precision” bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.

Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors, air force archives, and oral histories never before published in English, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account, and his most important and compelling work to date.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

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S4E4 In Defense of Bad Science and the Philosophy of Being Sep 04, 2024

What role does science play in shaping our laws? How do we distinguish between good science and bad science? Where does science hit its limits due to our human nature? And how do we separate orthodox belief from true knowledge? These are just some of the thought-provoking questions we'll explore in our upcoming philosophical conversation on science and human existence.

Join us as we dive into these topics with Dr. William Allen, a distinguished scholar renowned for his expertise in political philosophy and the philosophy of science. Dr. Allen has been a long-standing participant at The Conference on Science, Statistics, and Public Policy, bringing with him a wealth of knowledge and experience.

Dr. Allen's illustrious career includes serving as the dean of James Madison College and as a professor of political science at Michigan State University. He has also held academic positions at Villanova University, Ashland University, and Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. His academic journey began with a Ph.D. in government from the prestigious Claremont Graduate University.

Beyond academia, Dr. Allen has made significant contributions as a former member and chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He is a recipient of the Kellogg National Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and has served on the National Council on the Humanities. His published works include critically acclaimed books like George Washington: America’s First Progressive and Rethinking Uncle Tom: The Political Philosophy of H. B. Stowe. Dr. Allen has also edited influential collections such as George Washington: A Collection and The Essential Antifederalist, alongside numerous scholarly articles on political philosophy and American political thought.

Don't miss this opportunity to engage with one of the foremost thinkers of our time as we navigate the intersection of science, truth, and human existence.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

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Jordan Magnuson, "Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice" (Amherst College Press, 2023) Sep 04, 2024

Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols.

This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) Sep 04, 2024

The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteracts this “backwardness” paradigm, arguing that from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, Russian medical researchers—along with their counterparts in France and Germany—were at the forefront of the struggle against cholera. Davis’ birds-eye view of this hundred-year period illustrates that the conditions allowing cholera to flourish were the same set of conditions that helped create the collapse of the tsarist regime during the First World War. Credit for elimination of cholera must go to the Bolsheviks, both for implementing tsarist-era medical theory, and especially for making war on cholera in a organized, systematic manner that the old regime was variously unable or unwilling to achieve.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Kostas Kampourakis, "Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods" (Cambridge UP, 2024) Sep 03, 2024

Many historical ﬁgures have their lives and works shrouded in myth, both in life and long after their deaths. Charles Darwin (1809–82) is no exception to this phenomenon and his hero-worship has become an accepted narrative.

Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods (Cambridge UP, 2024) unpacks this narrative to rehumanize Darwin's story and establish what it meant to be a 'genius' in the Victorian context. Leading Darwin scholars have come together to argue that, far from being a lonely genius in an ivory tower, Darwin had fortune, diligence and – crucially – community behind him. The aims of this essential work are twofold. First, to set the historical record straight, debunking the most pervasive myths and correcting falsehoods. Second, to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of science itself, relevant to historians, scientists and the public alike.

Aims to debunk myths and correct falsehoods about Charles Darwin's life and work
Leading Darwin scholars offer new conclusions about the history and nature of science
Accessibly written for readers across many fields including history, philosophy and the sciences

Kostas Kampourakis is the author and editor of several books about evolution, genetics, philosophy and history of science, as well as the editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Understanding Life. He teaches biology and science education courses at the University of Geneva

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Sarah Malanowski and Nicholas R. Baima, "Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer" (Routledge, 2024) Sep 03, 2024

If you enjoy video games as a pastime, you are certainly not alone—billions of people worldwide now play video games. However, you may still find yourself reluctant to tell others this fact about yourself. After all, we are routinely warned that video games have the potential to cause addiction and violence. And when we aren’t being warned of their outright harms, we are told we should be doing something better with our time, like going outside, socializing with others, or reading a book. Playing video games is thus often seen at best as a waste of time, and at worst a source of violent tragedy.

Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer (Routledge, 2024) takes on the pervasive assumption that playing video games is a childish and time-wasting hobby, and a potentially addictive and dangerous one at that. It argues instead that there are many ways in which gaming can help us flourish, for example by: developing genuine friendships and other meaningful relationships with others, helping us cultivate a virtuous personal character, giving us a unique aesthetic experience, providing us with psychological benefits, and just plain helping us relax and enjoy ourselves. Video games are not just for those with no life; on the contrary, they can help contribute to a rich and meaningful life.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Andy Clarno et al., "Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago" (U Minnesota Press, 2024) Sep 03, 2024

Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to police the poor and suppress struggles for social justice. Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago(University of Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the role of local law enforcement, federal immigration authorities, and national security agencies in upholding the city’s highly unequal social order.

Collaboratively authored by the Policing in Chicago Research Group (PCRG), Imperial Policing was developed in dialogue with movements on the front lines of struggles against racist policing in Black, Latinx, and Arab/Muslim communities. The members of PCRG are Andy Clarno, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran, and Haley Volpintesta. Imperial Policing analyzes the connections between three police “wars”—on crime, terror, and immigrants—focusing on the weaponization of data and the coordination between local and national agencies to suppress communities of color and undermine social movements. Topics include high-tech, data-based tools of policing; the racialized archetypes that ground the police wars; the manufacturing of criminals and terrorists; the subversion of sanctuary city protections; and abolitionist responses to policing, such as the Erase the Database campaign.

Andy Clarno is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies and coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research examines racism, capitalism, colonialism, and empire in the early 21st century, with a focus on racialized policing and struggles for social justice in contexts of extreme inequality.

Michael De Anda Muñiz is an Assistant Professor in the Latina/Latino Studies Department at San Francisco State University. His research interests include culture, art, community engagement, space, and resistance.

Ilā Ravichandran is an assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Dr. Ravichandran’s research interests include science, knowledge, technology, biopolitics, policing, surveillance, counterinsurgency, state, queerness & Black studies.

Timi Koyejo is a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor for the City of Chicago.

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Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021) Sep 02, 2024

Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and consequence. In Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe (MIT Press, 2021), Brian Clegg explores the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationships between space and time to the quantum behaviors that rule the way that matter and light interact, Clegg shows how these patterns provide a unique view of the physical world and its fundamental workings.

Guiding readers on a tour of our world and the universe beyond, Clegg describes the cosmic microwave background, sometimes called the "echo of the big bang," and how it offers clues to the universe's beginnings; the diagrams that illustrate Einstein's revelation of the intertwined nature of space and time; the particle trail patterns revealed by the Large Hadron Collider and other accelerators; and the simple-looking patterns that predict quantum behavior (and decorated Richard Feynman's van). Clegg explains how the periodic table reflects the underlying pattern of the configuration of atoms, discusses the power of the number line, demonstrates the explanatory uses of tree diagrams, and more.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Sep 02, 2024

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science.

Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself.

Elizabeth A. Williams is professor emerita of history at Oklahoma State University.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019) Sep 02, 2024

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Henry H. Work, "Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels"(Reaktion Books, 2024) Sep 01, 2024

Barrels – we rarely acknowledge their importance, but without them we would be missing out on some of the world’s finest wines and spirits. For over two thousand years they’ve been used to store, transport and age an incredibly diverse array of provisions around the globe. In this comprehensive and wide-ranging book titled Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels (Reaktion, 2024), now available in paperback, Henry H. Work tells the intriguing story of the significant and ever-evolving role wooden barrels have played during the last two millennia.

Offering a new way of thinking about one of the most enduring and successful products in history, Wood, Whiskey and Wine is a must-read for everyone from technology and history buffs to wine and whiskey aficionados.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Susan Greenhalgh, "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Aug 31, 2024

Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mould research to meet industry needs. The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.

Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives. Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally.

By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today. Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.

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Mel Stanfill, "Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture" (NYU Press, 2024) Aug 31, 2024

In their latest book, Fandom is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture (NYU Press, 2024), Mel Stafill highlights the importance of considering contemporary public culture through the lens of fan studies The Gamergate harassment campaign of women in video games, the “Unite the Right” rally where hundreds of Confederate monument supporters cried out racist and antisemitic slurs in Charlottesville, and the targeted racist and sexist harassment of Star Wars’ Asian American actress Kelly Marie Tran all have one thing in common: they demonstrate the collective power and underlying ugliness of fandoms. These fans might feel victimized or betrayed by the content they’ve intertwined with their own identities, or they may simply feel that they’re speaking truth to power. Regardless, by connecting via social media, they can unleash enormous amounts of hate, which often results in severe real-world consequences.

Fandom Is Ugly argues that reactionary politics and media fandoms go hand in hand, and to understand one, we need to understand the other. Stanfill pushes back on two mainstream assumptions: that media and the pleasure of consumption are frivolous and unworthy of study, and that fandoms are inherently progressive. Drawing on a corpus of angry social media posts, Fandom Is Ugly finds that ugly moments happen when deep emotional attachments collide with social structures and situations that have been misunderstood. By holistically examining the forms of ugly fandom in cases that touch upon race, gender, and sexuality, Fandom Is Ugly produces a comprehensive theory of the negative sides of fan attachments.

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John V. Pavlik, "Journalism and the Metaverse" (Anthem Press, 2024) Aug 30, 2024

Journalism has been in a state of disruption since the development of the Internet. The Metaverse, or what some describe as the future of the Internet, is likely to fuel even further disruption in journalism. Digital platforms and journalism enterprises are already investing substantial resources into the Metaverse, or its likely components of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality. Although research shows most of the public has little knowledge of the Metaverse, many are keenly interested in what it or its components may bring.

Journalism and the Metaverse (Anthem Press, 2024) by Dr. John Pavlik critically examines the nature of the Metaverse and its implications for journalism. In particular, the book will examine how the advance of a broadband, interactive and immersive Internet called the Metaverse may change the content and format of news, the nature of journalistic work, who or what is a journalist, the nature and structure of the new industry and how it is funded, as well as the fundamental role of journalism in a digital society.

In particular, this book builds on a vision of the Metaverse as an immersive and interactive virtual world, a key development in the next generation of the broadband, publicly accessible Internet. Broadband means high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet connectivity, especially wirelessly. Immersive refers to enveloping, 3D forms of media and communication. Today, we often see immersive media in the form of augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) or other forms of what are labeled extended Reality (XR). Fueled by artificial intelligence, these forms are three dimensional (3D), they have depth and they surround the user in a 360 virtual world visually and aurally (and potentially via other senses, including the haptic). Interactive means both user-to-user engagement (e.g., social media) as well as an exchange between the user and the enveloping content experience of a virtual world. This book examines the implications of the Metaverse for journalism in four broad domains, including content, how journalists work, structural and systemic considerations, and user and public engagement with news.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Tarryn Li-Min Chun, "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024), "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (U Michigan Press, 2024) Aug 30, 2024

Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, 2024) offers a fascinating approach to modern Chinese theater history by placing the stage at the center of the story. Combining vivid readings of plays with technical manuals and how-to guides, Tarryn Li-Min Chun charts how stage technology changed from the 1920s to the 1980s, showing how Chinese theater artists mobilized staging, lighting, and props to convey different meanings, including political revolution, nationalist nation-building, grassroots ingenuity, and the triumph of science. Throughout, Revolutionary Stagecraft demonstrates how theater, technology, and politics were deeply intertwined in modern China, and how Chinese theater artists manipulated the materiality of stagecraft for their own means.

Revolutionary Stagecraft should be of interest to those who are familiar with Chinese history, but also those who are interested in global theater, material culture, and the history of technology, as well as anyone who wants to know just how difficult it is to make fog appear on the stage (for the answer, see Chapter 2). Written in a clear and accessible way, Revolutionary Stagecraft is available both in print and as an Open Access ebook.

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The Human Advantage: A Conversation with Jay Richards Aug 28, 2024

In this episode, we explore the insights of Jay Richards, author of The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines (Forum, 2019). Richards wrote this book during a time when automation and technology were beginning to redefine the boundaries of human work and creativity. His core argument is that, despite the rise of machines, there are certain uniquely human qualities—such as creativity, moral judgment, and entrepreneurial spirit—that cannot be replicated by technology. These traits, he suggests, are what give us a distinct edge in the face of automation.

As we look at today's world, where artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced at an unprecedented pace, we must ask: Do Richards' ideas still hold true? In an era where AI can perform tasks once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans, from creative endeavors to complex decision-making, is there still a clear-cut human advantage? Richards' book offers a lens through which to examine these questions, urging us to consider how we can harness our inherent strengths to adapt and thrive in this new landscape.

In our conversation, we dive deep into these questions, exploring the relevance of The Human Advantage in today's rapidly evolving technological environment. How can we, as individuals and as a society, ensure that we maintain and even enhance our human edge? What role do creativity, ethics, and entrepreneurship play in a world increasingly driven by algorithms and automation? This episode offers valuable insights for anyone grappling with the implications of modern technology on our work, lives, and future.

Jay Richards is an American analytical philosopher who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

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Joanna Wuest, "Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Aug 27, 2024

Scholars often narrate the legal cases confirming LGBTQ+ rights as a huge success story. While it took 100 years to confirm the rights of Black Americans, it took far less time for courts to recognize marriage and adoption rights or workplace discrimination protections for queer people.

The legal and political success of LGBTQ+ advocates often depended upon presenting sexual and gender identities as innate – or “immutable” to fit legal categories. Conservatives who oppose LGBTQ+ equality often argue that sexual and gender identity is something that can be taught. They use the offensive language of “grooming” and contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children.

In Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement(U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Joanna Wuest unpacks how a biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality– based on arguments from the “natural sciences and mental health professions” – became central to American LGBTQ+ advocacy. Her book is both a “celebratory and cautionary” story about the costs of relying on science to win impressive victories for queer rights. The book interrogates the “LGBTQ+ rights movement, the scientific study of human difference, and the biopolitical character of citizenship that formed at the nexus of the two.” As LGBTQ+ advocates brought “science to bear on civil rights struggles,” they transformed American politics and the epistemology of identity politics more broadly.”

Dr. Joanna Wuest is an incoming Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University and a sociolegal scholar specializing in sexual and gender minority rights, health, and political economy. Her book, Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Social Studies of Science's 2024 Rachel Carson Prize and was featured on a recent episode of Radiolab.

During the podcast, we mentioned:

Joanna’s article with Dr. Briana S. Last, “Agents of scientific uncertainty: Conflicts over evidence and expertise in gender-affirming care bans for minors” in Social Science & Medicine.

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Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, "Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility" (U Washington Press, 2024) Aug 27, 2024

Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic bicycle communities. Exploring how people bike and what biking means in the city, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria challenges assumptions that underlie sustainable transportation planning.Arguing that planning professionals and advocates need to pay closer attention to ordinary people who cycle for transportation or for work, or who choose to cycle for recreation, Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility (U Washington Press, 2024) offers an alternative to the thinking that dominates mainstream sustainable transportation discussions. The book's insights come from bicycle activists, commuters, food delivery workers, event organizers, planners, technicians, shop owners, transportation planners, architects, and manufacturers.

Through ethnographic vignettes and descriptions of diverse biking experiences, it shows how pedaling through the city produces a way of seeing and understanding infrastructure. Readers will come away with a new perspective on what makes a city bicycle friendly and an awareness that lessons for more equitable and sustainable urban future can be found in surprising places.

In the episode, we make a reference to an essay Jonathan Anjaria wrote for Ethnographic Marginalia. You can read the essay here.

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Cyrus Mody on the Importance of Square (as in NOT COOL) Scientists and Engineers Aug 26, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Cyrus Mody, Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation and Director of the STS Program at Maastricht University, about his book, The Squares: US Physical and Engineering Scientists in the Long 1970s (MIT Press, 2022). Many narratives about contemporary technologies, especially digital computing and the Internet, focus on the influences of 1960s counter-cultures. In _The Squares_, Mody takes the opposite approach and asks how square, non-counter-cultural scientists and engineers reacted to their changing environments in the 1970s. Vinsel and Mody also talk about what this story may suggest about current efforts to refocus STEM education on “values.” The pair also discuss how, over the course of his career, Mody has continually used a set of historical actors he knows a great deal about to examine different historical themes and questions. Finally, they discuss Mody’s current projects and where he is headed.

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Yerkebulan Sairambay, "New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) Aug 26, 2024

Dr. Yerkebulan Sairambay’s New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan(Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) confronts the sociological problem of the usage of new media (social media, the Internet, digital technologies, messaging applications) by young people in political participation. This book not only sheds light on the ways in which new media use contributes to the nature of political participation in Kazakhstan and Russia, but also explains why citizens use these tools in their civic engagement. Dr. Sairambay sets his sights on what occurs downstream, i.e., not in the minds of political leaders and/or well known oppositionists, but on the ground in specific contexts such as cities, towns, and villages by young people.

For a similar interview in the Russian language, see Dr. Sairambay’s podcast episode with the University of Tartu’s Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies.

Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based writer and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context.

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Phil Haun, "Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War: Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Aug 25, 2024

Tactical Air Power and the Vietnam War: Explaining Effectiveness in Modern Air Warfare(Cambridge UP, 2023) introduces a much-needed theory of tactical air power to explain air power effectiveness in modern warfare with a particular focus on the Vietnam War as the first and largest modern air war. Phil Haun shows how in the Rolling Thunder, Commando Hunt, and Linebacker air campaigns, independently air power repeatedly failed to achieve US military and political objectives. In contrast, air forces in combined arms operations succeeded more often than not. In addition to predicting how armies will react to a lethal air threat, he identifies operational factors of air superiority, air-to-ground capabilities, and friendly ground force capabilities, along with environmental factors of weather, lighting, geography and terrain, and cover and concealment in order to explain air power effectiveness. The book concludes with analysis of modern air warfare since Vietnam along with an assessment of tactical air power relevance now and for the future.

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Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019) Aug 24, 2024

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, Chater first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.

Dr. Nick Chater is Professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School and cofounder of Decision Technology Ltd. He has contributed to more than two hundred articles and book chapters and is author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books.

Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness.

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Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019) Aug 23, 2024

Butterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies. And yet their populations are declining at an alarming rate, to the extent that even the seemingly ubiquitous Monarch could conceivably go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Many other, more obscure, butterfly species are already perilously close to extinction. For the last 20 years, Nick Haddad has worked to identify and save some of the rarest butterflies on earth, a quest that has taken him to both surprisingly ordinary and extraordinarily inhospitable areas, including a swampy, active artillery range on a military installation in North Carolina. It has also led him to some surprising conclusions about the best ways to protect these increasingly endangered butterflies.

In The Last Butterflies: A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature (Princeton UP, 2019), Haddad profiles five such species – the ones he has determined to be the rarest of all – and takes us into each one’s unique habitat, life cycle, and existential challenges. From the Crystal Skipper, bouncing over sand dunes adjacent to vacation homes on barrier islands, to the Schaus’ Swallowtail, confined to increasingly remote areas of the Florida Keys, Haddad shows how human activities have affected rare butterfly populations. His unexpected conclusion is that leaving them in peace is not a viable option; disturbances, both natural and human-caused, are necessary for the ecosystems that support butterfly populations to thrive. One of the hardest lessons for him to absorb was that to save populations, some individuals have to be killed in the process.

Haddad’s intrepid field work – he describes one of his strengths as “an unusual capacity to tolerate harsh environments - informs the story of each butterfly species. His lab’s effort to collect, quantify, propagate, and ultimately perpetuate, the rarest butterflies has led to increasing awareness of how much more biologists have to learn about their natural histories, and how critical such knowledge is to saving them. In perhaps the most dramatic example of unintended consequences, Haddad’s team discovered that the St. Francis Satyr, a small brown butterfly, was protected by regular artillery fire on the Fort Bragg army installation in southern North Carolina. The resulting fires were one disturbance the St. Francis Satyr needed to sustain viable conditions (dams built by beavers was another). In another twist, it turned out that Haddad’s initial efforts to help the species were having the opposite effect. Yet over time, these discoveries led to lessons that ultimately have helped the St. Francis Satyr and can be applied to other conservation efforts.

The Last Butterflies could be read as a warning, but Haddad’s tone is never dire. The book is infused with enthusiasm for conservation efforts, both now and in the future, and with an admiration for the beauty, fragility, and resilience of butterflies. It is an important book for anyone concerned with biodiversity and conservation issues. It’s also an eye-opening and engaging read for anyone with an interest in butterflies.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. She is a longtime butterfly enthusiast and is working, slowly, on a fictional book for middle-grade readers about butterfly conservation.

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Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, "Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age" (Columbia UP, 2023) Aug 23, 2024

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.

Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age(Columbia UP, 2023) explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.

Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.

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Michele Santamaria and Nicole Pfannenstiel, "Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the Acrl Framework" (ACRL, 2024) Aug 20, 2024

Teaching our students how to become flexible and accurate evaluators of information requires teaching them adaptable processes and not static heuristics. Our conventional information literacy teaching and learning tools are simply not up to tackling the life-long, real-world challenges and transferable applications required by today's evolving information landscape.

Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework (ACRL, 2024) by Michele Santamaria and A. Nicole Pfannenstiel (2024, ACRL) provides librarians and non-librarian practitioners with ways to teach and learn with social media. It addresses how to broadly conceptualize information literacy teaching with social media and allay any student reluctance to using social media for academic purposes. It proposes how to map some of the ACRL threshold concepts onto specific social media platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, while providing general guidance for if and when those platforms change. There are eight concrete, cross-disciplinary lesson plans that factor in design, assessment, and student engagement. Finally, the book considers how up-and-coming platforms might empower students to be critical content creators and encourage librarians and faculty to support and create new information literacy initiatives on their campuses. Information Literacy and Social Media demonstrates how to engage students with and through social media platforms and teach them to embrace their role as information creators through engagement with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This is the step that they must take to truly be metaliterate in the creative and ethical ways that make information literacy an essential college competency.

New Books Network listener can receive 20% off this title through the ALA Store using the promo code: ACRL5456P.

Michele Santamaría is the Learning Design Librarian at Millersville University.

Nicole Pfannenstiel, PhD., is a student-centered faculty member of the English & World Languages department at Millersville University.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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12 Angry Alaskans: Re-Examining the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Case Aug 16, 2024

This is part #2 of a the (ir)Rational Alaskans, a Cited Podcast series that re-examines the legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Last episode, the spill devastates Cordova, Alaska. In this second part, 12 Angry Alaskans, a jury of ordinary Alaskans picks up our story. They muddle through the most devastating, and most complicated, environmental disaster in US history. How would they decide the case?

Subscribe today to ensure you do not miss our finale, Damaging Rationality, which examines the forgotten academic story behind Exxon’s legal appeals. You can also listen to a trailer today. The (ir)Rational Alaskans is a partnership with Canada’s National Observer. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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Noah Heringman, "Deep Time: A Literary History" (Princeton UP, 2023) Aug 14, 2024

In Deep Time: A Literary History(Princeton UP, 2023), Noah Heringman, Curators’ Professor of English at the University of Missouri, presents a “counter-history” of deep time. This counter-history acknowledges and investigates the literary and imaginary origins of the idea of deep time, from eighteen-century narratives of voyages around the world to William Blake’s ballads and writings by Charles Darwin. This approach to the idea of deep time and the history of its formation engages with contemporary debates over the concept of an “Anthropocene” and the more general problem of sequencing and understanding the Earth’s time.

The book’s main contribution is to show that the idea of deep time is not exclusively a scientific and geologic concept. In order to be properly understood and responsibly used, this idea needs to be approached as “a field of imagination,” which has been shaped by the entangled histories of exploration, colonialism, natural sciences, archeology, and literary forms. Deep Time is both a surprising exploration of the forms that “the fantasy of a legible earth history” took between the eighteen and the nineteenth centuries and an invitation to reflect on how these forms might have left their marks on our current attempts at framing the depth and strangeness of the Earth’s time.

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Heather Murray, "Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) Aug 13, 2024

Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Dr. Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films.

This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Craig Gent, "Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work" (Verso, 2024) Aug 13, 2024

Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.

In Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work(Verso, 2024), Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.

Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres.

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Aimee Louise Middlemiss, "Invisible Labours: The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England" (Berghahn Books, 2024) Aug 12, 2024

Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labour: The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England (Berghahn, 2024) by Dr. Aimee Louise Middlemiss describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester pregnancy loss produces specific medical and social experiences, revealing an underlying teleological ontology of pregnancy. Some women then understand their pregnancy through kinship with the unborn baby.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Matthew Evangelista, "Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945: Bombing among Friends" (Routledge, 2024) Aug 11, 2024

Tens of thousands of Italian civilians perished in the Allied bombing raids of World War II. More of them died after the Armistice of September 1943 than before, when the air attacks were intended to induce Italy’s surrender.

Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945 (Routledge, 2023) addresses this seeming paradox, by examining the views of Allied political and military leaders, Allied air crews, and Italians on the ground. It tells the stories of a little-known diplomat (Myron Charles Taylor), military strategist (Solly Zuckerman), resistance fighter (Aldo Quaranta), and peace activist (Vera Brittain) – architects and opponents of the bombing strategies. It describes the fate of ordinary civilians, drawing on a wealth of local and digital archival sources, memoir accounts, novels, and films, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro.

The book will be of interest to readers concerned about the ethical, legal, and human dimensions of bombing and its effects on civilians, to students of military strategy and Italian history, and to World War II buffs. They will benefit from a people-focused history that draws on a range of eclectic and rarely used sources in English and Italian.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

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Daniel Kahneman’s Forgotten Legacy: Investigating Exxon-Funded Psychological Research Aug 09, 2024

After the unprecedented Exxon Valdez oil spill, a jury of ordinary Alaskans decided that Exxon had to be punished. However, Exxon fought back against their punishment. They did so, in-part, by supporting research that suggested jurors are irrational. This work came from an esteemed group of psychologists, behavioural economists, and legal theorists–including Daniel Kahneman, and Cass Sunstein.

In this three-part series in partnership with Canada’s National Observer, Cited Podcast investigates the forgotten legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the research that followed. This first part, an Alaskan Nightmare, covers the spill and its immediate effects. Subsequent episodes will run weekly. Subscribe today to ensure you do not miss part #2, 12 Angry Alaskans, and part #3, Damaging Rationality.

This is episode five of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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Neoliberalism and the University, Part 2 Aug 09, 2024

This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

Today, our hosts, Anjali DasSarma and Sim Gill, present the second episode in a two-part series on neoliberalism and the state of the university as a deeply powerful structure, along with two incredible scholars: Professor Natalie Fenton and Professor Alison Hearn.

In this episode, we delve into the intricate mechanisms of capitalism, unpacking how metrics, the pressure to "publish or perish," and intellectual extraction shape the academic landscape. From the commodification of knowledge to the erosion of job security, we'll shine a light on some of the systemic forces at play in higher education. We also unpack the rhetoric surrounding Elon Musk and his impact on the age of artificial intelligence, to consider how AI tools like ChatGPT are shifting debates about teaching and student evaluation methods.

Amidst these challenges, we'll also uncover the power of the ideological project of hope. Join us as we engage in a thought-provoking discussion on information, communication, and knowledge production.

In this episode you will hear about:

AI and job security
How metrics, “publishing or perishing,” and intellectual extraction function under capitalism
What the ideological project of hope offers us
Community organizing, resistance, and learning

Guest Biographies:

Natalie Fenton: Natalie is a Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths University.

Alison Hearn: Alison is a professor in the Department of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

Host Biographies:

Anjali DasSarma: Anjali DasSarma is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sim Gill: Sim Gill is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and the Center on Digital Culture and Society.

Credits

Interview by: Anjali DasSarma and Sim Gill Produced by: Eszter Zimanyi
Edited by: Anjali DasSarma and Matt Parker
Sound Mixing by: Matt Parker
Music by: Zoe Zhao Blog post written by: Anjali DasSarma and Sim Gill

Keywords: neoliberalism, higher education, artificial intelligence, community organizing

This episode was recorded on November 15th, 2023 at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

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Alice Mah, "Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation" (Duke UP, 2023) Aug 08, 2024

Is a green future possible? In Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (Duke UP, 2023), Alice Mah, a Professor in Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow examines the practices of the petrochemical industry, along with the communities living with, and resisting, its impact. Offering ethnographic and theoretical reflections on this often overlooked and hidden part of the oil and plastics production chain, the book offers a new perspective on our present environmental crisis. Diagnosing the acuteness of problems as well as the challenges of solutions, the book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand our planet and environment. The book is available open access here.

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The GiveWell Method Aug 07, 2024

In this episode, Caleb Zakarin and Uri Bram dive into the world of effective charitable giving through the lens of GiveWell, an organization known for its rigorous evaluation of charities. Uri explains how GiveWell identifies and recommends high-impact charities, discussing the data-driven criteria and ethical considerations behind their assessments. The conversation highlights real-world examples of how smart giving can lead to substantial, measurable benefits. Whether you're a seasoned donor or new to philanthropy, this episode offers valuable insights into making your contributions truly count.

Please consider donating with GiveWell.

Work at GiveWell. A great job for academics considering an alternative path.

Uri Bram is head of communications at GiveWell and CEO of The Browser.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Andrew Denning, "Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa" (Cornell UP, 2024) Aug 07, 2024

In Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organised colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole.

European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pressures of constructing and maintaining roads rendered colonial administration thin, ineffective, and capricious. Automotive empire emerged as the European solution to the transport problem, but revealed weakness as much as it extended power.

As Automotive Empire reveals, motor vehicles and roads seemed the ideal solution to the colonial transport problem. They were cheaper and quicker to construct than railroads, overcame the environmental limitations of rivers, and did not depend on the recruitment and supervision of African porters. At this pivotal moment of African colonialism, when European powers transitioned from claiming territories to administering and exploiting them, automotive empire defined colonial states and societies, along with the brutal and capricious nature of European colonialism itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Edward Shanks, "The People of the Ruins" (MIT Press, 2024) Aug 06, 2024

In The People of the Ruins(originally published in 1920), Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neo mediaeval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, he eventually decides that he prefers the post civilised life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.

One of the most critically acclaimed and popular postwar stories of its day, The People of the Ruins captured a feeling that was common among those who had fought and survived the Great War: haunted by trauma and guilt, its protagonist feels out of time and out of place, unsure of what is real or unreal. Shanks implies in this seminal work, as Dr. Paul March-Russell explains in the book's introduction, that the political system was already corrupt before the story began, and that Bolshevism and anarchism—and the resulting civil wars—merely accelerated the world's inevitable decline.

A satire of Wellsian techno-utopian novels, The People of the Ruins is a bold, entertaining, and moving postapocalyptic novel contemporary readers won't soon forget.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Thomas A. Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, "Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change" (Oregon State UP, 2021) Aug 06, 2024

Bringing together philosophy, jurisprudence, and a deep concern for the environment, Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change offers an inspiring and generative way of thinking about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. In particular, Thomas Kearns and Kathleen Dean Moore provide readers with insight into the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal as well as the wide-ranging and deeply-felt impacts of fracking, interspersing legal analysis, excerpts of Tribunal testimony, and reflections by climate writers like Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber. The book's structure even creatively mirrors that of the Tribunal, offering a collage of insight to any reader interested in human rights and environmental issues—it is a work of deep dedication to thinking critically and deeply about how to face not only the environmental degradation caused by fracking, but also other kinds of harms caused by resource extraction and corporate interests. Rather than slip into climate nihilism, Bearing Witness seeks to name, investigate, and claim rights around environmental harms felt by humans and non-humans alike.

In the face of the increasing, globally-felt impacts of climate change, Kearns and Dean Moore provide us with a human-rights centered framework for engaging with and addressing some of the most pressing questions of our time.

Thomas A. Kearns is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at North Seattle College, and is Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory. In 2015, he helped draft the international Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change, and in 2018, co-organized the International Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change, which forms much of the basis for this book. His work is currently centred around facilitating youth climate courts.

Kathleen Dean Moore is a Distinguished Philosophy Professor Emerita at Oregon State University, and longstanding public advocate for climate justice and ecological thriving. Her concern for climate catastrophe led her to leave her academic position to speak and write on environmental crises. Her numerous books and essays—many award-winning—focus on environmental ethics and climate crises, and she has published widely in academic and non-academic fora alike.

Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion.

Further reading and works discussed in this episode:

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking, and Climate Change
Film by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University, Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change
Kathleen Dean Moore and Bob Haverluck, Take Heart(OSU Press)
Youth Climate Courts website

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Mark Walker, "Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima" (Cambridge UP, 2024) Aug 05, 2024

Who were the German scientists who worked on atomic bombs during World War II for Hitler's regime? How did they justify themselves afterwards?

Examining the global influence of the German uranium project and postwar reactions to the scientists involved, Mark Walker explores the narratives surrounding 'Hitler's bomb'. The global impacts of this project were cataclysmic. Credible reports of German developments spurred the American Manhattan Project, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in turn the Soviet efforts. After the war these scientists' work was overshadowed by the twin shocks of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima (Cambridge UP, 2024) sheds light on the postwar criticism and subsequent rehabilitation of the German scientists, including the controversial legend of Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's visit to occupied Copenhagen in 1941. This scientifically accurate but non-technical history examines the impact of German efforts to harness nuclear fission, and the surrounding debates and legends.

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Jeremy Black, "Histories of War" (Pen & Sword Military, 2024) Aug 04, 2024

A global account of histories of war, from Antiquity to the present day, Histories of War (Pen & Sword Military, 2024) shows how the varied modes of representation record political, cultural and social developments as well as military events. Covers all forms of discussion and commemoration from statuary to scholarship, films to novels. Important not only to those interested in the history of war but also to those concerned with culture and history in general.

This erudite volume on the theory and practice of military history will interest a wide readership including both professional historians of war and those concerned with its broader philosophical dimension. The author - a well established authority in European history - has provided an informed, rigorous analysis of a difficult topic. It will delight those who seek enlightenment of the historian's craft, military or otherwise.

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Mitchel P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz, "Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb" (Reaktion Books, 2024) Aug 02, 2024

Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mitchel P. Roth and Dr. Mahmut Cengiz unfolds the gripping history of weaponized mail, offering the first ever comprehensive exploration of this sinister phenomenon. Spanning two centuries, the book unveils the history of postal bombs, describing the evolution of both explosives and the postal services that facilitated their deadly use. From an eighteenth-century incident involving Jonathan Swift to modern acts of terror by groups like the IRA and the suffragettes and lone wolves such as the Unabomber, it uncovers the surprising ubiquity of mail bombs. This chronological account meticulously covers each decade, from early anarchists and world wars through the Cold War to the rise of the serial bomber. Astounding in scope, this book sheds light on the psychopathy, motivations and political implications behind murder by mail.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Edward Kaplan, "The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age" (Cornell UP, 2022) Aug 02, 2024

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book,The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age(Cornell UP, 2022).

The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC).

From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States.

Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC’s reports offered the best estimates of the butcher’s bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.

Taken with the intelligence community’s assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC’s work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

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Monica Berger, "Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications" (ACRL, 2024) Jul 31, 2024

Predatory publishing is a complex problem that harms a broad array of stakeholders and concerns across the scholarly communications system. It shines a light on the inadequacies of scholarly assessment and related rewards systems, contributes to the marginalization of scholarship from less developed countries, and negatively impacts the acceptance of open access. To fix what is broken in scholarly communications, academic librarians must act as both teachers and advocates and partner with other stakeholders who have the agency to change how scholarship is produced, assessed, and rewarded.

Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications (ACRL, 2024) by Monica Berger is a unique and comprehensive exploration of predatory publishing in four parts: Background; Characteristics and Research; The Geopolitics of Scholarly Publishing; and Responses and Solutions. It examines the history of predatory publishing and basics of scholarly assessment; identifies types of research misconduct and unethical scholarly behaviors; provides critical context to predatory publishing and scholarly communications beyond the Global North; and offers structural and pedagogical solutions and teaching materials for librarians to use in their work with authors, students, faculty, and other stakeholders. Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications gives powerful insight into predatory publishing across the world, inside and outside of the library community, and provides tools for understanding and teaching its impact and contributing to its improvement.

Monica Berger is the Instruction and Scholarly Communications Librarian and Professor at the New York City College of Technology, City University of New York.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Kate McDonald on Asian Mobility History as Labor History Jul 29, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Kate McDonald, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, about her fascinating research on the history of mobility in Asia and how it looks different when we approach it as a history of work and labor. The pair traverse McDonald’s career from her current project, The Rickshaw and the Railroad: Human-Powered Transport in the Age of the Machine, to her first book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (U California Press, 2017) to digital humanities projects she has helped lead. Along the way, they talk about the craft of historical research and what we can learn by revisiting classic texts with mobility and the work of transportation in mind.

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Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media" (Duke UP, 2023) Jul 26, 2024

Welcome to the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

In this episode, Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh joins our host, Zehra Husain, to discuss her latest book, The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media(Duke UP, 2023).

Over the course of the interview, you’ll learn about:

The origins of the book and how Ghosh became interested in the body as a material medium
The importance of conceptualizing global epidemics in multiscalar ways
What Ghosh means by multispecies relationality and “lively media”
The distinctions between the “global” and the “planetary”
Ghosh’s research process for the book and her thoughts on using an ethnographic mode
The media archive Ghosh assembled while conducting research for the book
How and why Ghosh conceptualizes blood as media in the book
The expansive sites, scales, and temporalities that Ghosh tracks across The Virus Touch

…and much more!

About the book

“In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.” Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website!

Guest Biography

Bishnupriya Ghosh publishes in global media cultures, environmental media, and critical health studies.

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Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels, "Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War" (Oxford UP, 2024) Jul 26, 2024

War in the 21st century will remain a chameleon that takes on different forms and guises. Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War (Oxford University Press, 2024) edited by Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels offers the first comprehensive update and revision of ideas about the future of war since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the war has fundamentally shifted our perspective on the nature and character of future war, but also cautions against marginalising many other parallel trends, types of war, and ways of waging them.

World-renowned international experts from the War Studies field consider the impact of the war in Ukraine on the broader social phenomenon of war: they analyse visions of future war; examine the impact of technological innovation on its conduct; assess our ability to anticipate its future; and consider lessons learned for leaders, soldiers, strategists, scholars and concerned citizens.

Beyond Ukraine features contributions from Azar Gat, Beatrice Heuser, Antulio Echevarria, Audrey Cronin, T.X. Hammes, Kenneth Payne, Frank Hoffman, David Betz, Jan Willem Honig, and many other pre-eminent thinkers on the past, present and future of war—including an afterword by the late Christopher Coker.

Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) and a Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands’ War Studies Research Centre of the Netherlands Defence Academy.

Jeffrey H. Michaels PhD is the IEN Senior Fellow in American Foreign Policy and International Security at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, "Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) Jul 24, 2024

Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable.

In Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Kirsten Moore-Sheeley untangles the complicated history of insecticide-treated nets as it unfolded transnationally and in Kenya specifically—a key site of insecticide-treated net research—to reveal how the development of this intervention was deeply enmeshed with the emergence of the contemporary global health enterprise.

While public health workers initially conceived of nets as a stopgap measure that could be tailored to impoverished, rural health systems in the early 1980s, nets became standardised market goods with the potential to save lives and promote economic development globally. This shift attracted donor resources for malaria control amid the rise of neoliberal regimes in international development, but it also perpetuated a paradigm of fighting malaria and poverty at the level of individual consumers. Africans' experiences with insecticide-treated nets illustrate the limitations of this paradigm and provide a warning for the precariousness of malaria control efforts today.

Drawing on archival, published, and oral historical evidence from three continents, Dr. Moore-Sheeley reveals the important role Africans have played in shaping global health science and technology. In placing both insecticide-treated nets and Africa at the center of global health history, this book sheds new light on how and why commodity-based health interventions have become so entrenched as solutions to global disease control as well as the challenges these interventions pose for at-risk populations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Quantifying the American Mind: George Gallup, and the Promise of Political Polling Jul 24, 2024

Early pollsters thought they had the psychological tools to quantify American mind, thereby enabling a truly democratic polity that would be governed by a rational public opinion. Today, we malign the misinformed public and dismiss the deluge of frivolous polls. How did the rational public become the phantom public? We tell the story of George Gallup, his critics, and also examine alternatives to political polling.

This is episode three of Cited Podcast’s returning season, the Rationality Wars. This season tells stories of political and scholarly battles to define rationality and irrationality. For a full list of credits, and for the rest of the episodes, visit the series page.

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Anton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jul 22, 2024

Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, commerce, music, art, architecture, communications, food, and every other corner of society. Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2020), written by the historian of innovation and the RSA’s resident historian Anton Howes, is the fascinating story of this unique institution.

Drawing on exclusive access to a wealth of rare papers and artifacts from the Society’s own archives, Howes shows how the Society of Arts has constantly reinvented itself to keep in step with changing times. The Society has served as a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, purchased and restored an entire village, encouraged the planting of more than sixty million trees, and sought technological alternatives to child labour. Arts and Minds reveals how a society of public-spirited individuals tried to make their country a better place, and draws vital lessons from their triumphs and failures for all would-be reformers today.

Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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David Badre, "On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jul 21, 2024

On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives.

Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done?

In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being. Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do. A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior.

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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Özge Çelikaslan, "Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma" (DPR Barcelona, 2024) Jul 19, 2024

“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma(DPR Barcelona, June 2024) is about those stories and much more. Özge Çelikaslan uses bak.ma, a digital media archive born out of the social movements in Turkey, to guide us through a journey in which archives become sites of other kinds of stories—some of solidarity, activism, and the commons. Çelikaslan uses the concept of archives of the commons reimagining archives as dynamic spaces of commoning in which creative, autonomous platforms are generated collectively to perpetuate knowledge and sociopolitical relations grounded in solidarity and an ethics of care, not in some distant future but in the here and now.

Özge Çelikaslan is a scholar and practitioner whose research interests encompass media historiography, critical audiovisual archival studies, and research-based film/video practices.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Sören Schoppmeier, "Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture" (De Gruyter, 2023) Jul 19, 2024

Videogames have always depicted representations of American culture, but how exactly they feed back into this culture is less obvious. Advocating an action-based understanding of both videogames and culture, this book delineates how aspects of American culture are reproduced transnationally through popular open-world videogames.

Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture (De Gruyter, 2023) proposes an analytic focus on open-world videogames' "ambient operations" and traces practices of "playing American" through the stages of videogame development, gameplay, and reception. Three case studies - concentrating on the Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs, and Red Dead Redemption franchises, respectively - highlight different figurations of "playing American." Thematic foci range from public discourses on systemic racism and neoliberal capitalism to the justification of real-world surveillance practices and to the reconfiguration of the Western in the digital age. Playing American provides those interested in either videogames or American culture with a fresh angle and new concepts regarding its subject matters. It demonstrates that videogames are agents of cultural reproduction that do distinct cultural work for American culture in the twenty-first century.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Thomas Zeller, "Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) Jul 17, 2024

What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.

For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters(Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century.

Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers―landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners―sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.

Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?”

Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria. His publications include:

"Making Austria German Again: Austrofascist ‘Home Guards’ against ‘Austrian Legionaries’, 1933-1934," Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2024
"Borderland Brothers: Austrofascist Competition and Cooperation with National Socialists, 1936–1938," Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023, Winner of Austrian Studies Association’s Max Kade Prize, 2024
"Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019
"Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017.

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Paula Bialski on Middletech, Software Work, and the Culture of Good Enough Jul 15, 2024

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with Paula Bialski, an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, about her recent book, Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough (Princeton UP, 2024). The pair talk about the art of ethnographic study of software work, and how, maybe, our world could do with a healthy dose of good enough-ness. They also scheme about some potential collaborations here on Peoples & Things, which you should definitely keep an eye out for. (You should also check out Paula’s folk pop group, Paula & Karol, whose music was greatly enjoyed while working on this episode.)

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Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020) Jul 15, 2024

Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study?

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are.

Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health.

Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Carl Öhman, "The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Jul 14, 2024

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die.

These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to “interact” with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own—and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity—the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyone—past, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, Öhman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains.

As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change, The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care (U Chicago Press, 2024) will be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past—before it is too late.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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AI and Music: The Future is Here (featuring "There I Ruined It") Jul 13, 2024

It’s the UConn Popcast, and recently UConn’s Center for the Study of Popular Music hosted a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Music. The panel featured Dr. Mitchell Green, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut; Dustin Ballard, a musician and creator of the social media channel “There I Ruined It”; and Dr. Aaron Dial, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humanities and Technoscience Lab at Purdue University.

The conversation addressed AI music creation, production, composition, aesthetics, trends, copyright issues, and algorithms.

The panel was moderated by Professor Jeffrey Ogbar, Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music and Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

Timestamps:

Mitchell Green: 7:00-23:40
Aaron Dial: 23:45-43:55
Dustin Ballard: 44:02-54:32

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Tea Krulos, "American Madness: The Story of the Phantom Patriot and How Conspiracy Theories Hijacked American Consciousness" (Feral House, 2020) Jul 12, 2024

The mainstream news media struggles to understand the power of social media. In contrast, conspiracy advocates, malicious political movements, and even foreign governments have long understood how to harness the power of fear and the fear of power into lucrative outlets for outrage and money. But what happens when the messengers of “inside knowledge” go too far?

Author Tea Krulos tells the story of one man, Richard McCaslin, whose fractured thinking made him the ideal consumer of even the most arcane of conspiracy theories. Acting on the daily rants of Alex Jones and his ilk, McCaslin takes matters into his own hands to stop the unseen powers behind the world’s disasters who congregate at conspiracy world’s Mecca—The Bohemian Grove. It all goes wrong with terrible consequences for the man who styled himself The Phantom Patriot.

McCaslin is not alone, as conspiracy-driven political action has bubbled its way up from the margins of society to the White House. It’s no longer a lone deranged kook convinced of getting secret messages from a cereal box; now, it’s slick videos and well-funded outrage campaigns ready to peddle the latest innuendos and lies in hopes of harnessing the chaos for political gain. What is the long-term effect on people who believe these barely believable stories? Who benefits, and who pays the price?

In American Madness: The Story of the Phantom Patriot and How Conspiracy Theories Hijacked American Consciousness(Feral House, 2020), Krulos investigates and explains the power of conspiracy, and the shared madness it brings on the American psyche.

Tea Krulos is a freelance journalist and author from Milwaukee, WI. Some of his favorite subjects to explore include subcultures and social movements, weird news, the paranormal, and strange personalities. He also writes about local art and entertainment, lifestyle, and food/drink for publications like Milwaukee Magazine, Shepherd Express, and Milwaukee Record. His five non-fiction books are American Madness, Wisconsin Legends & Lore, Apocalypse Any Day Now, Monster Hunters, and Heroes in the Night. He’s also been published in places like Atlas Obscura, Fortean Times, and Scandinavian Traveler and writes a weekly column called “Tea’s Weird Week” at teakrulos.com.

Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos.

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Monika Krause, "Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jul 10, 2024

In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Dr. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.

Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Dr. Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert, "The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2024) Jul 10, 2024

What is data, and why does it matter for us to care about the data traces we leave behind? What are the implications for our lives of how this data is used by other people in other times and places? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, authors Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert introduce their new book and talk about how we can rethink our relationship with data and stay informed to make better decisions in the face of technological uncertainty.

In their latest book, The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in The Age of Algorithmic Surveillance (MIT Press, 2024), Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable and often surprising ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks.

The book focuses primarily on the long-term consequences of humanity's recent rush toward digitizing, storing, and analyzing every piece of data about ourselves and the world we live in. The authors advocate for “slow fixes” regarding our relationship to data, such as creating new laws and regulations, ethics and aesthetics, and models of production for our datafied society.

Aram Sinnreich is an author, professor, and musician. He is Chair of Communication Studies at American University. His books include Mashed Up, The Piracy Crusade, The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property, and A Second Chance for Yesterday (published as R. A. Sinn).

Jesse Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of visual art, sound, and software design at his firm Dark Matter Media. He was the founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University, and he has taught interactive software design at both CalArts and UC San Diego.

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Shannon Vallor, "The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking" (Oxford UP, 2024) Jul 10, 2024

There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords.

In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking(Oxford UP), Shannon Vallor argues that the actual, and very alarming, existential risk of AI that we face right now is quite different. Because some AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or other large language models, can closely mimic the outputs of an understanding mind without having actual understanding, the technology can encourage us to surrender the activities of thinking and reasoning. This poses the risk of diminishing our ability to respond to challenges and to imagine and bring about different futures. In her compelling book, Vallor, who holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, critically examines AI Doomers and Long-termism, the nature of AI in relation to human intelligence, and the technology industry's hand in diverting our attention from the serious risks we face.

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David Alff, "The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region" (U Chicago Press, 2024) Jul 09, 2024

Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. Dr. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (University of Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization.

Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Dr. David Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jul 08, 2024

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—that is, careful consideration of not only what is seen but what is unseen. David assembles wide-ranging examples, from the histories of science and finance to his own research and consultancy, to show how this perspective can shed new light on concepts as classical as random sampling and survey design and as cutting-edge as machine learning and the measurement of honesty. I expect the book to inspire the same enjoyment and reflection in general readers as it is sure to in statisticians and other data analysts.

Suggested companion work: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020) Jul 08, 2024

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In Contraception: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2020), Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily.

Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access

Dr. Donna Drucker leads the English as the Language for Instruction Project, which helps faculty, administrative staff, scientific staff, and students at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany) improve their English abilities for teaching and learning.

Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.

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Sandra Hirsh, "Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) Jul 07, 2024

Building on the success and impact of Library 2020: Today’s Leading Visionaries Describe Tomorrow’s Library by Joseph Janes, Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries(Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) edited by Sandra Hirshupdates, expands upon, and broadens the discussions on the future of libraries and the ways in which they transform information services to best serve their communities. Library 2035 explores the lessons learned over the past decade and forecasts the opportunities, strengths, and challenges for libraries in the future. Contributors including R. David Lankes, Kelvin Watson, Annie Norman, Miguel Figueroa, and Nicole Cooke, along with 25 other library leaders, were asked to describe the “library of 2035” in whatever way they wanted. Their responses to this question will inspire, provoke, challenge, and expand our thinking about the role and importance of libraries in the future. Library leaders, LIS students and faculty will find this book particularly meaningful and useful as we grapple with what the future of libraries and the profession will be.

Dr. Sandra Hirsh hosts the Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries Webcast with contributors to this work

Dr. Sandra Hirsh is the Associate Dean for Academics in the College of Professional and Global Education at San José State University (SJSU). She previously served as professor and director of the SJSU School of Information and worked at HP Labs, Microsoft, and LinkedIn. She is past president of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) and the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T).

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Jeremy Black, "A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today" (Amberley Publishing, 2023) Jul 06, 2024

There were 20,000 miles of railways in 1865 and about a million by 2020. Scale has always been a key theme in railway history. In the First World War, the London and North West Railway transported 325,000 miles of barbed wire and over twelve million pairs of army boots. At the end of the twentieth century, Indian Railways sold 4.5 billion tickets annually.

In A World History of Rail: From the Steam Regime to Today (Amberley Publishing, 2023), Jeremy Black examines how rail transformed the world. While always shaped by commercial interests, the role of the railway was (and is) strategic in the broadest sense: like Roman roads and Chinese canals, it helped develop the economic links that sustained and strengthened the major powers. For example, the railway was fundamental in integrating the frontiers of settlement with the world economy, in the spread of cultivation and ranching, and in the exploitation of mining opportunities. Rail expanded the 'logistical space' of most states. To give one modern example of the political importance of rail, Ukraine's railway is on the 1.52 metre gauge, rather than the 1.435 metre one used in Poland and most of Europe. In 2022, Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine's Prime Minister, declared that the railways there would be rebuilt to the European gauge. This enhanced capability would counter the Russian ability to blockade Ukraine's Black Sea ports, notably Odessa. The plan was not endorsed by the Kremlin...

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Pierre Sokolsky, "Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star" (Columbia UP, 2024) Jul 05, 2024

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 and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of the unchanging celestial realm, and it took observations through telescopes by Galileo and others to establish the reality of solar imperfections. In the nineteenth century, amateur astronomers discovered that sunspots ebb and flow about every eleven years—spurring speculation about their influence on the weather and even the stock market.

Exploring these and many other crucial developments, Pierre Sokolsky provides a history of knowledge of the Sun through the lens of sunspots and the solar cycle. He ranges widely across cultures and throughout history, from the earliest recorded observations of sunspots in Chinese annals to satellites orbiting the Sun today, and from worship of the Sun as a deity in ancient times to present-day scientific understandings of stars and their magnetic fields. Considering how various thinkers sought to solve the puzzle of sunspots, Sokolsky sheds new light on key discoveries and the people who made them, as well as their historical and cultural contexts. Fast-paced, comprehensive, and learned, Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star(Columbia UP, 2024) shows readers our closest star from many new angles.

Garima Garg is a New Delhi based journalist and author.

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Tara Ward, "Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram" (U California Press, 2024) Jul 05, 2024

What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Tara Ward reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Dr. Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalises on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art.

Dr. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Eve Herold, "Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots" (St. Martin's Press, 2024) Jul 04, 2024

The latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence and a preview of the coming decades, based on research and interviews with the world's foremost experts. If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible.

This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots (St. Martin's Press, 2024). Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image. Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future.

Sophia the Robot Tries to Convince the Experts

Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Firuzeh Shokooh Valle, "In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics from the Global South" (Stanford UP, 2023) Jul 04, 2024

Including women in the global South as users, producers, consumers, designers, and developers of technology has become a mantra against inequality, prompting movements to train individuals in information and communication technologies and foster the participation and retention of women in science and technology fields.

In In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure: Feminist Technopolitics from the Global South (Stanford UP, 2023), Firuzeh Shokooh Valle argues that these efforts have given rise to an idealized, female economic figure that combines technological dexterity and keen entrepreneurial instinct with gendered stereotypes of care and selflessness. Narratives about the "equalizing" potential of digital technologies spotlight these women's capacity to overcome inequality using said technologies, ignoring the barriers and circumstances that create such inequality in the first place as well as the potentially violent role of technology in their lives. In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure examines how women in the Global South experience and resist the coopting and depoliticizing nature of these scripts. Drawing on fieldwork in Costa Rica and a transnational feminist digital organization, Shokooh Valle explores the ways that feminist activists, using digital technologies as well as a collective politics that prioritize solidarity and pleasure, advance a new feminist technopolitics.

Firuzeh Shokooh Valle is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Franklin and Marshall College. Previously, she was a journalist in Puerto Rico covering violence against women, the LGBTQI+ community, migration, racism, and social movements, and earned numerous national awards for her investigative work.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Pandemics Perspectives 15: The Dynamic Nature of Science Jul 02, 2024

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, about the differences between science and pseudoscience and how the COVID-19 Pandemic showed that most people don't realize that science is highly dynamic. Gordin is the author of (among other books) of On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience(Oxford UP, 2021).

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

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Jason Hannan, "Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jul 02, 2024

We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?

This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling.

Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Travis B. Williams et al., "The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture" (Brill, 2023) Jul 01, 2024

Media studies is an emerging discipline that is quickly making an impact within the wider field of biblical scholarship. The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture(Brill, 2023) is designed to evaluate the status quaestionis of the Dead Sea Scrolls as products of an ancient media culture, with leading scholars in the Dead Sea Scrolls and related disciplines reviewing how scholarship has addressed issues of ancient media in the past, assessing the use of media criticism in current research, and outlining potential directions for future discussions.

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Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) Jun 30, 2024

Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders.

The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Joshua Schuster, "What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals" (Fordham UP, 2023) Jun 28, 2024

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.

Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.

What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present.

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk.

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Barbara Klinger, "Immortal Films: 'Casablanca' and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic" (U California Press, 2022) Jun 27, 2024

Casablanca is one of the most celebrated Hollywood films of all time, its iconic romance enshrined in collective memory across generations. Drawing from archival materials, industry trade journals, and cultural commentary, in Immortal Films: "Casablanca" and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic (University of California Press, 2022), Dr. Barbara Klinger explores the history of Casablanca's circulation in the United States from the early 1940s to the present by examining its exhibition via radio, repertory houses, television, and video. By resituating the film in the dynamically changing industrial, technological, and cultural circumstances that have defined its journey over eight decades, Dr. Klinger challenges our understanding of its meaning and reputation as both a Hollywood classic and a cult film. Through this single-film survey, Immortal Films proposes a new approach to the study of film history and aesthetics and, more broadly, to cinema itself as a medium in constant interface with other media as a necessary condition of its own public existence and endurance.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Peter Hill, "Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East" (Oneworld Academic, 2024) Jun 26, 2024

Today I talked to Peter Hill about his new book Prophet of Reason: Science, Religion and the Origins of the Modern Middle East (Oneworld Academic, 2024).

In 1813, high in the Lebanese mountains, a thirteen-year-old boy watches a solar eclipse. Will it foretell a war, a plague, the death of a prince? Mikha’il Mishaqa’s lifelong search for truth starts here. Soon he’s reading Newtonian science and the radical ideas of Voltaire and Volney: he loses his religion, turning away from the Catholic Church. Thirty years later, as civil war rages in Syria, he finds a new faith – Evangelical Protestantism. His obstinate polemics scandalise his community. Then, in 1860, Mishaqa barely escapes death in the most notorious event in Damascus: a massacre of several thousand Christians. We are presented with a paradox: rational secularism and violent religious sectarianism grew up together.

By tracing Mishaqa’s life through this tumultuous era, when empires jostled for control, Peter Hill answers the question: What did people in the Middle East actually believe? It’s a world where one man could be a Jew, an Orthodox Christian and a Sunni Muslim in turn, and a German missionary might walk naked in the streets of Valletta.

Peter Hill is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialising in the Arab world in the long nineteenth century. His research focusses on political thought and practice, the politics of religion, and translation and intercultural exchanges. He also has a strong interest in comparative and global history.

Before joining Northumbria University in 2019, Peter was Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He has taught and designed modules in the history of the Middle East and global history, and the history of capitalism. In 2023 he was the winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.

Peter's first book, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He has published several articles on translation, political thought and popular politics in the Middle East, in journals such as Past & Present, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Journal of Global History.

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Living with Digital Surveillance in China Jun 24, 2024

How do Chinese citizens make sense of digital surveillance and live with it? What narratives do they come up with to deal with the daily and all-encompassing reality of life in China? What mental tactics do they apply to dissociate themselves from surveillance? Ariane Ollier-Malaterre explores these questions in her book Living with Digital Surveillance in China (Routledge, 2023).

Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Professor of Management and Canada Research Chair on Digital Regulation at Work and in Life at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada talks with Joanne Kaui about her research that investigates Chinese citizens’ imaginaries about surveillance and privacy from within the Chinese socio-political system.

Based on in-depth qualitative research interviews, detailed diary notes, and extensive documentation, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre attempts to ‘de-Westernise’ the internet and surveillance literature. In the book, she shows how the research participants weave a cohesive system of anguishing narratives on China’s moral shortcomings and redeeming narratives on the government and technology as civilizing forces.

Although many participants cast digital surveillance as indispensable in China, their misgivings, objections, and the mental tactics they employ to dissociate themselves from surveillance convey the mental and emotional weight associated with such surveillance exposure.

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Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard, "Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools" (MIT Press, 2024) Jun 24, 2024

A probing examination of the dynamic history of predictive methods and values in science and engineering that helps us better understand today's cultures of prediction.

The ability to make reliable predictions based on robust and replicable methods is a defining feature of the scientific endeavor, allowing engineers to determine whether a building will stand up or where a cannonball will strike. Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools (MIT Press, 2024), which bridges history and philosophy, uncovers the dynamic history of prediction in science and engineering over four centuries. Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard identify four different cultures, or modes, of prediction in the history of science and engineering: rational, empirical, iterative-numerical, and exploratory-iterative. They show how all four develop together and interact with one another while emphasizing that mathematization is not a single unitary process but one that has taken many forms.

The story is not one of the triumph of abstract mathematics or technology but of how different modes of prediction, complementary concepts of mathematization, and technology coevolved, building what the authors call “cultures of prediction.” The first part of the book examines prediction from early modernity up to the computer age. The second part probes computer-related cultures of prediction, which focus on making things and testing their performance, often in computer simulations. This new orientation challenges basic tenets of the philosophy of science, in which scientific theories and models are predominantly seen as explanatory rather than predictive. It also influences the types of research projects that scientists and engineers undertake, as well as which ones receive support from funding agencies.

Nikki Stevens, PhD is a critical technology researcher and software engineer. Find more of their work here.

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Trish Kahle on the Labor History of Energy Systems Jun 24, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Trish Kahle, Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University-Qatar, about Kahle's new project, "Power Up: A Social History of American Electricity," which focuses especially on the labor history of both constructing and maintaining the electricity grid. They also talk about Kahle's forthcoming book, Energy Citizenship: Coal and Democracy in the American Century(Columbia UP, 2024), which "traces how modern U.S. social citizenship has been shaped by coal miners and the fuel they extracted." The pair also discuss the emerging field of the "energy humanities" and what it means to take a labor-centered approach to energy history.

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Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024) Jun 21, 2024

In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke UP, 2024) Siobhan Angus tells the history of photography through the minerals upon which the medium depends. Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, Angus focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how the mining of bitumen, silver, platinum, iron, uranium, and rare earth elements is a precondition of photography. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, she illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to expose the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism.

This conversation discusses the meta-narrative and performative aspects of some of the photographs shown in the text, dives into some of the stories and examples from Ann Atkin's cyanotypes of the 1800s to Warren Cariou's contemporary bitumin prints, and asks what ethical photography looks like given the resource extraction required.

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M. Girard Dorsey, "Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II" (Cornell UP, 2023) Jun 21, 2024

In Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II (Cornell UP, 2023), M. Girard Dorsey uncovers just how close Britain, the United States, and Canada came to crossing the red line that restrained poison gas during World War II.

Unlike in World War I, belligerents did not release poison gas regularly during the Second World War. Yet, the looming threat of chemical warfare significantly affected the actions and attitudes of these three nations as they prepared their populations for war, mediated their diplomatic and military alliances, and attempted to defend their national identities and sovereignty.

The story of chemical weapons and World War II begins in the interwar period as politicians and citizens alike advocated to ban, to resist, and eventually to prepare for gas use in the next war. Molly Dorsey reveals, through extensive research in multinational archives and historical literature, that although poison gas was rarely released on the battlefield in World War II, experts as well as lay people dedicated significant time and energy to the weapon's potential use; they did not view chemical warfare as obsolete or taboo.

Poison gas was an influential weapon in World War II, even if not deployed in a traditional way, and arms control, for various reasons, worked. Thus, what did not happen is just as important as what did. Holding Their Breath provides insight into these potentialities by untangling World War II diplomacy and chemical weapons use in a new way.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. 

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Paulina Rowinska, "Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers" (Pan Macmillan, 2024) Jun 19, 2024

How does a delivery driver distribute hundreds of packages in a single working day? Why does remote Alaska have such a large airport? Where should we look for elusive serial killers? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and maths.

In Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers (Pan Macmillan, 2024), Dr Paulina Rowinska embarks on a fascinating journey to discover the mathematical foundations of cartography and cartographical influences on mathematics.

From a sixteenth-century map that remains an indispensable navigation tool despite emphasising the North–South divide to public transport maps that both guide and mislead passengers, she reveals how maps and maths shape not only our sense of space and time but also our worldview.

Through entertaining stories, surprising real-world examples and a cast of unforgettable characters, Mapmatics helps us to appreciate the mathematical methods and ideas behind maps. And, by illuminating how our world works, leaves us better equipped to understand and look after it.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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danah boyd on Digital Technology and Everyday Life Jun 17, 2024

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with danah boyd, Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University, about her career and work. The pair discuss boyd's the genesis and intellectual background of boyd's now classic text, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Teens (Yale UP, 2014) as well as her more recent work on digital infrastructure and the US Census Bureau.

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Lisa M. P. Munoz, "Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity" (Columbia UP, 2023) Jun 16, 2024

Women working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic problems block women from advancing or push them out of science and technology entirely.

Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity(Columbia UP, 2023) examines solutions to this persistent gender gap, offering new perspectives on how to make science more equitable and inclusive for all. This book shares stories and insights of women from a range of backgrounds working in various disciplines, illustrating the journeys that brought them to the sciences, the challenges they faced along the way, and the important contributions they have made to their fields. Lisa M. P. Munoz combines these narratives with a wealth of data to illuminate the size and scope of the challenges women scientists face, while highlighting research-based solutions to help overcome these obstacles. She presents groundbreaking studies in social psychology and organizational behavior that are informing novel approaches for combating historic and ongoing inequities.

Through a combined focus on personal experiences and social-science research, this timely book provides both a path toward greater gender equity and an inspiring vision of science and scientists.

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Carlos M. N. Eire, "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" (Yale UP, 2023) Jun 16, 2024

In the early modern era, seemingly impossible stories of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft were common and believable. The important question of the time was not if these things happened, but why. This was particularly true as the rise of Protestantism began to challenge Catholic beliefs in miracles and continued to be the case even after scientific research began to supplant religious belief in these phenomena.

In They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023), Carlos Eire shows how these events were an accepted component of early modern life. Based on firsthand accounts, Eire explores the stories of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and others, to describe a world animated by a different understanding of the natural and supernatural. Eire examines why and how cultural, historical, religious, and scientific contexts plays a role in defining both the possible and the impossible.

Recommended reading:

Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred &

How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

both by Jeffrey J. Kripal.

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Allison J. Pugh, "The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World" (Princeton UP, 2024) Jun 15, 2024

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World(Princeton UP, 2024) explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other in these settings is valuable and worth preserving.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions--from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers--Allison Pugh develops the concept of "connective labor," a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other's humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works.

Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.

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Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, "At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans" (Columbia UP, 2024) Jun 14, 2024

At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans(Columbia UP, 2024) takes readers on a journey from California tidepools to Antarctic poles, showcasing myriad efforts to research and protect marine environments. Through insightful interviews, oceanographer Tessa Hill and science journalist Eric Simons offer a compelling exploration of humanity's relationship with the ocean. They shed light on research methodologies, the ocean's importance, and the vital role of indigenous peoples in ocean stewardship.

Tune in to their interview with the New Books Network, where they share stories from how the research came together, how COVID affected their investigation, and what people can do today to build closer relationships with the ocean.

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More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech Jun 13, 2024

Today’s book is: More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech(MIT Press, 2024), by Meredith Broussard. When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch—it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery? What if they're coded into the system itself?

Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More Than a Glitch how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable. Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences. Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.

Our guest is: Meredith Broussard, who is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, and Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Her academic research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting and ethical AI, with a particular interest in using data analysis for social good.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support the show by downloading, sharing, posting about, or assigning any of our 200+ episodes.

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Julia Wojnowska-Radzińska, "Implications of Pre-Emptive Data Surveillance for Fundamental Rights in the European Union" (Brill Nijhoff, 2023) Jun 12, 2024

InImplications of Pre-Emptive Data Surveillance for Fundamental Rights in the European Union (Brill Nijhoff, 2023) Julia Wojnowska-Radzińska offers a comprehensive legal analysis of various forms of pre-emptive data surveillance adopted by the European legislator and their impact on fundamental rights. It also identifies what minimum guarantees have to be set up to recognize pre-emptive data surveillance as a legitimate measure in a democratic society. The book aims to answer the essential question of how to strike the proper balance between fundamental rights and security interests in the digital age.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network.

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Carl Elliott, "The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No" (Norton, 2024) Jun 12, 2024

The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No (Norton, 2024) is an intellectual inquiry into the moral struggle that whistleblowers face, and why it is not the kind of struggle that most people imagine.

Carl Elliott is a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who was trained in medicine as well as philosophy. For many years he fought for an external inquiry into a psychiatric research study at his own university in which an especially vulnerable patient lost his life. Elliott’s efforts alienated friends and colleagues. The university stonewalled him and denied wrongdoing until a state investigation finally vindicated his claims.

His experience frames the six stories in this book of medical research in which patients were deceived into participating in experimental programs they did not understand, many of which had astonishing and well-concealed mortality rates. Beginning with the public health worker who exposed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ending with the four physicians who in 2016 blew the whistle on lethal synthetic trachea transplants at the Karolinska Institute, Elliott tells the extraordinary stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses, and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.

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Duana Fullwiley, "Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science" (U California Press, 2024) Jun 12, 2024

In Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California Press, 2024), Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history--one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.

Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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John Blaxland and Clare Birgin, "Revealing Secrets: An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence and the Advent of Cyber" (UNSW Press, 2023) Jun 11, 2024

Why does Australia have a national signals intelligence agency? What does it do and why is it controversial? And how significant are its ties with key partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, to this arrangement?

Revealing Secrets: An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence and the Advent of Cyber(University of New South Wales Press, 2023) co-authored by John Blaxland and Clare Birgin is a compelling account of Australian Signals intelligence, its efforts at revealing the secrets of other nations, and keeping ours safe. It brings to light those clever Australians whose efforts were for so long entirely unknown or overlooked. In unearthing this integral, if hidden and little understood, part of Australian statecraft, this book increases our understanding of the past, present and what lies ahead.

John Blaxland is Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University (ANU). He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. He is also formerly a military intelligence officer, Head of SDSC and Director of the ANU Southeast Asia Institute.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Cameron J. Buckner, "From Deep Learning to Rational Machines" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jun 10, 2024

Artificial intelligence started with programmed computers, where programmers would manually program human expert knowledge into the systems. In sharp contrast, today's artificial neural networks – deep learning – are able to learn from experience, and perform at human-like levels of perceptual categorization, language production, and other cognitive abilities at h. This difference has been portrayed as roughly parallel to the philosophical divide between rationalists or nativists on the one hand, and empiricists on the other.

In From Deep Learning to Rational Machines (Oxford UP, 2024), Cameron Buckner lays out a program for future AI development based on discussions of the human mind by such figures as David Hume, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Sophie de Grouchy, among others. Buckner, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, offers a conceptual framework that occupies a middle ground between the extremes of 'blank slate' empiricism and innate domain specific faculty psychology, and defends the claim that neural network modelers have found, at least in some cases, a sweet spot of abstraction from the messy details of biological cognition so as to capture the relevant similarities in their artificial networks.

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Pandemic Perspectives 13: The Need for Genuine Communication Jun 09, 2024

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Elizabeth Anderson, Max Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy at the University of Michigan, on the need for making increased efforts to explicitly create occasions for people to frankly communicate with each other during a crisis.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Sharrona Pearl, "Do I Know You?: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) Jun 08, 2024

In Do I Know You? From Faceblindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Sharrona Pearl explores the fascinating category of face recognition and the "the face recognition spectrum," which ranges from face blindness at one end to super recognition at the other. Super recognizers can recall faces from only the briefest exposure, while face blind people lack the capacity to recognize faces at all, including those of their closest loved ones. Informed by archival research, the latest neurological studies, and testimonials from people at both ends of the spectrum, Dr. Pearl tells a nuanced story of how we relate to each other through our faces.

The category of face recognition is relatively new despite the importance of faces in how we build relationships and understand our own humanity. Dr. Pearl shows how this most tacit of knowledge came to enter the scientific and diagnostic field despite difficulties with identifying it. She offers a grounded framework for how we evaluate others and draw conclusions about them, with significant implications for race, gender, class, and disability. Dr. Pearl explores the shifting ideas around the face-recognition spectrum, explaining the effects of these diagnoses on real people alongside implications for how facial recognition is studied and understood. Face blindness is framed as a disability, while super recognition is framed as a superpower with no meaningful disadvantages. This superhero rhetoric is tied to the use of super recognizers in criminal detection, prosecution, and other forms of state surveillance. Do I Know You? demonstrates a humanistic approach to the study of the brain, one that offers an entirely new method for examining this fundamental aspect of human interaction.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Aaron Eddens, "Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa" (U California Press, 2024) Jun 06, 2024

In Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa(University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Dr. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South.

Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Dr. Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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AI and the Humanities: Nina Beguš DIscusses "Artificial Humanities" Jun 03, 2024

In this debut conversation, we speak to Dr. Nina Beguš, a researcher at UC Berkeley and the founder of InterpretAI who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Listen to learn about Nina’s path at the intersection of AI and the humanities, the challenges and rewards of working across disciplines, what questions to ask as an ethical researcher, and practical advice for how to succeed in a multifaceted, multidisciplinary career in today’s fast-changing digital landscape.

Beguš' first book, titled Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, is currently under an advance contract with the University of Michigan Press.

Towards Knowledge is a Latent Knowledge podcast series where we interview industry and academic leaders about research in the real world — from career development to the most pressing philosophical questions in today’s changing research landscape.

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Gretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020) Jun 01, 2024

Brynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.

Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Robert Phillip Kolker and Marsha Gordon, "Film, Form, and Culture" (Routledge, 2024) May 30, 2024

This fifth edition ofFilm, Form, and Culture (Routledge, 2024) offers a lively introduction to both the formal and cultural aspects of film.

With extensive analysis of films past and present, this textbook explores how films are constructed from part to whole: from the smallest unit of the shot to the way shots are edited together to create narrative. Robert P. Kolker and Marsha Gordon demystify the technical aspects of filmmaking and demonstrate how fiction and nonfiction films engage with culture. Over 265 images provide a visual index to the films and issues being discussed. This new edition includes: an expanded examination of digital filmmaking and distribution in the age of streaming; attention to superhero films throughout; a significantly longer chapter on global cinema with new or enlarged sections on a variety of national cinemas (including cinema from Nigeria, Senegal, Burkina Faso, South Korea, Japan, India, Belgium, and Iran); new or expanded discussions of directors, including Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Oscar Micheaux, Agnès Varda, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Jafar Panahi, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and Penny Lane; and new, in-depth explorations of films, including Within Our Gates (1919), Black Girl (1966), Creed (2015), Moonlight (2016), Wonder Woman (2017), Get Out (2017), Black Panther (2018), Parasite (2019), Da 5 Bloods (2020), The French Dispatch (2021), The Power of the Dog (2021), RRR (2022), and Tár (2022).

Robert P. Kolker is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is the author/editor of several books on film including The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies (2008), A Cinema of Loneliness, 4th edition (2011), The Cultures of American Film (2014), The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema (2016), Politics Goes to the Movies (2018), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (2019), and, with Nathan Abrams, Kubrick: An Odyssey (2024).

Marsha Gordon is Professor and Director of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, USA. She is the author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (2023), Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (2017), and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (2008), and co-editor of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (2019) and Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012).

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (2016), he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His work also appears on Pages and Frames.

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Edwin McRae, "Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds" (Narrative, 2024) May 28, 2024

Game worlds differ from traditional fictional worlds. While literary and cinematic worlds are written to host character arcs and plots, game worlds need to be designed to host game mechanics. While Princess Leia, Mad Max and Daenerys Targaryen may leave their marks on their fictional worlds, it is YOU, the player, who will carve your personal experience into the digital firmament of every game world you inhabit.

In Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds(Narrative, 2024), games industry veteran Edwin McRae will guide you through the evergreen principles of player-centric game world design.

How do you create game-based environments and cultures that resonate with reality? This senior narrative designer will share a range of field-tested techniques that will help you design instead of derive.

How do you organise all that lore? This is a common pain point for world builders and Edwin will offer tools and tactics that keep game bibles scoped, searchable and sensible.

How do you make your game world fun? Through the player-centric perspective, you’ll see how storytelling can be used to support and enrich game play and achieve that Shangri-La of gaming experience... ludo-narrative harmony!

Play is what we do. Story is why we do it. And the game world is where it all happens.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Joanna Guldi, "The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History" (Cambridge UP, 2022) May 28, 2024

The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History (Cambridge UP, 2022) celebrates the bold new research now possible because of text mining: the art of counting words over time. However, this book also presents a warning: without help from the humanities, data science can distort the past and lead to perilous errors. The book opens with a rogue's gallery of errors, then tours the ground-breaking analyses that have resulted from collaborations between humanists and data scientists.

Jo Guldi explores how text mining can give a glimpse of the changing history of the past - for example, how quickly Americans forgot the history of slavery. Textual data can even prove who was responsible in Congress for silencing environmentalism over recent decades. The book ends with an impassioned vision of what text mining in defence of democracy would look like, and why humanists need to be involved.

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Chris Haufe, "Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?" (Cambridge UP, 2023) May 28, 2024

There is in certain circles a widely held belief that the only proper kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge. This belief often runs parallel to the notion that legitimate knowledge is obtained when a scientist follows a rigorous investigative procedure called the 'scientific method'.

InDo the Humanities Create Knowledge? (Cambridge UP, 2023), Chris Haufe challenges this idea. He shows that what we know about the so-called scientific method rests fundamentally on the use of finely tuned human judgments directed toward certain questions about the natural world. He suggests that this dependence on judgment in fact reveals deep affinities between scientific knowledge and another, equally important, sort of comprehension: that of humanistic creative endeavour. His wide-ranging and stimulating new book uncovers the unexpected unity underlying all our efforts – whether scientific or arts-based – to understand human experience. In so doing, it makes a vital contribution to broader conversation about the value of the humanities in an increasingly STEM-saturated educational culture.

If it is agreed that the humanities are valuable and essential, are there better and worse ways in which to generate humanistic knowledge? This book offers compelling answers.

Chris Haufe is the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of How Knowledge Grows (2022) and Fruitfulness (2024).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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American Innovation, American Vitality: A Conversation with Chris Buskirk May 22, 2024

How can we restore America's frontier spirit, foster innovation, and stave off decay? Chris Buskirk sits down to discuss his new book America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay. Along the way, he delves into the history of innovation from Augustan Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment to Silicon Valley, whether America is an oligarchy or an aristocracy, how our education system can better support American needs, and more.

Chris Buskirk is the founder, editor, publisher of the magazine American Greatness, as well as a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. A serial entrepreneur, he is also the Founder & Chief Investment Officer of 1789 Capital.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Rob Drew, "Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable" (Duke UP, 2023) May 20, 2024

Well into the new millennium, the analog cassette tape continues to claw its way back from obsolescence. New cassette labels emerge from hipster enclaves while the cassette’s likeness pops up on T-shirts, coffee mugs, belt buckles, and cell phone cases. In Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital.

Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Dr. Drew examines a moment in the early 1980s when music industry representatives argued that the cassette encouraged piracy. At the same time, 1980s indie rock culture used the cassette as a symbol to define itself as an outsider community. Indie’s love affair with the cassette culminated in the mixtape, which advanced indie’s image as a gift economy. By telling the cassette’s long and winding history, Dr. Drew demonstrates that sharing cassettes became an acceptable and meaningful mode of communication that initiated rituals of independent music recording, re-recording, and gifting.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Daniel P. Ott, "Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery" (U Nebraska Press, 2023) May 20, 2024

Cyrus McCormick invented the revolutionary mechanical reaper in 1831...right? At least, that's how the story has been told for decades. In Harvesting History: McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery(U Nebraska Press, 2023), National Park Service historian Daniel Ott argues that not only have textbooks and other sources of historical knowledge gotten this wrong, but that they've done so because of a massive PR campaign. Ott argues that McCormick, his family, and the company that bears his name, all engaged in a multi-decade long fight to convince potential buyers that their reaper was the first, and given the potentially millions of dollars at stake in a competitive farm implement marketplace, claiming so was no exercise in arcane trivia. In the late 19th and early 20th century. McCormick's company recruited salesmen, advertisers, and newly professionalized historians to shape a narrative about the reaper that sanded over the complex and contingent nature of its invention, and turned McCormick into an American hero. The history told by these groups was malleable enough to fit changing times, as populists and progressives came and went - the claim of "first" gave McCormick's reaper credibility its competitiors could never match. Harvesting History is a story about the importance of getting the story right, and why some people will go to great lengths to make sure we keep getting the story wrong.

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Mona Simion, "Resistance to Evidence" (Cambridge UP, 2024) May 19, 2024

We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, but efforts to spread this knowledge often encounter resistance to evidence. The phenomenon of resistance to evidence, while subject to thorough investigation in social psychology, is acutely under-theorised in the philosophical literature.

Mona Simion's Resistance to Evidence (Cambridge UP, 2024) is concerned with positive epistemology: it argues that we have epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs on available and undefeated evidence. In turn, our resistance to easily available evidence is unpacked as an instance of epistemic malfunctioning. Simion develops a full positive, integrated epistemological picture in conjunction with novel accounts of evidence, defeat, norms of inquiry, permissible suspension, and disinformation. Her book is relevant for anyone with an interest in the nature of evidence and justified belief and in the best ways to avoid the high-stakes practical consequences of evidence resistance in policy and practice.

Mona Simion is a philosopher. She is professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow where she is also deputy director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Simion's work focuses on issues in epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Raven Simone Maragh-Lloyd, "Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2024) May 19, 2024

Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age(U California Press, 2024) explores the creative range of Black digital users and their responses to varying forms of oppression, utilizing cultural, communicative, political, and technological threads both on and offline.

Raven Maragh-Lloyd demonstrates how Black users strategically rearticulate their responses to oppression in ways that highlight Black publics’ historically rich traditions and reveal the shifting nature of both dominance and resistance, particularly in the digital age. Through case studies and interviews, Maragh-Lloyd reveals the malleable ways resistance can take shape and the ways Black users artfully demonstrate such modifications of resistance through strategies of survival, reprieve, and community online. Each chapter grounds itself in a resistance strategy, such as Black humor, care, or archiving, to show the ways that Black publics reshape strategies of resistance over time and across media platforms.

Linking singular digital resistance movements while arguing for Black publics as strategic content creators who connect resistance strategies from our past to suit our present needs, Black Networked Resistance encourages readers to create and cultivate lasting communities necessary for social and political change by imagining a future of joy, community, and agency through their digital media practices.

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Priya Satia, "Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution" (Bloomsbury, 2019) May 18, 2024

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution transformed Britain from an agricultural and artisanal economy to one dominated by industry, ushering in unprecedented growth in technology and trade and putting the country at the center of the global economy. But the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution, anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses, overlooks the true root of economic and industrial expansion: the lucrative military contracting that enabled the country's near-constant state of war in the eighteenth century. Demand for the guns and other war materiel that allowed British armies, navies, mercenaries, traders, settlers, and adventurers to conquer an immense share of the globe in turn drove the rise of innumerable associated industries, from metalworking to banking.

Bookended by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2019) traces the social and material life of British guns over a century of near-constant war and violence at home and abroad. Priya Satia develops this story through the life of prominent British gun-maker and Quaker Samuel Galton Jr., who was asked to answer for the moral defensibility of producing guns as new uses like anonymous mass violence rose. Reconciling the pacifist tenet of his faith with his perception of the economic realities of the time, Galton argued that war was driving the industrial economy, making everyone inescapably complicit in it. Through his story, Satia illuminates Britain's emergence as a global superpower, the roots of the government's role in economic development, and the origins of our own era's debates over gun control and military contracting.

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History and Professor of British History at Stanford University. She is the author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (2009), and her writing has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, the Nation, and the Huffington Post, among other publications.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Constantin Ardeleanu, "Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860" (CEU Press, 2024) May 18, 2024

Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutional modernization in one of Europe's peripheries. Beyond technological advances and the transportation of goods on a trans-imperial waterway, steamboat travel revolutionized human interactions, too. Steamboat Modernity: Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860 (CEU Press, 2024) offers a fascinating insight into the social and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, drawing on first-hand accounts of Danube cruising.

Describing the story of travelers who interacted, met, and visited the places they stopped, Constantin Ardeleanu creates a transnational history of travel up and down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. The pleasures and sometimes the travails of the travelers unfold against a backdrop of technical and economic transformation in the crucial period of modernization.

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Catherine D'Ignazio, "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" (MIT Press, 2024) May 17, 2024

What isn't counted doesn't count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action(MIT Press, 2024) brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work.

Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D'Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account. This book is also a forceful intervention that challenges hegemonic data science by exploring the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification and drawing lessons for a restorative and transformative data science.

This book is available open access here.

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Douglas L. Reside, "Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory" (Oxford UP, 2023) May 15, 2024

Thousands of shows have opened on Broadway. Why do we remember some and not others?

The musical theatre repertory is not composed of titles popular in the theatre but by those with successful cast recordings, movie versions, or even illegal bootlegs on YouTube. The shows audiences know, and the texts and music they expect to hear when they attend a production, are defined by media consumed at home more than by memories of performances witnessed in the theatre. For example, author Doug Reside shows that it is no accident that the serious book musical with a fixed score developed in the 1940s - when commercially pressed and marketed record albums made it possible to record most of the score of a new musical in a fixed medium. And Hamilton, a musical with dense lyrics and revolutionary musical style, would not have been as easily accessible to world audiences if most hadn't already had the opportunity to learn the score by listening to free digital streams of the original cast recording.

The technologies that made these media possible developed concurrently with and shaped the American musical as an art form. Reside uncovers how the affordances and limitations of these technologies established a repertory of titles that are most frequently performed and defined by the texts used in these performances. Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that the musicals we most remember are those which most effectively used their era's best recording and distribution technologies to document and share the work with those who would never see the original production on Broadway.

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Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia, "The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice" (MIT Press, 2024) May 15, 2024

Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a “normative” learner does. In The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice (MIT Press, 2024, open access at this link), educational researchers Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia start from a different assumption—that outliers are, and must be treated as, valued individuals. Berland and Garcia argue that the aim of analytics should not be about enforcing and entrenching norms but about using data science to break new ground and enable play and creativity. From this speculative vantage point, they ask how we can go about living alongside data in a better way, in a more just way, while also building on the existing technologies and our knowledge of the present.

The Left Hand of Data explores the many ways in which we use data to shape the possible futures of young people—in schools, in informal learning environments, in colleges, in libraries, and with educational games. It considers the processes by which students are sorted, labeled, categorized, and intervened upon using the bevy of data extracted and collected from individuals and groups, anonymously or identifiably. When, how, and with what biases are these data collected and utilized? What decisions must educational researchers make around data in an era of high-stakes assessment, surveillance, and rising inequities tied to race, class, gender, and other intersectional factors? How are these complex considerations around data changing in the rapidly evolving world of machine learning, AI, and emerging fields of educational data science? The surprising answers the authors discover in their research make clear that we do not need to wait for a hazy tomorrow to do better today.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Dancing Parkinson's and Queering Science with John Noel Viaña May 14, 2024

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr John Noel Viaña.

Dr John Noel Viaña’s work is focused on the social and ethical aspects of neuroscience and biotechnology. He has interests in a range of bioethical issues and has engaged with researchers, clinicians and science communicators to explore justice, equity and diversity considerations in health research and promotion.

They discuss the use of art to present research, how art can help to express identities and perspectives, and its resonances with Dr Viaña's work in justice and science.

A transcript of this episode is available on the Concept : Art website (www.conceptart.fm).

Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

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Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg, "The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism" (CEU Press, 2023) May 12, 2024

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Per Högselius and Achim Klüppelberg to discuss their new book with CEU Press entitled, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (CEU Press, 2023).

The book is available Open Access, click here to download.

The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance.

The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure.

Per and Achim’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more here.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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"Did You Miss My Comment or What?": Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions May 11, 2024

Listen to this interview of Courtney Miller, PhD student in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about her paper "Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions (ICSE 2022).

Courtney Miller : "One of the things I really enjoyed after publication was the interest of other communities in our work. I mean, just the summer after we published, I went and gave a talk at the Linux Open Source conference, and it was really great to learn that — there's a lot of duality of thought in this world, but there's a lot of people who are pretty much studying the same types of problems as you but from completely different fields and completely different directions. And so, being able to incorporate their work in as well, while also having the bulk of our citations be to ICSE, of course, because that's our bread and butter in software engineering — all that comes together to make a better foundation for the paper."

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Gina Sipley, "Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice" (Bristol UP, 2024) May 11, 2024

We all sometimes ‘lurk’ in online spaces without posting or engaging, just reading the posts and comments. But neither reading nor lurking are ever passive acts. In fact, readers of social media are making decisions and taking grassroots actions on multiple dimensions. Unpacking this understudied phenomenon, Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice (Bristol UP, 2024) by Gina Sipley challenges the conventional perspective of what counts as participatory online culture. Presenting lurking as a communication and literacy practice that resists dominant power structures, it offers an innovative approach to digital qualitative methods. Unique and original in its subject, this is a call for internet researchers to broaden their methods to include lurkers’ participation and presence.

Just Here for the Comments will be released on May 28th by Bristol University Press. Pre-orders are now open here. Readers can also get a 25% discount on ALL Bristol University Press and Policy Press books by signing up to their newsletter.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will benefit The Children’s Greenhouse, which provides high-quality, low-cost childcare to the children of SUNY Nassau Community College students, faculty, and staff. The Greenhouse is the reason many of our student parents persist and graduate with their degrees. Many of these students are first generation, too. You can learn more about this organization and how to donate, here.

Dr. Gina Sipley is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College. Dr Sipley is in the process of developing with Bristol University Press free resources for academics, K-12 teachers, and book clubs interested in teaching and researching the social and economic effects of lurker literacies. Anyone interested in receiving these materials when they become available can hit subscribe on her website.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trere, "Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power" (MIT Press, 2024) May 10, 2024

What are the tactics needed for a world of platforms and algorithms? In Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power (MIT Press, 2024), Tiziano Bonini, Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Siena, and Emiliano Treré, a Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies at Cardiff University, examine the impact of platforms and algorithms on people, communities, and global social life. The book explores these issues using three case studies of gig work, culture, and politics. At its heart, the book demonstrates the potential for transforming the seeming total control of platforms and algorithms through the tactics and strategies of workers, artists, and social movements. The book is essential reading across humanities, social sciences, and computing, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary digital life. The book is available open access here.

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Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022) May 10, 2024

Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.

Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive(Dutton, 2022) is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to recreate life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab?

Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.

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The Scientific Attitude May 07, 2024

Listen to this interview of Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science (Boston University) and Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science (Aspen Institute). We talk about his book The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019).

Lee McIntyre : "Scientists have an enormous role — and I'll even say, a responsibility, to make sure that their work does not end just with the discoveries, but extends, as well, to include the communication of those discoveries to their scientific colleagues and beyond them, to society more broadly. And I think that there's enormous room for more public education, not just about the results of science, but also about how science actually works."

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Matteo Pangallo and Emily B. Todd, "Teaching the History of the Book" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023) May 07, 2024

Edited by Matteo Pangallo and Emily Todd, Teaching the History of the Book (University of Massachusetts Press 2023) is the first collection of its kind dedicated to book history pedagogy. With original contributions from a diverse range of teachers, scholars, and practitioners in literary studies, history, book arts, library science, language studies, and archives, this volume presents a variety of methods for teaching book history both as its own subject and as an approach to other material. Each chapter describes lessons, courses, and programs centered on the latest and best ways of teaching undergraduate and graduate students.

Expansive and instructive, this volume introduces ways of helping students consider how texts were produced, circulated, and received, with chapters that cover effective ways to organize courses devoted to book history, classroom activities that draw on this subject in other courses, and an overview of selected print and digital tools. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in the field, utilize their own classroom experiences to bring to life some of the rich possibilities for teaching book history in the twenty-first century.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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MC Forelle on Cars, Chipification, and Repair May 06, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MC Forelle, Assistant Professor of Engineering & Society at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at University of Virginia, about their research on the “chipification” of automobiles. MC’s work examines how computerization affects repair and a wide variety of other automotive experiences. In recent years, they have continued broadening out to include electric and autonomous vehicles and the environmental impacts thereof. Lee and MC also chew the fat about a bunch of other issues along the way.

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Dead Air May 06, 2024

On our first episode of Phantom Power, we ponder those moments when the air remains unmoved. Whether fostered by design or meteorological conditions or technological glitch, the absence of sound sometimes affects us more profoundly than the audible. We begin with author John Biguenetdiscussing his book Silence (Bloomsbury, 2015) and the relationship between quietude, reading, writing, and the self. Next, we speak to poet and hurricane responder Rodrigo Toscano, who takes us into the foreboding silence in eye of a storm. Finally, our own co-host and poet cris cheek ponders the many contradictory experiences of “dead air” in an age of changing media technologies. Today’s episode features music by our own Mack Hagood and by Graeme Gibson, who is currently touring on drums with Michael Nau and the Mighty Thread.

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Tanisha M. Fazal, "Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War" (Oxford UP, 2024) May 05, 2024

Decisions to go to war are often framed in cost-benefit terms, and typically such assessments do not factor in longer term costs. However, recent dramatic improvements in American military medicine have had an unanticipated effect: saving more soldiers' lives has vastly increased long-term, downstream costs of war with profound consequences for global politics in an era of heightened great power competition.

In Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War(Oxford UP, 2024), Tanisha Fazal traces the modern history of medical treatment and casualty rates in American conflicts from the Civil War to the more recent counterinsurgency wars. As she shows, wars became increasingly survivable for wounded troops, to the point now where a large majority of wounded soldiers survive.

Yet the human and financial implications of this steep increase in the wounded-to-killed ratio are dramatic, and her powerful analysis of this shift provides a necessary corrective to how we understand the costs of war. For each major conflict, Fazal analyzes the weapons used, injuries sustained, and policies put in place for veterans' care and pensions. As she argues, these improvements have significant financial and deeply personal implications for the returned wounded and their families, as well as the US government and its citizenry. Fazal's analysis highlights the significance of policymakers underestimating the costs of war, which in turn makes it easier both to initiate and continue military action abroad, contributing to Americas' penchant for engaging in so-called "endless wars."

Tanisha Fazal is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict. In addition to her new book, she is the author of two award-winning books and numerous articles in academic and policy journals. From 2021-2023, she was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu

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John Powers, "Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture" (Oxford UP, 2023) May 04, 2024

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. John Powers examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture.

By reasserting the physicality of the body in making time-lapse and kinesthetic sequences with the Bolex, filmmakers conversed with other art forms and integrated broader spheres of humanistic and scientific inquiry into their artistic process. Drawing from the photographic qualities of stocks such as Tri-X and Kodachrome, they discovered pliant metaphors that allowed them to connect their artistic practice to metaphysics, spiritualism, and Hollywood excess. By framing film labs as mystical or adversarial, they cultivated an oppositionality that valorized control over the artistic process. And by using the optical printer as a tool for excavating latent meaning out of found footage, they posited the reworking of images as fundamental to the exploration of personal and cultural identity.

Providing a wealth of new detail about the making of canonised avant-garde classics by such luminaries as Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage, as well as rediscovering works from overlooked artists such as Chick Strand, Amy Halpern, and Gunvor Nelson, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John J. Berger, "Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth" (Seven Stories Press, 2023) May 03, 2024

Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth(Seven Stories Press, 2023) is a hopeful and critical resource that makes a convincing and detailed case that there is a path forward to save our environment. Illustrating the power of committed individuals and the necessity for collaborative government and private-sector climate action, the book focuses on three essential areas:

The technological dimension move to 100% clean renewable energy as fast as we possibly can through innovations like clean-steel, "green" cement, and carbon-reuse companies;
The ecological dimension enhance and protect natural ecosystems, forests, and agricultural lands to safely store greenhouse gases and restore soils, transforming how we grow, process, and consume food;
The social dimension update and create new laws, policies and economic measures to recenter human values and reduce environmental and social injustice.

Based on more than 6 years of research, Berger traveled the nation and abroad to interview governors, mayors, ranchers, scientists, engineers, business leaders, energy experts, and financiers as well as carbon farmers, solar and wind innovators, forest protectors, non-profit leaders, and activists.

With real world examples, an explanation of cutting-edge technologies in solar and wind, and political organizing tactics, Solving the Climate Crisis provides a practical road map for how we effectively combat climate change. Replacing the fossil-fuel system with a newly invigorated, modernized, clean-energy economy will produce tens of millions of new jobs and save trillions of dollars. Protecting the climate is thus potentially the greatest economic opportunity of our time.

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The Contagion of Covid Policy: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on Freedom of Speech May 03, 2024

After a storied career as a health policy expert, Stanford Medicine's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya's work became a political focal point during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he advocated against widespread lockdowns. He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter signed by infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists which advocated for a focused protection approach to COVID-19, and the Twitter Files revealed that his Twitter account had been placed on Twitter's "black list." In this conversation, he sits down to discuss how the history of American infectious disease affected our COVID response, the mimetic nature of lockdown policy, the importance of freedom of speech to the scientific endeavor, and more.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and the Director of the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. He holds an MD and a PhD in Economics, both from Stanford University.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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John L. Sullivan, "Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Apr 27, 2024

Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium(Bloomsbury, 2024) explores the transition underway in podcasting by considering how the influx of legacy and new media interest in the medium is injecting professional and corporate logics into what had been largely an amateur media form.

Many of the most high-profile podcasts today, however, are produced by highly-skilled media professionals, some of whom are employees of media corporations. Legacy radio and new media platform giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify are also making big (and expensive) moves in the medium by acquiring content producers and hosting platforms. This book focuses on three major aspects of this transformation: formalization, professionalization, and monetization. Through a close read of online and press discourse, analysis of podcasts themselves, participant observations at podcast trade shows and conventions, and interviews with industry professionals and individual podcasters, John Sullivan outlines how the efforts of industry players to transform podcasting into a profitable medium are beginning to challenge the very definition of podcasting itself.

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Leigh Gilmore, "The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women" (Columbia UP, 2023) Apr 27, 2024

The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What changed?

In The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (Columbia UP, 2023), Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases. At a time when the cultural conversation was fixated on appeals to legal and bureaucratic systems, narrative activism— storytelling in the service of social change—elevated survivors as authorities. Their testimony fused credibility and accountability into the #MeToo effect: uniting millions of separate accounts into an existential demand for sexual justice and the right to be heard.

Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism. She analyzes the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism and traces how literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity intertwine with cultural notions of doubt, obligation, and agency. By focusing on the intersectional prehistory of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to frame sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions in diverse global contexts. Considering the roles of literature and literary criticism in movements for social change, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how “reading like a survivor” provides resources for activism.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

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Natalia Grincheva and Elizabeth Stainforth, "Geopolitics of Digital Heritage" (Cambridge UP, 2024) Apr 27, 2024

How are digital platforms transforming heritage? In Geopolitics of Digital Heritage(Cambridge UP, 2023), Dr Natalia Grincheva, Program Leader of the BA (Hons) Arts Management at the University of the Arts Singapore and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Dr Elizabeth Stainforth, a lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds explore the global political context for digital heritage. Drawing on 4 detailed case studies- Singapore Memory Project, the National Library of Australia’s Trove, the EU’s Europeana, and Google Arts and Culture- the book shows the political ideas and imperatives underpinning the aggregation of heritage on digital platforms. Both an accessible introduction and a significant intervention to the field of heritage studies, the book will be essential reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

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Social media’s business model is changing democracy, and not for the better Apr 24, 2024

Democracies in Europe and the world over are grappling with the challenges posed by social media. In this episode, Charlotte Galpin and Verena Brändle talk with host Licia Cianetti about the multiple ways in which the online and the offline intersect in contemporary democracies, and how the engagement-maximising business model of privately owned social media platforms drives polarisation, undermines the quality of traditional media, and pushes extreme content onto unsuspecting users. There is no easy solution, but democracies must grapple with this new reality.

Charlotte Galpin is Associate Professor in German and European Politics at the University of Birmingham.
Verena Brändle is Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.
Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!

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Anu Bradford, "Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023) Apr 24, 2024

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. In Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford UP, 2023), her provocative follow-up to The Brussels Effect, Anu Bradford explores a rivalry that will shape the world in the decades to come.

Across the globe, people dependent on digital technologies have become increasingly alarmed that their rapid adoption and transformation have ushered in an exceedingly concentrated economy where a few powerful companies control vast economic wealth and political power, undermine data privacy, and widen the gap between economic winners and losers. In response, world leaders are variously embracing the idea of reining in the most dominant tech companies. Bradford examines three competing regulatory approaches―the American market-driven model, the Chinese state-driven model, and the European rights-driven regulatory model―and discusses how governments and tech companies navigate the inevitable conflicts that arise when these regulatory approaches collide in the international domain. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear.

Digital societies are at an inflection point. In the midst of these unfolding regulatory battles, governments, tech companies, and digital citizens are making important choices that will shape the future ethos of the digital society. Digital Empires lays bare the choices we face as societies and individuals, explains the forces that shape those choices, and illuminates the immense stakes involved for everyone who uses digital technologies.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Asif Siddiqi on Rockets, Prisons, Pop Songs, and So Much More Apr 22, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Asif Siddiqi, Professor of History at Fordham University, about the arc of his career and his wide-ranging interests and work. The pair start by discussing Siddiqi's wonderful book, The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), a history of the social and cultural trends, including a heavy dose of science fiction and mysticism, in Russia and the Soviet Union that led to Sputnik. They then talk about Siddiqi's other projects and interests from prisons to pop songs to global histories of space infrastructures. They also discuss the promises of recent turns to global and international research projects and stories in the history of technology.

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Héctor Beltrán, "Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands" (Princeton UP, 2023) Apr 21, 2024

In Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands(Princeton UP, 2023), Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders’ personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions—at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. Merging ethnographic analysis with systems thinking, he draws on his eight years of research in México and the United States—during which he participated in and observed hackathons, hacker schools, and tech entrepreneurship conferences—to unpack the conundrums faced by workers in a tech economy that stretches from villages in rural México to Silicon Valley.

Beltrán chronicles the tension between the transformative promise of hacking—the idea that coding will reconfigure the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, and gender—and the reality of a neoliberal capitalist economy divided and structured by the US/México border. Young hackers, many of whom approach coding in a spirit of playfulness and exploration, are encouraged to appropriate the discourses of flexibility and self-management even as they remain outside formal employment. Beltrán explores the ways that “innovative culture” is seen as central in curing México’s social ills, showing that when innovation is linked to technological development, other kinds of development are neglected. Beltrán’s highly original, wide-ranging analysis uniquely connects technology studies, the anthropology of capitalism, and Latinx and Latin American studies.

Mentioned in this episode, among others:

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Hong, G. K., & Ferguson, R. A. (Eds.). (2011). Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Duke University Press.
Coleman, E. G. (2012). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press.

Héctor Beltrán is Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT, where he teaches “Cultures of Computing,” “Hacking from the South,” and “Latin American Migrations.”

Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

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Coreen McGuire, "Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period" (Manchester UP, 2020) Apr 20, 2024

Measurements, and their manipulation, have been underestimated as crucial historical forces motivating and guiding the way we think about disability.

Using measurement technology as a lens, and examining in particular the measurement of hearing and breathing, Coreen McGuire's book Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period (Manchester UP, 2020) draws together several existing discussions on disability, phenomenology, healthcare, medical practice, big data, embodiment, and emerging medical and scientific technologies around the turn of the twentieth century. These are popular topics of scholarly attention but have not, until now, been considered as interconnected topics within a single book. As such, this work connects several important, and usually separate academic subject areas and historical specialisms. The standards embedded in instrumentation created strict, but, ultimately arbitrary thresholds of what is categorised as normal and abnormal. Considering these standards from a long historical perspective reveals how these dividing lines shifted when pushed.

This book is available open access here.

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Heather Parry, "Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism" (404 Ink, 2024) Apr 20, 2024

In the future, we’ll all be having sex with robots… won’t we?

Roboticists say they’re a distracting science fiction, yet endless books, films and articles are written on the subject. Campaigns are even mounted against them. So why are sex robots such a hot topic?

Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism (404 Ink, 2024) by Heather Parry picks apart the forces that posit sex robots as either the solution to our problems or a real threat to human safety, and looks at what’s being pushed aside for us to obsess about something that will never happen.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Stephen Morillo, "War and Conflict in the Middle Ages" (Polity Press, 2022) Apr 20, 2024

In War and Conflict in the Middle Ages (Polity, 2022), Dr. Stephen Morillo offers the first global history of armed conflict between 540 and 1500 or as late as 1800 CE, an age shaped by climate change and pandemics at both ends. Examining armed conflict at all levels, and ranging across China and the central Asian steppes to southwest Asia, western Europe, and beyond, Morillo explores the technological, social, cultural, and environmental determinants of warfare and the tools and tactics used by warriors on land and at sea.

Part I explains the geographical, political, and technological rules that shaped patterns of military activity everywhere. Part II explores how these rules played out in various historical contexts. Armed conflict played a central role in the making of the medieval world, and medieval people used war and conflict to create, expand, and defend their communities and identities. But the devastating effects of climate change and epidemic disease continually reshaped these communities and the nature of their conflicts.

Broad in its scope and rich in detail, War and Conflict in the Middle Ages will be the go-to guide for students and aficionados of military history, medieval history, and global history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, "Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Apr 15, 2024

In 1845 an expedition led by Sir John Franklin vanished in the Canadian Arctic. The enduring obsession with the Franklin mystery, and in particular Inuit information about its fate, is partly due to the ways in which information was circulated in these imperial spaces. Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Annaliese Jacobs Claydon examines how the Franklins and other explorer families engaged in science, exploration and the exchange of information in the early to mid-19th century. It follows the Franklins from the Arctic to Van Diemen's Land, charting how they worked with intermediaries, imperial humanitarians and scientists, and shows how they used these experiences to claim a moral right to information.

Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge shows how the indigenous peoples, translators, fur traders, whalers, convicts and sailors who explorer families relied upon for information were both indispensable and inconvenient to the Franklins. It reveals a deep entanglement of polar expedition with British imperialism, and shows how geographical knowledge intertwined with convict policy, humanitarianism, genocide and authority. In these imperial spaces families such as the Franklins negotiated their tenuous authority over knowledge to engage with the politics of truth and question the credibility and trustworthiness of those they sought to silence.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Miriam Piilonen, "Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human" (Oxford UP, 2024) Apr 15, 2024

What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research?

Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human (Oxford UP, 2024) is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Darwin and Spencer. Author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in light of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought.

In this book, Piilonen delves into how historical evolutionists, in particular Darwin and Spencer, developed and applied a concept of music that served as a boundary-drawing device, used to trace or obscure the conceptual borders between human and animal. She takes as primary texts the early evolutionary treatises that double as theoretical accounts of music's origins. For Darwin, music served as a kind of proto-language common to humans and animals alike; he heard the songs of birds and the chirps of mice as musical, as articulated in texts such as The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Spencer, on the other hand, viewed music as a specifically human stage of evolutionary advance, beyond language acquisition, as outlined in his essay, "The Origin and Function of Music" (1857). These competing views established radically different perspectives on the origin and function of music in human cultural expression, while at the same time being mutually constitutive of one another.

A ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, Theorizing Music Evolution turns to music evolution with an eye toward disrupting and intervening in these questions as they recur in the present.”

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

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Kevin Lambert, "Symbols and Things: Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) Apr 15, 2024

The stereotype of the solitary mathematician is widespread, but practicing users and producers of mathematics know well that our work depends heavily on our historical and contemporary fellow travelers. Yet we may not appreciate how our work also extends beyond us into our physical and societal environments.

Kevin Lambert takes what might be a first crack at this perspective in his book Symbols and Things: Material Mathematics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). An historian of science, Dr. Lambert has shifted in his view of mathematics as a language of science to one as a material practice. Expanding on ideas from historians, archeologists, philosophers, and other scholars of human activity, and through several interweaving vignettes of mathematical work during a technologically dynamic period in British history, he argues that mathematical practice, communication, and even thought occur to a large degree outside the bodies of the persons performing them.

In this interview, we explore Kevin's journal to and through this book project. We discuss how such ideas as Andy Clark's extended mind informed his approach, and we review several of the lively stories—the co-creation of the long-distance mathematical community with the research journal, Peacock's museological argument for the adoption of symbolic algebra, and the foundational entanglement of electromagnetism, quaternions, and the philosophy of space, among others—he drew out of historical and archival sources. (Here i cannot resist mentioning Tait's collection of his intensive correspondence with Hamilton that transformed how quaternions were applied in physics and even conceptualized as mathematical objects.) We close with some thoughts on our own materially extended cognitive work and where Kevin's interests are currently driving him.

Suggested companion works:

• ChatGPT, as a cutting-edge extension of human thought

• work by Courtney Ann Roby, including the forthcoming The Mechanical Tradition of Hero of Alexandria: Strategies of Reading from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period

• Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000, edited by Morgan G. Ames and Massimo Mazzotti

• work by Emily Miller Bonney, for example "A Reconsideration of Depositional Practices in Early Bronze Age Crete"

Kevin Lambert is a historian of science and mathematics in the early modern and modern periods and professor in the liberal studies department at California State University, Fullerton. His recent book Symbols and Things explores mathematics as a way of thinking outside the body and through the material environment. He also recently published a chapter in the volume Algorithmic Modernity that traces the genealogy of algorithmic practices. He is now working on the problem of writing longue durée histories of science. He is close to completing a paper called “Malthus in the Landscape” that investigates the temporalities of global histories. He is also exploring the problem of writing a global history of the early modern sciences without the prism of the so called “Scientific Revolution.” His work can be found on ResearchGate.

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Sharrona Pearl, "Mask" (Bloombury, 2024) Apr 14, 2024

From the theatre mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity.

Even as they conceal and protect, masks – as faces – are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponized and politicised, in Mask(Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Sharrona Pearl looks at the politics of the mask, exploring how identity itself is read on this object.

By exploring who we do (and do not) seek to protect through different forms of masking, Dr. Pearl's long history of masks helps us to better understand what it is we value.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Rasmus Winther, "Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Apr 14, 2024

Situated at the intersection of natural science and philosophy, Our Genes: A Philosophical Perspective on Human Evolutionary Genomics(Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores historical practices, investigates current trends, and imagines future work in genetic research to answer persistent, political questions about human diversity. Readers are guided through fascinating thought experiments, complex measures and metrics, fundamental evolutionary patterns, and in-depth treatment of exciting case studies. The work culminates in a philosophical rationale, based on scientific evidence, for a moderate position about the explanatory power of genes that is often left unarticulated. Simply put, human evolutionary genomics - our genes - can tell us much about who we are as individuals and as collectives. However, while they convey scientific certainty in the popular imagination, genes cannot answer some of our most important questions. Alternating between an up-close and a zoomed-out focus on genes and genomes, individuals and collectives, species and populations, Our Genes argues that the answers we seek point to rich, necessary work ahead.

Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther is a philosopher of science, researcher, writer, educator, diver, and explorer. He is Professor of Humanities at University of California, Santa Cruz and Affiliate Professor of Transformative Science at the GLOBE Institute at University of Copenhagen.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Darren Wershler et al,, "The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies" (U Minnesota Press, 2022) Apr 14, 2024

A hybrid lab functions in the space between institutions and infrastructure, creating new opportunities for understanding their interconnection. However, their legitimacy remains fuzzy without formal and methodological critique. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies(U of Minnesota Press, 2021) proposes the "extended lab model" to describe the relationship of various facets of a lab and uses a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies. This conversation covers the role of collection in academic labs, the influence of universities on labs and infrastructure negotiations, the acknowledgment of people and imaginaries in knowledge production, and transparency and accessibility.

Find the Open Access version of the book here.

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Stewart Lawrence Sinclair, "Space Rover" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Apr 13, 2024

In 1971, the first lunar rover arrived on the moon. The design became an icon of American ingenuity and the adventurous spirit and vision many equated with the space race.

Fifty years later, that vision feels like a nostalgic fantasy, but the lunar rover's legacy paved the way for Mars rovers like Sojourner, Curiosity, and Perseverance. Other rovers have made accessible the world's deepest caves and most remote tundra, extending our exploratory range without risking lives. Still others have been utilised for search and rescue missions or in clean up operations after disasters such as Chernobyl.

Space Rover (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Stewart Lawrence Sinclair is the addition to the Object Lessons series that explores all of this and more. The book shows that for all these achievements, rovers embody not just our potential, but our limits. Examining rovers as they wander our terrestrial and celestial boundaries, we might better comprehend our place, and fate, in this universe.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts, "Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine" (Harper, 2023) Apr 12, 2024

In this deep and incisive study, General David Petraeus, who commanded the US-led coalitions in both Iraq, during the Surge, and Afghanistan and former CIA director, and the prize-winning historian Andrew Roberts, explore over 70 years of conflict, drawing significant lessons and insights from their fresh analysis of the past. Drawing on their different perspectives and areas of expertise, Petraeus and Roberts show how often critical mistakes have been repeated time and again, and the challenge, for statesmen and generals alike, of learning to adapt to various new weapon systems, theories and strategies. Among the conflicts examined are the Arab-Israeli wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the two Gulf Wars, the Balkan wars in the former Yugoslavia, and both the Soviet and Coalition wars in Afghanistan, as well as guerilla conflicts in Africa and South America.

Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine(Harper, 2023) culminates with a bracing look at Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, yet another case study in the tragic results when leaders refuse to learn from history, and an assessment of the nature of future warfare. Filled with sharp insight and the wisdom of experience, Conflict is not only a critical assessment of our recent past, but also an essential primer of modern warfare that provides crucial knowledge for waging battle today as well as for understanding what the decades ahead will bring.

General David Petraeus is a retired United States Army general and widely respected as a leading warrior intellectual. He graduated with distinction from the US Military Academy and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He served for 37 years in the US Army, culminating his time in uniform with 6 consecutive commands as a general officer, 5 of which were in combat, including Command of the Surge in Iraq, US Central Command, and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. He then served as Director of the CIA. He has held academic appointments at six universities and currently is a Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Yale. He is a prominent commentator on contemporary security issues, military developments, and global affairs. He is currently a Partner in a major investment firm and chairs that firm’s Global Institute.

Sam Canter is a strategic planner, a PhD candidate in Politics and International Relations, and an Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated.

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Grazia Ingravalle, "Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital" (Amsterdam UP, 2024) Apr 12, 2024

Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital(Amsterdam UP, 2023) is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age.

A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archive’s hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.

Archival Film Curatorship is available as an open access e-book at this link.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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100 Years of Radio in South Africa: Then and Now Apr 11, 2024

Today’s book is: 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now(Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), edited by Dr. Sisanda Nkoala (with Gilbert Motsaathebe). The book focuses on South African radio stations and broadcasters in the past and present. It brings together media scholars and practitioners to deliberate on the role and influence of radio broadcasting in South Africa over the past 100 years. One of few books to consider radio broadcasting in South Africa, this volume provides a historical account of the development of the sector, theoretical frameworks, an in-depth look at key people and institutions that have shaped the sector, a critique of the medium’s role in community-building and culture making, and includes the voices of media practitioners reflecting on the importance of this medium.

Our guest is: Dr. Sisanda Nkoala who is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape. She won the NIHSS Digital Humanities: Best Visualisation or Infographic award; the Western Cape Cultural Affairs Award for Best Researcher Contributing to Archival Heritage; the HERS-SA Young Women Leader in Higher Education award; and Vodacom Journalist of the Year: Western Cape Radio Features category. She serves as vice-chair of the IAMCR’s media education research section, the African Journalism Educators Network secretary-general, as an associate editor for the Journal of Communication Technology, a public representative on the South African Press Council, a member of the Film & Publication Board’s Appeals Tribunal, and as the vice-president of the South African Communication Association. She is published in journals and in The Conversation. She is the editor of 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now, and Community Radio, Digital Radio and the Future of Radio in South Africa. Before joining academia, she was a radio journalist.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also like:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.

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Bishnupriya Ghosh, "The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media" (Duke UP, 2023) Apr 10, 2024

In The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP. 2023), Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.

Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches at the Department of English and Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She studies global media cultures, environmental media and critical health studies. Her early research includes two monographs When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, while the co-edited volume exemplifies her current research, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk.

Priyam Sinha is a doctoral candidate in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached here.

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Sean Vanatta on Credit Cards Apr 08, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with historian and standup comedian, Sean Vanatta, lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow and senior fellow at the Wharton Initiative for Financial Policy and Regulation, about Vanatta’s cool new book, Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale UP, 2024). Plastic Capitalism examines the fascinating history of the rise of the credit card business in the United States, uncovering a complex picture that includes banks, consumers, and federal and state governments. It involves complex interplays of movement and countermovement, ending in the relative dissolution of regulatory power. Vinsel also talks with Vanatta about his current and future projects.

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Tina Sikka, "Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Apr 05, 2024

Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2023) critically examines contemporary health and wellness culture through the lens of personalization, genetification and functional foods. These developments have had a significant impact on the intersecting categories of gender, race, and class in light of the increasing adoption of digital health and surveillance technologies like MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, HealthyifyMe, and Fooducate. These three vectors of identity, when analysed in relation to food, diet, health, and technology, reveal significant new ways in which inequality, hierarchy, and injustice become manifest.

In the book, Tina Sikka argues that the corporate-led trends associated with health apps, genetic testing, superfoods, and functional foods have produced a kind of dietary-genomic-functional food industrial complex. She makes the positive case for a prosocial, food secure, and biodiverse health and food culture that is rooted in community action, supported by strong public provisioning of health care, and grounded in principles of food justice and sovereignty.

Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Dominic Boyer, "No More Fossils" (U Minnesota Press, 2023) Apr 03, 2024

Our hosts, Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, sat down with Dominic Boyer to talk about his new book, No More Fossils, which appeared just last year (2023) from the University of Minnesota's "Forerunners" series. We talked at length about his book, its gestation in basic questions about how to divest from fossil energy and fossil culture, and the grounds for optimism about our future. In a wide ranging discussion, we also talked about utopia, our investment in memoir and place-based writing, the importance of affect and anxiety in thinking about climate, and the fiction, scholarship, and activism that gives us inspiration.

Some show notes: we talked about other work by Dominic (including his books Hyposubjects and Energopolitics); other works on energy and ecocriticism (including Patricia Jaeger's column "Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources"; Cara New Dagget's The Birth of Energy; Allen MacDuffie's Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination; and Heidi Scott's Fuel: An Ecocritical History; and Barbara Leckie's Climate Change: Interrupted); talked about matriarchal collectives and the show Station Eleven; and fiction including Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge, and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward; and William Morris's News from Nowhere; and finally, Osaka University's "Fragmentary Institute of Comparative Timelines," and Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass's book, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics. It was awesome.

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Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023) Apr 03, 2024

The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities.

High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press, 2023) charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for "killing music," the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn't control. For so many, tapes meant freedom--to create, to invent, to connect.

Marc Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today's labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical.

Marc Masters is a music journalist whose work has appeared on NPR and in the Washington Post, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Bandcamp Daily. He is also the author of No Wave. Marc Masters on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Guru Madhavan on Wicked Problems and Engineering a Better World Apr 02, 2024

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Guru Madhavan, Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, about his recent book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). In Wicked Problems, Madhavan draws on a rich body of literature from the humanities and social sciences to think through how engineers can do a better job working on problems that include complex social and technical realities. The pair also talk about how Madhavan came to the National Academy of Engineering after working as an engineer and entrepreneur and some of his future work, including ongoing writing on the importance of maintenance and “grind problems” in engineering.

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Max Bennett, "A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains" (Mariner Books, 2023) Apr 01, 2024

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement learning algorithm trying to mimic neural networks.

Max Bennett is an AI entrepreneur and neuroscience researcher. His work combines insights from evolutionary neuroscience, comparative psychology, and AI. As each chapter describes how a skill evolved, it also explains whether(!) and how an AI system has managed to implement something similar. A recurring theme is how human brains and neural circuits have influenced AI architecture. The other side of this bi-directional connection is also intriguing. AI has often served as a litmus test, giving a clue how a not well understood neurobiological phenomenon might work, how plausible a hypothesis is.

The organzining principle of this book is a framework of five breakthroughs, which compares evolution to technological innovation. Like a new technology enables several innovative products, a new brain capability enables several new skills. For example, mammals show several new intelligent behaviors compared to their ancestors: vicarious trial and error, episodic memory, and planning. The foundation of all these novelties, is probably the same capability: simulation.

The five breakthroughs are:

steering in bilaterians
learning from trial and error in vertebrates
simulating in mammals
mentalizing in primates
speaking in humans

This framework guides the readers through a time travel of 600 million years. We learn about the environment in which these capabilities evolved: Who were the first mammals and why did planning benefit them? We see what contemporary animals can and can't do: Fish aren't as dumb as folklore suggests. And we take a look at AI's baffling achievements and limitations: Why can AI write decent essays but not load a dishwasher?

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Claudia de Rham, "The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity" (Princeton UP, 2024) Apr 01, 2024

Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body's buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth's pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravity's irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

In The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity(Princeton UP, 2024), de Rham shares captivating stories about her quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature. Her life's pursuit led her from a twist of fate that snatched away her dream of becoming an astronaut to an exhilarating breakthrough at the very frontiers of gravitational physics.

While many of us presume to know gravity quite well, the brightest scientists in history have yet to fully answer the simple question: what exactly is gravity? De Rham reveals how great minds--from Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking, Andrea Ghez, and Roger Penrose--led her to the edge of knowledge about this fundamental force. She found hints of a hidden side to gravity at the particle level where Einstein's theory breaks down, leading her to develop a new theory of "massive gravity." De Rham shares how her life's path turned from a precipitous fall to an exquisite flight toward the discovery of something entirely new about our surprising, gravity-driven universe.

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Building the Future Buddha: A Discussion with Jundho Cohen Mar 31, 2024

Jundo Cohen is a Zen Buddhist teacher and founder of Treeleaf Zendo, a digital Zen community with members in over 50 countries. He writes on the intersection of Buddhism, ethics, science, and the future of the planet. He resides in Tsukuba, Japan’s “Science City”. He is the author of The Zen Master’s Dance: A Guide to Understanding Dogen and Who You Are in the Universe (Wisdom, 2020), and is co-host of The Zen of Everything podcast.

In this episode I speak to Jundo about his new book, Building the Future Buddha: The Zen of AI, Genes, Saving the World, and Travel to the Stars (Treeleaf, 2024). The conversation covers a wide range of topics related to the future and Buddhism with some fun utopian thought on the way and some disagreement that makes for an interesting exploration.

Jundho claims that tomorrow’s technologies will change Buddhism. AI and robotics, bio-engineering and physical enhancements, genetics and nano-implants, virtual reality and new media, medical miracles and manufacturing marvels, extended lifespans and expanded minds will make many of Buddhism’s most fabulous ideals potentially realizable.

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Matthew H. Hersch, "Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle" (MIT Press, 2023) Mar 30, 2024

In Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant human space program of the last 50 years, NASA's space shuttle. He begins with the origins of the space shuttle: a century-long effort to develop a low-cost, reusable, rocket-powered airplane to militarize and commercialize space travel, which Hersch explains was built the wrong way, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. Describing the unique circumstances that led to the space shuttle's creation by President Richard Nixon's administration in 1972 and its subsequent flights from 1981 through 2011, Dr. Hersch illustrates how the space shuttle was doomed from the start.

While most historians have accepted the view that the space shuttle's fatal accidents—including the 1986 Challenger explosion—resulted from deficiencies in NASA's management culture that lulled engineers into a false confidence in the craft, Dark Star reveals the widespread understanding that the shuttle was predestined for failure as a technology demonstrator. The vehicle was intended only to give the United States the appearance of a viable human spaceflight program until funds became available to eliminate its obvious flaws. Hersch's work seeks to answer the perilous questions of technological choice that confront every generation, and it is a critical read for anyone interested in how we can create a better world through the things we build.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Ya-Wen Lei, "The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China" (Princeton UP, 2023) Mar 30, 2024

Since the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has increasingly shifted away from labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing to a process of socioeconomic development centered on science and technology. In The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China(Princeton University Press, 2023) Ya-Wen Lei traces the contours of this techno-developmental regime and its resulting form of techno-state capitalism, telling the stories of those whose lives have been transformed—for better and worse—by China’s rapid rise to economic and technological dominance.

Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork and a wealth of in-depth interviews with managers, business owners, workers, software engineers, and local government officials, Lei describes the vastly unequal values assigned to economic sectors deemed “high-end” versus “low-end,” and the massive expansion of technical and legal instruments used to measure and control workers and capital. She shows how China’s rise has been uniquely shaped by its time-compressed development, the complex relationship between the nation’s authoritarian state and its increasingly powerful but unruly tech companies, and an ideology that fuses nationalism with high modernism, technological fetishism, and meritocracy. Some have compared China’s extraordinary transformation to America’s Gilded Age. This provocative book reveals how it is more like a gilded cage, one in which the Chinese state and tech capital are producing rising inequality and new forms of social exclusion.

Ya-Wen Lei is professor of sociology at Harvard University, where she is affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network.

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Robert Willim, "Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary" (Bristol UP, 2024) Mar 30, 2024

Robert Willim's new book Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary (Bristol University Press, 2024), takes the reader on a journey through the realm of Mundania, a realm that is both familiar and incomprehensible, banal and uncanny. Mundania is the realm in which technology, which seemed unspeakable before its arrival in our world, becomes an everyday fixture of life, and, more specifically, mundane.

Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network!

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Emma Frances Bloomfield, "Science V. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators" (U California Press, 2024) Mar 30, 2024

Listen to this interview of Emma Frances Bloomfield, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We talk about her novel analytical tool for helping you narrativize research! Bloomfield's new book is Science V. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators (U California Press, 2024)

Emma Bloomfield : "I'd love to see more direct incorporation of communication studies and communication skills into the science curriculum but also into a researcher's overall training as well. Because I think that researchers can be very good at communication, but unfortunately they're not specifically trained in it and they're not really incentivized to do it. Basically, we put researchers, unnecessarily, before the choice of becoming either public intellectuals or recognized members of their research community and tenured professors at university. But we can give people more time and more compensation so that they can do both — and that will benefit the research and the communication of the research."

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Thomas S. Mullaney, "The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age" (MIT Press, 2024) Mar 29, 2024

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device?

In The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Thomas Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doing so, discovers that the key to this seemingly impossible riddle has given rise to a new epoch in the history of writing—a form of writing he calls “hypography.” Based on fifteen years of research, this pathbreaking history of the Chinese language charts the beginnings of electronic Chinese technology in the wake of World War II up through to its many iterations in the present day. Mullaney takes the reader back through the history and evolution of Chinese language computing technology, showing the development of electronic Chinese input methods—software programs that enable Chinese characters to be produced using alphanumeric symbols—and the profound impact they have had on the way Chinese is written. Along the way, Mullaney introduces a cast of brilliant and eccentric personalities drawn from the ranks of IBM, MIT, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Taiwanese military, and the highest rungs of mainland Chinese establishment, to name a few, and the unexpected roles they played in developing Chinese language computing. Finally, he shows how China and the non-Western world—because of the hypographic technologies they had to invent in order to join the personal computing revolution—“saved” the Western computer from its deep biases, enabling it to achieve a meaningful presence in markets outside of the Americas and Europe. An eminently engaging and artfully told history, The Chinese Computer is a must-read for anyone interested in how culture informs computing and how computing, in turn, shapes culture.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network.

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Ignacio Cofone, "The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Mar 28, 2024

Our privacy is besieged by tech companies.

Companies can do this because our laws are built on outdated ideas that trap lawmakers, regulators, and courts into wrong assumptions about privacy, resulting in ineffective legal remedies to one of the most pressing concerns of our generation.

Drawing on behavioral science, sociology, and economics, Ignacio Cofone challenges existing laws and reform proposals and dispels enduring misconceptions about data-driven interactions. This exploration offers readers a holistic view of why current laws and regulations fail to protect us against corporate digital harms, particularly those created by AI. Cofone then proposes a better response: meaningful accountability for the consequences of corporate data practices, which ultimately entails creating a new type of liability that recognizes the value of privacy.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Anita R. Gohdes, "Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence" (Oxford UP, 2023) Mar 26, 2024

Global adoption of the Internet has exploded, yet we are only beginning to understand the Internet's profound political consequences. Authoritarian states are digitally catching up with their democratic counterparts, and both are showing a growing interest in the use of cyber controls--online censorship and surveillance technologies--that allow governments to exercise control over the Internet. Under what conditions does a digitally connected society actually help states target their enemies? Why do repressive governments sometimes shut down the Internet when faced with uprisings? And how have cyber controls become a dependable tool in the weapons arsenal that states use in civil conflict?

In Repression in the Digital Age: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Dynamics of State Violence (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Anita R. Gohdes addresses these questions, and provides an original and in-depth look into the relationship between digital technologies and state violence. Drawing on large-scale analyses of fine-grained data on the Syrian conflict, qualitative case evidence from Iran, and the first global comparative analysis on Internet outages and state repression, Dr. Gohdes makes the case that digital infrastructure supports security forces in their use of violent state repression. More specifically, she argues that mass access to the Internet presents governments who fear for their political survival with a set of response options. When faced with a political threat, they can either temporarily restrict or block online public access or they can expand mass access to online information and monitor it to their own advantage. Surveillance allows security forces to target opponents of the state more selectively, while extreme forms of censorship or shutdowns of the Internet occur in conjunction with larger and more indiscriminate repression. As digital communication has become a bedrock of modern opposition and protest movements, Repression in the Digital Age breaks new ground in examining state repression in the information age.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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John Warner on Teaching Writing in the Age of Generative AI Mar 25, 2024

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with writer and editor John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for more than twenty years. Warner is the author of at least three - or four depending on whether you count a work of parody - books on writing and higher education, and today he is perhaps best known for his Substack, The Biblioracle Recommends. Vinsel and Warner talk about how teaching writing will need to shift after the arrival of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, but only after discussing a deeper truth: Teaching writing and thinking at the college level has had big problems for years, problems that AI tools simply exacerbate. The pair talk about Warner’s experiences and his approach to teaching writing as well as about a book he is writing about teaching writing in the age of generative AI.

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How Can We Reach International Consensus on AI Regulation? Mar 25, 2024

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Gabriele Mazzini, a lawyer and officer of the European Commission and expert in AI regulation. Mazzini discusses the means through which European countries have found agreement on the definition of AI and how to regulate it. Moreover, Mazzini stresses that the fears of an apocalyptic AI revolution taking over humankind are not well-grounded. He also comments on the United States case and how it differs from Europe when it comes to regulating AI, acknowledging that there's been big progress in legislation in this area.

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George S. Takach, "Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America" (Pegasus Book, 2024) Mar 24, 2024

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War.

So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”

George S. Takach’s incisive and meticulously researched new volume, Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America (Pegasus Book, 2024), is the book we need to thoroughly understand these frightening and perilous times. In the geopolitical sphere, there are no more pressing issues than the appalling mechanizations of a surveillance state in China, Russia’s brazen attempt to assert its autocratic model in Ukraine, and China’s increasingly likely plans to do the same in Taiwan. But the key here, Takach argues, is that our new Cold War is not only ideological but technological: the side that prevails in Cold War 2.0 will be the one that bests the other in mastering the greatest innovations of our time. Artificial intelligence sits in our pockets every day—but what about AI that coordinates military operations and missile defense systems? Or the highly sophisticated semiconductor chips and quantum computers that power those missiles and a host of other weapons? And, where recently we have seen remarkable feats of bio-engineering to produce vaccines at record speed, shouldn’t we be concerned how catastrophic it would be if bio-engineering were co-opted for nefarious purposes? Takach thoroughly examines how each of these innovations will shape the tension between democracy and autocracy, and how each will play a central role in this second Cold War. Finally, he crafts a precise blueprint for how Western democracies should handle these innovations to respond to the looming threat of autocracy—and ultimately prevail over it.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023) Mar 22, 2024

The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death.

In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of remembering, and the right and desire to be forgotten.

From the popular image of Gordon (also known as "Whipped Peter") to photographs of the lynching of Jesse Washington to the video of George Floyd's murder, from DNA to holograms to posthumous communication, this book traces the commodification of Black bodies and lives across time. Through the lens of (anti-)Blackness in the United States, Sutherland interrogates the intersections of life, death, personal data, and human autonomy in the era of Google, Twitter, and Facebook, and presents a critique of digital resurrection technologies. If the Black digital afterlife is rooted in bigotry and inspires new forms of racialized aggression, Resurrecting the Black Body asks what other visions of life and remembrance are possible, illuminating the unique ways that Black cultures have fought against erasure and oblivion.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Beth Linker, "Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2024) Mar 21, 2024

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century's worth of nude "posture" photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America's largely forgotten posture panic--a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences. Tracing the rise and fall of this socially manufactured epidemic, Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America(Princeton UP, 2024) also tells how this period continues to feed today's widespread anxieties about posture.

In the early twentieth century, the eugenics movement and fears of disability gave slouching a new scientific relevance. Bad posture came to be seen as an individual health threat, an affront to conventional race hierarchies, and a sign of American decline. What followed were massive efforts to measure, track, and prevent slouching and, later, back pain--campaigns that reached schools, workplaces, and beyond, from the creation of the American Posture League to posture pageants. The popularity of posture-enhancing products, such as girdles and lumbar supports, exploded, as did new fitness programs focused on postural muscles, such as Pilates and modern yoga. By 1970, student protests largely brought an end to school posture exams and photos, but many efforts to fight bad posture continued, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

A compelling history that mixes seriousness and humor, Slouch is a unique and provocative account of the unexpected origins of our largely unquestioned ideas about bad posture.

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Jörg Matthias Determann and Shoaib Ahmed Malik, "Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life: New Frontiers in Science and Religion" (I. B. Tauris, 2024) Mar 19, 2024

Over the last thirty years, humanity has discovered thousands of planets outside of our solar system. The discovery of extraterrestrial life could be imminent. This book explains how such a discovery might impact Islamic theology. It is the foundational reference on the subject, comprising a variety of different insights from both Sunni and Shi'i positions, from different Muslim contexts, and with chapters that compare and contrast Islamic perspectives with Christianity. Together, they address some of our biggest questions through an Islamic lens: What makes humans unique in the cosmos? What are the ethics of dealing with other sentient beings? And how universal is salvation?

Given the accelerating advances in exoplanet research and astrobiology, Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life: New Frontiers in Science and Religion (I. B. Tauris, 2024) is at the frontier of science and Islamic thought. Contributors include a range of leading experts from Muslim theologians, scholars of comparative religion and philosophers, to historians, social scientists and natural scientists.

Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Brandon R. Brown, "Sharing Our Science: How to Write and Speak STEM" (MIT Press, 2023) Mar 18, 2024

Listen to this interview of Brandon Brown, Professor of Physics at the University of San Francisco. We talk about factoring in both message-sender and -receiver to your writing for STEM. Brown is the author of Sharing Our Science: How to Write and Speak STEM (MIT Press, 2023).

Brandon Brown : "I've seen so many different scientists and communicators, including Nobel Laureates, all the way to grad students who are struggling with the English — and it's just apparent to me that some people do have a much better sense of audience. And to my mind, that level of compassion, even perhaps of connection — that is what makes their communication work so very well. And really, this is a talent or disposition which is independent of a person's linguistic skills or background, isn't it?"

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Lisa Messeri, "In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles" (Duke UP, 2024) Mar 16, 2024

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles(Duke UP, 2024), Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

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Ruth A. Morgan, "Climate Change and International History: Climate Diplomacy in the Global North and South Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Mar 16, 2024

Exploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Ruth A. Morgan reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organisations have engaged in diplomatic efforts to address it. Developing amidst the Cold War, decolonization and a growing transnational environmental consciousness, it asks how this wider historical context has shaped international responses to the greatest threat to humankind to date.

Thinking beyond the science of climate change to the way it is received and responded to, Dr. Morgan shows how climate science has been mobilised in the political sphere, paying particular attention to the North-South dynamics of climate diplomacy. The privileging of climate science and the mobilisation of climate scepticism are explored to consider how they have undermined efforts to remedy this planetary problem. Studying climate change and international history in tandem, this book explains the origins of the debates around this environmental emergency, the response of political leaders attempting to address the threat, and the barriers to creating an international regime to resolve the climate crisis.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Once More--What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to be Generative? Mar 16, 2024

Listen to Episode No.9 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois; and joining us, as well, is James Gee, Regents Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the generativity of machines.

James Gee : "I fundamentally believe that humans are a screwed-up species — one of the few species that will put themselves out of business in a shorter evolutionary time than any species that has lived on Earth. So, something must be wrong with us. And I think what's wrong with us is, we don't understand what sort of animal we are. That's why our schools are no good — we don't understand how humans really learn. We don't understand what a human really is. We have an elevated view of our own rationality, of our own intelligence, and the consequence is, we are depleting the world. So, the biggest attempt we can still make now is to use everything we can (including Chat) to retheorize who we are as a being before we put ourselves out of existence."

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Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface" (Edinburgh UP, 2023) Mar 15, 2024

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface(Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nick Jones examines this residue and its consequences, revealing how the GUI exerts a powerful influence on contemporary media.

Focusing on aesthetics and adopting a media agnostic approach, Dr. Jones explores cinema, streaming platforms, television, user-generated content, videogames, apps, virtual reality, VFX, design software, and more in order to show how they cross-pollinate with one another and with our desktop interfaces. The result is a new approach for analysing convergent media in the digital era.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Peter D. McDonald, "Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer" (MIT Press, 2024) Mar 15, 2024

How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players.

Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer (MIT Press, 2024), Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar’s movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities expressed by different enemies, and the emotion elicited by collecting a coin.

To understand these games, McDonald draws on technical discussions by game designers as well as theoretical work about the nature of signs from structuralist semiotics. Interspersed throughout are design exercises that show how critical interpretation can become a tool for game designers to communicate with their players. With examples drawn from over forty years of game history, and from games made by artists, hobbyists, iconic designers, and industry studios, Run and Jump presents a comprehensive—and engaging—vision of this slice of game history.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Eleanor Patterson, "Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution" (U Illinois Press, 2024) Mar 12, 2024

Long before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content via informal networks that crisscrossed transnational boundaries.

Eleanor Patterson’s fascinating cultural history explores the distribution of radio and TV tapes from the 1960s through the 1980s. Looking at bootlegging against the backdrop of mass media’s formative years, Patterson delves into some of the major subcultures of the era. Old-time radio aficionados felt the impact of inexpensive audio recording equipment and the controversies surrounding programs like Amos ‘n’ Andy. Bootlegging communities devoted to buddy cop TV shows like Starsky and Hutch allowed women to articulate female pleasure and sexuality while Star Trek videos in Australia inspired a grassroots subculture built around community viewings of episodes. Tape trading also had a profound influence on creating an intellectual pro wrestling fandom that aided wrestling’s growth into an international sports entertainment industry.

Original and engaging, Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution (U Illinois Press, 2024) shares the story of how fan passion and technology merged into a flourishing subculture.

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Zachary Loeb on the History of the End of the World Mar 11, 2024

Are you into the end of the world? Well, have we got the guest for you. In this episode, Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel interviews Zachary Loeb, assistant professor of history at Purdue University, about his work. On his faculty page, Loeb describes himself as “interested in the idea that humanity’s romance with technology has the species (and the planet) on a course that may lead to catastrophe.” Vinsel and Loeb talk about this idea and its history before turning to a discussion of Loeb’s dissertation and forthcoming book, a history of Y2K. The pair also discuss potential future directions of Loeb’s research. Peoples & Things has a new newsletter, where you can learn behind the scenes details about the podcast and much more. Check it out here.

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Zachary Loeb on the History of the End of the World Mar 11, 2024

Are you into the end of the world? Well, have we got the guest for you. In this episode, Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel interviews Zachary Loeb, assistant professor of history at Purdue University, about his work. On his faculty page, Loeb describes himself as “interested in the idea that humanity’s romance with technology has the species (and the planet) on a course that may lead to catastrophe.” Vinsel and Loeb talk about this idea and its history before turning to a discussion of Loeb’s dissertation and forthcoming book, a history of Y2K. The pair also discuss potential future directions of Loeb’s research. Peoples & Things has a new newsletter, where you can learn behind the scenes details about the podcast and much more. Check it out here.

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Brian Merchant, "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" (LIttle, Brown, 2023) Mar 10, 2024

"Luddite" has become an insult and Brain Merchant wants to change that. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (Little, Brown, 2023) tells the story of when machines starting taking human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work--and how it explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech today. Two hundred years ago in rural England, working men and women rose up en masse rather than starve at the hands of the factory owners who were using machines to erase and degrade their livelihoods. Under the banner of a mythical General Loud, they organized guerrilla raids, smashed specific machines, and threatened wealthy machine owners. Luddites won the support of Lord Byron, inspired Mary Shelley, and enraged the louche Prince Regent and his bloodthirsty government. Before it was over, much blood would be spilled--of rich and poor, of the invisible and of the powerful. This deeply misunderstood class struggle nearly brought 19th century England to its knees. Currently many fear that big tech is dominating our lives and machines replacing human labor run high. We worry that technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are ousting workers from factories, and artificial intelligence will soon remove drivers from cars. Saving the movement from what E. P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity", Merchant finds inspiration in Luddism for our current crises.

Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (2017, Little, Brown). His work has appeared in a variety of places including Wired and The Atlantic. He is a founder of VICE’s speculative fiction outlet Terraform and was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times.

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Hsuan L. Hsu, "Air Conditioning" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Mar 08, 2024

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people's daily lives, thermoception-or the sensory perception of temperature-is being carefully studied and exploited as a tool of marketing, social control, and labour management.

Yet air conditioning isn't for everybody: its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu's Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury, 2024) explores questions about culture, ethics, ecology, and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Christy Spackman, "The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage" (U California Press, 2023) Mar 08, 2024

Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023) explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment processes. By focusing on the relationship between taste and the environment, Christy Spackman shows how efforts to erase unwanted tastes and smells have transformed water into a highly industrialized food product divorced from its origins. The Taste of Water invites readers to question their own assumptions about what water does and should naturally taste like while exposing them to the invisible—but substantial—sensory labor involved in creating tap water.

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor of Art/Science at Arizona State University, where she holds a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. She is also Director of the Sensory Labor(atory), an experimental research collective dedicated to creatively disrupting longstanding sensory hierarchies. Her academic work focuses on how the sensory experiences of making, consuming, and disposing of food influence and are influenced by “technologies of taste,” her term for the oft-overlooked technologies and practices used to manage the sensory aspects of foods during production.

Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explores the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

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Murray Dick, "The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications" (MIT Press, 2020) Mar 07, 2024

Infographics and data visualization are ubiquitous in our everyday media diet, particularly in news—in print newspapers, on television news, and online. It has been argued that infographics are changing what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century—and even that they harmonize uniquely with human cognition. In this first serious exploration of the subject, Murray Dick traces the cultural evolution of the infographic, examining its use in news—and resistance to its use—from eighteenth-century print culture to today's data journalism. He identifies six historical phases of infographics in popular culture: the proto-infographic, the classical, the improving, the commercial, the ideological, and the professional.

In The Infographic: A History of Data Graphics in News and Communications (MIT Press, 2020), Dick describes the emergence of infographic forms within a wider history of journalism, culture, and communications, focusing his analysis on the UK. He considers their use in the partisan British journalism of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print media; their later deployment as a vehicle for reform and improvement; their mass-market debut in the twentieth century as a means of explanation (and sometimes propaganda); and their use for both ideological and professional purposes in the post–World War II marketized newspaper culture. Finally, he proposes best practices for news infographics and defends infographics and data visualization against a range of criticism. Dick offers not only a history of how the public has experienced and understood the infographic, but also an account of what data visualization can tell us about the past.

Dr Murray Dick. Senior Lecturer In Multimedia Journalism at Newcastle University

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Mike Duggan, "All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us" (Reaktion Books, 2024) Mar 07, 2024

Maps go far beyond just showing us where things are located. All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mike Duggan is an exploration of how maps impact our lives on social and cultural levels. This book takes readers on a journey through the fascinating history of maps, from ancient cave paintings and stone carvings to the digital interfaces we rely on today. But it’s not just about the maps themselves; it’s about the people behind them. Discover how maps have affected societies, influenced politics and economies, impacted the environment, and even shaped our sense of personal identity. Dr. Duggan uncovers the incredible power of maps to shape the world and the knowledge we consume. This is a unique and eye-opening perspective on the significance of maps in our daily lives.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Joanna Crosby, "Apples and Orchards Since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Mar 05, 2024

Showing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, Apples and Orchards since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Joanna Crosby takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the importance of the apple as a symbol of both tradition and innovation.

From the 18th century in Britain, technological innovation in fruit production and orchard management resulted in new varieties of apples being cultivated and consumed, while the orchard became a representation of stability. In America orchards were contested spaces, as planting seedling apple trees allowed settlers to lay a claim to land. In this book, Dr. Crosby explores how apples and orchards have reflected the social, economic and cultural landscape of their times. From the association between English apples and 'English' virtues of plain speaking, hard work and resultant high-quality produce, to practices of wassailing highlighting the effects of urbanisation and the decline of country ways and customs, Apples and Orchards from the Eighteenth Century shows how this everyday fruit provides rich insights into a time of significant social change.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Robert Charette on Researching the Material World Mar 04, 2024

In this episode, Peoples & Thing host Lee Vinsel interviews engineer, businessman, consultant, author, contributing editor at IEEE Magazine, and former P&T guest Bob Charette about his research method. Charette really excels at finding great and telling numbers for his pieces on technology, business, and public policy, including in his 12-part IEEE Magazine article series and now ebook, The EV Transition Explained. Vinsel and Charette use Bob's June 2023 IEEE Magazine article, “EV Chargers for ALL,” to talk about how Bob uncovers these numbers. In this episode, you'll also hear from graduate students in Lee's Fall 2023 grad seminar Communicating Academic Ideas to Non-Academic Audiences. We were so glad to have them on the show! ICYMI, Peoples & Things has a new newsletter, where you can learn behind the scenes details about the podcast and much more. Check it out here.

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Francesca Sobande, "Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture" (U California Press, 2024) Mar 03, 2024

Can brands really support positive social change? In Big Brands are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture(U California Press, 2024), Francesca Sobande, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores this question by considering the morality of contemporary brands in contemporary, digitial, culture. The book offers a rich set of case studies, ranging from the ways corporations co-opt social justice campaigns and how nations brand themselves, through to influencers, music festivals, and high end television. A significant contribution to both the theory and practice of branding and marketing, the book will be of interest across social sciences, business, and humanities, as well as anyone interested in the role of branding in modern life.

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Verity Harding, "AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI's Future and Save Our Own" (Princeton UP, 2024) Mar 01, 2024

Artificial intelligence may be the most transformative technology of our time. As AI's power grows, so does the need to figure out what--and who--this technology is really for. AI Needs You argues that it is critical for society to take the lead in answering this urgent question and ensuring that AI fulfills its promise.

Verity Harding draws inspiring lessons from the histories of three twentieth-century tech revolutions--the space race, in vitro fertilization, and the internet--to empower each of us to join the conversation about AI and its possible futures. Sharing her perspective as a leading insider in technology and politics, she rejects the dominant narrative, which often likens AI's advent to that of the atomic bomb. History points the way to an achievable future in which democratically determined values guide AI to be peaceful in its intent; to embrace limitations; to serve purpose, not profit; and to be firmly rooted in societal trust.

AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI's Future and Save Our Own(Princeton UP, 2024) gives us hope that we, the people, can imbue AI with a deep intentionality that reflects our best values, ideals, and interests, and that serves the public good. AI will permeate our lives in unforeseeable ways, but it is clear that the shape of AI's future--and of our own--cannot be left only to those building it. It is up to us to guide this technology away from our worst fears and toward a future that we can trust and believe in.

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Carol Beggy, "Pencil" (Bloomsbury, 2024) Feb 28, 2024

A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it.

Pencils were used to sketch civilization's greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw's blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. Pencil offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object.

Pencils are a simple device that are deceptively difficult to manufacture. At a time when many use cellphones as banking branches and instructors reach students online throughout the world, pencil use has not waned, with tens of millions being made and used annually. In Pencil (Bloomsbury, 2024) Carol Beggy sketches out how the lowly pencil is still a mighty useful tool.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Sara J. Grossman, "Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy" (Duke UP, 2023) Feb 28, 2024

In Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke UP, 2023), Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarchal settler society. Grossman outlines the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science, from the nineteenth-century public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers and the automation of weather data during the Dust Bowl to the role of meteorological satellites in data science’s integration into the militarized state. Throughout, Grossman shows that weather science reproduced the natural world as something to be measured, owned, and exploited. This data gathering, she contends, gave coherence to a national weather project and to a notion of the nation itself, demonstrating that weather science’s impact cannot be reduced to a set of quantifiable phenomena.

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The Taste of Water: A Conversation with Christy Spackman Feb 26, 2024

After WAY too long a hiatus, Peoples & Things is back! GET EXCITED!! In this episode, host Lee Vinsel interviews Christy Spackman, Assistant Professor of Art/Science with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University, about her recent book, The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023). Most Americans drink water that has gone through industrial filtration and treatment. Those processes often leave a flavor in water.

The Taste of Water tells the fascinating story of how scientists, engineers, and water system workers have worked for decades to ensure that processed water has an appealing flavor. Vinsel and Spackman talk about a lot of other things along the way, from how water fits into the field of food studies to Spackman’s future plans. HEY! Peoples & Things has a new newsletter, where you can learn behind the scenes details about the podcast and much more. Check it out here.

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Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, "Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam" (Duke UP, 2021) Feb 26, 2024

Through a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam(Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war's lingering toxicity.

In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the intersecting histories of militarism, biomedicine, race, and aesthetics become materially and metaphorically visible on skin.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at Tulane University. He is interested in the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. If you are interested in any of these topics, feel free to contact him by email: yli88@tulane.edu / lydooooong@gmail.com.

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Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023) Feb 26, 2024

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun.

Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech's platforms and rents. Meanwhile, with every click and scroll, we labour like serfs to increase its power. Welcome to technofeudalism.

Drawing on stories from Greek Myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power and ultimately what it will take overthrow it.

Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres.

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What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to Generate? Feb 24, 2024

Listen to Episode No.8 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. Today we welcome, too, Duane Searsmith, E-Learning Technical Specialist, Information Trust Institute, also at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the meaning of generation by machine.

It's stunning what Generative AI can produce, but what exactly is it there that is being produced? What does it mean, and what do we do with it? And actually, more important, what do we do with the AI that's doing the producing?

AI in our lives now and will continue infiltrating and embedding only more as each day passes and each new update and redesign is released. Therefore, we are the responsible parties in this — we, us, the users. We are the ones we must ask: What does AI mean to us? Because what AI just means, itself... well, that is still only whatever we can mean, ourselves.

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Paul Scharre, "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" (Norton, 2023) Feb 24, 2024

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry―the struggle to control artificial intelligence.

A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives―and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence(Norton, 2023) argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Data is a vital resource like coal or oil, but it must be collected and refined. Advanced computer chips are the essence of computing power―control over chip supply chains grants leverage over rivals. Talent is about people: which country attracts the best researchers and most advanced technology companies? The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military.

Scharre’s account surges with futuristic technology. He explores the ways AI systems are already discovering new strategies via millions of war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, tracking billions of people using biometrics, and subtly controlling information with secret algorithms. He visits China’s “National Team” of leading AI companies to show the chilling synergy between China’s government, private sector, and surveillance state. He interviews Pentagon leadership and tours U.S. Defense Department offices in Silicon Valley, revealing deep tensions between the military and tech giants who control data, chips, and talent. Yet he concludes that those tensions, inherent to our democratic system, create resilience and resistance to autocracy in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technology.

Engaging and direct, Four Battlegrounds offers a vivid picture of how AI is transforming warfare, global security, and the future of human freedom―and what it will take for democracies to remain at the forefront of the world order.

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Jacob Ward, "Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications" (MIT Press, 2024) Feb 23, 2024

In Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.

When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales. In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain’s nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.

Jacob Ward is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Science, Technology and Society Studies Research Program at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. He is coeditor of Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain.

Filippo De Chirico is a PhD student in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy).

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Neil Lee, "Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy" (U California Press, 2024) Feb 21, 2024

How can we build a more equal economy? InInnovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy (U California Press, 2024), Neil Lee, a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, explores the question of how societies have fostered and supported innovation. The book challenges conventional assumptions that innovative economies must be unequal. Drawing on 4 detailed, and critical, case studies- Switzerland, Austria, Taiwan and Sweden, the book shows how Europe has good models of innovation; how the state matters; and how innovation and shared prosperity policies are mutually reinforcing. Accessible and clearly written, the book will be essential reading across social sciences and public policy, as well as anyone wanting a blueprint for equitable economic development,

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Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15" (FSG, 2023) Feb 20, 2024

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.

In American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15(FSG, 2023), the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner--the American Kalashnikov--as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America's gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry.

Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia.

Zusha Elinson is a national reporter, writing about guns and violence for the Wall Street Journal. Based in California, he has also written for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times Bay Area section.

Recommended Books:

Robert Caro, The Path to Power
William Shawcross, Sideshow
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
Adam Winkler, Gun Fight
Tim Mak, Misfire
Doug Stanton, Horse Solidiers

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Nate Klemp, "Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World" (Sounds True, 2024) Feb 19, 2024

With the avalanche of information we get every day, closing down our minds and hearts seems to be the only way to survive. We close down to our inner experience by compulsively checking our devices. We close down to others by getting caught in echo chambers of outrage. But what if there's another way? What if being more open to life is actually what brings us sanity and happiness? In this climate of distraction and division, Nate Klemp's Open: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World(Sounds True, 2024)offers a path back to a way of living that is expansive, creative, and filled with wonder.

Drawing on new science, age-old practices, and personal stories, Klemp examines why we close down when faced with stressors or threats, then reveals how we can train ourselves to open up to the fullness that life offers--even when frightened, outraged, or heartbroken.

Nate Klemp, PhD, is a philosopher, writer, and mindfulness entrepreneur.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Jenna Ng, "The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie" (Amsterdam UP, 2021) Feb 14, 2024

Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate.

Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (University of Amsterdam Press, 2021) by Dr. Jenna Ng develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed. Interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, this open-access book argues that the disappearance of difference reflects shifted conditions of actuality and virtuality in understanding the human condition. These shifts further connect to the current state of politics by way of their distorted truth values, corrupted terms of information, and internalizations of difference.

The Post.Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections thus thinks anew the image’s borders and delineations, evoking the screen boundary as an instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations which do not tell the truth. In the process, a new imagination for images emerges for a gluttony of the virtual; for new conceptualizations of object and representation, materiality and energies, media and histories, real and unreal; for new understandings of appearances, dis-appearances, replacement and re.placement – the post-screen.

This book is available open access here.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Patrick Gamsby, "The Discourse of Scholarly Communication" (Lexington Books, 2023) Feb 14, 2024

The Discourse of Scholarly Communication (Lexington Books, 2023) examines the place and purpose of modern scholarship and its dialectical relationship with the ethos of Enlightenment. Patrick Gamsby argues that while Enlightenment/enlightenment is often used in the mottos of numerous academic institutions, its historical, social, and philosophical elements are largely obscured. Using a theoretical lens, Gamsby revisits the ideals of the Enlightenment alongside the often-contradictory issues of disciplinary boundaries, access to research, academic labor in the production of scholarship (author, peer reviewer, editor, and translator), the interrelationship of form and content (lectures, textbooks, books, and essays), and the stewardship of scholarship in academic libraries and archives. It is ultimately argued that for the betterment of the scholarly communication ecosystem and the betterment of society, anti-Enlightenment rules of scholarship such as ‘publish or perish’ should be dispensed with in favor of the formulation of a New Enlightenment.

Patrick Gamsby is the Scholarly Communication Librarian and Cross-Appointed to the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He previously worked in scholarly communications at Brandeis University and Duke University. Patrick holds a MLIS degree from the University of Western Ontario, a MES degree from York University, and a Ph.D. from Laurentian University. He is the author of two books - Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life and The Discourse of Scholarly Communication - and he lives in St. John's, Newfoundland with his wife and two daughters.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program and Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Christopher Reddy, "Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide" (Routledge, 2023) Feb 13, 2024

Listen to this interview of Christopher Reddy, environmental chemist and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. We talk about his book Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide (Routledge Earthscan 2023).

Christopher Reddy : "Communication definitely teaches us scientists things that we hadn't knows or appreciated, even in our own research. I mean, when you have to rethink about how and why you're doing something and what the outcomes mean, that is a series of mental gymnastics. And when we do gymnastics, we become fitter. We increase our longevity and have a richer and fuller quality of life. And that goes for science too: When you are challenged in the communication, you are putting yourself on a treadmill and you become fitter."

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James S. Damico and Mark C. Baildon, "How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change" (Teachers College Press, 2022) Feb 13, 2024

Climate change and climate denial have remained largely off the radar in literacy and social studies education in the United States. How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change(Teachers College Press, 2022) addresses that gap with the design of the Climate Denial Inquiry Model (CDIM) and clear examples of how educators and students can confront two forms of climate denial: science denial and action denial. The CDIM highlights how critical literacies specifically designed for climate denial texts can be used alongside eco-civic practices of deliberation, reflexivity, and counter-narration to help students discern corporate, financial, and politically motivated roots of climate denial and to better understand efforts to misinform the American public, sow doubt and distrust of basic scientific knowledge, and erode support for evidence-based policymaking and collective civic action. With an emphasis on inquiry-based teaching and learning, the book also charts a path from destructive stories-we-live-by that are steeped in climate denial (humans are separate from nature, the primary goal of society is economic growth without limits, nature is a resource to be used and exploited) to ecojustice stories-To-live by that invite teachers and students to consider more just and sustainable futures.

As mentioned in the podcast, From Climate Denial to Ecojustice is the accompanying website.James S. Damico is Professor of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A.

Mark Baildon is an Associate Professor of Foundations of Education and Coordinator of International Collaborations and Partnerships in United Arab Emirates University’s College of Education.

Madden Gilhooly is a public-school teacher and casual academic based on Gadigal land in so-called-Sydney, Australia.

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Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022) Feb 12, 2024

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.

"Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe, and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.

In The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat (Pegasus Books, 2022), Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. This new book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat.

Rob Percival is Head of Policy at the Soil Association, Britain's leading food and farming charitable organization. He has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize as well as the Thompson Reuters Food Sustainability Media Award.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Markus Krajewski, "The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque" (Yale UP, 2018) Feb 11, 2024

The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque (Yale UP, 2018) is a cutting–edge media history on a perennially fascinating topic that attempts to answer the crucial question: Who is in charge, the servant or the master?

Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current–day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants’ relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.

Markus Krajewski is professor of media history at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 and World Projects: Global Information Before World War I, which was awarded the 2007 Prize of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology. He also works as a software developer and maintainer of his bibliography software Synapsen: A Hypertextual Card Index (www.synapsen.ch). Ilinca Iurascu is assistant professor of German at the University of British Columbia, specializing in nineteenth-century cultural studies and media theory.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, "Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Feb 10, 2024

An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds.

The internet brings information to our fingertips almost instantly. The result is that we often jump to thinking too fast, without taking a few moments to verify the source before engaging with a claim or viral piece of media. Information literacy expert Mike Caulfield and educational researcher Sam Wineburg are here to enable us to take a moment for due diligence with this informative, approachable guide to the internet.

In Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (U Chicago Press, 2023), you will learn to identify red flags, get quick context, and make better use of common websites like Google and Wikipedia that can help and hinder in equal measure.

This how-to guide will teach you how to use the web to verify the web, quickly and efficiently, including how to

• Verify news stories and other events in as little as thirty seconds (seriously)

• Determine if the article you’re citing is by a reputable scholar or a quack

• Detect the slippery tactics scammers use to make their sites look credible

• Decide in a minute if that shocking video is truly shocking

• Deduce who’s behind a site—even when its ownership is cleverly disguised

• Uncover if that feature story is actually a piece planted by a foreign government

• Use Wikipedia wisely to gain a foothold on new topics and leads for digging deeper

And so much more. Building on techniques like SIFT and lateral reading, Verified will help students and anyone else looking to get a handle on the internet’s endless flood of information through quick, practical, and accessible steps.

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Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, "After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Feb 10, 2024

Creative storytelling is the beating heart of Darwin's science. All of Darwin's writings drew on information gleaned from a worldwide network of scientific research and correspondence, but they hinge on moments in which Darwin asks his reader to imagine how specific patterns came to be over time, spinning yarns filled with protagonists and antagonists, crises, triumphs, and tragedies. His fictions also forged striking new possibilities for the interpretation of human societies and their relation to natural environments. After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP, 2022) gathers an international roster of scholars to ask what Darwin's writing offers future of literary scholarship and critical theory, as well as allied fields like history, art history, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, the history of race, aesthetics, and ethics. It speaks to anyone interested in the impact of Darwin on the humanities, including literary scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers interested in Darwin's continuing influence.

• Provides an interdisciplinary lens on the philosophy and writing of Charles Darwin

• Emphasizes Darwin as a thinker and a humanist, showing readers Darwin's wider-ranging and ongoing impact in various fields of social, philosophical, and aesthetic thought

• Looks beyond Darwin's theory of natural selection to focus on his contributions to theories of race and gender, aesthetics, ecology, animal studies, environmentalism, and politics

Devin Griffiths is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His book, The Age of Analogy (2016) was a finalist for the BARS, BSLS, and NVSA book prizes. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Victorian Studies, ELH, the History of Humanities, and Book History. He's now working on a study of ecocriticism and the energy humanities.

Deanna Kreisel is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy, and has published articles in PMLA, Representations, ELH, Novel, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and elsewhere. Her current book project is on utopia and sustainability in Victorian culture.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, "The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science" (Cornell UP, 2023) Feb 04, 2024

Can we predict the future? In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science(Cornell UP, 2023), Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University, tells the story of Soviet and Post-Soviet attempts to order economy and society using a variety of scientific and management techniques. The analysis is wide ranging, demonstrating the contemporary importance, as well as the historical context, of prediction and its associated intellectual and governmental champions. Rich with details, as well as accessible and fascinating, the book is essential reading across history and the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in how we know the past present and future of the modern world.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.

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Lisa Herzog, "Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023) Feb 01, 2024

For better or worse, democracy and epistemology are intertwined. For one thing, politics is partly a matter of gathering, assessing, and applying information. And this can be done responsibly or incompetently. At least since Plato, a leading critique of democracy has focused on the ignorance of ordinary citizens. Historically, this kind of critique has supplied the basis for several nondemocratic proposals. Yet it has also worked in the background of a range of views within democratic theory. Among these are views that have relied on markets as mechanisms for sharing and distributing information.

But there are hazards to market-based thinking about democracy. In Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Lisa Herzog explores three conceptually distinct sites where democracy interfaces with epistemology: markets, expert communities, and public deliberation. The result is an integrated political epistemology for democracy.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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Ismar Volić, "Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation" (Princeton UP, 2024) Feb 01, 2024

What's the best way to determine what most voters want when multiple candidates are running? What's the fairest way to allocate legislative seats to different constituencies? What's the least distorted way to draw voting districts? Not the way we do things now. Democracy is mathematical to its very foundations. Yet most of the methods in use are a historical grab bag of the shortsighted, the cynical, the innumerate, and the outright discriminatory. Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation(Princeton UP, 2024) sheds new light on our electoral systems, revealing how a deeper understanding of their mathematics is the key to creating civic infrastructure that works for everyone.

In this timely guide, Ismar Volic empowers us to use mathematical thinking as an objective, nonpartisan framework that rises above the noise and rancor of today's divided public square. Examining our representative democracy using powerful clarifying concepts, Volic shows why our current voting system stifles political diversity, why the size of the House of Representatives contributes to its paralysis, why gerrymandering is a sinister instrument that entrenches partisanship and disenfranchisement, why the Electoral College must be rethought, and what can work better and why. Volic also discusses the legal and constitutional practicalities involved and proposes a road map for repairing the mathematical structures that undergird representative government.

Making Democracy Count gives us the concrete knowledge and the confidence to advocate for a more just, equitable, and inclusive democracy.

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Science Is a Creative Human Enterprise: A Discussion with Natalie Aviles Jan 31, 2024

Listen to this interview of Natalie Aviles, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia. We talk about how organizations shape people, and how people shape science.

Natalie Aviles : "I think, in general, the more self-conscious that scientists can be about what motivates them, about what makes them happy, about what drives them — the more, then, they can try to imagine a future that satisfies not only their intellectual curiosity but helps them navigate, too, the very sort of prosaic conditions that they find themselves in on a day-to-day basis."

Works referred to in the interview:

Natalie Aviles. An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the U.S. National Cancer Institute (Columbia University Press 2023)
Natalie Aviles. "Environing innovation: Toward an ecological pragmatism of scientific practice." (Sociological Perspectives 2023)
Robin Scheffler and Natalie Aviles. "State planning, cancer vaccine infrastructure, and the origins of the oncogene theory." (Social Studies of Science 2022)
Natalie Aviles. "Scientific innovation as environed social learning." (In: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy. Edited by Gross, Reed, and Winship. Columbia University Press 2022)
Natalie Aviles. "Situated practice and the emergence of ethical research." (Science, Technology, & Human Values 2018)

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Eviane Leidig, "The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization" (Columbia UP, 2023) Jan 31, 2024

On mainstream social media platforms, far-right women make extremism relatable. They share Instagram stories about organic foods that help pregnant women propagate the “pure” white race and post behind-the-scenes selfies at antivaccination rallies. These social media personalities model a feminine lifestyle, at once promoting their personal brands and radicalizing their followers. Amid discussions of issues like dating, marriage, and family life, they call on women to become housewives to counteract the corrosive effects of feminism and champion the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which motivated massacres in Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo.

Eviane Leidig offers an in-depth look into the world of far-right women influencers, exploring the digital lives they cultivate as they seek new recruits for white nationalism. Going beyond stereotypes of the typical male white supremacist, she uncovers how young, attractive women are playing key roles as propagandists, organizers, fundraisers, and entrepreneurs. Leidig argues that far-right women are marketing themselves as authentic and accessible in order to reach new followers and spread a hateful ideology. This insidious—and highly gendered—strategy takes advantage of the structure of social media platforms, where far-right women influencers’ content is shared with and promoted to mainstream audiences. Providing much-needed expertise on gender and the far right, this timely and accessible book also details online and offline approaches to countering extremism.

Rameen Mohammed is a community organizer based in Texas, a fellow for Muslim Counterpublics Lab and a soon-to-be law student.

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Curtis Fox, "Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict" (30 Press Publishing, 2023) Jan 30, 2024

The on-going war in Ukraine continues to highlight the distinct differences between how Russia operates large-scale military operations from the usual manner NATO military forces often engage themselves. What accounts for the Russian way of war? A common term used to describe Russian military strategy in the 21st century is "hybrid warfare" that seeks to subvert an enemy force in manners other than direct confrontation. Curtis L. Fox argues in his book Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition & Conventional Military Conflict(30 Press Publishing, 2023)that this approach to warfare is rooted in Russian history and explains much of Russia's conduct in the war in Ukraine thus far.

Curtis L. Fox is a former Green Beret and served as a demolitions and combat engineering expert on a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha, as well as other operational duties and missions. He separated from the Army in 2016 to attend the MBA program at Georgetown before re-entering public service in the Department of Defense.

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Chen-Pang Yeang, "Transforming Noise. A History of Its Science and Technology from Disturbing Sounds to Informational Errors, 1900-1955" (2023) Jan 30, 2024

Today, the concept of noise is employed to characterize random fluctuations in general. Before the twentieth century, however, noise only meant disturbing sounds. In the 1900s-50s, noise underwent a conceptual transformation from unwanted sounds that needed to be domesticated into a synonym for errors and deviations to be now used as all kinds of signals and information. Transforming Noise examines the historical origin of modern attempts to understand, control, and use noise. Its history sheds light on the interactions between physics, mathematics, mechanical technology, electrical engineering, and information and data sciences in the twentieth century.

This book explores the process of engineers and physicists turning noise into an informational concept, starting from the rise of sound reproduction technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio in the 1900s-20s until the theory of Brownian motions for random fluctuations and its application in thermionic tubes of telecommunication systems. These processes produced different theoretical treatments of noise in the 1920s-30s, such as statistical physicists' studies of Brownian fluctuations' temporal evolution, radio engineers' spectral analysis of atmospheric disturbances, and mathematicians' measure-theoretic formulation. Finally, it discusses the period during and after World War II and how researchers have worked on military projects of radar, gunfire control, and secret communications and converted the interwar theoretical studies of noise into tools for statistical detection, estimation, prediction, and information transmission.

To physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, and computer scientists, this book offers a historical perspective on themes highly relevant in today's science and technology, ranging from Wi-Fi and big data to quantum information and self-organization. This book also appeals to environmental and art historians to modern music scholars as the history of noise constitutes a unique angle to study sound and society. Finally, to researchers in media studies and digital cultures, Transforming Noise demonstrates the deep technoscientific historicity of certain notions - information, channel, noise, equivocation - they have invoked to understand modern media and communication.

Interview by Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español Communications officer- Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

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Sandro Galea, "Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Jan 28, 2024

A provocative chronicle of how US public health has strayed from its liberal roots.

The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment.

It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of knowledge through reasoned inquiry that should inform the work of public health.

Across fifty essays, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time(U Chicago Press, 2023) chronicles how public health became enmeshed in the insidious social trends that accelerated under Covid-19. Galea challenges this intellectual drift towards intolerance and absolutism while showing how similar regressions from reason undermined social progress during earlier eras. Within Reason builds an incisive case for a return to critical, open inquiry as a guiding principle for the future public health we want—and a future we must work to protect.

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Elinor Cleghorn, "Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World" (Dutton, 2022) Jan 28, 2024

Medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. Over centuries, women’s bodies have been demonised and demeaned until we feared them, felt ashamed of them, were humiliated by them. But as doctors, researchers, campaigners and most of all as patients, women have continuously challenged medical orthodoxy. Medicine’s history has always been, and is still being, rewritten by women’s resistance, strength and incredible courage.

In this ground-breaking history Dr. Elinor Cleghorn unpacks the roots of the perpetual misunderstanding, mystification and misdiagnosis of women’s bodies, illness and pain. From the ‘wandering womb’ of ancient Greece to today’s shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation and menopause, Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World (Dutton, 2021) is the revolutionary story of women who have suffered, challenged and rewritten medical misogyny. Drawing on Elinor’s own experience as an unwell woman, this is a powerful and timely exposé of the medical world and woman’s place within it.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Paddy Walker and Peter Roberts, "War's Changed Landscape?: A Primer on Conflict's Forms and Norms" (Howgate, 2023) Jan 27, 2024

Throughout much of the 21st century thus far, the common argument among military pundits was that war has or will soon be radically changed in manners that exist beyond imagination. The main catalyst for such extraordinary changes would be new advancements in technology and weaponry. With the on-going war in Ukraine, one fundamental surprise that has stunned many military analysts is that in spite of major technological advancements such as drones and open-source intelligence (OSINT) via social media, the main character of the conflict seems more akin to World War I (1914-1918) style trench warfare. What can explain this perplexing paradox?

Peter Roberts and Paddy Walker explain in their co-authored book War's Changed Landscape?: A Primer on Conflict's Forms and Norms(Howgate Publishing Limited, 2023) that all change in war is often outweighed by continuity in military history. Even when change does occur, it is often a slow evolution of norms rather than a sudden rupture. The role of technology in such is often grossly exaggerated in the popular media.

Peter Roberts is a Senior Associate Fellow for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), having been Director of Military Sciences there between January 2014 and November 2021.

Paddy Walker is Managing Director of the Leon Group, a senior research Fellow in Modern War Studies at The University of Buckingham, an Associate Fellow at RUSI and previously London chair of NGO Human Rights Watch.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Renée Fox, "The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2023) Jan 27, 2024

The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present’s desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions “necromantic literature” at a nineteenth-century intersection between sentimental historiography, medical electricity, imperial gothic monsters, and the Irish Literary Revival, contending that these unghostly bodies resist critical assumptions about the always-haunting power of history.

By considering Irish Revival texts within the broader scope of nineteenth-century necromantic works, The Necromantics challenges Victorian studies’ tendency to merge Irish and English national traditions into a single British whole, as well as Irish studies’ postcolonial efforts to cordon off a distinct Irish canon. Fox thus forges new connections between conflicting political, formal, and historical traditions. In doing so, she proposes necromantic literature as a model for a contemporary reparative reading practice that can reanimate nineteenth-century texts with new aesthetic affinities, demonstrating that any effective act of reading will always be an effort of reanimation.

Renee Fox is an Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz where she also serves as the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies and Co-Director of The Center for Monster Studies. She’s co-edited quite a number of works in Irish Studies, Irish literature and monster literature as well writing for journals such as Victorian Studies, the Irish University Review and the New Hibernia Review.

Aidan Beatty teaches in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Lee McIntyre, "On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy" (MIT Press, 2023) Jan 27, 2024

The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy(MIT Press, 2023), Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre explains how autocrats wield disinformation to manipulate a populace and deny obvious realities, why the best way to combat disinformation is to disrupt its spread, and most importantly, how we can win the war on truth.

McIntyre takes readers through the history of strategic denialism to show how we arrived at this precarious political moment and identifies the creators, amplifiers, and believers of disinformation. Along the way, he also demonstrates how today's "reality denial" follows the same flawed blueprint of the "five steps of science denial" used by climate deniers and anti-vaxxers; shows how Trump has emulated disinformation tactics created by Russian and Soviet intelligence dating back to the 1920s; provides interviews with leading experts on information warfare, counterterrorism, and political extremism; and spells out the need for algorithmic transparency from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. On Disinformation lays out ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens--from resisting polarization to pressuring our Congresspeople to regulate social media--as well as the important steps our government (if we elect the right leaders) must take.

Compact, easy-to-read (and then pass on to a friend), and never more urgent, On Disinformation does nothing less than empower us with the tools and knowledge needed to save our republic from autocracy before it is too late.

Emanuel Stoakes is a freelance journalist and researcher. Bylines in a range of international outlets including The NY Times, The Washington Post, NBC digital, The Guardian, The Independent etc. Spinoff and Newsroom in Aotearoa New Zealand. TV production work with Al Jazeera, VICE, ABC Australia, ARD (Germany), ARTE and others.

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Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, "Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives" (U Michigan Press, 2023) Jan 26, 2024

Featuring perspectives from educators, undergraduates, and archivists who are affiliated with community and institutional archives, the contributions to Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives(U Michigan Press, 2023) explore efforts to deconstruct and transform the institutional authority of the archive and describe new possibilities for archives in education. In this conversation, editors Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes speak about the book’s genesis, their framing of critical digital archives, and the broad range of institutions, labor, and individuals connected to projects described in the book. This discussion also touches on how factors including supportive leadership and space for experimentation create opportunities for instructors and students to challenge the authority of the archive. Read an open access edition of this book on the Lever Press website.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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The Future of Images of Human Evolution Jan 20, 2024

We are all familiar with the “march of progress” image - the representation of evolution that depicts a series of apelike creatures becoming progressively taller and more erect before finally reaching the upright human form. It’s a powerful image. In his book Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image(Yale UP, 2024), Professor Gowan Dawson examines its origins and its influence on the public understanding of evolution. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Hartmut Koenitz, "Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative: Immersive Expressions for a Complex Time" (Routledge, 2023) Jan 19, 2024

This remarkably clearly written and timely critical evaluation of core issues in the study and application of interactive digital narrative (IDN) untangles the range of theories and arguments that have developed around IDN over the past three decades.

Looking back over the past 30 years of theorizing around interactivity, storytelling, and the digital across the fields of game design/game studies, media studies, and narratology, as well as interactive documentary and other emerging forms, Hartmut Koenitz's book Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative: Immersive Expressions for a Complex Time (Routledge, 2023) offers important and insightful correctives to common misunderstandings that pervade the field. This book also changes the perspective on IDN by introducing a comprehensive conceptual framework influenced by cybernetics and cognitive narratology, addressing limitations of perspectives originally developed for legacy media forms. Applying its framework, the book analyzes successful works and lays out concrete design advice, providing instructors, students, and practitioners with a more precise and specific understanding of IDN.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Cross-Cultural Research on Gaming and “Gaming Disorder” Jan 19, 2024

In 1998 the phrase “internet addiction” was first used to describe problematic prolonged internet use, and encompassed a wide range of online activities including reading news, connecting in chat rooms, viewing pornography, and gambling. Since then, particular focus has been placed on internet gaming, and in 2022 the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (11th edition) classified Gaming Disorder as a "mental disorder due to addictive behaviors." But as Dr. Veli-Matti Karhulahti and Dr. Yaewon Jin explain, there is far from universal consensus on what “gaming disorder” exactly is. They share their insights as researchers of the ORE (Ontological Reconstruction of Gaming Disorder), a five-year interdisciplinary project funded by the European Research Council, and discuss the difficulties not only in identifying “gaming disorder” but in categorizing the various kinds of games that are considered. They share their own experiences with computer gaming, from early 1990s Finnish schools to South Korea’s PC bangs (internet cafés). They leave us to contemplate culturally and historically dependent perspectives not only on what constitutes a so-called disorder, but why individuals play games.

This episode is supported by the Otto A. Malm Foundation.

Dr. Veli-Matti Karhulahti is the ORE project’s principle investigator and is an interdisciplinary senior researcher of play, games, and the philosophy of science at the University of Jyväskylä. Dr. Yaewon Jin is a post-doctoral researcher at Jyvaskyla, and focuses on South Korea as part of the project. She is also currently a visiting professor at Yonsei University and principal researcher at the Game-n-Science institute.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.

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What Decision Means Jan 19, 2024

Listen to Episode No.5 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois, and also Gang Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is what decision means.

Decision is no simple matter, whether the decider in question is human or machine. In a sense, both are black boxes to us, and yet the urgency today to open the lid on A.I. is heightened because of how human-like the machine seems to be able to do decision. This is why, across disciplines, we need to convene and discuss and decide together on how to understand and use A.I. The alternative is grisly: Everyone using a tool that no one fully understands — no one using the tool in full understanding or for that matter, in any understanding at all.

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Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit" ((EF,JP)) Jan 18, 2024

Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race) privilege–in India, yes, but also in American and other meritocratic democracies as well.

The wide-ranging discussion explored how inequality gets reproduced, passed on and justified. Caste–often framed as a fundamentally “Eastern” form of difference–not only seems to have a lot in common with race, but also shares a history through colonial, plantation-based capitalism. This may explain some of the ways “merit” has also made race (and class) disparities invisible in the United States. This helps explain ways in which dominant groups excoriate the “identity politics” of those seeking greater access to privileged domains, and claim their own independence from “ascriptive” identities--while silently relying on the privilege and other hidden advantages of particular racial or caste-based forms of belonging.

The companion text for this episode--Privilege by Shamus Khan--addresses very similar issues in the elite high school where he was a student, teacher and sociological researcher, St. Paul’s School. Khan traces a shift over the past decades (we argued a bit about the time frame) from a conception of privilege defined by maintaining boundaries, to one based on the privileged person’s capacity to move with ease through all social contexts.

Discussed in this episode:

Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India
Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor : How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test
John Carson, The Measure of Merit
Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn
Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions
Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India

Listen and Read Here

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Paul Gowder, "The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Jan 17, 2024

Governments and consumers expect internet platform companies to regulate their users to prevent fraud, stop misinformation, and avoid violence. Yet, so far, they've failed to do so. The inability of platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon to govern their users has led to stolen elections, refused vaccines, counterfeit N95s in a pandemic, and even genocide. Such failures stem from these companies' inability to manage the complexity of their userbases, products, and their own incentives under the eyes of internal and external constituencies.

In The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms (Cambridge UP, 2023), Paul Gowder argues that countries should adapt the institutional tools developed in political science for platform governance to democratize major platforms. Democratic institutions allow knowledgeable actors to freely share and apply their understanding of the problems they face while leaders more readily recruit third parties to help manage their decision-making capacity.

This book is also available open access on Cambridge Core.

Paul Gowder is Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and a Founding Fellow of the Integrity Institute. He is the author of The Rule of Law in the Real World and The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation.

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Christopher Corker, "The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930" (U of York, 2016) Jan 16, 2024

Christopher Corker'sThe Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930 (U of York, 2016) focuses on four in-depth case studies of John Brown, Cammell-Laird, Thomas Firth and Hadfields to examine the business and technology of the industry. It builds on the work of Tweedale and Trebilcock on Sheffield and armaments, and advances the argument that during the period of study from 1900 to 1930, the city was one of the most important centres for armaments research and production anywhere in the world. The business of the armaments industry is explored through an examination of the evolving links the industry had with the Government against the backdrop of an uncertain trading environment, and the managerial connections established between the state and private industry. Also explored are the collaborative, collusive and independent defensive measures enacted by the industry to counter uncertainty in the industry, through collaborative business arrangements and various approaches to entering international markets for armaments. An examination of the business of the armaments industry also highlights the value of the technological investment made by the industry. At the centre of exploring the technology of the armaments industry, a reconstruction of its technological history is undertaken using patent and archival records, highlighting the nuances and research dead-ends of development in the industry. Of central importance is the notion of spin-off and the interactions between armaments and metallurgical developments in the creation of a pool of knowledge to be utilised for future research into alloy steels, and the notion of path-dependent technological research. Also advanced is the concept of an innovation system centred on Sheffield, and an exploration of the important national and international links advanced by the industry

This title is available open access here.

Chris is a business historian, and Lecturer in Management at the School for Business and Society at the University of York, where he is a former Director of Undergraduate Programmes. He completed his PhD in 2016, and won the 2017 Coleman Prize from the Association of Business Historians for excellence in new business history research, and an Emerald Literati Prize in 2019. His current research is on innovation and knowledge in industrial clusters, in particular the business and intellectual history of Stainless Steel, which has been supported by a small grant from the Business Archives Council. Outside of academia Chris is an advisor to Sheffield Archives, member of the Joined Up Heritage Sheffield Partnership Board, and former Chair of Portland Works Little Sheffield, a social enterprise housed in a 19th Century cutlery works. His work has also been featured on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking.

Also discussed during the podcast

Chris Corker, ‘Continuity and Change in the Sheffield Armaments Industry 1919-1930’, Journal of Management History, Vol. 24, No.2, pp.174-188, 2018.
Wilson, J.F., Corker, C., and Lane, J.P. (Eds), Industrial Clusters in the UK: Knowledge, Innovation Systems and Sustainability (Routledge, 2022).

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Free to Investigate: Dr. Scott Atlas on the Freedom in the Sciences Jan 16, 2024

Can we have science without freedom of speech? Dr. Scott Atlas's professional work and personal experiences bring to light an important and often under-discussed element of speech: freedom of speech in the hard sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a host of new questions and concerns surrounding our medical system and government health agencies: as Special Advisor to the President and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from July to December 2020, Dr. Atlas was at the forefront of such debates. In this conversation, he discusses the importance of debate not only to science itself but also to popular trust in and support of the sciences, which since the pandemic have suffered a steep decline.

Dr. Scott Atlas, MD, is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and the co-director of the Global Liberty Institute. In addition to his role in White House he has served as Senior Advisor for Health Care to several numerous candidates for President, as well as counselled members of the U.S. Congress on health care, testified before Congress, and briefed directors of key federal agencies. Before his appointment at Hoover Institution, he was a Professor and Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center for 14 years, and he received his medical degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine. He is the author of numerous books, most recently A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America.

Here is the Cochrane Library analysis on masking mentioned during the interview.

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Alexandra Filindra, "Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Jan 15, 2024

The United States has more guns than people and more gun violence than any Western democracy. Scholars in diverse fields interrogate why 21st century Americans support gun ownership and valorize vigilantism even as they fear gun violence. Many question how the NRA – National Rifle Association – has successfully lobbied for radical gun laws that most Americans don’t support.

In Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Alexandra Filindra highlights political culture. She argues that the NRA depends upon political narratives that can be traced back to the American Revolution. Rather than focus on the constitution, Lockean liberalism, rule of law, or individual rights, she argues that the American Revolution depended upon classical republican ideals – especially the martial virtue of the citizen-soldier – that became foundational to American democracy. American gun culture fuses the republican citizen-soldier with White male supremacy to create what Filindra calls ascriptive martial republicanism. Her book demonstrates how the militarized understandings of political membership prominent in NRA narratives and embraced by many White Americans fit within this broader revolutionary ideology.

Even as contemporary NRA narratives embrace 18th and 19th century versions of ascriptive martial republicanism, the NRA radically decouples political virtue and military service by associating virtue with the consumer act of purchasing a firearm. Rather than emphasizing military service or preparedness, consumer choice defines the politically virtuous citizen.

White Amerians embrace this combination of civic republicanism and White male supremacy but Filindra’s research shows that they also hold a competing form of republicanism (inclusive republicanism) that includes a commitment to peaceful political engagement, civic forms of voluntarism and participation, and a strong belief in multiculturalism.

In the podcast, Susan mentions previous podcasts on Katherine Franke’s Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition and Drew McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America.

Dr. Alexandra Filindra is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She specializes in American gun politics, immigration policy, race and ethnic politics, public opinion, and political psychology.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman, "Mainstreaming and Game Journalism" (MIT Press, 2023) Jan 15, 2024

Why games are still niche and not mainstream, and how journalism can help them gain cultural credibility.

Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023) addresses both the history and current practice of game journalism, along with the roles writers and industry play in conveying that the medium is a “mainstream” form of entertainment. Through interviews with reporters, David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman retrace how the game industry and journalists started a subcultural spiral in the 1980s that continues to this day. Digital play became increasingly exclusionary by appealing to niche audiences, relying on hardcore fans and favoring the male gamer stereotype. At the same time, this culture pushed journalists to the margins, leaving them toiling to find freelance gigs and deeply ambivalent about their profession.

Mainstreaming and Game Journalism also examines the bumpy process of what we think of as “mainstreaming.” The authors argue that it encompasses three overlapping factors. First, for games to become mainstream, they need to become more ubiquitous through broader media coverage. Second, an increase in ludic literacy, or how-to play games, determines whether that greater visibility translates into accessibility. Third, the mainstreaming of games must gain cultural legitimacy. The fact that games are more visible does little if only a few people take them seriously or deem them worthy of attention. Ultimately, Mainstreaming and Game Journalism provocatively questions whether games ever will—or even should—gain widespread cultural acceptance.

This book is available open access here.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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James W. Cortada, "Inside IBM: Lessons of a Corporate Culture in Action" (Columbia Business School, 2023) Jan 14, 2024

IBM was the world's leading provider of information technologies for much of the twentieth century. What made it so successful for such a long time, and what lessons can this iconic corporation teach present-day enterprises?

James W. Cortada--a business historian who worked at IBM for many years--pinpoints the crucial role of IBM's corporate culture. He provides an inside look at how this culture emerged and evolved over the course of nearly a century, bringing together the perspectives of employees, executives, and customers around the world. Through a series of case studies, Inside IBM: Lessons of a Corporate Culture in Action (Columbia Business School, 2023) explores the practices that built and reinforced organizational culture, including training of managers, employee benefits, company rituals, and the role of humor. It also considers the importance of material culture, such as coffee mugs and lapel pins.

Cortada argues that IBM's corporate culture aligned with its business imperatives for most of its history, allowing it to operate with a variety of stakeholders in mind and not simply prioritize stockholders. He identifies key lessons that managers can learn from IBM's experience and apply in their own organizations today. This engaging and deeply researched book holds many insights for business historians, executives and managers concerned with stakeholder relations, professionals interested in corporate culture, and IBMers.

James W. Cortada is a senior research fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He spent nearly forty years at IBM in various sales, consulting, management, and executive positions.

Other NBN interviews with the same author include "The Birth of Modern Facts" and "IBM: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon".

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Can A.I. Mean? Jan 13, 2024

Listen to Episode No.4 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is whether A.I. can mean.

The short answer is yes, A.I. can mean... whatever we make it mean.

For instance, ChatGPT does has access to text on certain kinds of subject matter, like, for example, the assembly of explosives or specifications on suicide. This kind of stuff is on the web, so ChatGPT has “read it” these subjects into its corpus. However, human programmers have applied filters telling the A.I. not to speak about these things. Nonetheless, you may be able to get to what it “thinks” about these things with some clever prompts, called “jailbreaks” in the hacker trade.

But does the A.I. really think, as we humans would associate with the act of thinking? Not really, because an A.I. like ChatGPT does not think about bombs or self-destruction. It just has words about these subjects which it doesn’t itself “understand.” And on top of that, its human-programmer masters have told it not to repeat them.

But whose purpose is meant to be served here, the A.I.'s or our own? In our discussion in this instalment of All We Mean, we argue, of course, for the A.I. serving the purposes of us humans. But there the questions immediately arises, which of us humans will be served? It may be that only the big stakeholders in the large Internet companies get served, and who knows what purposes they have. Perhaps they're quite content to see A.I. create the illusion of fact and consciousness, if for no other reason than to increase profits.

We, on the opposite side of that, say that the technology has tremendous potential for everyone, if used in everyone's interests. For example, people who want to learn can use A.I. technologies to improve their own performance, just as people who want to discover can use A.I. technologies to communicate their findings more effectively. These are the sorts of purpose we believe A.I. can be used to accomplish, by anyone, for everyone. But, we wonder, will purposes such as these also count when the technology rests firmly in the hands of the very few, because what if they don't really care what the rest of us want?

Read Bill's and Mary's multimodal grammar of A.I.

And read their work on using A.I. in education.

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Thomas DeGloma, "Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Jan 11, 2024

In recent years, anonymity has rocked the political and social landscape. There are countless examples: An anonymous whistleblower was at the heart of President Trump’s first impeachment, an anonymous group of hackers compromised more than 77 million Sony accounts, and best-selling author Elena Ferrante resolutely continued to hide her real name and identity. In his book Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Thomas DeGloma investigates contemporary and historical cases to build a sociological theory that accounts for the many faces of anonymity.

Thomas DeGloma is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019) Jan 10, 2024

The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental movement in the United States and finds everywhere talk of health. At its best, viewing the environment through the lens of health encouraged decentralized organizing and a sense of collective responsibility. At its worst it supported technocracy and uninspired paeans to green consumerism. With shrewd analysis, Thomson gives the movement its own check-up as she reassess the careers and political imaginations of many of the its luminaries, including David Brower, Wendell Berry, Dave Foreman, and Bill McKibben. Dispensing with the habit of thinking of environmentalism as responding only and ever to itself, Thomson sets its history within the larger context of American political development. So the book is full of unexpected historical crossovers, such as Love Canal residents responding to the Mariel boatlife or the OPEC embargo-era U.S. oil industry championing the Gaia hypothesis. Few books on environmentalism’s past are a better guide for envisioning its future.

Jennifer Thomson is Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell History. She also hosts the radio program Bucknell: Occupied, which airs Thursday at 6:00 pm on WVBU.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.

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Mark Monmonier, "Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography" (ESRI Press, 2019) Jan 10, 2024

In Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography (ESRI Press, 2019), cartographic cogitator Mark Monmonier shares his insights about the relationships between networks and maps through a collection of essays. Using historical maps, he explores: triangulation networks used to establish the baselines of a map’s scale; astronomical observations, ellipsoids, geodetic arcs, telegraph networks, and GPS constellations that establish latitude and longitude at control stations; cartographic symbols that portray network features on a map; survey networks used to situate and construct canals, railways, roads, and power lines; Postal and electronic networks that created and disseminated weather maps, and; topological networks that underlie modern census enumeration and satellite navigation systems.

Connecting the past to the present via maps and reflection, Monmonier continues his contribution to cartographic scholarship by demonstrating the network as a unifying concept for understanding and using maps.

Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado

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Roland Allen, "The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper" (Profile Books, 2023) Jan 06, 2024

We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think?

In The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Profile Books, 2023), Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of mediaeval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine.

On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.

In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive - and happier.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Chinmay Tumbe, "The Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020) Jan 03, 2024

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management History. He has written two books, one in 2018 India Moving: A History of Migration, which talks about how people have moved in India historically, and his 2020 book the Age of Pandemics 1817-1920: How They Shaped India and the World (HarperCollins, 2020). The book argues that the period between the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century - an age otherwise known for the worldwide spread of the industrial revolution, imperialism, and globalization - was also the 'age of pandemics'. It documents the scale of devastation caused by different pandemics, cholera, the plague, influenza, and finally Covid. The book has great resources for the classroom and for the general public such as a timeline of pandemics, striking tables such as the death toll in millions for each epidemic, and a set of photographs at the end that is definitely worth viewing.

Paula De La Cruz-Fernández is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO.

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Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019 Jan 02, 2024

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire.

Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio received her BA in history at the University of Puerto Rico and her PhD in Central/East European history from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her dissertation, “The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and Biopolitics in the Prussian-Polish Provinces, 1840-1914,” was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Award in Polish Studies by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) in 2010.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is the winner of the 2020 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies and honorable mention for the 2020 Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

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Robert R. Janes, "Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat" (Routledge, 2023) Jan 02, 2024

Who do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse for which we may be heading?

Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat (Routledge, 2023) proposes an unlikely hero in this narrative. Robert Janes’ text explores the implications of societal collapse from a multidisciplinary perspective and considers the potential museums have to contribute to the reimagining and transitioning of a new society with the threat of collapse.

Arguing that societal collapse is underway, but that total collapse is not inevitable, Janes maintains that museums are well-positioned to mitigate and adapt to the disruptions of societal collapse. As institutions of the commons, belonging to and affecting the public at large, he contends that museums are both responsible and capable of contributing to the durability and well-being of individuals, families, and communities, and enhancing societal resilience in the face of critical issues confronting our species.

The Museum COP at Tate
Museum pressure groups: The Empathetic Museum, Museum as Progress, Museum Human.
The Australian Museum’s mission statement
Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh
Museum of Homelessness
Horniman Museum

Robert R. Janes is an independent scholar whose work draws on his many year’s experience as a museum director. He is the editor emeritus of the Museum Management and Curatoriship journal, a visiting scholar at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, and the founder of the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice. He is the author of multiple books on the social role of museums.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019) Jan 02, 2024

What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it something more?

In The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019), Lee McIntyre addresses recent attacks on science in areas such as climate change, vaccination, and even belief that the world is flat by explaining why science is a culture built around a “scientific attitude” that embraces evidence and a willingness to change beliefs based on where evidence leads.

What does it mean for science education if the success of science derives as much from attitude as it does from methodology? And can science provide a model for other truth-seeking endeavors?

Join us for a conversation that draws together ideas from science, philosophy, and education and applies them to the most important issues we face as a society.

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School.

Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org.

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Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jan 01, 2024

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India(Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India's attempts to feed itself between the 1940s and 1970s. Following the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, hunger and malnutrition remained key issues for India's politicians, planners and citizens as a new nation sought to become self-sufficient in food production. Siegel's book follows debates on land reform, technology and native diets to understand how the food question became an entry point into larger questions of citizenship, rights and welfare, debates that continue to loom large in the battle against agrarian distress and widespread food insecurity in present-day India.

Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled "Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.

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Carolyn Birdsall, "Radiophilia" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Dec 31, 2023

A century ago, the emergence of radio, along with organized systems of broadcasting, sparked a global fascination with the 'wonder' of sound transmission and reception. The thrilling experience of tuning in to the live sounds of this new medium prompted strong affective responses in its listeners.

This book introduces a new concept of "radiophilia," defined as the attachment to, or even a love of radio. Treating radiophilia as a dynamic cultural phenomenon, it unpacks the various pleasures associated with radio and its sounds, the desire to discover and learn new things via radio, and efforts to record, re-experience, and share radio. Surveying 100 years of radio from early wireless through to digital audio formats like podcasting, Carolyn Birdsall's Radiophilia (Bloomsbury Press, 2023) engages in debates about fandom, audience participation, listening experience, material culture, and how media relate to affect and emotions.

Alejandra Bronfman is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Nicole Seymour, "Glitter" (Bloombury, 2022) Dec 28, 2023

Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuries-from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory-along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender/sexual identity.

Glitter is part of the Object Lessons series: short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Jeffrey Whyte, "The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War" (Oxford UP, 2023) Dec 27, 2023

Jeffrey Whyte's book The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War(Oxford UP, 2023) explores the history, politics, and geography of United States psychological warfare in the 20th century against the backdrop of the contemporary 'post-truth era'. From its origins in the Second World War, to the United States' counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam, Whyte traces how the theory and practice of psychological warfare transformed the relationship between the home front and theatres of war. Whyte interrogates the broader political mythologies that animate popular conceptions of psychological war, such as its claim to make war more humane and less violent.

On the contrary, The Birth of Psychological War demonstrates the role of psychological warfare in expanding the scope and scale of military violence amidst ostensible efforts to 'win hearts and minds'. While casting a critical eye on psychological warfare, Whyte establishes its continued significance for the contemporary student of international relations.

Dr. Whyte earned his Ph.D. with the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia and before that a MA with School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, also in beautiful British Columbia. He is currently Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Ben Jacobsen and David Beer, "Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past" (Bristol UP, 2023) Dec 24, 2023

Social media platforms hold vast amounts of biographical data about our lives. They repackage our past content as ‘memories’ and deliver them back to us. But how does that change the way we remember?

Drawing on original qualitative research as well as industry documents and reports, Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past (Bristol University Press, 2021) by Dr. Ben Jacobsen and Dr. David Beer critically explores the process behind this new form of memory making. In asking how social media are beginning to change the way we remember, it will be essential reading for scholars and students who are interested in understanding the algorithmically defined spaces of our lives.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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André Jansson, "Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition" (Edward Elgar, 2022) Dec 23, 2023

How are geographies of communication changing with contemporary digital media and data infrastructure? What is ‘geomedia’ and ‘transmedia’? Where are the possibilities for human agency to emerge in the increasingly digitally mediated world? André Jansson, Professor at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden, introduces his latest book, Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition (Edward Elgar, 2022).

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, André speaks about how he uses a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of communication geographies, introducing the framework for understanding ‘geomedia’ as an environmental regime that shapes human subjectivity. The book explores the human condition under digital capitalism, depicting an environment in which digital logistics have taken centre stage in day-to-day life. It argues that human activities are accommodated to sustain the circulation of digital data.

André Jansson is director of the Centre for Geomedia Studies. His research is oriented towards questions of media use, identity and power from an interdisciplinary perspective. His work links various theoretical strands from social phenomenology, human geography and sociology of culture. A particular interest regards the relationship between mediatization processes and the production of social space. He is currently leading the project Hot Desks in Cool Places: Coworking Spaces as Post-Digital Industry and Movement (with Karin Fast), which studies the ‘future of work’ and struggles over this future in relation to so-called coworking spaces in urban settings.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Journalism as an Institution in the Age of AI. She is also an affiliated PhD student with the Graduate School of Asian Studies at Lund University and with the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests center around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or on X @JoanneKuai.

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Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, "Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry" (Oxford UP, 2023) Dec 23, 2023

Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt tells a new story about the history of the music business and the ten technological advances that disrupted it over the last century.

In recent years, narratives about the music industry tend to hew to a common theme: it was humming along for decades until the Internet and Napster came along and disrupted it. Key Changes shows that this view is incorrect: the industry was actually shaken up not once in the 1990s, but ten times over more than 100 years. These ten disruptions came with the introduction of new formats for enjoying recorded music: starting with the cylinders and discs played on early phonographs; then moving through radio, LPs, tapes, CDs, television, digital downloads, streaming, and streaming video; and then into Artificial Intelligence (AI), which enables a wide range of new capabilities with profound impacts upon the business. This book devotes a chapter to each of these formats, illustrating how such innovations beget shifts in creativity, consumer behavior, economics, and law.

Each of the technological innovations covered in this book not only disrupted the music business, but also fundamentally altered the industry's character. And while the technologies themselves have evolved in unique and varied ways over the decades, the changes within the business follow a clear pattern. Veteran music industry professionals and music technology experts Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt illuminate this pattern through a framework they term "the 6 Cs": cutting edge technology, channels of distribution, creators, consumers, cash, copyright. This framework provides insight into how such disparate innovations similarly disrupted and transformed the music business in each era. Extensively researched and supplemented by interviews with Grammy-winning artists, producers and executives, the book provides an insightful perspective on the ways technology has fundamentally altered the music industry, throughout history and into the present era.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Joanna Zylinska, "The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI" (MIT Press, 2023) Dec 22, 2023

A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.

We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformation of photography by computation—and the transformation of human perception by algorithmically driven images, from CGI to AI—The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI(MIT Press, 2023) investigates what it means for us to live surrounded by image flows and machine eyes. In an astute and engaging argument, Joanna Zylinska brings together media theory and neuroscience in a Vilém Flusser–Paul Virilio remix. Her “perception machine” names a technical universe of images and their infrastructures. But it also refers to a sociopolitical condition resulting from today's automation of vision, imaging—and imagination.

Written by a theorist-practitioner, the book incorporates Zylinska's own art projects, some of which have been co-created with AI. The photographs, collages, films, and installations available as part of the book (and its companion website) provide a different mode of thinking about our technological futures, at a local as well as a planetary level. Offering provocative concepts such as eco-eco-punk, AUTO-FOTO-KINO, planetary micro-vision, loser images, and sensography, the book outlines an existential philosophy of messy media for a time when our practices of imaging and self-imaging are being radically redesigned. Importantly, it also offers a new vision of our future.

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King's College London. The author of Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press) and many other books on art, technology, and ethics, she is also an artist and curator.

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Vineeta Sinha. "Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia" (Berghahn Books, 2023) Dec 20, 2023

The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Vineeta Sinha's Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2023) critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and 'traces'.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Vincent Ialenti, "Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now" (MIT Press, 2020) Dec 19, 2023

Based on twelve years of anthropological exploration, Vincent Ialenti'sDeep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now(MIT Press, 2020) is an engaging guide on deep time learning to reorient our understanding of time and space. As each chapter begins with creative vignettes to capture the reader's imagination and empathy and concludes with five to six reflective "reckonings," the book focuses on Finland's nuclear waste experts whose daily lives revolve around considerations of the far-flung futures and deep pasts. The main goal of chapters one and two is to pursue independent, expert-inspired, long-termist learning. The book's second goal, captured in chapters three and four, is to encourage support for highly trained, too often ignored, long-termist experts. By combating the deflation of expertise by weaving together chains of generational knowledge, Deep Time Reckoning advocates for one route of spirited and adventurous learning to rescue hopes of a safe tomorrow from the Earth's current ecological death spiral.

Sarah Newman (@newmantropologa) is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores long-term human-environmental interactions, including questions of waste and reuse, processes of landscape transformation, and relationships between humans and other animals.

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Laila Shereen Sakr, "Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives" (Stanford UP, 2023) Dec 18, 2023

Laila Shereen Sakr's book Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford UP, 2023) explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements.

Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual. Are we cyborgs or citizens—or both? This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within.

Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Media Theory and Practice at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.

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Skylar Bayer and Gabriela Serrato Marks, "Uncharted: How Scientists Navigate Their Own Health, Research, and Experiences of Bias" (Columbia UP, 2023) Dec 18, 2023

People with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM fields, and all too often, they face isolation and ableism in academia. Uncharted: How Scientists Navigate Their Own Health, Research, and Experiences of Bias(Columbia UP, 2023) is a collection of powerful first-person stories by current and former scientists with disabilities or chronic conditions who have faced changes in their careers, including both successes and challenges, because of their health. It gives voice to common experiences that are frequently overlooked or left unspoken. These deeply personal accounts describe not only health challenges but also the joys, sorrows, humor, and wonder of science and scientists.

With a breadth of perspectives on being disabled or chronically ill, these stories highlight the intersectionality of minoritized identities with the disability community. Uncharted features essays by contributors who are d/Deaf, blind, neurodivergent, wheelchair users, have experienced traumatic brain injuries, have blood sugar disorders, have rare medical diagnoses, or have received psychiatric diagnoses, among many others. In many cases, the scientific field is not fully accessible to them, and they frankly describe struggling as well as thriving alongside their conditions.

Skylar Bayer is a marine ecologist and science communicator. Currently a marine habitat resource specialist in the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences for research on the sex lives of scallops and is a producer for the Story Collider.

Gabi Serrato Marks is a geochemist turned writer. She received her PhD in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and is now a partner at the scientist-focused PR firm Stellate Communications. Her work has been published in Scientific American and Audubon and on the PBS Eons YouTube Channel

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Toward Equity in Science: A Discussion with Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière Dec 16, 2023

Listen to this interview of Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière, co-authors of Equity for Women in Science: Dismantling Systemic Barriers to Advancement(Harvard UP, 2023). Cassidy is Professor and Tom and Marie Patton School Chair in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also President of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics. Vincent is Professor of Information Science at Université de Montréal, where he also serves as Associate Vice-President of Planning and Communications. He is Scientific Director of the Érudit journal platform and Associate Scientific Director of the Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies.

We talk about how the science of science is advancing the work done by each and every scientist, by helping them to do work that is fairer, truer, and realer.

Vincent Larivière : "Scientists are group leaders, reviewers, editors, administrators — I mean, we are mostly an autonomous community, so there's mostly no one else to blame for inequity in our science practice. The system that we're in is the one that we've created collectively. So, there is a responsibility in all of the actions we do and in all of the different roles that we have to actually make science better and to fight inequality. Because the inequality, as so much work now demonstrates, is bad. It’s bad from the point of view of the individual scientist, but it’s bad too for the science itself — we could do better science by being more inclusive in our science practice."

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Genealogies of Modernity Episode 7: A Genealogy of Gun Violence Dec 13, 2023

The problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has its roots in the industrial revolution. Satia tells the story of British gun-maker Samuel Galton, Jr., who was called to task by his Quaker community for manufacturing rifles. As a professed pacifist, Galton had to wrestle with the large-scale uses to which his weapons were put. So where do we look for answers about how to regulate guns? Some claim the answer has to lie in the past, in the nation’s founding documents. Others argue that novel technologies demand novel solutions. Solving the problem of gun violence may be a case where we need to make a strong modernity claim.

Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Christopher Nygren, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh

Featured Scholars:

Catherine Fletcher, Professor of History, Manchester Metropolitan University

Priya Satia, Professor of History, Stanford University

Special thanks: James DeMasi, Chloé Hogg, Jonathan Lyonhart, Pernille Røge, Jennifer Waldron, Catherine Yanko.

For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here.

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Nettrice R. Gaskins, "Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom" (MIT Press, 2021) Dec 13, 2023

Today I talked to Nettrice R. Gaskins about Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom(MIT Press, 2021).

The growing maker movement in education has become an integral part of both STEM and STEAM learning, tapping into the natural DIY inclinations of creative people as well as the educational power of inventing or making things. And yet African American, Latino/a American, and Indigenous people are underrepresented in maker culture and education. In this book, Nettrice Gaskins proposes a novel approach to STEAM learning that engages students from historically marginalized communities in culturally relevant and inclusive maker education. Techno-vernacular creativity (TVC) connects technical literacy, equity, and culture, encompassing creative innovations produced by ethnic groups that are often overlooked.

TVC uses three main modes of activity: reappropriation, remixing, and improvisation. Gaskins looks at each of the three modes in turn, guiding readers from research into practice. Drawing on real-world examples, she shows how TVC creates dynamic learning environments where underrepresented ethnic students feel that they belong. Students who remix computationally, for instance, have larger toolkits of computational skills with which to connect cultural practices to STEAM subjects; reappropriation offers a way to navigate cultural repertoires; improvisation is firmly rooted in cultural and creative practices. Finally, Gaskins explores an equity-oriented approach that makes a distinction between conventional or dominant pedagogical approaches and culturally relevant or responsive making methods and practices. She describes TVC habits of mind and suggests methods of instructions and projects.

Mentioned in this episode:

“Underwater Dreams,” 2014 film directed by Mary Mazzio
Dr. Gaskins’ collages, generative AI portrait of Greg Tate, links to Romare Bearden, and more

Nettrice Gaskins is an African American digital artist, academic, cultural critic and advocate of STEAM fields. She is currently the assistant director of the STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

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Jesse Dart, "Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry" (Lexington Books, 2022) Dec 11, 2023

Food is increasingly a subject of interest in social sciences: how we cook, consume, and share food is relevant to our social lives. In Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry (Lexington Books, 2022), Jesse Dart draws on ethnographic fieldwork to consider the ways in which free food has become ubiquitous and even compulsory within the tech industry. Packed lunches have nearly disappeared as more companies provide free food with the stated objectives of attracting and retaining employees, increasing productivity, and creating a sense of community through commensality. Dart demonstrates how these food programs alter the relationship between employer and employee, support a flexible type of workforce, and reveal a commensality that is both exclusionary and inclusionary. Through detailed descriptions and insightful analysis, the book illustrates the tension embedded in food perks in the workplace, between food as a kind of gift and as a part of everyday entitlement.

Jesse Dart is a social anthropologist and writer whose origins are in southern Illinois. He has spent many years living, researching and studying overseas, most recently in Italy. His academic interests are in the anthropology of work, food, and care. He is currently the senior UX research at Hyatt Hotels Corporation.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Mark Munsterhjelm, "Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) Dec 10, 2023

Forensic genetic technologies are popularly conceptualized and revered as important tools of justice. The research and development of these technologies, however, has been accomplished through the capture of various Indigenous Peoples' genetic material and a subsequent ongoing genetic servitude.

In Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples(McGill-Queen's UP, 2023), Mark Munsterhjelm explores how controversial studies of Indigenous Peoples have been used to develop racializing forensic technologies. Making moral and political claims about defending the public from criminals and terrorists, international networks of scientists, police, and security agencies have developed forensic genetic technologies firmly embedded in hierarchies that target and exploit many Indigenous Peoples without their consent. Collections began under the guise of the highly controversial Human Genome Diversity Project and related efforts, including the 1987 sampling of Brazilian Indigenous Peoples as they recovered from near genocide. After 9/11, War on Terror rhetoric began to be used to justify research on ancestry estimation and physical appearance (phenotyping) markers, and since 2019, international research cooperation networks' use of genetic data from thousands of Uyghurs and other Indigenous Peoples from Xinjiang and Tibet has contributed to a series of controversies.

Munsterhjelm concludes that technologies produced by forensic genetics advance the biopolitical security only of privileged populations, and that this depends on imposing race-based divisions between who lives and who dies. Meticulously researched, Forensic Colonialism adds to growing debates over racial categories, their roots in colonialism, and the political hierarchies inherent to forensic genetics.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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The Future of Predictions: A Discussion with Christopher E. Mason Dec 09, 2023

Predictive algorithms are changing the world – that is the claim of Christopher E. Mason who has co-authored (with Igor Tulchinsky) the book The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk (MIT Press, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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This is the Best Statement of the Simulation Hypothesis We've Seen Dec 08, 2023

It’s the UConn PopCast, and in this episode we discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 movie World on a Wire, shown on West German television over two nights, and then lost for decades. When it was restored and re-released nearly 40 years later, the movie quickly gained acclaim as a lost masterwork of science fiction cinema.

We discuss the movie’s sophisticated and pioneering presentation of the simulation hypothesis, and its deep engagement with Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra and simulation.

We examine the deep influence of the movie on blockbusters like The Matrix and Inception, consider the Cold War context of its production, and ask where World on a Wire places in the pantheon of philosophically informed - and philosophically influential - cinema.

The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

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Genealogies of Modernity Episode 3: What Is Genealogy Dec 07, 2023

Genealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy can guard against the potential dangers of claiming modernity. Against the effort to erase the past, genealogy asserts that our ancestry will always be with us. Against the effort to master the past, genealogy reminds us that our descendants have the freedom to create new futures. Sociologist Alondra Nelson tells the story of how African Americans have used DNA-informed genealogy to recover African identity despite slavery’s erasure of family history. Genealogical thinking can help us shape a disposition to the past that recognizes the legacy of injustice while also fostering human flourishing in the future.

Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Ryan McDermott, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh; Senior Research Fellow, Beatrice Institute

Featured Scholars:

Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study

Caro Pirri, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh

Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University

Special thanks to: Eduard Fiedler, Christopher Firestone, Thomas A. Lewis, Thomalind Martin Polite, Sara Trevisan

For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here.

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Using History For User Research (UX): A Discussion with Larry McGrath Dec 07, 2023

In Episode 4 of "Practical History" I talk to Larry McGrath, a user researcher at Amazon (and author of Making Spirit Matter Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France(University of Chicago Press, 2020). Larry earned his PhD in the history of science, briefly taught at a university, and then decided to move into the consulting and tech industries. We discuss Larry's experiences of translating his historical skills and expertise into UX research, a burgeoning field focused on discovering the needs of product users. We talk about what it means to be a historian in UX and what historical methods / concepts / habits are useful in helping companies in these domains solve problems. Larry shares concrete examples of challenges he solved using the historian's toolbox while working for a medical consultancy and then at Facebok/Meta and Amazon Sports. We also discuss why it is so important for those eager to apply their skills in business and tech to focus on the value that they could offer to companies.

Patryk Babiracki is a historian, researcher and writer; professor & MA student advisor at the University of Texas at Arlington. PhD from Johns Hopkins. Promoter of #AppliedHistory: using historical concepts, frameworks, and methodologies to solve real-world organizational problems.

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Linda Eckert, "Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer" (Cambridge UP, 2024) Dec 05, 2023

Cervical cancer kills almost 350,000 women each year. What's more horrifying, is that millions have died of this disease that's nearly 100% preventable. It's no secret that healthcare is full of inequities, with a severe lack of accessible screening programs. But women's health care is also impeded by cultural, gender, and political barriers, issues that have combined to create devastating consequences.

In Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr Linda Eckert takes her years of experience and weaves it together with the voices of the courageous women who use their own experience of cervical cancer to advocate for change. This heart-breaking, yet hopeful, book takes you through the world of cervical cancer with evidence-based information, personal stories and actionable outcomes. Society flourishes when women have access to safe and affordable healthcare. Together we can make this need a reality and eliminate the world's most preventable cancer.

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Monica Huerta, "The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2023) Dec 04, 2023

The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity—industrialization, racialization, and capitalism—were quickly reshaping the world. The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism(NYU Press, 2023) slows down the moment in which the technology of photography seemed to speed itself—and so the history of racial capitalism—up. It follows the substantial shifts in the markets, mediums, and forms of photography during a legally murky period at the end of the nineteenth century. Monica Huerta traces the subtle and paradoxical ways legal thinking through photographic lenses reinscribed a particular aesthetics of whiteness in the very conceptions of property ownership.

The book pulls together an archive that encompasses the histories of performance and portraiture alongside the legal, pursuing the logics by which property rights involving photographs are affirmed (or denied) in precedent-setting court cases and legal texts. Emphasizing the making of “expression” into property to focus our attention on the failures of control that cameras do not invent, but rather put new emphasis on, this book argues that designations of control’s absence are central to the practice and idea of property-making.

The Unintended proposes that tracking and analyzing the sensed horizons of intention, control, autonomy, will, and volition offers another way into understanding how white supremacy functions. Ultimately, its unique historical reading practice offers a historically-specific vantage on the everyday workings of racial capitalism and the inheritances of white supremacy that structure so much of our lives.

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Andrew C. McKevitt, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America" (UNC Press, 2023) Dec 04, 2023

The United States has more guns than people – a condition that is “unprecedented in world history.” Scholars often focus on gun culture, the Second Amendment, or the history of gun safety, duties, and rights. Often, people assume that the number of guns is a natural state – the guns were always there. But were the guns always there? What caused the drastic boom in firearms, and when did it happen?

In Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America(UNC Press, 2023), Dr. Andrew McKevitt investigates how and when the guns arrived – and why so many people bought them. McKevitt argues that what Americans refer to as “gun culture” in the 21st century “emerged out of the intersections of the Cold War and consumer capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s.” A booming consumer market following World War II coupled with a surplus of cheap firearms readily available for American entrepreneurs to resell to citizens laid the groundwork for rampant firearm distribution in the country. War made the United States into a “gun country” but US gun politics – “interwoven with struggles over race and gender” cannot be detached from consumer politics. Gun safety and gun rights organizations both demand consumer regulation and protection.

Dr. Andrew C. McKevitt is the John D. Winters Endowed Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University. His previous book, Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (2017) was published by the University of North Carolina Press and he received the Stuart L. Bernath Scholarly Article Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Too Much Communication? Dec 02, 2023

Listen to Episode No.2 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about TMC — Too Much Communication.

In the 2000s, people complained about the demand to know more stuff. Not today.

It's amazing if you stop to think — if you can find the peace to stop for anything — but such a short time ago, media were about information. Now it's just communicate — post, tweet, share, text, send, upload, access, retweet, like, promote, influence, watch, listen, follow... we do a lot of activity on that surface of our devices. Well, surface is what communication is. That's it. It’s, make available — that’s communicating. And whether there's too much of it or the wrong kind, one thing is for certain: There’s tons of it. Communication is spread everywhere. And what it's all about is not really the question. The pressing question right now is, What is it?

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Jeff Jarvis, "The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Dec 01, 2023

The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind in The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet(Bloomsbury, 2023).

To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.

What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today's debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis' exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Daniel Jütte, "Transparency: The Material History of an Idea" (Yale UP, 2023) Dec 01, 2023

Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea?

From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, Transparency: the Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023) is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Dr. Daniel Jütte argues that the experience of transparency has been inextricably linked to one element of Western architecture: the glass window.

Windows are meant to be unnoticed. Yet a historical perspective reveals the role that glass has played in shaping how we see and interpret the world. A seemingly “pure” material, glass has been endowed, throughout history, with political, social, and cultural meaning, in manifold and sometimes conflicting ways. At the same time, Jütte raises questions about the future of vitreous transparency—its costs in terms of visual privacy but also its ecological price tag in an age of accelerating climate change.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Andrea L. Guzman et al., "The SAGE Handbook of Human–Machine Communication" (SAGE, 2023) Nov 28, 2023

The SAGE Handbook of Human-Machine Communication (Sage, 2023) has been designed to serve as the touchstone text for researchers and scholars engaging in new research in this fast-developing field. Chapters provide a comprehensive grounding of the history, methods, debates and theories that contribute to the study of human-machine communication. Further to this, the Handbook provides a point of departure for theorizing interactions between people and technologies that are functioning in the role of communicators, and for considering the theoretical and methodological implications of machines performing traditionally ‘human’ roles. This makes the Handbook the first of its kind, and a valuable resource for students and scholars across areas such as communication, media and information studies, and computer science, as well as for practitioners, engineers and researchers interested in the foundational elements of this emerging field.

Among the chapters you will find in this book are: Machines are Us: An Excursion in the History of HMC; Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human–Machine Communication (HMC); Philosophical Contexts and Consequences of Human–Machine Communication; An ethnography for studying HMC: What can we learn from observing how humans communicate with machines?; Feminist, Postcolonial, and Crip Approaches to Human-Machine Communication Methodology; AI, Human–Machine Communication and Deception; Human-Machine Communication in Marketing and Advertising; and Conceptualizing Empathic Child–Robot Communication.

Interview by Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español Communications officer- Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto.

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G. H. Bennett, "The War for England's Shores: S-Boats and the Fight Against British Coastal Convoys" (US Naval Institute Press, 2023) Nov 27, 2023

The War for England's Shores: S-Boats and the Fight Against British Coastal Convoys (US Naval Institute Press, 2023) by Dr. G. H. Bennett examines the Kriegsmarine's S-Boat offensive along the English Channel and the North Sea from 1940 to 1945, together with British and, later, Allied responses to nullify that threat. Very fast, and armed with torpedoes and mines, S-Boats posed a serious threat to the convoys that were forced to run close along the British coast on a daily basis. Despite the significance of this campaign and the real threat to the whole British war economy, it has been, until now, strangely overlooked by historians. Indeed, the book highlights issues around the maritime identity of those states and navies that see themselves in oceanic terms, at the expense of engagement with, and operations in, coastal waters.

Using an array of archival materials from Britain, Germany and the USA, The War for England’s Shores examines why the Germans failed to make the most of this opportunity to disrupt British trade. G. H. Bennett analyses how the British slowly countered the threat by embracing new technologies and developing a system of sea control that gradually forced the German S-Boat arm from the offensive against Britain's coastal convoys, and on to the defensive in the months leading up to the invasion of France. The author also looks at the S-Boat campaign along these convoy routes in the context of present-day interest in littoral warfare, so that the work has a vital and current appeal and offers significant and surprising insights.

The book offers an unparalleled exploration of a key moment in the development of coastal warfare, and will appeal to historians and enthusiasts as well as defence analysts and naval personnel.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Peter Bellerby, "The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Nov 27, 2023

Peter Bellerby is the founder of Bellerby & Co. Globemakers, the world's only truly bespoke makers of globes. His team of skilled craftspeople make exquisite terrestrial, celestial and planetary globes for customers around the world. In The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft (Bloomsbury, 2023), he introduces us to this world. The story began after his attempt to find a special globe for his father's 80th birthday. Failing to find anything suitable, he decided to make one himself which took him on an extraordinary journey of rediscovering this forgotten craft.

The chapters of The Globemakers take us through the journey of how to build a globe, or 'earth apples' as they were first known, and include fascinating vignettes on history, art history, astronomy and physics, as well as the day-to-day craftsmanship at the workshop itself. This beautiful book uses illustration, photography and narrative to tell the story of our globe and many different globes it has inspired.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Ran Zwigenberg, "Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Nov 27, 2023

Ran Zwigenberg’s Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (U Chicago Press, 2023) explores early efforts by the American military, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social scientists to understand the effects of the atomic bombings on the minds of those who had survived. In positioning the book as “a prehistory of PTSD,” Zwigenberg draws attention to the historicity of the idea of psychological “trauma” before the concept was institutionalized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980.

Nuclear Minds shows that the ideological temperament of Cold War science and the gendered nature of scientific knowledge production versus psychological care were among the factors that led scientists and researchers to minimize, deny, or simply not register as meaningful the suffering of survivors, but also that without the concept of “trauma” as we use it now (or even the category of “survivor”) the experience of the affected did not always cleanly conform to our contemporary expectations.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Dirk Van Laak, "Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure" (MIT Press, 2023) Nov 26, 2023

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape?

InLifelines of our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalise infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.

Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Dr. van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfilment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, Dr. van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Anne Baillot, "From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis" (Open Book Publishers, 2023) Nov 26, 2023

How do we currently preserve and access texts, and will our current methods be sustainable in the future?

In From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis (Open Book Publishers, 2023), Anne Baillot seeks to answer this question by offering a detailed analysis of the methods that enable access to textual materials, in particular, access to books of literary significance. Baillot marshals her considerable expertise in the field of digital humanities to establish a philological overview of the changing boundaries of ‘access’ to literary heritage over centuries, deconstructing the western tradition of archiving and how it has led to current digital dissemination practices. Rigorously examining the negative environmental impact of digital publishing and archiving, Baillot proposes an alternative model of preservation and dissemination which reconciles fundamental traditions with the values of social responsibility and sustainability in an era of climate crisis.

Integrating historical, archival and environmental perspectives, From Handwriting to Footprinting illuminates the impact that digitisation has had on the dissemination and preservation of textual heritage and reflects on what its future may hold. It is invaluable reading for anyone interested in textual history from a linguistic or philological perspective, as well as those working on publishing, archival and infrastructure projects that require the storing and long-term preservation of texts, or who want to know how to develop a more mindful attachment to digitised material.

This book is available open access here.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Peter Samsonov, "IS-2: Development, Design, and Production of Stalin's Warhammer" (Military History Group, 2022) Nov 26, 2023

The IS-2 is the quintessential Soviet heavy tank from World War 2. Heavily armored and boasting a fearsome 122mm gun, this tank matched the German panzers on the Eastern front by more than just its fierce appearance.

In Peter Samsonov's book IS-2: Development, Design, and Production of Stalin's Warhammer (Military History Group, 2022), this tank's history is told from the beginning of the Soviet heavy tank programme until the very end of World War 2, in the most detailed and complete account of its development, design and production available in English. Supported by extensive research of Russian language sources, this publication includes a comprehensive breakdown of prototypes, the Soviet analysis of weaknesses in German tanks including the Tiger and Panther, the development of the 122mm gun, the principles of the new tank's armor layout and a wealth of technical data.

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Kat Mustatea, "Voidopolis" (MIT Press, 2023) Nov 25, 2023

Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, Kat Mustatea's Voidopolis (MIT Press, 2023) is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.

Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante's Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita.

Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec's A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again. At the end of this decay cycle, only the printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains. Each July 1, the date the project first started on Instagram, the book resets again, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing.

A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from a major university press, Voidopolis is a unique and deeply affecting artwork that speaks as much to our existential moment as it does to the fragility of experience, reality, and our connection to one another.

A guide to reading Voidopolis can be found here.

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Tabitha Stanmore, "Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Nov 24, 2023

Magic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early modern eras, practical magic by contrast – performed to a useful end for payment, and actually more common than malign spellcasting – has been overlooked. InLove Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Tabitha Stanmore brings this world to light.

Exploring many hundred instances of daily magical usage, and setting these alongside a range of imaginative and didactic literatures, Tabitha Stanmore demonstrates the entrenched nature of 'service' magic in premodern English society. This, she shows, was a type of spellcraft for needs that nothing else could address: one well established by the time of the infamous witch trials. The book explores perceptions of magical practitioners by clients and neighbours, and the way such magic was utilised by everyone: from lowliest labourer to highest lord. Stanmore reveals that – even if technically illicit – magic was for most people an accepted, even welcome, aspect of everyday life.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Anne Mendelson, "Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood" (Columbia UP, 2023) Nov 22, 2023

Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the population is lactose-intolerant? Why are gigantic new dairy farms permitted to deplete the sparse water resources of desert ecosystems? Why do thousands of U.S. dairy farmers every year give up after struggling to recoup production costs against plummeting wholesale prices?

Exploring these questions and many more, Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood(Columbia UP, 2023) is an unflinching and meticulous critique of the glorification of fluid milk and its alleged universal benefits. Anne Mendelson's groundbreaking book chronicles the story of milk from the Stone Age peoples who first domesticated cows, goats, and sheep to today's troubled dairy industry. Spoiled shows that drinking fresh milk was rare until Western scientific experts who were unaware of genetic differences in the ability to digest lactose deemed it superior to traditional fermented dairy products. Their flawed beliefs fueled the growth of a massive and environmentally devastating industry that turned milk into a cheap, ubiquitous commodity.

Mendelson's wide-ranging account also examines the consequences of homogenization and refrigeration technologies, the toll that modern farming takes on dairy cows, and changing perceptions of raw milk since the advent of pasteurization. Unraveling the myths and misconceptions that prop up the dairy industry, Spoiled calls for more sustainable, healthful futures in our relationship with milk and the animals that provide it.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Ruth Dalton, "Living in Houses: A Personal History English Domestic Architecture" (Lund Humphries, 2022) Nov 22, 2023

In Living in Houses: A Personal History of English Domestic Architecture (Lund Humphries, 2022), Dr. Ruth Dalton presents a rich and rewarding history of houses in England through the stories of nine houses, dating from the 1600s to the 1980s, which have been inhabited by the author, an architect and academic. Chronologically ordered, the book covers rural vernacular houses from the 17th Century, Georgian and Victorian townhouses, villas and converted industrial buildings, Edwardian semis and 20th-century council housing and mixed tenure new developments.

Firstly reflecting on the author’s own experience of the house, each chapter then examines its historical context, before making a detailed analysis of the buildings design and layout, usefully illustrated with architectural drawings. Each chapter concludes with a useful discussion of lessons learnt from each house/historic period and compares them with contemporary houses which use similar materials, construction techniques or ideas. It not only details the evolution of the design and construction of houses through the centuries, but also includes concise but highly informative sections on the history of various types of construction and materiality, such as brickmaking and timber and steel frame; sections on conversion and adaptive reuse and what works and what doesn't; the evolution of styles; housing density; ownership; and the three broad waves of council/social housing etc.

On reflecting on her own experiences, the author provides useful insights into how we relate to our homes, how they shape and affect us and the value and meaning of the home.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Joe Lane, "Networks, Innovation, and Knowledge: the North Staffordshire Potteries, 1750-1851" (U of London, 2023) Nov 20, 2023

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the industrial district of the North Staffordshire Potteries dominated the British earthenware industry, producing local goods that sold in global markets. Over this time the region experienced consistent growth in output, an extreme spatial concentration of physical and human capital, and became home to some of the most famous Master Potters in the world. The Potteries was also characterised by a growing body of useful and practical knowledge about the materials, processes and skills required to produce world-leading earthenware. This thesis exploits this striking example of a highly concentrated and highly skilled craft-based industry during a period of sustained growth and development which offers a rich opportunity to contribute to several strands of economic and business history.

This thesis presents and analyses new empirical evidence based on trade directories to examine the organisational evolution of the district. It reconstructs the district at the firm level, showing that the region’s growth was incredibly dynamic. The spatial concentration of producers and the importance of social and business networks are also explored through a new map of the region in 1802 and social network analysis. As a study of a craft-based, highly skilled industry without a legacy of formal institutions such as guilds to govern and protect access to knowledge, this thesis also offers substantial empirical and historiographical contributions to the study of knowledge and innovation during the period of the Industrial Revolution. It presents a new database of pottery patents alongside a variety of qualitative evidence such as trade literature, exhibition catalogues, advertisements and sales catalogues. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals the low propensity to patent in the North Staffordshire pottery industry, and provides a new typology of knowledge used in the industry. It argues that the types of knowledge being created and disseminated influenced the behaviour of producers substantially, and this typology of knowledge is far more complex than those established tacit/explicit divisions favoured in historical study and the social sciences more broadly. The findings of this thesis allow us to answer numerous outstanding questions concerning the development of the North Staffordshire Potteries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When brought together in such a way, the complementary strands of research and findings presented offer a coherent narrative of an extremely complex and dynamic cluster of production that both challenges and confirms traditional historiographical tradition concerning industrial districts.

This thesis is available open access here.

Dr. Joe Lane is a business historian and lecturer in Strategy at Henley Business School at the University of Reading. He holds a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics, where he subsequently worked before joining Henley in 2019. He is co-director of the centre for economic institutions and international business history at the University of Reading and has two current streams of research, one into patents and innovation over the long run, and a second concerning how industrial clusters as sites of knowledge creation and dissemination.

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Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023) Nov 18, 2023

Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance(Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point for the rather curious story of the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and how they created a new system with a strong independent nuclear safety regulator that has refused to back down even as the political tides have changed, and what this has meant for energy policy in Japan in the past dozen years. Koppenborg’s history of nuclear power regulation in Japan also seriously considers the implications of this dramatic break for regimes in other countries. This case study provides a complex and thought-provoking contribution to discussions of the role of nuclear power and independent regulation in global efforts to decarbonize our energy supply.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Jason Puskar, "The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans" (U Minnesota Press, 2023) Nov 18, 2023

From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency.

The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans (U Minnesota Press, 2023) traces the sudden rise of a technology that has transformed everyday life for billions of people: the binary switch. By chronicling the rapid growth of binary switching since the mid-nineteenth century, Jason Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common today as pushing a button or flipping a switch--the deceptively simple act of turning something on or off. More than a technical history, The Switch offers a cultural and political analysis of how reducing so much human action to binary alternatives has profoundly reshaped modern society.

Analyzing this history, Puskar charts the rapid shift from analog to digital across a range of devices--keyboards, cameras, guns, light switches, computers, game controls, even the "nuclear button"--to understand how nineteenth-century techniques continue to influence today's pervasive digital technologies. In contexts that include musical performance, finger counting, machine writing, voting methods, and immersive play, Puskar shows how the switch to switching led to radically new forms of action and thought.

The innovative analysis in The Switch makes clear that binary inputs have altered human agency by making choice instantaneous, effort minimal, and effects more far-reaching than ever. In the process, it concludes, switching also fosters forms of individualism that, though empowering for many, also preserve a legacy of inequality and even domination.

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Jenny Odell, "Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock" (Random House, 2023) Nov 18, 2023

In her first book, How to Do Nothing, artist Jenny Odell examined the power of quiet contemplation in a world where our attention is bought and sold. Now, she takes up the question of how to find space for silence when we feel like we don’t have enough time to spend.

In her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock(Random House, 2023), Odell traces the history behind our relationship to time, from the day-to-day pressures of productivity to the deeper existential dread underlying the climate crisis. In the process, she explores alternative ways of experiencing time that can help us get past the illusion of the separate self and instead open us to wonder and freedom.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Odell to discuss the social dimensions of time, how paying attention can unsettle the boundaries between us, why she views burnout as a spiritual issue, and how love can bring us out of linear time.

Life As It Is is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.

Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. This approach has enabled Tricycle to successfully attract readers from all walks of life, many of whom desire to enrich their lives through a deeper knowledge of Buddhist traditions.

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Matthew F. Jordan, "Danger Sound Klaxon!: The Horn That Changed History" (U Virginia Press, 2023) Nov 17, 2023

Danger Sound Klaxon!:The Horn That Changed History (University of Virginia Press, 2023) reveals the untold story of the Klaxon automobile horn, one of the first great electrical consumer technologies of the twentieth century. Although its metallic shriek at first shocked pedestrians, savvy advertising strategies convinced consumers across the United States and western Europe to adopt the shrill Klaxon horn as the safest signaling technology available in the 1910s. The widespread use of Klaxons in the trenches of World War I, however, transformed how veterans heard this car horn, and its traumatic association with gas attacks ultimately doomed this once ubiquitous consumer technology.

By charting the meteoric rise and eventual fall of the Klaxon, Dr. Matthew Jordan highlights how perceptions of sound-producing technologies are guided by, manipulated, and transformed through advertising strategies, public debate, consumer reactions, and governmental regulations. Jordan demonstrates in this fascinating history how consumers are led toward technological solutions for problems themselves created by technology.

Dr. Jordan also directs the News Literacy Initiative, including co-hosting its podcast News Over Noise.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Stefan Tanaka, "History without Chronology" (Lever Press, 2019) Nov 15, 2023

In this interview, we talk with Stefan Tanaka, professor emeritus of UCSD and a specialist in modern Japanese history. He is author of two books on modern Japan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993) and New Times in Modern Japan (2004), and his most recent book is History Without Chronology(Lever Press, 2019) which we discuss here! The host, Sarah Kearns, was introduced to Tanaka's work at a Digital History and Theory Conference and became very interested in becoming a "mystic" of scholarly communications and how narrative and comic books could facilitate a different understanding of history and time. The 1884 project is here.

A bit about the book, which is available open access:

Although numerous disciplines recognize multiple ways of conceptualizing time, Stefan Tanaka argues that scholars still overwhelmingly operate on chronological and linear Newtonian or classical time that emerged during the Enlightenment. This short, approachable book implores the humanities and humanistic social sciences to actively embrace the richness of different times that are evident in non-modern societies and have become common in several scientific fields throughout the twentieth century. Tanaka first offers a history of chronology by showing how the social structures built on clocks and calendars gained material expression. Tanaka then proposes that we can move away from this chronology by considering how contemporary scientific understandings of time might be adapted to reconceive the present and pasts. This opens up a conversation that allows for the possibility of other ways to know about and re-present pasts. A multiplicity of times will help us broaden the historical horizon by embracing the heterogeneity of our lives and world via rethinking the complex interaction between stability, repetition, and change. This history without chronology also allows for incorporating the affordances of digital media.

Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely drinking mushroom tea.

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Technology, AI, Political Economy, and Economic Development Nov 14, 2023

Simon Johnson (MIT Sloan Economics Professor and Former IMF Chief Economist) joins the podcast to discuss his new book "Power and Progress", co-authored with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu, on the interplay between technology, political economy, and economic development.

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Emily H. C. Chua, "The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era" (U Michigan Press, 2023) Nov 13, 2023

China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, China, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era(U Michigan Press, 2023) brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals.

In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to set out from the preexisting assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its public(s). It also suggests researchers further explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.

Emily Chua is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, working at the intersections of digital technology, media, capital and authoritarian state politics in China and Singapore. Her articles are published in journals including JRAI, Ethnography, Science, Technology and Society, Asian Studies Review, and China Quarterly.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Kai Jun Chen, "Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China" (U Washington Press, 2023) Nov 13, 2023

Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technology in Qing China (University of Washington Press; 2023) looks at the history of court-sponsored porcelain production in Qing China through the work and career of the Manchu polymath Tang Ying (1682-1756). Viewing him as a technocrat — an official who combined technological specialization and managerial expertise — Kai Jun Chen uses Tang to explore how porcelain manufacture was carried out in the Qing, how technological innovations were created and passed on, and how technocrats learned their skills. At the same time, the book shows how technocrats imposed and extended imperial order over local society, and how essential technocrats were to the operation and success of Qing cultural policies.

Lucidly written and complete with truly striking images, Porcelain for the Emperor is a beautiful combination of the study of material culture, literature, art history, and technology. This book should be of interest not only to historians of the Qing and the early modern world, but also art historians and curators, as well as anyone who has ever seen a piece of Qing porcelain and wondered how it came to be. Curious readers should also seek out Making the Palace Machine Work, co-edited by Kai Jun Chen, Martina Siebert, and Dorothy Ko.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu

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A.I. and Practice with Stuart Baldwin Nov 10, 2023

The technological revolution we are facing today is artificial intelligence. At least this is what we are told. Those doing the telling include tech experts such as Elon Musk, linguist Noam Chomsky, as well as philosophers, politicians and intellectuals of all stripes.

What are to make of all this and how are we to manage a world experiencing such rapid change as practitioners?

We explore the role of A.I. and its place in a line of societal change that has serious consequences for all of us. We discuss practice, and thinkers including Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Noam Chomsky and a bunch of contemporary commentators and their thoughts. We look at the big picture of society in turmoil and ask what practices might help us navigate this moment of intense change and disruption. We look at what it means to remain human despite the push to merge ourselves with the spectacle of social media and the calls to become more than human by tech dudes and the emergent forms of Capitalism and their need for us all to discard ever more of our humanity.

My companion in this episode is the co-founder of the podcast, Stuart Baldwin, who came back for this one off episode. The topic of tech and A.I. is close to his heart and the conversation both captures past glories of earlier episodes and signals a new maturation in our relationship in what we hope will be a stimulating conversation for serious practitioners.

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Xaq Frohlich, "From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age" (U California Press, 2023) Nov 10, 2023

Xaq Frohlich’s From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (U California Press, 2023) is a biography of the Nutrition Facts label that adorns millions of food products and has become an integral part of the food and information landscape in the United States. Frohlich’s story unfolds in part as an institutional history of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for the label, using the agency as a way to understand the ideological and policy debates about responsibility for communicating scientific information to the public, from regulation and gatekeeping to information brokering and nudging. From Label to Table is the story of how the contemporary American food information environment emerged out of this history of transformation from paternalism to “informationism.”

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Can You Fall in Love with ChatGPT? Nov 10, 2023

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute recently sponsored a panel discussion on the topic, “Can you fall in love with ChatGPT?” and we recorded this discussion as a live podcast. The panel, which brought together a computer scientist, humanities scholars, and social scientists, focused in part on the latest advances in sociable AI, but much more on the impact these technologies are having, and are going to have, on human relationships.

As our AI becomes more able to anticipate and perform human-like conversation and emotional responses will we, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle suspects, develop ever deeper relationships with our machines? What will this mean for our relationships with other humans? In an America beset by a loneliness epidemic, is the future of companionship, and of care, to be found in the artificial? To put the issue at its starkest: can, or should, you fall in love with ChatGPT?

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The Future of Crucial Materials: A Discussion with Ed Conway Nov 09, 2023

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future.

The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization (Knopf, 2023)--calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Aarathi Prasad, "Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses" (William Collins, 2023) Nov 09, 2023

Silk—a luxury fabric, a valuable trade good, and a scientific marvel. This material, created by the bombyx mori silkworm, has captivated artisans for centuries—and it captivated science presenter and writer Aarathi Prasad, who was studying the scientific potential of silk for new treatments.

That started Aarathi on a journey to explore the world of silk—not just the traditional silk we use today, but all its different varieties: wild silks, made from less famous moths; sea silks, made from mollusks; and spider silk, strong, yet significantly more difficult to harvest. This all comes together in her latest book, Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses (William Collins, 2023)

In this interview, Aarathi and I explore this world of silk, in all its forms, and why silk may be the hottest new material in biotechnology today.

Aarathi Prasad is a writer, broadcaster, and researcher interested in the intersection of science and technology with cultures, history, health, and the environment. She is also the author of In The Bonesetter’s Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine (Profile Books Limited: 2016) which was about health and disease in modern India, and Like A Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex (Simon and Schuster: 2012), which explored the history and future of reproduction. Aarathi has a PhD in genetics from Imperial College London and is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Silk. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Colin McFarlane, "Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife" (Verso, 2023) Nov 07, 2023

In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Colin McFarlane, through Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), makes a call to action on one of modern urban life's most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All.

The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre's concept of 'the right to the city', it uses the notion of 'citylife' to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Nov 07, 2023

Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinariness is the ultimate symbol of its success.

However, behind the mundanity of the barcode lies an important history. Barcodes bridged the gap between physical objects and digital databases and paved the way for the contemporary Internet of Things, the idea to connect all devices to the web. They were highly controversial at points, protested by consumer groups and labor unions, and used as a symbol of dystopian capitalism and surveillance in science fiction and art installations.

Jordan Frith's bookBarcode (Bloomsbury, 2023) tells the story of the barcode's complicated history and examines how an object so crucial to so many parts of our lives became more ignored and more ordinary as it spread throughout the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, "Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) Nov 06, 2023

Over the past 40 years, lawmakers in America's two major political parties have taken increasingly extreme positions on ideological issues. Voters from the two parties have become increasingly distinct and hostile to one another along the lines of race, religion, geography, and culture. In Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young illustrates how political leaders and media organizations capitalize on social and cultural identities to separate, enrage, and mobilize people. Because humans are motivated to comprehend, to feel in control, and to be part of a community, they seek information that satisfies these needs – including misinformation that favors their political team. They don’t want to be wrong.

Bringing together tools from political science, communications, and social psychology, Dr. Goldthwaite Young creates a model to explain how public officials, journalists, and social media platforms encourage what she calls identity distillation. Dr. Young both describes the dynamics and provides suggestions for how to disrupt “identity-driven wrongness.” These include journalists abandoning conflict framing in the coverage of politics, social media platforms increasing transparency about their algorithmic content rankings and ad targeting, and individuals cultivating intellectual humility and disrupting performances of political identity to increase the demand for democracy-centered political information.

Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of Communications and Political Science at the University of Delaware. Her areas of expertise include political media effects, media psychology, public opinion, and the psychology of misinformation. I’m delighted to welcome her to the New Books Network.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Peter Nelson, "Computer Games As Landscape Art" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) Nov 06, 2023

Peter Nelson's book Computer Games As Landscape Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) proposes that computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary landscape and offers a synthesis of art history, geography, game studies and play. Like paint on canvas, the game engine is taken as the underlying medium, and using the Valve Source Engine as the primary case study, it analyses landscapes according to the technical, economic and cultural features this medium affords. It presents the single-player first-person shooter (Half-Life 2) as a Promethean safari, examines how the economics of gambling and product placement shaped the eSports landscapes of Counter-Strike and reveals how sandboxes such as Garry’s Mod visualise the radical landscape of Web 2.0. This book explores how our relationship to the environment is changing, how we express this through computer games and how we can move beyond examining artistic influences on games to examining how historical connections flow through games and the history of landscape images.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Jeremy Howick, "The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023) Nov 05, 2023

Should your doctor prescribe a placebo for you, instead of conventional medicine? And if she did, would it work? Is the double-blind placebo-controlled paradigm really the gold standard for medical research?

Placebos are the most widely used treatments in the history of medicine. Thousands of studies show that they can be effective and make us happier and healthier. Yet confusion about what placebos are and how to measure their effects prevents some doctors from using them to help patients. Meanwhile, damage caused by the nocebo effect—the negative effect of expecting something bad—is not widely recognized.

In The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care(Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Jeremy Howick provides an interdisciplinary perspective on placebos and nocebos based on more than twenty years of research and data from over 300,000 patients. This book, the culmination of that research, offers practical ways for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to put placebo and nocebo research into practice to improve health outcomes.

In addition to providing an overview of placebos and nocebos and explaining how belief systems and context can create physiological effects in the body, Howick advocates for a number of controversial positions, including why it may be unethical to include placebos in most clinical trials in which there are already established therapies and why physicians should consider using placebos regularly in their practices. Howick also underscores the importance of the therapeutic effects of interactions between health care practitioners and patients, in the context of care. The Power of Placebos dispels the confusion surrounding placebos and paves the way for doctors to help patients by enhancing placebo effects and avoiding the pitfalls of nocebos.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Megan Nutzman, "Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine" (Edinburgh UP, 2022) Nov 05, 2023

In the ancient Mediterranean world, individuals routinely looked for divine aid to cure physical afflictions. Contested Cures: Identity and Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) by Dr. Megan Nutzman argues that the inevitability of sickness and injury made people willing to experiment with seemingly beneficial techniques, even if they originated in a foreign cultural or religious tradition. With circumstances of close cultural contacts, such as prevailed in Palestine, the setting was ripe for neighbouring Jews, Samaritans, Christians, Greeks and Romans to borrow rituals perceived to be efficacious and to alter them to fit their own religious framework. As a result, they employed related means of seeking miraculous cures. The similarities of these rituals, despite changes in the identity of the divine healers that they invoked, made them the subject of polemical discourse among elite authors trying to police collective borders. Contested Cures investigates the resulting intersection of ritual healing and communal identity.

This innovative study synthesises evidence for the full range of healing rituals that were practised in the ancient Mediterranean world. Examining both literary and archaeological evidence, Dr. Nutzman considers ritual healing as a component of identity formation and deconstructs the artificial boundary between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ in relation to ritual cures.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Anthony Hodgson, "Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World" (Triarchy Press, 2011) Nov 03, 2023

Recently I had a chance to sit down for a long overdue chat with Anthony (Tony) Hodgson. When we last spoke it happened to be for my very first episode of Systems and Cybernetics. We talked about his newest book at the time: Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). That was in the summer of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was seemed to be experiencing more turbulence than it ever had.

Fast forward to late 2023. The world, by all accounts—wars, climate chaos, mass shootings, and a lingering virus that will probably never go away—is turbulent beyond the tolerance threshold of the planet itself, not to mention its inhabitants. It seemed a fitting time to talk to Tony about his more recent Ready for Anything: Designing Resilience for a Transforming World, 2nd Edition (Triarchy, 2021).

First published a decade ago, Ready for Anything starts by describing a 'global predicament', characterized by reductionist modes of thinking that are increasingly unsuited to what is really going on, and our fixation on short-term results—a pattern often referred to as shifting the burden. Hodgson writes that "complex messes are often the result of interactions between multiple complex adaptive systems, resulting in the emergence of unpredictable behaviours" (p. 18).

In Ready for Anything, Hodgson introduces 'The World System Model'. The model encompasses 12 nodes ranging from Dominant Worldviews, to Wealth and Power, to Climate Change impact, and aims to provide a much-needed platform for a design revolution that harmonizes humanity, ecology and technology by integrating knowledge across disciplines around the major systemic issues confronting our world. Hodgson brought the model to the International Futures Forum (IFF) where it was implemented as the IFF World Game (follow the link for a visual of the model and examples of how it's put to use), which makes the model accessible to any kind of group in a highly participative manner.

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Wendy H. Wong, "We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age" (MIT Press, 2023) Nov 02, 2023

Our data-intensive world is here to stay, but does that come at the cost of our humanity in terms of autonomy, community, dignity, and equality? In We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023), Wendy H. Wong argues that we cannot allow that to happen. Exploring the pervasiveness of data collection and tracking, Wong reminds us that we are all stakeholders in this digital world, who are currently being left out of the most pressing conversations around technology, ethics, and policy. This book clarifies the nature of datafication and calls for an extension of human rights to recognize how data complicate what it means to safeguard and encourage human potential.

Wendy H. Wong is Professor of Political Science and Principal's Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of two award-winning books: Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights and (with Sarah S. Stroup) The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu

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The Future of Cancelling: A Conversation with Greg Lukianoff Nov 01, 2023

Cancel culture is something all academics are aware of and some are concerned about. Certainly that’s true of Greg Lukianoff who was the co-author (with Jonathan Haidt) of The Coddling of the American Mind(Penguin, 2018) and who has now co-authored (with Rikki Schlott) of The Canceling of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Michael Serazio, "The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics" (Stanford UP, 2023) Oct 31, 2023

In recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive virality of one hot social media app after another. It characterizes Donald Trump's willful disregard for political correctness (and proofreading) and inspires multinational corporations to stake activist claims in ways that few "woke" brands ever dared before. It buttresses a multibillion-dollar influencer industry of everyday folks shilling their friends with #spon-con and burnishes the street cred of rock stars and rappers alike. But, ironically, authenticity's not actually real: it's as fabricated as it is ubiquitous.

InThe Authenticity Industries: Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2023) journalist and scholar Michael Serazio combines eye-opening reporting and lively prose to take readers behind the scenes with those who make "reality"—and the ways it tries to influence us. Drawing upon dozens of rare interviews with campaign consultants, advertising executives, tech company leadership, and entertainment industry gatekeepers, the book slyly investigates the professionals and practices that make people, products, and platforms seem "authentic" in today's media, culture, and politics. The result is a spotlight on the power of authenticity in today's media-saturated world and the strategies to satisfy this widespread yearning. In theory, authenticity might represent the central moral framework of our time: allaying anxieties about self and society, culture and commerce, and technology and humanity. It infects and informs our ideals of celebrity, aesthetics, privacy, nostalgia, and populism. And Serazio reveals how these pretenses are crafted, backstage, for audiences, consumers, and voters.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Tom Burbage et al., "F-35: The Inside Story of the Lightning II" (Skyhorse, 2023) Oct 29, 2023

The inside story of the most expensive and controversial military program in history, as told by those who lived it.

The F-35 has changed allied combat warfare. But by the time it’s completed, it will cost more than the Manhattan Project and the B-2 Stealth Bomber. It has been subject to the most aggressive cyberattacks in history from China, Russia, North Korea, and others. Its stealth technology required nearly 9 million lines of code; NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover required 2.5 million. And it was this close to failure.

F-35: The Inside Story of the Lightning II(Skyhorse, 2023) is the only inside look at the most advanced aircraft in the world and the historic project that built it, as told by those who were intimately involved in its design, testing, and production. Based on the authors' personal experience and over 100+ interviews, F-35 pulls back the curtain on one of the most heavily criticized government programs in history from start to finish: the dramatic flights that won Lockheed Martin the contract over Boeing; the debates and decisions over capabilities; feats of software, hardware, and aeronautical engineering that made it possible; how the project survived the Nunn-McCurdy breach; the conflicts among all three branches of the U.S. military, between the eight other allied nation partners, and against spy elements from enemies. For readers of Skunk Works by Ben Rich and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, F-35 will pique the interest of airplane enthusiasts, defense industry insiders, military history aficionados, political junkies, and general nonfiction readers.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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William B. Eimicke et al., "Leveling the Learning Curve: Creating a More Inclusive and Connected University" (Columbia UP, 2023) Oct 26, 2023

Will the COVID-19 pandemic be remembered as a turning point in how universities deliver teaching and learning? How might the widespread use of digital tools change higher education?

Leveling the Learning Curve: Creating a More Inclusive and Connected University (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the role of digital education at this crucial crossroads. Built on interviews with more than fifty leading practitioners from major universities and ed-tech firms, Leveling the Learning Curve is an indispensable guide to the inner workings of digital education. Written for university managers and leaders, it explores how new tools can allow universities to reach new audiences and address long-standing imbalances. The authors examine challenges to implementing digital education programs and provide insight into how universities have managed to balance the needs of faculty and on- and off-campus students. The book traces the history of digital education initiatives from Khan Academy, TED Talks, and MOOCs through the pandemic, examining both successes and failures. It offers compelling examples of what a "connected university" looks like in practice, sharing ways digital tools can bring in wider audiences, expand interdisciplinary teaching and learning, connect students to real-life issues, help meet equity goals, and open new revenue streams.

Designed as both a manual and an in-depth study, Leveling the Learning Curve is required reading for educational leaders looking to navigate the complex waters of postpandemic digital education.

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Diana Kamin, "Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy" (MIT Press, 2023) Oct 25, 2023

How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (MIT Press, 2023), Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions.

Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public. Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

"Working With the Whitney's Replication Committee," Ben Lerner, The New Yorker, 2016
Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami, Cascadia Art Museum, 2018
Soichi Sunami's manuscript autobiography, Museum of Modern Art Library
The New York Public Library: A Universe of Knowledge, Phyllis Dain (Scala Books and The New York Public Library, 2000)
What Photographs Do: The Making and Remaking of Museum Cultures, eds. Elizabeth Edwards and Ella Ravilious (UCL Press, 2022).

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Jeremy Nobel, "Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection" (Avery Publishing Group, 2023) Oct 24, 2023

Even before the Covid pandemic began in 2020, chronic loneliness was a private experience of profound anguish that had become a public health crisis. Since then it has reached new heights. Loneliness assumes many forms, from enduring physical isolation to feeling rejected because of difference, and it can have devastating consequences for our physical and mental health. Jeremy Nobel founded Project UnLonely to bring creativity as well as social and medical strategies to address this societal problem.

In his book Project UnLonely: Healing our Crisis of Disconnection(Avery, 2023), Dr. Nobel unpacks our personal and national experiences of loneliness to discover its roots and to show how we can take steps to find comfort and connection. Dr. Nobel brings together many voices, from pioneering researchers, to leaders in business, education, the arts, and healthcare, to lonely people of every age, background, and circumstance. He discovers that the pandemic isolated us in ways that were not only physical, and that, at its core, a true sense of loneliness results from a disconnection to the self. He clarifies how meaningful reconnection can be nourished and sustained. And he reveals that an important component of the healing process is engaging in creativity, a powerful opportunity he shows us can be accessed by all.

Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical and science reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist.

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The Future of Paying Attention: A Discussion with Carolyn Dicey Jennings Oct 24, 2023

Is it really harder to pay attention to something than it used to be? No doubt the world is getting faster, and social media platforms are so good at grabbing attention. But how real is the problem and in particular, does it impact our creativity? Carolyn Dicey Jennings is based at the University of California, Merced, and has just co-written a chapter called “Attention, Technology, and Creativity” in a book calledScenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses published by Columbia UP (2023) Listen to her in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Corry Cropper and Seth Whidden, "Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France" (Bucknell UP, 2022) Oct 21, 2023

Today we are joined by Corry Cropper, a Professor of French at Brigham Young University, and one of two authors, alongside Seth Whidden, of Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France (Bucknell University Press, 2023). In our conversation we discussed the origin of the velocipede and how it illuminated the paradoxes of cultural life in Second Empire France.

In Velocipedomania, Cropper and Whidden argue that a close examination of the velocipede and the discourse around it both highlight the complexities of class, gender and modernity in late Second Empire France but also prefigure the links between the Third Republic and the French bicycle craze of the late 19th century. Through a close look at a range of primary sources, mostly drawn from 1868-1869, and carefully translated and reproduced in whole in the text, they demonstrate that the velocipede was more than a passing fad. The velocipede was instead a vital symbol of French modernity and tradition, masculinity and femininity, practicality and fancy, and machine power and body power.

The book contains four major sections. Each correspond to a different primary source or set of primary sources. The most significant of the texts is The Manual of the Velocipede, written by Richard Lesclide and illustrated by Emile Benassit. The Manual contains scientific articles, short stories, instructions on how to learn to ride a velocipede, and dozens of images that provided some of the earliest visual lexicons of bicycle riding. Cropper and Whidden reproduce complete translations of these sections, copies of the images, and unpack them in text and footnotes.

Cropper and Whidden’s text and footnotes provide necessary context and compelling analysis; the sources can also be read alone and excerpted for teaching. Their discussion of the Manual for example focuses on a series of themes: the carnivalesque, the social classes of the Second Empire, gender difference, the erotic, and the modern and the traditional.Readers interested in the gender politics of velocipede riding will discover both the progressive and the retrograde. Cropper and Whidden show how the velocipede fad opened the door to sporting women who were able to use the machine to travel further than ever before but public decorum and sartorial conventions still limited the ways that women were able to ride.

In a section called Note on Monsieur Michaux’s Velocipede, Cropper and Whidden solve a historical mystery. They identify the note’s author: a French naval officer de la Rue and velocipede enthusiast who invented the aquatic velocipede. De la Rue’s Note offered practical explanations for why the French state should invest in velocipedes, including the speed of telegraph delivery and the protection of the borders from smugglers. At the same time, he also emphasized the pleasure he derived from riding his cycle.

In the second chapter, Cropper and Whidden sketch out the history of velocipedes on stage. They show how velocipedes rolled into French opera following the liberalization of the medium during the final years of the Second Empire. Their translated text, Dagobert and his Velocipede, remains a very entertaining read. Their translation is joke dense and readers will need to flip between the text and footnotes to understand their witty and pun filled translation.

A final chapter examines velocipedes and poetry.

Cropper and Whidden’s innovative approach to unpacking the history of the velocipede, which so successfully integrates translated primary sources, should be read by scholars interested in French history and sports history. It will also be very useful in classroom teaching.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history.

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Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Vintage, 2006) Oct 21, 2023

The inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s major motion picture, Oppenheimer, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography explores the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” – who, like the mythological Prometheus, brought atomic fire to mankind. In deep detail, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Vintage, 2006) explores Oppenheimer’s early career at the forefront of quantum physics, his associations with left-wing politics and the Communist Party, his leadership of the Manhattan Project, and his confrontations with the moral and political consequences of scientific progress during the Cold War. Twenty-five years in the making, this definitive biography charts the rise and fall of one of the twentieth century’s most iconic and paradoxical characters and restores Oppenheimer’s legacy and his humanity.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College.

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Stephen Robert Miller, "Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature" (Island Press, 2023) Oct 20, 2023

In March 2011, people in a coastal Japanese city stood atop a seawall watching the approach of the tsunami that would kill them. They believed—naively—that the huge concrete barrier would save them. Instead they perished, betrayed by the very thing built to protect them. Erratic weather, blistering drought, rising seas, and ecosystem collapse now affect every inch of the globe. Increasingly, we no longer look to stop climate change, choosing instead to adapt to it.

Never have so many undertaken such a widespread, hurried attempt to remake the world. Predictably, our hubris has led to unintended—and sometimes disastrous—consequences. Academics call it maladaptation; in simple terms, it’s about solutions that backfire. Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature (Island Press, 2023) by Stephen Robert Miller tells us the stories behind these unintended consequences and about the fixes that can do more harm than good. From seawalls in coastal Japan, to the reengineered waters in the Ganges River Delta, to the artificial ribbon of water supporting both farms and urban centres in parched Arizona, Miller traces the histories of engineering marvels that were once deemed too smart and too big to fail. In each he takes us into the land and culture, seeking out locals and experts to better understand how complicated, grandiose schemes led instead to failure, and to find answers to the technologic holes we’ve dug ourselves into.

Over the Seawall urges us to take a hard look at the fortifications we build and how they’ve fared in the past. It embraces humanity’s penchant for problem-solving, but argues that if we are to adapt successfully to climate change, we must recognize that working with nature is not surrender but the only way to assure a secure future.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Christopher Phillips, "Civilian Specialists at War: Britain's Transport Experts and the First World War" (U London Press, 2020) Oct 17, 2023

World War I was the first great general conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods over land and sea. Yet the armies of the war were too vast in scale, their movements too complex, and the infrastructure upon which they depended too specialized to be operated by professional soldiers alone.

In Civilian Specialists at War: Britain's Transport Experts and the First World War(U London Press, 2020), Christopher Phillips examines the relationship between industrial society and industrial warfare through the lens of Britain's transport experts. Phillips analyzes the multiple connections between the army, the government, and the senior executives of some of prewar Britain's largest industrial enterprises, revealing that civilian transport experts were a key component of Britain's strategies in World War I. This book also details the application of recognizably civilian technologies and methods to the prosecution of war, and documents how transport experts were constrained by the political and military requirements of coalition warfare.

Civilian Specialists at War was a Bronze Medal winner of the Templer Medal Book Prize in 2020 and winner of the Coleman Prize in 2016. The dissertation version of this book, entitledManaging Armageddon: Britain’s Transport Experts and the First World War (awarded by the University of Leeds) is freely available from the British Library here.

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AI, Post-Truth, and Cultural Transformation Oct 16, 2023

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey talks with economists Luciana Lazzaretti and Stefania Oliva of the University of Florence about the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary cultural transformation. The authors discuss the genesis of computer culture from the garages of California hippies who dreamed of a changed world and unexpectedly unleashed the forces of science and art for the sake of entrepreneurship. Moving forward, the authors discuss the nature of a “post-truth” world and how the many faces of reality can converge towards the truth. Finally, Lazaretti and Oliva address the need to foster critical thinking to cope with the threats posed by AI in terms of misinformation and disinformation.

International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly expertise to bear on our understanding of international issues. John Torpey, the host of the podcast and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, holds conversations with prominent scholars and figures in state-of-the-art international issues in our weekly episodes.

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Smith Mehta, "The New Screen Ecology in India: Digital Transformation of Media" (British Film Institute, 2023) Oct 15, 2023

In The New Screen Ecology in India: Digital Transformation of Media (British Film Institute, 2023), Smith Mehta takes a deep dive into the world of social media platforms and their impact on contemporary film and television production, arguing that they have fundamentally shifted the creator dynamics of these industries. Through first-hand research with creators, platform and portal executives, and intermediaries such as talent agents and multi-channel networks, Mehta develops the concept of the 'new screen ecology'. He reveals how the Indian screen industries are affected by the social relations between these agents and how industrial practices are blurring the amateur-professional divide through creator and content interdependencies.

Mehta goes beyond theoretical analysis by interrogating the production practices of 13 different platforms and portals, including Hotstar, Netflix, YouTube, and TVFPlay. He analyses the extent to which they benefit from the lack of censorship and restrictive industrial practices that are characteristic of traditional media structures. By doing so, he provides a unique and insightful examination of the dynamics of digital transformation in the screen industries in a region-specific context.

Priyam Sinha is a doctoral candidate in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached on Twitter here.

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Txt Oct 13, 2023

In this episode of High Theory, Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about txt, or text. Not texting, or textbooks, but text as a form of data that is feeding large language models. Will the world end in fire, flood, or text?

In the full interview, Matthew recommended Tim Maughan’s novel Infinite Detail (Macmillan, 2019) as an excellent example of writing about the end of the internet, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014) as a positive example of a post-internet apocalypse. In the episode he references a paper by Beder et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021): 610–623. And several apocalyptic scenarios, including the dead internet theory and the gray goo hypothesis.

Matthew Kirschenbaum is Distinguished University Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. His books include Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP 2016) and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). With Kari Kraus, he co-founded and co-directs BookLab, a makerspace, studio, library, and press devoted to what is surely our discipline's most iconic artifact, the codex book. See mkirschenbaum.net or follow him on Twitter (or X?) as @mkirschenbaum for more.

Because we are hoping to encourage the text apocalypse, we made today’s image using generative AI. Specifically Saronik made it using the prompt “Text” in Canva’s AI interface.

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James J. A. Blair, "Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic" (Cornell UP, 2023) Oct 13, 2023

Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. James J. A. Blair probes the historical roots and current predicaments of a twenty-first century settler colony seeking to control an uncertain future through resource management and environmental science.

Four decades after a violent 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina reestablished British authority over the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas in Spanish), a commercial fishing boom and offshore oil discoveries have intensified the sovereignty dispute over the South Atlantic archipelago. Scholarly literature on the South Atlantic focuses primarily on military history of the 1982 conflict. However, contested claims over natural resources have now made this disputed territory a critical site for examining the wider relationship between imperial sovereignty and environmental governance.

Dr. Blair argues that by claiming self-determination and consenting to British sovereignty, the Falkland Islanders have crafted a settler colonial protectorate to extract resources and extend empire in the South Atlantic. Responding to current debates in environmental anthropology, critical geography, Atlantic history, political ecology, and science and technology studies, Dr. Blair describes how settlers have asserted indigeneity in dynamic relation with the environment. Salvaging Empire uncovers the South Atlantic's outsized importance for understanding the broader implications of resource management and environmental science for the geopolitics of empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Paul A. Thomas, "Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) Oct 11, 2023

In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued about 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor. Now a newly minted Ph.D. and a library specialist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he outlines the many roles a Wikipedia editor can fill. Some editors fix typographical errors, add facts and citations, or clean up the prose on existing articles; others create new articles on topics they find interesting. In Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and How You Can Be an Editor (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Thomas goes behind the familiar Wikipedia article page and looks at the unique brand of collaboration that is constantly at work to expand and improve this global resource.

James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications.

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Oil Beach - How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life: A Conversation with Christina Dunbar-Hester Oct 09, 2023

Christina Dunbar-Hester, professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, talks about her recent book, Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Port of Los Angeles and Beyond (U Chicago Press, 2023) with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The pair discuss the trajectory of Dunbar-Hester’s career from her dissertation on low powered FM pirates and activists to her examination of gender in open technology communities and how she came to write a multispecies, place-focused examination of how petroleum and port infrastructure harms life.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Joshua May, "Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science" (Oxford UP, 2023) Oct 07, 2023

Is free will an illusion? Is addiction a brain disease? Should we enhance our brains beyond normal? Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science (Oxford UP, 2023) blends philosophical analysis with modern brain science to address these and other critical questions through captivating cases. The result is a nuanced view of human agency as surprisingly diverse and flexible. With a lively and accessible writing style, Neuroethics is an indispensable resource for students and scholars in both the sciences and humanities.

Joshua May is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Agency in Mental Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Teaching (and Learning) at a University Online Oct 04, 2023

There is a lot of talk about online learning, and particularly universities going online. Today I talked to Caleb Simmons, Executive Director of Arizona Online (and notable scholar of religion and South Asian Studies). We talk about how online learning is done at Arizona and the promise of online learning generally.

Listeners might be interested in Caleb's article Narrative Pedagogy and Transmedia Balancing.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Taylor Lorenz, "Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet" (Simon & Schuster, 2023) Oct 03, 2023

Acclaimed Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz presents a groundbreaking social history of the internet—revealing how online influence and the creators who amass it have reshaped our world, online and off. For over a decade, Taylor Lorenz has been the authority on internet culture, documenting its far-reaching effects on all corners of our lives. Her reporting is serious yet entertaining and illuminates deep truths about ourselves and the lives we create online.

In her debut book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet(Simon & Schuster, 2023), she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism. By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations have resulted in a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.

Taylor Lorenz is a columnist at The Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Previously she was a technology reporter for the New York Times' business section and a technology reporter at the Atlantic and the Daily Beast. She was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where her research focused on Instagram and news consumption. She is a former affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and serves on the board of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. And for the purposes of this conversation, I’ll note she has 344.7 thousand followers on Twitter or X or whatever that guy calls his website these days and some 500,000 followers on TikTok.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Ben Whaley, "Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games" (U Michigan Press, 2023) Oct 02, 2023

Ben Whaley’s Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games (U Michigan Press 2023) examines the pathbreaking engagement strategies of four Japanese video games produced between 2002 and 2015. Each of these “persuasive games” deploys a distinct strategy of engagement to push players to engage with real-world social issues and traumas: Disaster Report (2002) takes on natural disasters, Catherine (2011) addresses Japan’s declining birthrate and aging population, Metal Gear Solid V (2015, after the March 2011 Fukushima triple disaster) takes on nuclear proliferation, and The World Ends with You (2007) faces the issue of social withdrawal. These games differ in genre, platform, and mechanics, but as Whaley shows, they share an interest in using the immersive, multimedia, boundary-crossing experience of gaming to create an emotive, “persuasive” experience that prods gamers to engage with these “IRL” issues in new ways.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Twenty Years After “The New Economy”: A Conversation with Doug Henwood Oct 02, 2023

Economic journalist and broadcaster Doug Henwood revisits his 2003 book, After the New Economy (New Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. “The New Economy” was a catchphrase that became extremely popular with economists, politicians, pundits, and many others during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The phrase was thought to describe a new economic reality rooted in information and computing technologies that would give rise to an extended period of abundance and prosperity that Clinton compared to the industrial revolution. But the phrase became unpopular after the dot com bust of 2000-2002, which also marked the end of the 1990s economic expansion. Henwood and Vinsel discuss Henwood’s long career as an economic journalist and how he came to write the book as well as how studying “the New Economy” makes the technology bubbles of the 2010s feel like deja vu.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Michael D. Smith, "The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World" (MIT Press, 2023) Sep 29, 2023

For too long, our system of higher education has been defined by scarcity: scarcity in enrollment, scarcity in instruction, and scarcity in credentials. In addition to failing students professionally, this system has exacerbated social injustice and socioeconomic stratification across the globe. In The Abundant University, Michael D. Smith argues that the only way to create a financially and morally sustainable higher education system is by embracing digital technologies for enrolling, instructing, and credentialing students—the same technologies that we have seen create abundance in access to resources in industry after industry.

The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World(MIT Press, 2023) explains how we got our current system, why it’s such an expensive, inefficient mess, and how a system based on exclusivity cannot foster inclusivity. Smith challenges the resistance to digital technologies that we have already seen among numerous institutions, citing the examples of faculty resistance toward digital learning platforms. While acknowledging the understandable self-preservation instinct of our current system of residential education, Smith makes a case for how technology can engender greater educational opportunity and create changes that will benefit students, employers, and society as a whole.

Smith, the J. Erik Johnson Chaired Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that American higher education is subject to market forces just like any other industry. Forbes says, “With a straightforward, conversational style, Smith succeeds in portraying the current problems bearing down on higher education and offering a set of bold solutions for a future where he envisions a college education becoming ‘more open, flexible, inclusive, and lower-priced.’ The Abundant University is a provocative book that should be read by higher ed insiders as well as those in the general public who care about expanding the reach and the impact of higher education.”

John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, investment management, and corporate strategy. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma.

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Kashmir Hill, "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It" (Random House, 2023) Sep 28, 2023

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?

In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.

Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It(Random House, 2023) is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Aditi Surie and Ursula Huws, "Platformization and Informality: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) Sep 27, 2023

In Platformization and Informality: Pathways of Change, Alteration, and Transformation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), scholars from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Jakarta, Cape Town, Sao Paulo and other cities of the global South explore the complex relationship between platformization and informality through a different lens. Drawing on extensive theoretical, quantitative and qualitative scholarship, they provide both a useful overview and insights into the lived realities of gig work for platforms covering a range of skills, working conditions, and forms of algorithmic management. Platform work has attracted considerable attention from scholars in the global North, who have tended to view it as a form of casualisation of work that was previously regulated. But what about the global South, where most employment, especially that of women and migrant workers was historically already informal?

Beyond a focus on livelihoods, employment, and work, the authors show how labour platforms take on powers that bring about broader impacts, including those affecting identity and personal wellbeing. They also illustrate the impact of platformization on the governance of affected sectors by public agencies, thus affecting political power, and how public data infrastructures contribute to further platformization. The purpose of this pioneering work is to lay bare these interactions to then rebuild our understanding of platformization and its social, political, cultural and economic impacts. Its insights are attentive to gender and ethnic differences, as well as geographical ones.

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Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Sep 27, 2023

In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies.

However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Michael D. Gordin, "Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2023) Sep 27, 2023

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella - astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields “pseudo” is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements - both of which display allegations of “pseudoscience” on all sides - there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.

Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction(Oxford UP, 2023) explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?

Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Lee Mcguigan, "Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech" (MIT Press, 2023) Sep 26, 2023

How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet.

Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing "eyeballs": these all seem like such recent features of our lives. And yet, Lee McGuigan tells us in this eye-opening book, digital advertising was well underway before the widespread use of the Internet. Explaining how marketers have brandished the tools of automation and management science to exploit new profit opportunities, Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech (MIT Press, 2023) traces data-driven surveillance all the way back to the 1950s, when the computerization of the advertising business began to blend science, technology, and calculative cultures in an ideology of optimization. With that ideology came adtech, a major infrastructure of digital capitalism.

To help make sense of today's attention merchants and choice architects, McGuigan explores a few key questions: How did technical experts working at the intersection of data processing and management sciences come to command the center of gravity in the advertising and media industries? How did their ambition to remake marketing through mathematical optimization shape and reflect developments in digital technology? In short, where did adtech come from, and how did data-driven marketing come to mediate the daily encounters of people, products, and public spheres? His answers show how the advertising industry's efforts to bend information technologies toward its dream of efficiency and rational management helped to make "surveillance capitalism" one of the defining experiences of public life.

Blyss Cleveland is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stanford University.

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Forty Years of Technology Studies Sep 18, 2023

Stephen Barley, professor emeritus at both Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, talks about the long arc of his forty-year career studying organizations and technologies with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Barley describes how he came to study the sociology of technology when that topic area really didn’t exist and how he came to write classic works, such as his 1986 article, “Technology as an occasion for structuring.” Barley and Vinsel also talk about institution building and how one creates research teams capable of doing strong and interesting work. This is the second of what will hopefully be a series of episodes featuring scholars who, in the 1980s, began studying how organizations adopted information and communications technologies. The first was our earlier episode with JoAnne Yates.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Daniel Jaffee, "Unbottled: The Fight Against Plastic Water and for Water Justice" (U California Press, 2023) Sep 17, 2023

In just four decades, bottled water has transformed from a luxury niche item into a ubiquitous consumer product, representing a $300 billion market dominated by global corporations. It sits at the convergence of a mounting ecological crisis of single-use plastic waste and climate change, a social crisis of affordable access to safe drinking water, and a struggle over the fate of public water systems. Unbottled: The Fight Against Plastic Water and for Water Justice(U California Press, 2023) examines the vibrant movements that have emerged to question the need for bottled water and challenge its growth in North America and worldwide.

Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, residents, public officials, and other participants in controversies ranging from bottled water's role in unsafe tap water crises to groundwater extraction for bottling in rural communities, Daniel Jaffee asks what this commodity's meteoric growth means for social inequality, sustainability, and the human right to water. Unbottled profiles campaigns to reclaim the tap and addresses the challenges of ending dependence on packaged water in places where safe water is not widely accessible. Clear and compelling, it assesses the prospects for the movements fighting plastic water and working to ensure water justice for all.

Joshua Mullenite is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Sustainability programs at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. They can be found on Mastodon at https://fediscience.org/@mullenite

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Avery Dame-Griff, "The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet" (NYU Press, 2023) Sep 17, 2023

Avery Dame-Griff's The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender identity and activism from the 1980s to the present. Through extensive archival research and media archeology, Avery Dame-Griff reconstructs the manifold digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who incited the second revolution of the title: the ascendance of “transgender” as an umbrella identity in the mid-1990s.

Dame-Griff argues that digital communications sparked significant momentum within what would become the transgender movement, but also further cemented existing power structures. Covering both a historical period that is largely neglected within the history of computing, and the poorly understood role of technology in queer and trans social movements, The Two Revolutions offers a new understanding of both revolutions—the internet’s early development and the structures of communication that would take us to today’s tipping point of trans visibility politics. Through a history of how trans people online exploited different digital infrastructures in the early days of the internet to build a community, The Two Revolutions tells a crucial part of trans history itself.

Scholars and Works Mentioned in the Episode

Queer Digital History Project
Alladi Venkatesh, Computers and Other Interactive Technologies for the Home (pdf)
Charlton D. McIlwain, Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter
Megan Sapnar Ankerson
Avery Dame-Griff, Mapping the Territory: Archiving the Trans Website in an Age of Search

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Katie J. Wells et al., "Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City" (Princeton UP, 2023) Sep 16, 2023

The first city to fight back against Uber, Washington, D.C., was also the first city where such resistance was defeated. It was here that the company created a playbook for how to deal with intransigent regulators and to win in the realm of local politics. The city already serves as the nation’s capital. Now, D.C. is also the blueprint for how Uber conquered cities around the world—and explains why so many embraced the company with open arms.

Drawing on interviews with gig workers, policymakers, Uber lobbyists, and community organizers, Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of a City (Princeton University Press, 2023) demonstrates that many share the blame for lowering the nation’s hopes and dreams for what its cities could be. In a sea of broken transit, underemployment, and racial polarization, Uber offered a lifeline. But at what cost?

This is not the story of one company and one city. Instead, Disrupting D.C. offers a 360-degree view of an urban America in crisis. Uber arrived promising a new future for workers, residents, policymakers, and others. Ultimately, Uber’s success and growth was never a sign of urban strength or innovation but a sign of urban weakness and low expectations about what city politics can achieve. Understanding why Uber rose reveals just how far the rest of us have fallen.

Katie J. Wells is a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University. Twitter. Website.
Kafui Attoh is associate professor of urban studies at the School of Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York. Twitter. Website.
Declan Cullen is assistant professor of geography at George Washington University. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Catherine Coveney et al., "Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) Sep 14, 2023

Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) draws on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, literature, and popular culture to highlight how a new technoscientifically mediated and modified phase and form of technosleep is now in the making – in the global north at least; and to discuss the consequences for our relationships to sleep, the values we accord sleep and the very nature and normativities of sleep itself.

The authors discuss how technosleep, at its simplest denotes the ‘coming together’ or ‘entanglements’ of sleep and technology and sensitizes us to various shifts in sleep–technology relations through culture, time and place. In doing so, it pays close attention to the salience and significance of these trends and transformations to date in everyday/night life, their implications for sleep inequalities and the related issues of sleep and social justice they suggest.

Katie Coveney, Ph.D. is a medical sociologist with expertise in social and ethical aspects of medicine and health care. She has particular research interests in the sociology of sleep, medical technology, and disability. Katie is the School of Social Sciences and Humanities Ethics Lead and Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy Lead Admissions officer.

Katie has been a senior lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough since 2018. She was co-convener of the British Sociological Association Medical Sociology Group (2019 – 2021). Before this she worked as a research fellow in the Centre for Reproduction Research at De Montfort University (2017-8), the Centre for Global Health Policy at the University of Sussex (2014-7), the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick (2010-2014) and the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy at the University of Nottingham (2009 -2010).

Eric L. Hsu, Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Justice & Society Academic Unit at the University of South Australia, where he also serves as a Research Platform Leader at the UniSA Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. With Dr Louis Everuss, Dr Hsu hosts and produces the Sociology of Everything podcast. This podcast aims to stimulate interest in sociological ideas by offering a sideways and engaging look at the wonders of sociology. More information can be found on his website: www.ericlhsu.com.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at emotional labor performed by employees and passengers at airports. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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A Better Way to Buy Books Sep 12, 2023

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Ines Prodöhl, "Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900–1950" (Routledge, 2023) Sep 11, 2023

Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950(Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soybean became a critical ingredient in industry and agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Japanese-dominated Manchuria, Germany, and the United States, Prodöhl shows that the soybean was a serendipitous solution to numerous and varied crises from the beginning of the century into the post-WWII decades. This story of imperialism, globalization, and technology begins in northeast China, the world’s soy cultivation center until the 1940s. It takes us to Germany, the number one importer of soybeans in the interwar period, and illuminates the various ways in which soy was integrated into the economy especially after the end of WWI as both an invaluable oilseed for industry and a source of protein-rich fodder for agriculture. Finally, Prodöhl explores how the United States first adopted the soybean mostly as a solution to overtaxed soils. Mixing economic, ecological, political, and technological/scientific history with a keen sense of the materiality of soy as a global product, Globalizing the Soybean is an accessible and enlightening book that will appeal to multiple audiences.

This book is available open access here.

This episode was recorded in person in the studios of Media City Bergen with technical assistance from Frode Ims.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Race and Electrical Infrastructure in the Jim Crow South Sep 11, 2023

Conor Harrison, Associate Professor of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina, talks about his research into the racist development of electrical systems in the Jim Crow South with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The pair discuss how Harrison’s research fits within larger trends in the academic discipline of geography and the kinds of empirical research Harrison did to support his articles on the racial dimensions of electricity infrastructure. They also discuss how Harrison’s research has shifted in recent years to focus on the financial structures of the electricity industry.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Maxim Samson, "Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World" (Profile Books, 2023) Sep 10, 2023

Our world has innumerable boundaries, ranging from the obvious - like an ocean - to subtle differences in language or climate. Most of us cross invisible lines all the time, but don't stop to consider them.

In Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World(Profile, 2023), geographer Dr. Maxim Samson presents 30 such unseen boundaries, intriguing and unexpected examples of the myriad ways in which we collectively engage with and experience the world. From football fans in Buenos Aires to air quality in China, Paris' banlieues to sub-Saharan Africa's Malaria Belt, the existence - or perceived existence - of dividing lines has manifold implications for people, wildlife, and places.

Fully illustrated with maps of each location, Invisible Lines reveals the extraordinary ways in which we try to render the planet more liveable and legible; a compelling guide to seeing and understanding our world in all its consistency - and all its messiness, too.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Marc Bonners, "Open World Structures: Architecture, Urban and Natural landscape in the Computer Game" (Büchner-Verlag, 2023) Sep 07, 2023

What role do algorithms play in the construction of images and the representation of the world and weather in computer games? How does the design of rooms, levels and topographies influence the decisions and behavior of the players? Is Brutalism the first genuine architectural style of computer games? What is the importance of landscape gardens and national parks in structuring game worlds? How is nature represented in times of climate change?

Particularly in the last 20 years, digital game worlds are adapting features of the physical real world more meticulously than ever before. Through elaborate production processes and complex visualization strategies, the adaptation to the rest of our everyday world is always created in dependence on game mechanics and worldliness. As can be seen at the latest in the example of open-world games, the adoption of certain worldviews and visual traditions leads to ideological implications that go far beyond the narrative conventions transferred from other media formats that have been the focus of research so far.

With his theory of architecture as a medial hinge, Marc Bonner reveals that digital game worlds exhibit media-specific properties that were previously out of reach and awaited exploration. By interweaving concepts from media studies, game studies, philosophy, architectural theory, human geography, landscape theory, and art history, among others, Bonner develops a transdisciplinary theoretical model and, using the analytical methods developed from it, makes it possible for the first time to understand and name the complex structure of today's computer games - from indie games to AAA open worlds.

Open World Structures (Offene-Welt-Strukturen (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)) makes the architectonics of digital game worlds comprehensively accessible.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, "After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time" (Verso, 2023) Sep 06, 2023

Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on.

In After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2023), Dr. Helen Hester and Dr. Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives – how the vacuum of free time has been taken up by vacuuming. Examining the history of the home over the past century – from running water to white goods to smart homes – they show how repeated efforts to reduce the burden of this work have faced a variety of barriers, challenges, and reversals.

Charting the trajectory of our domestic spaces over the past century, Dr. Hester and Dr. Srnicek consider new possibilities for the future, uncovering the abandoned ideas of anti-housework visionaries and sketching out a path towards real free time for all, where everyone is at liberty to pursue their passions, or do nothing at all. It will require rethinking our living arrangements, our expectations and our cities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kenneth J. Saltman, "The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers" (MIT Press, 2022) Sep 06, 2023

Today, conspiracy theories run rampant, attacks on facts have become commonplace, and systemic inequities are on the rise as individual and collective agency unravels. The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers (MIT Press, 2022) explains the educational, technological, and ideological preconditions for these contemporary crises of truth and agency and explores the contradictions and competing visions for the future of education that lie at the center of the problem.

Schools are increasingly reimagined as businesses, and high-stakes standardized testing and curricula, for-profit charter schools, and the rise of educational AI put capital and technology at the center of education. Yet even as our society demands measure, data, and facts, politicians and news outlets regularly make unfounded assertions. How should we make sense of the contradictions between the demand for radical data-driven empiricism and the flight from evidence, argument, or theoretical justification?

In this critical investigation of the new digital directions of educational privatization—AI education, adaptive learning technology, biometrics, the quantification of play and social emotional learning—and the politics of the body, Saltman shows how the false certainty of bodies and numbers replaces deliberative and thoughtful agency in a time of increasing precarity. A distinctive contribution to scholarship on public school privatization and educational technology, politics, policy, pedagogy, and theory, The Alienation of Fact is a spirited call for democratic education that values creating a society of “thinking people” over capitalistic gains.

This book is available open access here.

Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change.

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Stephen Ramsay, "On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations" (U Minnesota Press, 2023) Sep 06, 2023

Stephen Ramsey's On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities. Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media.

Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities. A founding figure in what was once known as “humanities computing,” Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives.

The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the author’s journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist. These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While “digital humanities” may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry.

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Herlinde Koelbl, "Fascination of Science: 60 Encounters with Pioneering Researchers of Our Time" (MIT Press, 2023) Sep 06, 2023

An intimate collection of portraits of internationally renowned scientists and Nobel Prize winners, paired with interviews and personal stories. What makes a brilliant scientist? Who are the people behind the greatest discoveries of our time? Connecting art and science, photographer Herlinde Koelbl seeks the answers in this English translation of the German book Fascination of Science: 60 Encounters with Pioneering Researchers of Our Time(MIT Press, 2023), an indelible collection of portraits of and interviews with sixty pioneering scientists of the twenty-first century. Koelbl’s approach is intimate and accessible, and her highly personal interviews with her subjects reveal the forces (as well as the personal quirks) that motivate the scientists’ work; for example, one wakes up at 3 am because her mind is calm then, another says his best ideas come to him in the shower. These glimpses into the scientists’ lives and thinking add untold texture in this up-to-the-minute survey of the activities and progress that are currently taking place in the broad field of the natural sciences. Koelbl’s interview subjects include Nobel Prize winners Dan Shechtman, Frances Arnold, Carolyn Bertozzi, and cover scientific fields from astronomy, biochemistry, and quantum physics to stem-cell research and AI. Beautifully bringing together art, science, and the written word, Fascination of Science is an inspiring read that shows how creativity, obsession, persistence, and passion drive the pioneering researchers of our time.

Herlinde Koelbl is a German photographic artist, author, and documentary filmmaker.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Gennifer Weisenfeld, "Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Sep 05, 2023

Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons.

Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan(U Chicago Press, 2023) explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense--or bōkū--through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan's imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country.

The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.

Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University.

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Gerald O'Brien, "Eugenics, Genetics, and Disability in Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Implications for the Social Work Profession" (Oxford UP, 2023) Sep 05, 2023

Gerald O'Brien's book Eugenics, Genetics, and Disability in Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Implications for the Social Work Profession (Oxford UP, 2023) focuses on the conceptual relationship between the American eugenic movement of the early 1900s and contemporary genetic research, policy and practices, and their relevance for social work and related professions. While the expansion of pre-natal testing and other genetic innovations are often couched as a form of "new eugenics," this description is only partially correct. This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between the emerging social work profession and the eugenic movement during the first quarter of the twentieth century and considers the historical importance of this for the profession today.

Social workers played a particularly important role in the movement of eugenic policies from targeting persons with disabilities to limiting procreation among "welfare" recipients, especially minority women. As the profession attempts to come to terms with this problematic history, it also needs to understand the dual "faces" it displays to persons with disabilities. Often purported as supporters of such persons, social workers' continued embracement of the medical model of disabilities keeps them from being accepted by many as true allies in the fight for social justice related to disability inclusion.

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Alexandra Roginski, "Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Sep 04, 2023

The contentious science of phrenology once promised insight into character and intellect through external ‘reading’ of the head. In the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, popular phrenologists — figures who often hailed from the margins — performed their science of touch and cranial jargon everywhere from mechanics’ institutions to public houses.

In Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge UP, 2023), Alexandra Roginski recounts a history of this everyday practice, exploring how it featured in the fates of people living in, and moving through, the Tasman World. Innovatively drawing on historical newspapers and a network of archives, she traces the careers of a diverse range of popular phrenologists and those they encountered. By analysing the actions at play in scientific episodes through ethnographic, social and cultural history, Roginski considers how this now-discredited science could, in its own day, yield fleeting power and advantage, even against a backdrop of large-scale dispossession and social brittleness.

Piers Kelly is a linguistic anthropologist at the University of New England, Australia

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Ari Ezra Waldman, "Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Sep 02, 2023

In Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ari Ezra Waldman exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Waldman reveals that companies don't just lobby against privacy law; they also manipulate how we think about privacy, how their employees approach their work, and how they weaken the law to make data-extractive products the norm. In contrast to those who claim that privacy law is getting stronger, Waldman shows why recent shifts in privacy law are precisely the kinds of changes that corporations want and how even those who think of themselves as privacy advocates often unwittingly facilitate corporate malfeasance. This powerful account should be read by anyone who wants to understand why privacy laws are not working and how corporations trap us into giving up our personal information.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and an AY23-24 affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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The Past and Present of Psychedelic Medicine Sep 01, 2023

Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn take such an ineffable thing — a tool for personal revelation, cosmic oneness, spiritual enlightenment, whatever people have called it — and make it just another product in late stage capitalism? From something that is potentially radical, to something that is brutally commodified, instrumentalized, hyped, and turned into the next meme stock craze. The venture capitalists and techno-optimist libertarians are certainly trying, but not everyone is happy about that. On this episode, we look at the deep rifts in and around psychedelic medicine, as different camps vie for the future of these drugs.

First, we go back to the beginning. Historian Erika Dyck tells us the little-known story of an earlier period of psychedelic research, led by pioneers in — believe it or not — Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Dyke’s book Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies charts the early days of this medical research, and reveals important lessons for our current tensions. The book shows that deep rifts have always existed in psychedelic research, because the drugs sit uncomfortably in-between many different ways of knowing.

Then, muckracking psychonaut David Nickles is calling out the mainstream commodification of psychedelics, as well as the bullshit and abuse within the underground. Nickles is an underground researcher, harm reduction advocate, and journalist, who is also managing editor of Psymopsia, a psychedelics watchdog group. In 2018, he excoriated the psychedelic research community for playing nice with the emerging VC-backed psychedelic firms, like the Peter Thiel-funded Compass Pathways (Nickles’ talk is summarized here, but the full talk is available on Youtube). Since then, Nickles says things have only gotten worse. He documents much of that in Power Trip, an investigative podcast series on psychedelic therapy, produced by New York Magazine and Psymosia.

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Bonnie Gordon, "Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Aug 31, 2023

Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood.

Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history, this multi-disciplinary book moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like “technology” and “human.” Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds (U Chicago Press, 2023) attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions—including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope—participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon’s revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University. Email: nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Brooke L. Blower, "Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper" (Oxford UP, 2023) Aug 30, 2023

On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways’ celebrated seaplane—the Yankee Clipper—took off from New York and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew.

In her new book, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper(Oxford UP, 2023), author Brooke L. Blower traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war. This vivid narrative captures the dramatic stories of these seven people and, through them, the impact of Americans’ global connections before and during World War II. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the U.S. war effort. The intriguing biographies of the Yankee Clipper’s passengers—among them an Olympic-athlete-turned-export-salesman, a Broadway star, and two entrepreneurs accused of trading with the enemy—upend conventional American narratives about World War II. Americans in a World at War offers fresh perspectives on a transformative period of U.S. history and global connections during the “American Century.”

Brooke L. Blower is an Associate Professor of History at Boston University.

James Kates is a Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

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Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023) Aug 30, 2023

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.

Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership.

Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order. The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent developments in the emerging field of the global history of knowledge—as science, as economy, and as culture. The case studies reveal how notions of knowing and owning emerge because they reciprocally produce and determine each other's limits and possibilities; that is, how we know inevitably affects how we can own what we know; and how we own always impacts how and what we are able to know.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Donna J. Drucker, "Fertility Technology" (MIT Press, 2023) Aug 29, 2023

A concise overview of fertility technology—its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world. In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman’s uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology (MIT Press, 2023) surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world. Donna J. Drucker’s concise and eminently readable account introduces the five principal types of fertility technologies used in human reproduction—artificial insemination; ovulation timing; sperm, egg, and embryo freezing; in vitro fertilization; and IVF in uterine transplants—discussing the development, manufacture, dispersion, and use of each. Geographically, it focuses on countries where innovations have emerged and countries where these technologies most profoundly affect individuals and population policies. Drucker’s wide-ranging perspective reveals how these technologies, used for birth control as well as conception in many cases, have been critical in shaping the moral, practical, and political meaning of human life, kinship, and family in different nations and cultures since the mid-nineteenth century.

Donna J. Drucker is Assistant Director of Scholarship and Research Development at the Columbia University School of Nursing.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Elaine Schattner, "From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer" (Columbia UP, 2023) Aug 28, 2023

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease.

Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor’s office and the public stage.

Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival.

In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease.

Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist.

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Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023) Aug 27, 2023

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. Gary Smith's book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerful computers.

Using a wide range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Stefan Heinrich Simond, "Pixelated Madness: The Construction of Mental Illnesses and Psychiatric Institutions in Video Games" (Hülsbusch, 2023) Aug 23, 2023

The relationship between madness and video games has been notoriously tense. In an abundance of titles, stereotypes and stigmatisations can be found—not only regarding the mentally ill, but also psychiatry as a discipline. Sequences of electroshock therapy come to mind, mutated patients, and homicidal maniacs. But where do we go from here? And what lies beyond the criticism of how mental illnesses are portrayed in video games?

In Pixelated Madness: The Construction of Mental Illnesses and Psychiatric Institutions in Video Games (Hülsbusch, 2023), game studies scholar Stefan Heinrich Simond focuses on a small selection of contemporary video games to present detailed qualitative analyses and ultimately develop a typology of madness in video games that can serve as an instructive basis for further study. The primary goal is thereby not to criticise or evaluate but to describe, understand, and disambiguate. From common tropes such as the horror asylum and the animalised inmate to the sanity meter and subversive means of subjectification, a broad angle on madness in video games is presented.

Aside from the concrete analyses, this dissertation also presents a constructivist understanding of madness. Instead of comparing video game characters to diagnostic manuals or therapeutic means to their actual application, video games are taken for what they are: creative expressions that aim to inspire and entertain. Madness in video games is then not considered a mirror to mental illnesses in real life, but a construction in its own right. Based on the presented observations, a new angle on the status of madness in the media might be well warranted.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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The Digital Mind: How Science Is Redefining Humanity Aug 23, 2023

What do computers, cells, and brains have in common? Computers are electronic devices designed by humans; cells are biological entities crafted by evolution; brains are the containers and creators of our minds. But all are, in one way or another, information-processing devices. The power of the human brain is, so far, unequaled by any existing machine or known living being. Over eons of evolution, the brain has enabled us to develop tools and technology to make our lives easier. Our brains have even allowed us to develop computers that are almost as powerful as the human brain itself. In The Digital Mind, Arlindo Oliveira describes how advances in science and technology could enable us to create digital minds.

Exponential growth is a pattern built deep into the scheme of life, but technological change now promises to outstrip even evolutionary change. Oliveira describes technological and scientific advances that range from the discovery of laws that control the behavior of the electromagnetic fields to the development of computers. He calls natural selection the ultimate algorithm, discusses genetics and the evolution of the central nervous system, and describes the role that computer imaging has played in understanding and modeling the brain. Having considered the behavior of the unique system that creates a mind, he turns to an unavoidable question: Is the human brain the only system that can host a mind? If digital minds come into existence—and, Oliveira says, it is difficult to argue that they will not—what are the social, legal, and ethical implications? Will digital minds be our partners, or our rivals?

In this episode Chris Gondek speaks with author Arlindo Oliveira about intelligence in respect to consciousness, and how artificial intelligence has spawned and will grow.

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Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, and the Future of Academic Publishing Aug 22, 2023

Avi Staiman, CEO of Academic Language Experts discusses the how advancements in artificial intelligence are shaping academic publishing. Avi offers various solutions and remedies to concerns around misuse, in addition to offering several tools that can support academics in their writing and research.

Sci Writer

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform Aug 22, 2023

The Nintendo Wii, introduced in 2006, helped usher in a moment of retro-reinvention in video game play. This hugely popular console system, codenamed Revolution during development, signaled a turn away from fully immersive, time-consuming MMORPGs or forty-hour FPS games and back toward family fun in the living room. Players using the wireless motion-sensitive controller (the Wii Remote, or “Wiimote”) play with their whole bodies, waving, swinging, swaying. The mimetic interface shifts attention from what's on the screen to what's happening in physical space. Codename Revolution describes the Wii's impact in technological, social, and cultural terms, examining the Wii as a system of interrelated hardware and software that was consciously designed to promote social play in physical space.

Each chapter of Codename Revolution focuses on a major component of the Wii as a platform: the console itself, designed to be low-powered and nimble; the iconic Wii Remote; Wii Fit Plus, and its controller, the Wii Balance Board; the Wii Channels interface and Nintendo's distribution system; and the Wii as a social platform that not only affords multiplayer options but also encourages social interaction in shared physical space. Finally, the authors connect the Wii's revolution in mimetic interface gaming—which eventually led to the release of Sony's Move and Microsoft's Kinect—to some of the economic and technological conditions that influence the possibility of making something new in this arena of computing and culture.

Steven E. Jones is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago.

George K. Thiruvathukal is Professor of Computer Science at Loyola University Chicago.

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Net Smart: How to Thrive Online Aug 21, 2023

Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In Net Smart, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.

Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he teaches us a lesson on networks and network building.

Rheingold points out that there is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.

Howard Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker on social media, is the author ofTools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (both published by the MIT Press), and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

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Outside the Box: The History and Future of Globalization Aug 21, 2023

Economist, historian, and author Marc Levinson talks about his book, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (Princeton UP, 2020), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Outside the Box traces the history of globalization from the early 19th century to the present and shows how its nature has shifted over time. Levinson argues that the most recent form of globalization, focused on moving stuff around the globe, has been in decline since the 2008 financial crisis and that a new form of globalization, focused on moving people, services, and ideas, may be emerging. The pair also discuss Levinson's interesting career as an economist and journalist.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Ian Convery et al., "Routledge Handbook of Rewilding" (Routledge, 2022) Aug 20, 2023

Routledge Handbook of Rewilding(Routledge, 2022) provides a comprehensive overview of the history, theory and current practices of ‘rewilding’. Rewilding offers a transformational paradigm shift in conservation thinking, and as such is increasingly of interest to academics, policymakers and practitioners. However, as a rapidly emerging area of conservation, the term has often been defined and used in a variety of different ways (both temporally and spatially). There is, therefore, the need for a comprehensive assessment of this field, and the Routledge Handbook of Rewilding fills this lacuna. The handbook is organized into four sections to reflect key areas of rewilding theory, practice and debate: the evolution of rewilding, theoretical and practical underpinnings, applications and impacts, and the ethics and philosophy of rewilding.

Drawing on a range of international case studies the handbook addresses many of the key issues, including land acquisition and longer-term planning, transitioning from restoration (human-led, nature enabled) to rewilding (nature-led, human enabled), and the role of political and social transformational change. Led by an editorial team who have extensive experience researching and practicing rewilding, this handbook is essential reading for students, academics and practitioners interested in rewilding, ecologaical restoration, natural resource management and conservation.

Isobel Akerman is a History PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying biodiversity and botanic gardens.

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The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga Aug 20, 2023

Long ago, in 1985, personal computers came in two general categories: the friendly, childish game machine used for fun (exemplified by Atari and Commodore products); and the boring, beige adult box used for business (exemplified by products from IBM). The game machines became fascinating technical and artistic platforms that were of limited real-world utility. The IBM products were all utility, with little emphasis on aesthetics and no emphasis on fun. Into this bifurcated computing environment came the Commodore Amiga 1000. This personal computer featured a palette of 4,096 colors, unprecedented animation capabilities, four-channel stereo sound, the capacity to run multiple applications simultaneously, a graphical user interface, and powerful processing potential. It was, Jimmy Maher writes in The Future Was Here, the world's first true multimedia personal computer.

Maher argues that the Amiga's capacity to store and display color photographs, manipulate video (giving amateurs access to professional tools), and use recordings of real-world sound were the seeds of the digital media future: digital cameras, Photoshop, MP3 players, and even YouTube, Flickr, and the blogosphere. He examines different facets of the platform--from Deluxe Paint to AmigaOS to Cinemaware--in each chapter, creating a portrait of the platform and the communities of practice that surrounded it. Of course, Maher acknowledges, the Amiga was not perfect: the DOS component of the operating systems was clunky and ill-matched, for example, and crashes often accompanied multitasking attempts. And Commodore went bankrupt in 1994. But for a few years, the Amiga's technical qualities were harnessed by engineers, programmers, artists, and others to push back boundaries and transform the culture of computing.

Jimmy Maher is an independent scholar and writer living in Norway.

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Roma Agrawal, "Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way)" (Norton, 2023) Aug 19, 2023

Smartphones, skyscrapers, spacecraft. Modern technology seems mind-bogglingly complex. But beneath the surface, it can be beautifully simple.

In Nuts & Bolts: Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World (in a Big Way) (W. W. Norton, 2023), award-winning Shard engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal deconstructs our most complex feats of engineering into seven fundamental inventions: the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump. Each of these objects is itself a wonder of design, the result of many iterations and refinements. Together, they have enabled humanity to see the invisible, build the spectacular, communicate across vast distances, and even escape our planet.

Tracing the surprising journeys of each invention through the millennia, Agrawal reveals how handmade Roman nails led to modern skyscrapers, how the potter’s wheel enabled space exploration, and how humble lenses helped her conceive a child against the odds.

She invites us to marvel at these small but perfectly formed inventions, sharing the stories of the remarkable, and often unknown, scientists and engineers who made them possible. The nuts and bolts that make up our world may be tiny, and are often hidden, but they’ve changed our lives in dramatic ways.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher.

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Networked: The New Social Operating System Aug 19, 2023

Daily life is connected life, its rhythms driven by endless email pings and responses, the chimes and beeps of continually arriving text messages, tweets and retweets, Facebook updates, pictures and videos to post and discuss. Our perpetual connectedness gives us endless opportunities to be part of the give-and-take of networking.

Some worry that this new environment makes us isolated and lonely. But in Networked, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. The new social operating system of “networked individualism” liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups; it also requires us to develop networking skills and strategies, work on maintaining ties, and balance multiple overlapping networks.

Rainie and Wellman outline the “triple revolution” that has brought on this transformation: the rise of social networking, the capacity of the Internet to empower individuals, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices. Drawing on extensive evidence, they examine how the move to networked individualism has expanded personal relationships beyond households and neighborhoods; transformed work into less hierarchical, more team-driven enterprises; encouraged individuals to create and share content; and changed the way people obtain information. Rainie and Wellman guide us through the challenges and opportunities of living in the evolving world of networked individuals.

Lee Rainie is Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and former managing editor of U.S. News and World Report.

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Academic Publishers Grapple with Advances in AI Aug 19, 2023

Niko Pfund joins the podcast to discuss the value of scientific content for building out Large Language Models and some of the challenges around tracking the quality and ownership of aggregated content from unknown sources. We also discuss potential avenues for collaboration between Generative AI companies and scholarly publishers.

Niko Pfund is Academic Publisher at Oxford University Press and President of Oxford’s US office.

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Indra’s Net and the Midas Touch: Living Sustainably in a Connected World Aug 18, 2023

We live today in a global web of interdependence, connected technologically, economically, politically, and socially. As a result of these expanding and deepening interdependencies, it has become impossible fully to control--or foretell--the effects of our actions. The world is rife with unintended consequences. The first law of human ecology--which declares that we can never do merely one thing--is a truth we ignore at our peril. In Indra's Net and the Midas Touch, Leslie Paul Thiele explores the impact of interdependence and unintended consequences on our pursuit of sustainability.

Unfortunately, good intentions provide no antidote to the law of unintended consequences, and proffered cures often prove worse than the disease. Biofuels developed for the purpose of reducing carbon emissions, for example, have had the unintended effect of cutting off food supplies to the needy and destroying rain forests. We must fundamentally transform our patterns of thinking and behavior. Thiele offers the intellectual and moral foundations for this transformation, drawing from ecology, ethics, technology, economics, politics, psychology, physics, and metaphysics. Awareness of our interconnectedness, he writes, stimulates creativity and community; it is a profound responsibility and a blessing beyond measure.

Leslie Paul Thiele is Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Director of Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of Environmentalism for a New Millennium: The Challenge of Coevolution, The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative, and other books.

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Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation Aug 17, 2023

Hello Avatar Or, {llSay(0, Hello, Avatar ); is a tiny piece of user-friendly code that allows us to program our virtual selves. In Hello Avatar, B. Coleman examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the "x-reality" that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations. And she argues that it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency--our new power to customize our networked life.

By avatar, Coleman means not just the animated figures that populate our screens but the gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities--in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. Exploring such network activities as embodiment, extreme (virtual) violence, and the work in virtual reality labs, and offering sidebar interviews with designers and practitioners, she argues that what is new is real-time collaboration and copresence, the way we make connections using networked media and the cultures we have created around this. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject--all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape.

B. Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. She is Faculty Director of the C3 Game Culture and Mobile Media initiative.

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Scott Skinner-Thompson, "Privacy at the Margins" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Aug 16, 2023

Limited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In Privacy at the Margins (Cambridge UP, 2021), Scott Skinner-Thompson highlights why privacy is of acute importance for marginalized groups. He explains how privacy can serve as a form of expressive resistance to government and corporate surveillance regimes - furthering equality goals - and demonstrates why efforts undertaken by vulnerable groups (queer folks, women, and racial and religious minorities) to protect their privacy should be entitled to constitutional protection under the First Amendment and related equality provisions. By examining the ways even limited privacy can enrich and enhance our lives at the margins in material ways, this work shows how privacy can be transformed from a liberal affectation to a legal tool of liberation from oppression.

Jake Chanenson, CS Ph.D. at UChicago

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Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers Aug 16, 2023

Geologists in the field climb hills and hang onto craggy outcrops; they put their fingers in sand and scratch, smell, and even taste rocks. Beginning in 2004, however, a team of geologists and other planetary scientists did field science in a dark room in Pasadena, exploring Mars from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by means of the remotely operated Mars Exploration Rovers (MER). Clustered around monitors, living on Mars time, painstakingly plotting each movement of the rovers and their tools, sensors, and cameras, these scientists reported that they felt as if they were on Mars themselves, doing field science. The MER created a virtual experience of being on Mars. In Working on Mars, William Clancey examines how the MER has changed the nature of planetary field science.

Drawing on his extensive observations of scientists in the field and at the JPL, Clancey investigates how the design of the rover mission enables field science on Mars, explaining how the scientists and rover engineers manipulate the vehicle and why the programmable tools and analytic instruments work so well for them. He shows how the scientists felt not as if they were issuing commands to a machine but rather as if they were working on the red planet, riding together in the rover on a voyage of discovery.

William J. Clancey is Chief Scientist of Human-Centered Computing in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center, and Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

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Jieun Kiaer, "Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Aug 16, 2023

Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Jieun Kiaer provides an in-depth discussion of emoji use in a global context, this volume presents the use of emoji as a hugely important facet of computer-mediated communication, leading Dr. Kiaer to coin the term 'emoji speak'.

Exploring why and how emojis are born, and the different ways in which people use them, this book highlights the diversity of emoji speak. Presenting the results of empirical investigations with participants of British, Belgian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Jordanian, Korean, Singaporean, and Spanish backgrounds, it raises important questions around the complexity of emoji use.

Though emojis have become ubiquitous, their interpretation can be more challenging. What is humorous in one region, for example, might be considered inappropriate or insulting in another. Whilst emoji use can speed up our communication, we might also question whether they convey our emotions sufficiently. Moreover, far from belonging to the youth, people of all ages now use emoji speak, prompting Kiaer to consider the future of our communication in an increasingly digital world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Benjamin Y. Fong, "Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge" (Verso, 2023) Aug 15, 2023

Benjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, and the New York Times. Previously, Ben’s work focused on the (usually negative) effects of neoliberal capitalism, writing about NGOs, labor leaders, and health care. Quick Fixes expands this examination into the world of drugs, examining nine different kinds of intoxicants, and five “orienting claims” that place their use within in larger capitalist histories.

A bit about the book...

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics--across the board, consumption has shot up in the 21st century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

Quick Fixes is a look at American society through the lens of its pharmacological crutches. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America's passionate love and intense hatred for drugs has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century.

Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans' fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, shape the sorts of drugs society chooses.

By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical comforts, the hope is to help answer that ever perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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How Uber Disrupted Washington, D.C.: A Conversation with Katie Wells and Kafui Attoh Aug 14, 2023

Katie Wells, a Postdoctoral Fritz Fellow with Georgetown University's Tech and Society Initiative, and Kafui Attoh, Associate Professor of Urban Studies in the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, talk about their new book, Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of a City (co-authored with Declan Cullen) (Princeton UP, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Disrupting D.C. examines how various actors took on a "let Uber deal with it" mindset about social problems, not so much because they had great faith in Uber but because they have profound distrust in city government.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Satsuki Takahashi, "Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape" (U Washington Press, 2023) Aug 12, 2023

Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi visited nearby communities, collecting accounts of life and livelihoods along the industrialized seascape. The resulting environmental ethnography examines the complex relationship between commercial fishing families and the Joban Sea--once known for premium-quality fish and now notorious as the location of the world's worst nuclear catastrophe.

Satsuki Takahashi's book Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape (U Washington Press, 2023) follows postwar Japan's maritime modernization from the perspectives of those most entangled with its successes and failures. In response to unrelenting setbacks, including an earlier nuclear accident at neighboring Tokaimura and the oil spills of stranded tankers during typhoons, these communities have developed survival strategies shaped by the precarity they share with their marine ecosystem. The collaborative resilience that emerges against this backdrop of vulnerability and uncertainty challenges the progress-bound logic of futurism, bringing more hopeful possibilities for the future into sharper focus.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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The Future of Underground/Sea Cables: A Discussion with Henry Farrell Aug 12, 2023

How much of US power is underground? We hear a lot about the US military assets used on land, on the sea, and in the air - but not much about what’s going on underground and on the sea bed. It turns out what goes on down there is a significant source of US power – which has been documented by Henry Farrell in his co-authored book (with Abraham Newman), Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Henry Holt, 2023). Listen to him describe it all with Owen Bennett-Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Michael Ruse, "Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017) Aug 11, 2023

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.

Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism.

In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought.

Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Chris Wiggins and Matthew L Jones, "How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms" (Norton, 2023) Aug 10, 2023

From facial recognition―capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents―to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.

In How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (Norton, 2023), Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. They explore how data was created and curated, as well as how new mathematical and computational techniques developed to contend with that data serve to shape people, ideas, society, military operations, and economies. Although technology and mathematics are at its heart, the story of data ultimately concerns an unstable game among states, corporations, and people. How were new technical and scientific capabilities developed; who supported, advanced, or funded these capabilities or transitions; and how did they change who could do what, from what, and to whom?

Wiggins and Jones focus on these questions as they trace data’s historical arc, and look to the future. By understanding the trajectory of data―where it has been and where it might yet go―Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Idolatry and Idle Hands (with Jacob Howland) Aug 10, 2023

Philosophy professor Jacob Howland applies the lessons of Greek classics and Jewish scripture to this our curious moment at the inception of Artificial intelligence when computers are doing more and more work for us, and we humans—like miniature Gods—can make up new simulated realities and even identities for ourselves. There’s a word for when people worship the things they create: idolatry. Looking to the Bible (from the Garden of Eden, the Fall, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, and the Golden Calf) and literature (from Homer, Plato, and Hesiod, all the way to Milton), Professor Howland and I talk about where we are, and where we might be headed.

Jacob Howland’s website and his faculty pages at the University of Tulsa and the University of Austin
Jacob Howland’s article, “AI is a False Prophet: Our enslavement to idolatry will end in disaster.” (Unherd, April 2023)
Jacob Howland’s article, “AI has always plagued mankind: Technological arrogance brought about our Fall.” (Unherd, July 2023)
Jacob Howland’s article, “Henry Adams and the Crisis of Education: How the famed historian foresaw our civilizational predicament” (City Journal, July 2023)
Jacob Howland and Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast (June 2023)

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

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Renny Thomas, "Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment" (Routledge, 2022) Aug 10, 2023

Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2022) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists' religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of 'conflict' and 'complementarity'. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Cory Doctorow, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" (Verso, 2023) Aug 09, 2023

Big Tech locked us into their systems by making their platforms hard to leave by design. The impossibility of staying connected to people on their platforms after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's an intentional business strategy.

In The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation(Verso, 2023), Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission.

This book comes out September 5, 2023. See seizethemeansofcomputation.org for book details.

Note: Cory mentioned that the book website is seizethemeansofcommunication.org it is actually seizethemeansofcomputation.org.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Daniel Foliard, "The Violence of Colonial Photography" (Manchester UP, 2022) Aug 08, 2023

The late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the first mass-produced cameras became available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and project an image of supremacy across the world.

Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, The Violence of Colonial Photography (Manchester UP, 2022) offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades before the First World War. It explores the ways the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, the book reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.

Daniel Foliard is a Professor of Modern History at Université Paris Cité

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Flora Samuel, "Housing for Hope and Wellbeing" (Routledge, 2022) Aug 07, 2023

Housing and neighborhoods have an important contribution to make to our wellbeing and our sense of our place in the world. Housing for Hope and Wellbeing (Routledge, 2023), written for a lay audience (with policy makers firmly in mind) offers a useful and intelligible overview of our housing system and why it is in ‘crisis’ while acting as an important reminder of how housing contributes to social value, defined as community, health, self development and identity. It argues for a holistic digital map-based planning system that allows for the sensitive balancing of the triple bottom line of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic value. It sets out a vision of what our housing system could look like if we really put the wellbeing of people and planet first, as well as a route map on how to get there.

Written primarily from the point of view of an architect, the account weaves across industry, practice, and academia cross-cutting disciplines to provide an integrated view of the field. The book focuses on the UK housing scene but draws on and provides lessons for housing cultures across the globe. Illustrated throughout with case studies, this is the go-to book for anyone who wants to look at housing in a holistic way.

Flora Samuel is Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. She helped set up the new School of Architecture at the University of Reading and is former Head of the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and the first RIBA Vice President for Research. The author of Why Architects Matter: Evidencing and Communicating the Value of Architects (Routledge, 2018) she has spent the last decade researching the positive impact of good design on people. Her interests are now moving to land use and social justice, both key to addressing climate change. She is well known as an industry advisor on the social value of the design of housing and places and a strong advocate of social value mapping. She is also known for her unorthodox writings on Le Corbusier, about whom she has published extensively. A mother of three daughters, she is based in Wales.

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

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Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile Aug 07, 2023

Gretchen Sorin, Director and Distinguished Professor of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York - Oneonta, talks about her book,Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Driving While Black examines how cars fit into black lives and sheds light on how this technology fits into much larger patterns of history, including the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. Sorin and Vinsel also talk about the field of public history and communicating to non-academic audiences.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games Aug 06, 2023

We may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our facial expressions are rarely those of happiness or bliss. Instead, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration as we lose, or die, or fail to advance to the next level. Humans may have a fundamental desire to succeed and feel competent, but game players choose to engage in an activity in which they are nearly certain to fail and feel incompetent. So why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? Juul examines this paradox.

In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Reader or audience reaction to tragedy is often explained as catharsis, as a purging of negative emotions. But, Juul points out, this doesn't seem to be the case for video game players. Games do not purge us of unpleasant emotions; they produce them in the first place. What, then, does failure in video game playing do?

Juul argues that failure in a game is unique in that when you fail in a game, you (not a character) are in some way inadequate. Yet games also motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving skills) is a central enjoyment of games. Games, writes Juul, are the art of failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it.

The Art of Failure is essential reading for anyone interested in video games, whether as entertainment, art, or education.

Jesper Juul is Assistant Professor at the New York University Game Center. He is the author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, both published by the MIT Press.

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Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023) Aug 06, 2023

In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ.

The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century.

But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror.

These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War(Harper, 2023) explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner.

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Christine Keiner, "Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal" (U Georgia Press, 2020) Aug 05, 2023

The Atlantic-Pacific Central American sea-level canal is generally regarded as a spectacular failure. However, Deep Cut: Science, Power, and the Unbuilt Interoceanic Canal(U Georgia Press, 2020) examines the canal in an alternative context, as an anticipated infrastructure project that captured attention from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Its advocates included naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, physicist Edward Teller, and U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. The waterway did not come to fruition, but as a proposal it served important political and scientific purposes during different eras, especially the years spanning the Cold War and the "environmental decade" of the 1970s.

Historian Christine Keiner shows how the evolving plans for the sea-level ship canal performed distinct kinds of work for diverse historical actors in light of shifting scientific, environmental, and diplomatic values. Dismissing it as a failed scheme prevents us from considering the political, cultural, and epistemological processes that went into constructing the seaway as an innovative diplomatic solution to rising U.S.-Panama tensions, an exciting research opportunity for evolutionary biologists, a superior hydrocarbon highway for the oil industry, or a serious ecological threat to marine biodiversity.

Invoking past dreams and nightmares of peaceful nuclear explosives, invasive sea snakes, and the 1970s energy crisis, Deep Cut uses the Central American seaway proposal to examine the changing roles of environmental diplomacy and state-sponsored environmental impact assessment. More broadly, Keiner amplifies an emerging conversation around the environmental, scientific, and political histories and legacies of unrealized megaprojects.

This book is available open access here.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.

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The Future of Space Travel: A Discussion with Douglas C. Ligor Aug 05, 2023

The expansion of space travel is much discussed but always seems subject to delay. Why is that and when will it happen on a much larger scale? Douglas Ligor has been considering that issue for the Rand corporation – and he talks to Owen Bennett-Jones about the prospects for space travel. Ligor is co-author of Assessing the Readiness for Human Commercial Spaceflight Safety Regulations (Rand, 2023) and International Space Traffic Management: Charting a Course for Long-Term Sustainability (Rand, 2023).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Robot Futures Aug 04, 2023

With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings.

Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

Illah Reza Nourbakhsh is Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also directs the Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab. He is a coauthor of Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (MIT Press).

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Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation Aug 03, 2023

Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and Buzz Lightyear, between ping pong and PONG. It began in 1963 when an MIT graduate student named Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad, the first true computer animation program. Sutherland noted: "Since motion can be put into Sketchpad drawings, it might be exciting to try making cartoons." This book, the first full-length history of CG, shows us how Sutherland's seemingly offhand idea grew into a multibillion dollar industry.

In Moving Innovation, Tom Sito--himself an animator and industry insider for more than thirty years--describes the evolution of CG. His story features a memorable cast of characters--math nerds, avant-garde artists, cold warriors, hippies, video game enthusiasts, and studio executives: disparate types united by a common vision. Sito shows us how fifty years of work by this motley crew made movies like Toy Story and Avatar possible.

Tom Sito has been a professional animator since 1975. One of the key players in Disney’s animation revival of the 1980s and 1990s, he worked on such classic Disney films as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and The Lion King (1994). He left Disney to help set up the Dreamworks Animation Unit in 1995. He is Professor of Cinema Practice in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

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The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us Aug 02, 2023

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.

Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world—our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known.

Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.

Noson S. Yanofsky is Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a coauthor of Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists.

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Kathryn Cramer Brownell, "24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News" (Princeton UP, 2023) Aug 01, 2023

As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens across the nation. Yet over the next three decades, the expansion of a different technology, cable, changed all of this. 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News(Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how the cable industry worked with political leaders to create an entirely new approach to television, one that tethered politics to profits and divided and distracted Americans by feeding their appetite for entertainment--frequently at the expense of fostering responsible citizenship.

In this timely and provocative book, Kathryn Cramer Brownell argues that cable television itself is not to blame for today's rampant polarization and scandal politics--the intentional restructuring of television as a political institution is. She describes how cable innovations--from C-SPAN coverage of congressional debates in the 1980s to MTV's foray into presidential politics in the 1990s--took on network broadcasting using market forces, giving rise to a more decentralized media world. Brownell shows how cable became an unstoppable medium for political communication that prioritized cult followings and loyalty to individual brands, fundamentally reshaped party politics, and, in the process, sowed the seeds of democratic upheaval.

24/7 Politics reveals how cable TV created new possibilities for antiestablishment voices and opened a pathway to political prominence for seemingly unlikely figures like Donald Trump by playing to narrow audiences and cultivating division instead of common ground.

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Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program Jul 31, 2023

In July 1969, ninety-four percent of American televisions were tuned to coverage of Apollo 11's mission to the moon. How did space exploration, once the purview of rocket scientists, reach a larger audience than My Three Sons? Why did a government program whose standard operating procedure had been secrecy turn its greatest achievement into a communal experience? In Marketing the Moon, David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek tell the story of one of the most successful marketing and public relations campaigns in history: the selling of the Apollo program.

Primed by science fiction, magazine articles, and appearances by Wernher von Braun on the “Tomorrowland” segments of the Disneyland prime time television show, Americans were a receptive audience for NASA's pioneering “brand journalism.” Scott and Jurek describe sophisticated efforts by NASA and its many contractors to market the facts about space travel—through press releases, bylined articles, lavishly detailed background materials, and fully produced radio and television features—rather than push an agenda. American astronauts, who signed exclusive agreements with Life magazine, became the heroic and patriotic faces of the program. And there was some judicious product placement: Hasselblad was the “first camera on the moon”; Sony cassette recorders and supplies of Tang were on board the capsule; and astronauts were equipped with the Exer-Genie personal exerciser. Everyone wanted a place on the bandwagon.

Generously illustrated with vintage photographs, artwork, and advertisements, many never published before, Marketing the Moon shows that when Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, it was a triumph not just for American engineering and rocketry but for American marketing and public relations.

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist and the author of three bestselling books,The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Real-Time Marketing, and Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. He lives in Lexington, Massachuetts.

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Powering American Farms: A Conversation with Richard Hirsh Jul 31, 2023

Richard Hirsh, Professor of History at Virginia Tech, talks about his book, Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Powering American Farms is a revisionist history of rural electrification that calls into question a long standard story that rural electrification only began through the powers of the US federal government during the New Deal. Through extensive archival research, Hirsh finds a wide variety of activities around electrification on farms, through efforts of utilities, academic researchers, agricultural extension programs, and farmers themselves.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Betty Adamou, "Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success" (Kogan Page, 2018) Jul 31, 2023

Games are the most engaging medium of all time: they harness storytelling and heuristics, drive emotion and push the evolution of technology in a way that no other platform has or can. It's no surprise, then, that games and gamification are revolutionizing the market research industry, offering opportunities to reinvigorate the notoriously sluggish engagement levels seen in traditional surveying methods. This not only improves data quality, but offers untapped insights unattainable through traditional methods. Games and Gamification in Market Research: Increasing Consumer Engagement in Research for Business Success(Kogan Page, 2018) shows readers how to design ResearchGames and Gamified Surveys that will intrinsically engage participants and how best to use these methodologies to become, and stay, commercially competitive.

In a world where brands and organizations are increasingly interested in the feelings and contexts that drive consumer choices, Games and Gamification in Market Research gives readers the skills to use the components in games to encourage play and observe consumer behaviours via simulations for predictive modelling. Written by Betty Adamou, the UK's leading research game designer and named as one of seven women shaping the future of market research, it explains the ways in which these methodologies will evolve with technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and how it will shape research careers. Alongside a companion website, this book provides a fully immersive and fascinating overview of game-based research.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Jade E. Davis, "The Other Side of Empathy" (Duke UP, 2023) Jul 30, 2023

In The Other Side of Empathy(Duke UP, 2023), Jade E. Davis contests the value of empathy as an affective or critical tool. Whether focusing on technology, colonialism, or racism, she shows how empathy can obscure relationships of dominance, control, submission, and victimization, arguing that these histories taint the whole concept of empathy.

Drawing on digital archives of photographs, memoirs, newspapers, interviews, and advertisements regarding nineteenth-century ethnographic museums and human zoos, Davis shows how empathetic responses erase culpabilities from those institutions that commodify difference. She also contends that empathy’s mediation through digital technology cannot lead to more ethical actions, as technology only connects representations of people rather than the people themselves.

In empathy’s place, Davis proposes mutual recognition as a way to see and experience others beyond colonial modes of empathy. Davis illustrates that moving beyond empathy allows for a more nuanced understanding of the colonial past and its ongoing impact while providing for a more meaningful affective engagement with the world.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Alice E. Marwick, "The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media" (Yale UP, 2023) Jul 30, 2023

Online privacy is under constant attack by social media and big data technologies. But we cannot rely on individual actions to remedy this—it is a matter of social justice.

In The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media (Yale UP, 2023), Alice E. Marwick offers a new way of understanding how privacy is jeopardized, particularly for marginalized and disadvantaged communities—including immigrants, the poor, people of color, LGBTQ+ populations, and victims of online harassment.

Marwick shows that there are few resources or regulations for preventing personal information from spreading on the internet. Through a new theory of “networked privacy,” she reveals how current legal and technological frameworks are woefully inadequate in addressing issues of privacy—often by design. Drawing from interviews and focus groups encompassing a diverse group of Americans, Marwick shows that even heavy social media users care deeply about privacy and engage in extensive “privacy work” to protect it. But people are up against the violation machine of the modern internet. Safeguarding privacy must happen at the collective level.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Rob Eschmann,, "When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2023) Jul 29, 2023

From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2023), Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance.

Drawing on a wealth of data, including interviews with students of Color around the country and analyses of millions of social media posts over the past decade, Eschmann investigates the influence of online communication on face-to-face interactions. When the Hood Comes Off highlights the power of the internet as an organizing tool, and shows that online racism can be a profound wake-up call. How will we respond?

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Jeremy Black, "A History of Artillery" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Jul 28, 2023

Jeremy Black's book A History of Artillery (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) traces the development of artillery through the ages, providing a thorough study of these weapons. From its earliest recorded use in battle over a millennium ago, up to the recent Gulf War, Balkan, and Afghanistan conflicts, artillery has often been the deciding factor in battle. Black shows that artillery sits within the general history of a war as a means that varied greatly between armies and navies, and also across time.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Nina Lager Vestberg, "Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization" (MIT Press, 2023) Jul 26, 2023

Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization (MIT Press, 2023) focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page are well-known sites of photographic production that have been replaced by cell phones, imaging software, and websites, the cultural intermediaries of mass-circulation photography—picture librarians and researchers, editors, and archivists—are less familiar. In this book, Nina Lager Vestberg artfully details the range of research skills, reproduction machinery, and communication infrastructures that was needed to make pictures available to a public before digitization.

Drawing on documents and representations across a range of cultural expressions, Picture Research reveals the intermediation that has been performed by skilled workers in a variety of roles, making use of pre-photographic, photographic, and digital machineries of capture, accumulation, extraction, and transmission. Tracing a history of the modern pictorial economy from the pre-photographic 1830s to the post-digitized 2010s, it makes visible and explicit the invisible labor that has built—and still sustains—the visual commodity culture of everyday life.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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The Science of Science: A Discussion with Aaron Clauset Jul 26, 2023

Listen to this interview of Aaron Clauset, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in the BioFrontiers Institute. Aaron is also External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. We talk about what the science of science can contribute to your career in research.

Aaron Clauset : "In science, having good ideas is, in the end, the most important part. You can go a long way, in terms of surviving in the ecosystem of scientific research, on the basis of having really good ideas. Because those ideas can help you get to a good, resource-rich institutional environment. Your ideas can help you cultivate a rich, productive collaboration network that will enable you to be successful over time. For example, a paper that I wrote, looking at the composition and size of collaboration networks and how, once you control for differences between men and women in the way they construct and maintain these different kinds of collaboration networks, productivity differences and impact differences essentially go away. I mean, that's kind of fascinating — that the social network that underlies science ends up being the thing that creates many of the disparities that we superficially see in the ecosystem of scientific research."

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Vincanne Adams, "Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move" (Duke UP, 2023) Jul 25, 2023

Vincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside our bodies, to within our cells to grapple with what it is to live in such an entangled world.

Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals. Prof. Vincanne Adams, is professor Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine.

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US History in 15 Foods: A Conversation with Anna Zeide Jul 24, 2023

Anna Zeide, Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech, talks about her book, US History in 15 Foods(Bloomsbury, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. US History in 15 Foods is an approachable book that covers key moments and major themes in the history of the United States from before European colonization to the present, using food as the lens of examination. Zeide and Vinsel also talk about how Zeide became a food historian and briefly discuss her previous, award-winning book, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Heidi Hausse, "The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany" (Manchester UP, 2023) Jul 21, 2023

Heide Hausse's book The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Manchester University Press, 2023) uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs, uncovering tense moments in which decisions to operate were made. Importantly, it teases out surgeons' ideas about the body embedded in their technical instructions. This unique study also explores the material culture of mechanical hands that amputees commissioned locksmiths, clockmakers, and other artisans to create, revealing their roles in developing a new prosthetic technology. Over two centuries of surgical and artisanal interventions emerged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body - that it was malleable.

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Yi-Tang Lin, "Statistics and the Language of Global Health: Institutions and Experts in China, Taiwan, and the World, 1917-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jul 21, 2023

Yi-Tang Lin received her BA in sociology at National Taiwan University and MA in MA Interdisciplinary Practices of Humanities and Social Sciences, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and École Normale Supériorie (ENS), France. She completed her PhD at the University of Lausanne. After spending several years at the University of Geneva for her postdoc research on "Rockefeller Fellows as Heralds of Globalization (1917-1970), she is now PRIMA Professor at University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Yi-Tang’s research focuses on the transnational history of science, technology and medicine. She is the author ofStatistics and the Language of Global Health: Institutions and Experts in China, Taiwan and the World, 1917–1960(Cambridge University Press, 2022). In this book, she traces the the historical process by which statistics became the language of global health for local and international health organizations. Currently, she is conducting a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, aiming to decentralize historical accounts of the Cold War-era “Green Revolution” by studying exchange pathways between Asia and Africa and challenging the notion of two regions considered only the recipients instead of actors in these exchanges.

Harry Yi-Jui Wu is Associate Professor jointly appointed by Cross College Elite Program and Department of Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan). He is the author of Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization (MIT Press, 2021).

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Usha Raman and Sumana Kasturi, "Childscape, Mediascape: Children and Media in India" (Orient BlackSwan, 2023) Jul 21, 2023

Children are considered to be a group of special interest by media scholars and advocates, especially because they are seen as a vulnerable group whose rights must be protected and also because they represent the future of the world, and so their education and socialisation is of particular importance. While there has been global research on children’s media practices, in India, there has been very little critical work in this area.

Usha Raman and Sumana Kasturi’s edited book Childscape, Mediascape: Children and Media in India (Orient BlackSwan, 2023) fills this gap by bringing together, for the first time, a variety of perspectives from media researchers, practitioners and those involved in secondary school education, with a focus on children, childhood and media. Questioning what it means to ‘grow up digital’ in twenty-first century India, this collection explores a variety of themes relating to children and the media landscape. The volume contains twelve essays on relevant topics such as digital media literacy among children and their new media practices; mediated childhood and child rights; children as both consumers and producers of social media; digitality and education; children’s entertainment and leisure practices, and issues of identity, representation and community in a mediated world. The book also contains a comprehensive introduction by the volume editors.

This volume will be of value to scholars of media and communication studies and cultural studies, while also drawing readers from psychology and journalism. The chapters offer critical insights of relevance to parents, teacher training institutes, child-focused NGOs, and others who work with children.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Aaron A. Reed, "50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to AI Dungeon" (2023) Jul 19, 2023

50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon is an extensively researched book chronicling the first half-century of interactive fiction: video games made from words.

Covering one text game released in each year from 1971 to 2020, in-depth chapters dive into classics like Zork, Trade Wars, and Hitchhiker's Guide; beloved fan games like Galatea and Photopia; wild experiments from Dwarf Fortress to Howling Dogs; and breakout hits like 80 Days, Fallen London, and Lifeline. Over 600 pages of coverage and dozens of original maps and flowcharts help explain the structure and design of each game included.

Aaron A. Reed has been creating and researching interactive stories for twenty years, focusing on understanding the many ways authors and players can tell stories together. He holds a PhD in interactive storytelling, and is currently based in California freelancing as a character and narrative consultant for games.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Lin Zhang, "The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the Chinese Digital Economy" (Columbia UP, 2023) Jul 17, 2023

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia UP, 2023) by Lin Zhang.

You’ll hear about:

A history of the book and Zhang’s entry into the fieldwork through family stories;
How to understand entrepreneurialism as a dominant ideology in the global neoliberal labor economy and China’s positionality in the world;
Why and how the book is organized based on three types of spaces – rural, urban, and transnational – across China and beyond;
The similarities and differences between the elite and the grassroot entrepreneurs in Beijing;
The e-commerce entrepreneurship as “platformized family production” in rural China and the roles played by government and large tech companies like Alibaba play in shaping the new rural production model;
The limit and possibility of reinvention through “shanzhai” (copycat) e-commerce production;
The gendered inequalities of entrepreneurial labor in rural and transnational spaces;
What is “daigou” (personal shopping agents) in transnational e-commerce and the structural challenges entrepreneurs – especially women – face across national borders and digital platforms;
What conversations in global studies of media and communication this book engages with.

About the book

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. You can find more about the book here by the Columbia University Press.

Author: Lin Zhang is an associate professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Host: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with an affiliation at the Center of the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC).

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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Juliet Schor, "After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back" (U California Press, 2021) Jul 17, 2023

When the "sharing economy" launched a decade ago, proponents claimed that it would transform the experience of work--giving earners flexibility, autonomy, and a decent income. It was touted as a cure for social isolation and rampant ecological degradation. But this novel form of work soon sprouted a dark side: exploited Uber drivers, neighborhoods ruined by Airbnb, racial discrimination, and rising carbon emissions. Several of the most prominent platforms are now faced with existential crises as they prioritize growth over fairness and long-term viability.

Nevertheless, the basic model--a peer-to-peer structure augmented by digital tech--holds the potential to meet its original promises. Based on nearly a decade of pioneering research, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back (U California Press, 2021) dives into what went wrong with this contemporary reimagining of labor. The book examines multiple types of data from thirteen cases to identify the unique features and potential of sharing platforms that prior research has failed to pinpoint. Juliet B. Schor presents a compelling argument that we can engineer a reboot: through regulatory reforms and cooperative platforms owned and controlled by users, an equitable and truly shared economy is still possible.

Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. She is a New York Times bestselling author and the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Better Future Project.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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African American Women on the American Railroad: A Conversation with Miriam Thaggert Jul 17, 2023

Miriam Thaggert, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, talks about her book, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (University of Illinois Press, 2022), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Riding Jane Crow features creative uses of a wide variety of sources to reconstruct how African American women interacted with Jim Crow railroads as both riders and workers. Thaggert and Vinsel also discuss what kinds of research were necessary to reconstruct these stories and why so many previous histories of the railroad passed over the lives of black women, even when they were noticing black men.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jul 16, 2023

Victoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan(U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration of the social history of microbial science in modern Japan. Lee shows that Japanese scientists and artisans in food, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries harnessed a combination of premodern and modern understandings of the microbial world to create a productive approach positing microbes “as living workers” in important industries.

With case studies that include sake and soy sauce, antibiotics, and biotechnology, Arts of the Microbial World weaves a historical narrative integrated with both the development of modern Japanese science and industry on the one hand and imperialism, expansion, and defeat and rebuilding on the other. Additionally, Lee couches her analysis of Japan’s microbial industries in the context of our contemporary microbiotic moment of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, green chemistry, and lab-grown foods and pharmaceuticals. In this sense, Arts of the Microbial World will be of interest to scholars and students of Japan, the history of science, food, pharmaceuticals, and industry, but also to readers concerned about the possibilities of mobilizing non-Western technological breakthroughs in the quest for global sustainability.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Jenna Grant, "Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh" (U Washington Press, 2022) Jul 15, 2023

Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author ofFixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh, published by University of Washington Press in 2022.

Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information and better prenatal and general health care. In Fixing the Image Jenna Grant draws on years of ethnographic and archival research to theorize the force and appeal of medical imaging in the urban landscape of Phnom Penh. Set within long genealogies of technology as tool of postcolonial modernity, and vision as central to skilled diagnosis in medicine and Theravada Buddhism, ultrasound offers stabilizing knowledge and elicits desire and pleasure, particularly for pregnant women. Grant offers the concept of "fixing"--which invokes repair, stabilization, and a dose of something to which one is addicted--to illuminate how ultrasound is entangled with practices of care and neglect across different domains. Fixing the Image thus provides a method for studying technological practice in terms of specific materialities and capacities of technologies--in this case, image production and the permeability of the body--illuminating how images are a material form of engagement between patients, between patients and their doctors, and between patients and their bodies.

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Janna Levin, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space" (Princeton UP, 2023) Jul 15, 2023

Is the universe infinite or just really big? With this question, cosmologist Janna Levin announces the central theme of this book, which established her as one of the most direct, unorthodox, and creative voices in contemporary science. As Levin sets out to determine how big "really big" may be, she offers a rare intimate look at the daily life of an innovative physicist, complete with jet lag and the tensions between personal relationships and the extreme demands of scientific exploration. Nimbly explaining geometry, topology, chaos, and string theory, Levin shows how the pattern of hot and cold spots left over from the big bang may one day reveal the size of the cosmos. How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space(Princeton UP, 2023) is a thrilling story of cosmology by one of its leading thinkers.

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Tom Mustill, "How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication" (Grand Central Publishing, 2022) Jul 13, 2023

What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill—the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty‑ton humpback whale breached onto his kayak—asks this question in his thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication.

“When a whale is in the water, it is like an iceberg: you only see a fraction of it and have no conception of its size.”

On September 12, 2015, Tom Mustill was paddling in a two-person kayak with a friend just off the coast of California. It was cold, but idyllic—until a humpback whale breached, landing on top of them, releasing the energy equivalent of forty hand grenades. He was certain he was about to die, but they both survived, miraculously unscathed. In the interviews that followed the incident, Mustill was left with one question: What could this astonishing encounter teach us?

Drawing from his experience as a naturalist and wildlife filmmaker, Mustill started investigating human–whale interactions around the world when he met two tech entrepreneurs who wanted to use artificial intelligence (AI)—originally designed to translate human languages—to discover patterns in the conversations of animals and decode them. As he embarked on a journey into animal eavesdropping technologies, where big data meets big beasts, Mustill discovered that there is a revolution taking place in biology, as the technologies developed to explore our own languages are turned to nature.

From seventeenth-century Dutch inventors, to the whaling industry of the nineteenth century, to the cutting edge of Silicon Valley, How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication (Grand Central Publishing, 2022) examines how scientists and start-ups around the world are decoding animal communications. Whales, with their giant mammalian brains, virtuoso voices, and long, highly social lives, offer one of the most realistic opportunities for this to happen. But what would the consequences of such human animal interaction be?

Here are some recordings of whale songs:

Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

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Randall Patnode, "The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet" (Rutgers UP, 2023) Jul 12, 2023

The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Randall Patnode traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteenth-century industrialists, political thinkers, and social reformers to tame an unruly society by controlling how people used their time.

The idea manifested itself in the form of the broadcast schedule, a managed flow of information and entertainment that required audiences to be in a particular place – usually the home – at a particular time and helped to create “water cooler” moments, as audiences reflected on their shared media texts. Audiences began disconnecting from the broadcast schedule at the end of the twentieth century, but promoters of social media and television services still kept audiences under control, replacing the schedule with surveillance of media use.

Dr. Randall Patnode offers compelling new insights into the intermingled roles of broadcasting and industrial/post-industrial work and how Americans spend their time.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Palo Alto: A Conversation with Malcolm Harris Jul 10, 2023

This is the second Peoples & Things episode featuring a guest host. In this case, it is M. R. “Mols” Sauter, an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Maryland. Sauter and Lee Vinsel interview writer Malcolm Harris about his recent book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Palo Alto (Little, Brown, and Company, 2023) is a BIG history of a single US city, how it developed, and how it fits into larger trend and processes of capitalist production and change. Harris, who grew up in the area, finds Palo Alto to be a place haunted by its many dark legacies, and the book’s conclusion raises large questions about the future of capitalism, justice, and the fate of the planet. This interview was recorded as a live stream as a part of Red May, “a month-long spree of red arts, red theory, and red politics based in Seattle, Washington” that “plots ways forward to a world beyond capitalism.” We are very grateful to all the Red May organizers for asking Peoples & Things to take part in the event and for allowing us to re-publish the recording as this episode.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Quinn Eastman, "The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Sleepiness" (Columbia UP, 2023) Jul 07, 2023

Sleep was taking over Anna's life. Despite multiple alarm clocks and powerful stimulants, the young Atlanta lawyer could sleep for thirty or even fifty hours at a stretch. She stopped working and began losing weight because she couldn't stay awake long enough to eat. Anna's doctors didn't know how to help her until they tried an oddball drug, connected with a hunch that something produced by her body was putting her to sleep.

The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Sleepiness (Columbia UP, 2023) tells Anna's story-and the broader story of her diagnosis, idiopathic hypersomnia (IH), a shadowy sibling of narcolepsy that has emerged as a focus of sleep research and patient advocacy. Quinn Eastman explores the science around sleepiness, recounting how researchers have been searching for more than a century for the substances that tip the brain into slumber. He argues that investigation of IH could unlock new understandings of how sleep is regulated and controlled. Eastman foregrounds the experiences of people with IH, relating how publicity around Anna's successful treatment helped others form a community. He shows how a group of patients who felt neglected or dismissed united to steer research toward their little-known disorder.

Sharing emerging science and powerful stories, this book testifies to the significance of underrecognized diseases and sheds new light on how our brains function, day and night. It is essential reading for anyone interested in sleep and sleep disorders, including those affected by or seeking to treat them.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Simon N. Whitney, "From Oversight to Overkill: Inside the Broken System That Blocks Medical Breakthroughs--And How We Can Fix It" (Rivertowns Books, 2023) Jul 04, 2023

Medical research saves lives-yet all too often, it is thwarted by a review system supposed to safeguard patients that instead creates needless delays and expense. Institutional Review Boards, which exist at every hospital and medical school that conducts medical research, have ended up imposing such complex, draconian conditions that research is frequently damaged, delayed, and distorted. This is why medical miracles like the COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed at warp speed, are far too rare. Instead, medical research in countless areas is kept at a horse-and-buggy pace. The result: unnecessary suffering and avoidable deaths.

From Oversight to Overkill: Inside the Broken System That Blocks Medical Breakthroughs--And How We Can Fix It(Rivertowns Books, 2023) vividly recounts the story behind this crisis, one that remains unknown to the general public. Family physician and ethicist Simon Whitney shows how the IRB system was launched in response to scandals like the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study-and how, in recent decades, this well-intentioned program has become increasingly bureaucratic, convoluted, and stifling.

Readers will learn how vital breakthroughs in treating conditions from kidney stones to heart attacks and premature birth have been delayed by IRB red tape, forcing doctors and patients to settle for less-effective treatments. They'll see how ill-informed demands from Congressional leaders that regulators "get tough" on scientists have caused respected research institutions to be shut down-with no benefit to the public. And they'll learn about a balanced, common-sense approach to reforming the system that can free scientists from pointless wheel-spinning while still protecting the public from the risks of unethical or careless experimentation.

Until now, the debate about the IRB system's failures has been confined to specialty journals in medicine, law, and ethics. From Oversight to Overkill will finally alert citizens about this little-known crisis with America's medical research system-and what can be done about it.

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The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University Jul 01, 2023

Behind the lectern stands the professor, deploying course management systems, online quizzes, wireless clickers, PowerPoint slides, podcasts, and plagiarism-detection software. In the seats are the students, armed with smartphones, laptops, tablets, music players, and social networking. Although these two forces seem poised to do battle with each other, they are really both taking part in a war on learning itself. In The War on Learning, Elizabeth Losh examines current efforts to “reform” higher education by applying technological solutions to problems in teaching and learning. She finds that many of these initiatives fail because they treat education as a product rather than a process. Highly touted schemes—video games for the classroom, for example, or the distribution of iPads—let students down because they promote consumption rather than intellectual development.

Losh analyzes recent trends in postsecondary education and the rhetoric around them, often drawing on first-person accounts. In an effort to identify educational technologies that might actually work, she looks at strategies including MOOCs (massive open online courses), the gamification of subject matter, remix pedagogy, video lectures (from Randy Pausch to “the Baked Professor”), and educational virtual worlds. Finally, Losh outlines six basic principles of digital learning and describes several successful university-based initiatives. Her book will be essential reading for campus decision makers—and for anyone who cares about education and technology.

Elizabeth Losh directs the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press) and the coauthor of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing.

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The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age Jun 30, 2023

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age.

Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures—from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media.

Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated—that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn't signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era's marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere.

James G. Webster is Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University.

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Mary Beltrán, "Latino TV: A History" (NYU Press, 2022) Jun 29, 2023

In this episode, our host Lucila Rozas discusses the book Latino TV: A History (2022) by Mary Beltrán.

You’ll hear about:

A brief trajectory of the book and the conversations on global studies of media and communication with which this book engages;
The concept of cultural citizenship and its relevance to study Latino TV;
How the author puts together the traces of the history of Latino TV, especially in the cases when it was difficult to find information about the series that were not preserved/archived;
What has changed in the 2000s-2010s that led to the inclusion of more Latinx people in TV roles in front and behind the camera;
How the diversification of latinidad identities in the TV shows is related to race, class, and gender through specific characters or forms of storytelling;
The importance of Latino(a)(x) representation in the US TV industry and the potential limits of representation and visibility;
The role of Latinx activism in the 1960s and 70s and the legacy of public television on today’s media landscape;
Some recent developments on Latino TV after the publication of the book, particularly given the ongoing writers’ strike in streaming television.

About the book

The first-ever account of Latino/a participation and representation in US English-language television, Latino TV: A History offers a sweeping study of key moments of Chicano/a and Latino/a representation and authorship since the 1950s. Drawing on archival research, interviews with dozens of media professionals who worked on or performed in these series, textual analysis of episodes and promotional materials, and analysis of news media coverage, Mary Beltrán examines Latina/o representation in everything from children’s television Westerns of the 1950s, Chicana/o and Puerto Rican activist-led public affairs series of the 1970s, and sitcoms that spanned half a century, to Latina and Latino-led series in the 2000s and 2010s on broadcast, cable, and streaming outlets, including George Lopez, Ugly Betty, One Day at a Time, and Vida. You can find more about the book here by NYU Press.

Author: Mary Beltrán is the Associate Director and former Founding Director of the Moody College of Communication’s Latino Media Arts & Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in critical studies-driven scholarship at the intersections of film and television studies, Latina/Latino and critical race studies, and gender studies. Informed by her prior careers as a journalist and social worker, Dr. Beltrán writes and teaches on ethnic diversity and the U.S. media industries, U.S. television and film history, mixed race and media culture, and feminist media studies, with emphasis on U.S. Latina and Latino representation and media production.

Host: Lucila Rozas is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a doctoral fellow at Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. She has developed interdisciplinary research in a wide variety of topics, from the strategies of LGBT+ activists to push for the approval of sexual orientation and gender identity policies to the representations of mental health in Peruvian print media. Her most recent academic work focuses on social media and the role it has in identity construction, discourse, activism, and social change.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

Keywords: Latino TV, Latinx identity, Cultural citizenship, Public Television, TV industry, Activism

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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Helle Porsdam, "Science as a Cultural Human Right" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) Jun 28, 2023

The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone's right to "share in scientific advancement and its benefits" and to "enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field.

The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of "post-truth" societies. "Dual use" and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk.

The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right(U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Nicholas Dagen Bloom, "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Jun 27, 2023

Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (U Chicago Press, 2023), our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way.

Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy--all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today's conversations about public transportation funding.

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Josh Shepperd, "Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting" (U Illinois Press, 2023) Jun 26, 2023

Despite uncertain beginnings, public broadcasting emerged as a noncommercial media industry that transformed American culture. In Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting(U Illinois Press, 2023), Josh Shepperd looks at the people, institutions, and influences behind the media reform movement and clearinghouse the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in the drive to create what became the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio.

Founded in 1934, the NAEB began as a disorganized collection of undersupported university broadcasters. Shepperd traces the setbacks, small victories, and trial-and-error experiments that took place as thousands of advocates built a media coalition premised on the belief that technology could ease social inequality through equal access to education and information. The bottom-up, decentralized network they created implemented a different economy of scale and a vision of a mass media divorced from commercial concerns. At the same time, they transformed advice, criticism, and methods adopted from other sectors into an infrastructure that supported public broadcasting in the 1960s and beyond.

Connor Kenaston is an Assistant Professor of History and Ainsworth Scholar in American Culture at Randolph College.

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The Singer Sewing Machine in Spain and Mexico: Multinational Business, Gender, and Technologies Jun 26, 2023

Historian Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez talks about her book, Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850-1940(Routledge, 2021), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Gendered Capitalism tells the fascinating tale of how the Singer corporation operated in Spain and Mexico. Along the way, Cruz-Fernandez finds that selling sewing machines was not a top-down process by which an American corporation forced its products on unwilling consumers, but a complex development that involved collective entrepreneurship and most importantly the dreams, ideals, and efforts of women who worked with sewing machines in the home. The book raises larger questions about how we think about processes of technology adoption in different cultures and about the relationship between corporations and consumers.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Metadata Jun 25, 2023

When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was "only" collecting metadata about phone calls--information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location--and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In Metadata, Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadata.

In the era of ubiquitous computing, metadata has become infrastructural, like the electrical grid or the highway system. We interact with it or generate it every day. It is not, Pomerantz tell us, just "data about data." It is a means by which the complexity of an object is represented in a simpler form. For example, the title, the author, and the cover art are metadata about a book. When metadata does its job well, it fades into the background; everyone (except perhaps the NSA) takes it for granted.

Pomerantz explains what metadata is, and why it exists. He distinguishes among different types of metadata--descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, and use--and examines different users and uses of each type. He discusses the technologies that make modern metadata possible, and he speculates about metadata's future. By the end of the book, readers will see metadata everywhere. Because, Pomerantz warns us, it's metadata's world, and we are just living in it.

Jeffrey Pomerantz is an information scientist. He was most recently Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he developed and taught the MOOC “Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information,” and a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington.

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Brian Cummings, "Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022) Jun 25, 2023

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back to the origins of writing in ancient Babylon and Egypt, then forwards to the age of Google. It uncovers bibliophobia from the first Chinese emperor to Nazi Germany, alongside parallel stories of bibliomania and bibliolatry in world religions and literatures. Books imply cognitive content embodied in physical form, in which the body cooperates with the brain. At its heart this relationship of body and mind, or letter and spirit, always retains a mystery. Religions are founded on holy books, which are also sites of transgression, so that writing is simultaneously sacred and profane. In secular societies these complex feelings are transferred to concepts of ideology and toleration. In the ambiguous future of the internet, digital immateriality threatens human equilibrium once again.

Bibliophobia is a global history, covering six continents and seven religions, describing written examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different kinds of human script; the development of textual media such as scrolls, codices, printed books, and artificial intelligence; the collection and destruction of libraries; the use of books as holy relics, talismans, or shrines; and the place of literacy in the history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution. It proposes a theory of writing, how it relates to speech, images, and information, or to concepts of mimesis, personhood, and politics. Originating as the Clarendon Lectures in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, the methods of Bibliophobia range across book history; comparative religion; philosophy from Plato to Hegel and Freud; and a range of global literature from ancient to contemporary. Richly illustrated with textual forms, material objects, and art works, its inspiration is the power that books always (and continue to) have in the emotional, spiritual, bodily, and imaginative lives of readers.

Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor at the University of York. Before arriving at York, he was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and then Professor of English at the University of Sussex.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Tom Higham, "The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins" (Yale UP, 2021) Jun 24, 2023

Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was not the only species of humans in the world. There were also Neanderthals in what is now Europe, the Near East, and parts of Eurasia; Hobbits (H. floresiensis) on the island of Flores in Indonesia; Denisovans in Siberia and eastern Eurasia; and H. luzonensis in the Philippines. Tom Higham investigates what we know about these other human species and explores what can be learned from the genetic links between them and us. He also looks at whether H. erectus may have survived into the period when our ancestors first moved into Southeast Asia.

Filled with thrilling tales of recent scientific discoveries, Tom Higham book The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins (Yale UP, 2021) offers an engaging synopsis of our current understanding of human origins and raises new and interesting possibilities--particularly concerning what contact, if any, these other species might have had with us prior to their extinction.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design Jun 24, 2023

California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage.

In Make it New, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies—including IDEO, frog, and Lunar—and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader—including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman—Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation.

Barry M. Katz is Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts, Consulting Professor in the Design Group at Stanford University, and Fellow at IDEO, Inc. He is coauthor of Change by Design, with Tim Brown, and NONOBJECT, with Branko Lukić (MIT Press).

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Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web Jun 23, 2023

Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In Reading the Comments, Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations "on the bottom half of the Internet," he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior.

Reagle visits communities of Amazon reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, freethinkers, and mean kids. He shows how comment can inform us (through reviews), improve us (through feedback), manipulate us (through fakery), alienate us (through hate), shape us (through social comparison), and perplex us. He finds pre-Internet historical antecedents of online comment in Michelin stars, professional criticism, and the wisdom of crowds. He discusses the techniques of online fakery (distinguishing makers, fakers, and takers), describes the emotional work of receiving and giving feedback, and examines the culture of trolls and haters, bullying, and misogyny. He considers the way comment--a nonstop stream of social quantification and ranking--affects our self-esteem and well-being. And he examines how comment is puzzling--short and asynchronous, these messages can be slap-dash, confusing, amusing, revealing, and weird, shedding context in their passage through the Internet, prompting readers to comment in turn, "WTF?!?"

Joseph M. Reagle, Jr. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University and the author of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (MIT Press).

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Andrew Jones, "How Kant Matters for Biology: A Philosophical History" (U Wales Press, 2023) Jun 23, 2023

Kant denied biology the status of a proper science, yet his account of the organism profoundly influenced a range of intellectual disciplines.

Andrew Jones's How Kant Matters for Biology: A Philosophical History (University of Wales Press, 2023) examines Kant’s influence on biology in the British Isles by proposing that his influence owes to misunderstandings of his philosophy. Andrew Jones exposes the incompatibility between transcendental realism and scientific naturalism and charts how Kant, nevertheless, influenced various aspects of the scientific method. With this context in mind, Jones examines the extent to which core concepts in contemporary philosophy—natural law, the unity of science, and our understanding of organisms— are compatible with scientific naturalism and proposes new avenues for developing Kant-inspired approaches within contemporary philosophy of science.

Özlem Yılmaz is a philosopher of science, with a focus on issues related to plant biology.

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Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art Jun 22, 2023

Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event scores and boxes--to name just a few examples. Over the past fifteen years, the synthesis of art and games has clouded for both artists and gamemakers. Contemporary art has drawn on the tool set of videogames, but has not considered them a cultural form with its own conceptual, formal, and experiential affordances. For their part, game developers and players focus on the innate properties of games and the experiences they provide, giving little attention to what it means to create and evaluate fine art. In Works of Game, John Sharp bridges this gap, offering a formal aesthetics of games that encompasses the commonalities and the differences between games and art.

Sharp describes three communities of practice and offers case studies for each. "Game Art," which includes such artists as Julian Oliver, Cory Arcangel, and JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) treats videogames as a form of popular culture from which can be borrowed subject matter, tools, and processes. "Artgames," created by gamemakers including Jason Rohrer, Brenda Romero, and Jonathan Blow, explore territory usually occupied by poetry, painting, literature, or film. Finally, "Artists' Games"--with artists including Blast Theory, Mary Flanagan, and the collaboration of Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman--represents a more synthetic conception of games as an artistic medium. The work of these gamemakers, Sharp suggests, shows that it is possible to create game-based artworks that satisfy the aesthetic and critical values of both the contemporary art and game communities.

John Sharp is Associate Professor of Games and Learning at Parsons the New School for Design and a member of the game design collective Local No. 12.

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Lars de Wildt, "The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion" (Amsterdam UP, 2023) Jun 22, 2023

Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques or temples. Lars de Wildt interviews developers and players of games such as Assassin’s Creed to find out how and why the Pop Theology of Videogames is so appealing to modern audiences.

Based on extensive fieldwork, Lars de Wildt's book The Pop Theology of Videogames: Producing and Playing with Religion(Amsterdam UP, 2023) argues that developers of videogames and their players engage in a ‘Pop Theology’ through which laymen reconsider traditional questions of religion by playing with them. Games allow us to play with religious questions and identities in the same way that children play at being a soldier, or choose to ‘play house.’

This requires a radical rethinking of religious questions as no longer just questions of belief or disbelief; but as truths to be tried on, compared, and discarded at will.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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James Hannam, "The Globe: How the Earth Became Round" (Reaktion Books, 2023) Jun 22, 2023

In The Globe: How the Earth Became Round (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. James Hannam presents a history of how we came to know that the earth is round, rather than flat.

The Globe tells the story of humanity's quest to discover the form of the world. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, and from there it spread to Baghdad and Central Asia. In early medieval Europe, Christians debated the matter but long before the time of Columbus, the Catholic Church had accepted that the Earth is round and not flat. However, it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that Jesuit missionaries finally convinced the Chinese that their traditional square-earth cosmology was mistaken.

An accessible challenge to long-established beliefs about the history of ideas, The Globe shows how the realization that our planet is a sphere deserves to be considered the first great scientific achievement.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Catherine Carstairs, "The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) Jun 22, 2023

As recently as fifty years ago most people expected to lose their teeth as they aged. Few children benefited from braces to straighten their teeth, and cosmetic procedures to change the appearance of smiles were largely unknown. Today, many Canadians enjoy straight, white teeth and far more of them are keeping their teeth for the entirety of their lives. Yet these advances have not reached everyone.

The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) examines the enormous improvements that have taken place over the past century. The use of fluorides, emphasis on toothbrushing, the rise of cosmetic dentistry, and better access to dental care have had a profound effect on the oral health and beauty of Canadians. Yet while the introduction of employer-provided dental insurance in the 1970s has allowed for regular visits to the dentist for many people, a significant number of Canadians still lack access to good oral health care, especially disabled Canadians, those on social assistance, the working poor, the elderly, and new immigrants. At the same time, an attractive smile has become increasingly important in the workplace and in relationships. People with damaged and missing teeth are at a substantial disadvantage, not just because of the pain and suffering caused by poor oral health, but because we live in a society that prizes good teeth and warm smiles.

The first history of oral health in Canada, The Smile Gap reveals that despite the gains made, too many Canadians go without any dental care, with damaging consequences for their oral health, general physical health, and self-image. To complete our health care system, it is time to close the gap.

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John L. Rudolph, "Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should)" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jun 21, 2023

Today I talked to John L. Rudolph about his book Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should) (Oxford UP, 2023).

Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more -- or so we think. But what if all this is simply wrong? What if the benefits we assume science education produces turn out to be an illusion, nothing more than wishful thinking?

John L. Rudolph is Vilas Distinguished Achievement professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has affiliate appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Robert and Jean Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and is the past editor-in-chief of the Wiley & Sons journal Science Education. Prior to his faculty appointment, he taught physics, chemistry, and biology in middle schools and high schools across Wisconsin.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby Jun 20, 2023

By providing capital to back the ideas and efforts of others, venture capitalists can make absurd amounts of money. But there is another way of looking at it – venture capitalists take huge risks and produce great benefits. Many of the companies we rely on today began with a punt by a venture capitalist. Sebastian Mallaby discusses venture capitalists with Owen Bennett Jones. Mallaby is the author of The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (Penguin, 2022) among other books.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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David A. Banks, "The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America" (U California Press, 2023) Jun 19, 2023

The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (U California Press, 2023) is the first book to explore how our cities gentrify by becoming social media influencers—and why it works.

Cities, like the people that live in them, are subject to the attention economy. In The City Authentic, author David A. Banks shows how cities are transforming themselves to appeal to modern desires for authentic urban living through the attention-grabbing tactics of social media influencers and reality-TV stars.

Blending insightful analysis with pop culture, this engaging study of New York State’s Capital Region is an accessible glimpse into the social phenomena that influence contemporary cities. The rising economic fortunes of cities in the Rust Belt, Banks argues, are due in part to the markers of its previous decay—which translate into signs of urban authenticity on the internet. The City Authentic unpacks the odd connection between digital media and derelict buildings, the consequences of how we think about industry and place, and the political processes that have enabled a new paradigm in urban planning. Mixing urban sociology with media and cultural studies, Banks offers a lively account of how urban life and development are changing in the twenty-first century.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place. He is currently conducting research on the branding of cities. I am particularly interested in the similarities and differences in how travel and tourism agencies see a city as compared to how residents and visitors see the same city. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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The History of the American Shopping Mall and Its Cultures Jun 19, 2023

Writer and design critic Alexandra Lange talks about her book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Shopping Mall (Bloombury, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Meet Me by the Fountain is a history of the American shopping mall from its emergence to recent attempts to reinvent and reconceptualize the shells of “dead” shopping centers. Along the way, it details the mall’s many ironies and contradictions and how it became the center and icon of community and culture, especially youth culture, in the late 20th century. Lange and Vinsel also discuss Lange’s larger career and her work as an architecture and design critic.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, "The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life" (U California Press, 2023) Jun 18, 2023

In The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life(U of California Press, 2023), Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist films of animal experiments from the 1930s and 1940s. These laboratory recordings—including Robert Yerkes's work with North American primate colonies, Yale University's rat‑based simulations of human society, and B. F. Skinner's promotions for pigeon‑guided missiles—have long been considered passive records of scientific research. In Schultz‑Figueroa's incisive analysis, however, they are revealed to be rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that played a crucial role in American scientific and cultural history—and remain foundational to contemporary conceptions of species, race, identity, and society.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Dr. Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Seattle University. His research focuses on the history of scientific filmmaking, nontheatrical film, and animal studies. Among other venues, his writing has been published in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, Millennium Film Journal, The Brooklyn Rail and Journal of Environmental Media.

Callie Smith is a poet and museum educator with a PhD in English. She currently lives in Louisiana.

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Chris Manias, "The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development, and Paleontology in the Long Nineteenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) Jun 17, 2023

When people today hear "paleontology," they immediately think of dinosaurs. But for much of the history of the discipline, dramatic demonstrations of the history of life focused on the developmental history of mammals.The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development, and Paleontology in the Long Nineteenth Century(U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) examines how nineteenth-century scholars, writers, artists, and public audiences understood the animals they regarded as being at the summit of life. For them, mammals were crucial for understanding the formation (and possibly the future) of the natural world. Yet, as Chris Manias reveals, this combined with more troubling notions: that seemingly promising creatures had been swept aside in the "struggle for life," or that modern biodiversity was impoverished compared to previous eras. Why some prehistoric creatures, such as the saber-toothed cat and ground sloth, had become extinct, while others seemed to have been the ancestors of familiar animals like elephants and horses, was a question loaded with cultural assumptions, ambiguity, and trepidation. How humans related to deep developmental processes, and whether "the Age of Man" was qualitatively different from the Age of Mammals, led to reflections on humanity's place within the natural world. With this book, Manias considers the cultural resonance of mammal paleontology from an international perspective--how reconstructions of the deep past of fossil mammals across the world conditioned new understandings of nature and the current environment.

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Chris Impey, "Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity" (MIT Press, 2023) Jun 16, 2023

The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home. Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars.

Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity (MIT Press, 2023) is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search for planets with the potential to host life. With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in 1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what’s behind this accelerating progress, what’s next, and what it might mean for humanity’s future. The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the definition of habitability to the changing shape of space exploration—as it expands beyond the interests of government to the pursuits of private industry—Worlds without End shows us the science, on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.

Chris Impey is University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Brett Brehm, "Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature" (Fordham UP, 2023) Jun 16, 2023

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature(Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Dr. Brett Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies.

Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes.

In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today.

Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting is forthcoming in the 2023 special issue, “Podcasting Disruptive Voices,” of CFC Intersections.

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The Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP) Jun 15, 2023

Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created.

Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to get lost in? Would Frankenstein’s monster be more popular as a podcaster than as a YouTuber? (The answer to that one seems most likely to be yes).

The conversation then turns to the difference between artworks that slide in at the ear and those that come in by eye. What kind of world-building is going on on Recall This Book? Which podcasts are like a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and which are more Schubertian, semi-detached and conversational? Then, in Recallable Books, Jared recommends Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Elizabeth recommends the work of Sarah Lewis, and John recommends the Habitat podcast.

Discussed in this episode:

Lapham’s Quarterly
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
“The Photograph,” Umberto Eco
Various audiobooks, John Le Carré
Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, Robert Frost
The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, P.G. Wodehouse
“The Dead,” James Joyce
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes
Aperture 223, “Vision and Justice,” ed. Sarah Lewis
The Habitat

Read the episode here.

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Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Jun 14, 2023

We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we think we know who the villains are: oil companies, consumerism, weak political leaders. But what if the real blocks to progress are the ideas and institutions that are supposed to be helping us?

Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change (Cambridge UP, 2023) is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganise our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe.

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Peter Baldwin, "Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All" (MIT Press, 2023) Jun 14, 2023

A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities. Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance.

In Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All(MIT Press, 2023), Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for “free” knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity’s age-old ambitions. Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world. Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement.

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at UCLA, and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Stephen G. Gross, "Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jun 13, 2023

Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in solar and wind technology. But this pioneering energy transition has been plagued with problems.

In Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change(Oxford UP, 2023), Stephen G. Gross explains the deeper origins of the Energiewende--Germany's transition to green energy--and offers the first comprehensive history of German energy and climate policy from World War II to the present. The book follows the Federal Republic as it passed through five energy transitions from the dramatic shift to oil that nearly wiped out the nation's hard coal sector, to the oil shocks and the rise of the Green movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the co-creation of a natural gas infrastructure with Russia, and the transition to renewable power today. He shows how debates over energy profoundly shaped the course of German history and influenced the landmark developments that define modern Europe. As Gross argues, the intense and early politicization of energy led the Federal Republic to diverge from the United States and rethink its fossil economy well before global warming became a public issue, building a green energy system in the name of many social goals. Yet Germany's experience also illustrates the difficulty, the political battles, and the unintended consequences that surround energy transitions.

By combining economy theory with a study of interest groups, ideas, and political mobilization, Energy and Power offers a novel explanation for why energy transitions happen. Further, it provides a powerful lens to move beyond conventional debates on Germany's East-West divide, or its postwar engagement with the Holocaust, to explore how this nation has shaped the contemporary world in other important ways.

Stephen G. Gross is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center of European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University.

Filippo De Chirico, History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy)

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The Future of Politicized Narratives: A Discussion with Andreas Krieg Jun 13, 2023

The word "narrative" is now so frequently heard that some think it over used. Perhaps its ubiquity results from it being so relevant – what used to be thought of as the mundane area of misinformation has become one of the most powerful elements of political practice. Andreas Krieg discusses the latest trends in the world of story-telling with Owen Bennett-Jones. Krieg is the author of Subversion: The Strategic Weaponization of Narratives (Georgetown UP, 2023).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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J. P. Daughton, "In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism" (Norton, 2021) Jun 13, 2023

J. P. Daughton's In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism(W. W. Norton, 2021) examines the complex and violent French construction of a line of railroad in Equatorial Africa from the coast inland. Begun in 1921, the Congo-Océan took 13 years to complete and resulted in the deaths of between 15,000 and 23,000 African lives. Daughton's book is a careful account of the brutality, harrowing labor conditions, and deprivation of these thousands of Africans whose very bodies were abused and destroyed in this iteration of the "civilizing mission" and "modernity" in empire.

Working through a broad range of archives located in France, Switzerland, the U.S., and the Congo, the book's several chapters outline in visceral detail the individuals and structures involved in making the railroad a reality, from the forced enlistment of African labourers, through the challenges of resistant landscape, the suffering of those physically tasked with its conquest, to the justifying rhetoric of those who championed the project and the denunciations of those who sought to reveal its atrocious human cost.

Key individual architects, company, and government representatives appear throughout these pages along with the powerful forces and voices of the French imperial state. Working with and against the presentation of the project in official documents, Daughton seeks to illuminate the experiences and voices of the African workers who made the railroad a reality. Completed by the 1930s, the Congo-Océan was also a large-scale humanitarian failure. Interested in broader questions of colonial violence and how scholars engage with and respond to that violence, Daughton's narrative and analysis will be accessible to wide range of readers. This, despite the difficult and painful subjects and stories it takes on.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Doctor Ex Machina: AI in Medicine and its Pitfalls Jun 13, 2023

Could an artificial intelligence diagnosis what ails you? Medical futurists offer a techno-utopian vision of perfect personalized risk assessments, diagnoses, and treatment recommendations. Yet, recent stories belie this optimism. Many of these robot doctors are rather stupid, and they seem more interesting in cutting costs than providing care.

Medical AIs are largely unregulated and unverified, and this has made them woefully inadequate and sometimes blatantly racist. Plus, they have been weaponized as tools to deny treatment to the patients who need it. We explore the world of AI in medicine with STAT News investigative reporter Casey Ross, and hematologist and philosopher Ben Chin-Yee.

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Red Team Blues and the Social Dimensions of Technology Jun 12, 2023

This episode is a first for the Peoples & Things podcast: it features a guest host. It is something you will be seeing more of in the future. Guest host Aaron Benanav, assistant professor of sociology at and a senior research associate of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute at Syracuse University, and Lee Vinsel interview writer Cory Doctorow, the author of over 20 books including several best-sellers and multi-award winners and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about his new novel, Red Team Blues(Tor, 2023). Red Team Blues is a taut neo-noir technothriller that examines crypto technologies and the many social and economic inequities of Silicon Valley. The conversation puts Red Team Blues in the larger context of Doctorow’s career and writings.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Payal Arora et al., "Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy" (Amsterdam UP, 2023) Jun 12, 2023

The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride-hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work - what we term “FemWork” - is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities.

Payal Arora, Usha Raman, and René König's book Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy (Amsterdam UP, 2023) offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful.

The book is published open access and can be downloaded from here.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Zhouxiang Lu, "A History of Competitive Gaming" (Routledge, 2022) Jun 12, 2023

Competitive gaming, or esports - referring to competitive tournaments of video games among both casual gamers and professional players - began in the early 1970s with small competitions like the one held at Stanford University in October 1972, where some 20 researchers and students attended. By 2022, the estimated revenue of the global esports industry is in excess of $947 million, with over 200 million viewers worldwide. Regardless of views held about competitive gaming, esports have become a modern economic and cultural phenomenon.

This book studies the full history of competitive gaming from the 1970s to the 2010s against the background of the arrival of the electronic and computer age. It investigates how competitive gaming has grown into a new form of entertainment, a sport-like competition, a lucrative business and a unique cultural sensation. It also explores the role of competitive gaming in the development of the video game industry, making a distinctive contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the history of video games.

Zhouxiang Lu's A History of Competitive Gaming (Routledge, 2022) will appeal to all those interested in the business and culture of gaming, as well as those studying modern technological culture.

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Brendan Keogh, "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production" (MIT Press, 2023) Jun 11, 2023

The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American, European, and East Asian cities. But most videogames today, in fact, are made by small clusters of people working on shoestring budgets, relying on existing, freely available software platforms, and hoping, often in vain, to rise to stardom—in short, people working like artists.

Aiming squarely at this disconnect between perception and reality, Brendan Keogh's book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production (MIT Press, 2023) presents a much more accurate and nuanced picture of how the vast majority of videogame-makers work—a picture that reveals the diverse and precarious communities, identities, and approaches that make videogame production a significant cultural practice.

Drawing on insights provided by over 400 game developers across Australia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Keogh develops a new framework for understanding videogame production as a cultural field in all its complexity. Part-time hobbyists, aspirational students, client-facing contractors, struggling independents, artist collectives, and tightly knit local scenes—all have a place within this model. But proponents of non-commercial game making don't exist in isolation; Keogh shows how they and their commercial counterparts are deeply interconnected and codependent in the field of videogame production.

A cultural intervention, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist challenges core assumptions about videogame production—ideas about creativity, professionalism, labor, diversity, education, globalization, and community. Its in-depth, complex portrayal suggests new ways of seeing, and engaging in, the videogame industry that really does exist.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Drone: Remote Control Warfare Jun 10, 2023

Drone Warfare is the first comprehensive analysis of one of the fastest growing--and most secretive--fronts in global conflict: the rise of robot warfare. In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had a fleet of nearly 7,500, and the US Air Force now trains more drone "pilots" than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Drones are already a $5 billion business in the US alone. The human cost? Drone strikes have killed more than 200 children alone in Pakistan and Yemen.

CODEPINK and Global Exchange cofounder Medea Benjamin provides the first extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who controls these unmanned planes, and what are the legal and moral implications of their use. In vivid, readable style, this book also looks at what activists, lawyers, and scientists across the globe are doing to ground these weapons. Benjamin argues that the assassinations we are carrying out from the air will come back to haunt us when others start doing the same thing--to us.

Hugh Gusterson is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of Nuclear Rites and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex.

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Amanda L. Van Lanen, "The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022) Jun 09, 2023

In the nineteenth century, most American farms had a small orchard or at least a few fruit-bearing trees. People grew their own apple trees or purchased apples grown within a few hundred miles of their homes. Nowadays, in contrast, Americans buy mass-produced fruit in supermarkets, and roughly 70 percent of apples come from Washington State. So how did Washington become the leading producer of America’s most popular fruit? In The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture(The University of Oklahoma Press, 2022), Amanda L. Van Lanen offers a comprehensive response to this question by tracing the origins, evolution, and environmental consequences of the state’s apple industry.

Washington’s success in producing apples was not a happy accident of nature, according to Van Lanen. Apples are not native to Washington, any more than potatoes are to Idaho or peaches to Georgia. In fact, Washington apple farmers were late to the game, lagging their eastern competitors. The author outlines the numerous challenges early Washington entrepreneurs faced in such areas as irrigation, transportation, and labor. Eventually, with crucial help from railroads, Washington farmers transformed themselves into “growers” by embracing new technologies and marketing strategies. By the 1920s, the state’s growers managed not only to innovate the industry but to dominate it.

Industrial agriculture has its fair share of problems involving the environment, consumers, and growers themselves. In the quest to create the perfect apple, early growers did not question the long-term environmental effects of chemical sprays. Since the late twentieth century, consumers have increasingly questioned the environmental safety of industrial apple production. Today, as this book reveals, the apple industry continues to evolve in response to shifting consumer demands and accelerating climate change. Yet, through it all, the Washington apple maintains its iconic status as Washington’s most valuable agricultural crop.

Amanda L. Van Lanen, PhD is a Professor of History at Lewis-Clark State College.

Troy A. Hallsell, PhD is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, Montana. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, the United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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Lawrence Freedman, "Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2022) Jun 08, 2023

Command in war is about forging effective strategies and implementing them, making sure that orders are appropriate, well-communicated, and then obeyed. But it is also an intensely political process. This is largely because how wars are fought depends to a large extent on how their aims are set. It is also because commanders in one realm must possess the ability to work with other command structures, including those of other branches of the armed forces and allies. In Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2022), Lawrence Freedman explores the importance of political as well as operational considerations in command with a series of eleven vivid case studies, all taken from the period after 1945. Over this period, the risks of nuclear escalation led to a shift away from great power confrontations and towards civil wars, and advances in communication technologies made it easier for higher-level commanders to direct their subordinates.

Freedman covers defeats as well as victories. Pakistani generals tried to avoid surrender as they were losing the eastern part of their country to India in 1971. Iraq's Saddam Hussein turned his defeats into triumphant narratives of victory. Osama bin Laden escaped the Americans in Afghanistan in 2001. The UK struggled as a junior partner to the US in Iraq after 2003. We come across insubordinate generals, such as Israel's Arik Sharon, and those in the French army in Algeria, so frustrated with their political leadership that they twice tried to change it. At the other end of the scale, Che Guevara in Congo in 1966 and Igor Girkin in Ukraine in 2014 both tried to spark local wars to suit their grandiose objectives.

Freedman ends the book with a meditation on the future of command in a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on technologies like artificial intelligence. A wide-ranging and insightful history of the changing nature of command in the postwar era, this will stand as a definitive account of a foundational concept in both military affairs and politics.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Athene Donald, "Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jun 07, 2023

Why are girls discouraged from doing science? Why do so many promising women leave science in early and mid-career? Why do women not prosper in the scientific workforce?

Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science (Oxford UP, 2023) looks back at how society has historically excluded women from the scientific sphere and discourse, what progress has been made, and how more is still needed. Athene Donald, herself a distinguished physicist, explores societal expectations during both childhood and working life using evidence of the systemic disadvantages women operate under, from the developing science of how our brains are―and more importantly aren't―gendered, to social science evidence around attitudes towards girls and women doing science.

It also discusses how science is done in practice, in order to dispel common myths: for example, the perception that science is not creative, or that it is carried out by a lone genius in an ivory tower, myths that can be very off-putting to many sections of the population. A better appreciation of the collaborative, creative, and multi-disciplinary nature of science is likely to lead to its appeal to a far wider swathe of people, especially women. This book examines the modern way of working in scientific research, and how gender bias operates in various ways within it, drawing on the voices of leading women in science describing their feelings and experiences. It argues the moral and business case for greater diversity in modern research, the better to improve science and tackle the great challenges we face today.

Athene Donald is Professor Emerita in Experimental Physics and Master of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Other than four years postdoctoral research in the USA, she has spent her career in Cambridge, specializing in soft matter physics and physics at the interface with biology. She was the University of Cambridge's first Gender Equality Champion, and has been involved in numerous initiatives concerning women in science. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and appointed DBE for services to Physics in 2010.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Amy Brady, "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023) Jun 06, 2023

Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses of tea to ward off the heat of a hot summer day. Most refrigerators owned by Americans feature automatic ice machines. Ice on-demand has so revolutionized modern life that it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way—and to overlook what aspects of society might just melt away as the planet warms.

In Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks--a Cool History of a Hot Commodity(G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023), journalist and historian Amy Brady shares the strange and storied two-hundred-year-old history of ice in America: from the introduction of mixed drinks “on the rocks,” to the nation’s first-ever indoor ice rink, to how delicacies like ice creams and iced tea revolutionized our palates, to the ubiquitous ice machine in every motel across the US. But Ice doesn’t end in the past. Brady also explores the surprising present-day uses of ice in sports, medicine, and sustainable energy—including cutting-edge cryotherapy breast-cancer treatments and new refrigerator technologies that may prove to be more energy efficient—underscoring how precious this commodity is, especially in an age of climate change.

Amy Brady is the executive director of Orion magazine, a contributing editor for Scientific American, and coeditor of The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Erik J. Dahl, "The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough" (Georgetown UP, 2023) Jun 06, 2023

Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warning systems were not enough to avert the COVID-19 disaster. In The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough(Georgetown UP, 2023), Erik J. Dahl demonstrates that understanding how intelligence warnings work--and how they fail--shows why the years of predictions were not enough.

In the first in-depth analysis of the topic, Dahl examines the roles that both traditional intelligence services and medical intelligence and surveillance systems play in providing advance warning against public health threats--and how these systems must be improved for the future. For intelligence to effectively mitigate threats, specific, tactical-level warnings must be collected and shared in real time with receptive decision makers who will take appropriate action. Dahl shows how a combination of late and insufficient warnings about COVID-19, the Trump administration's political aversion to scientific advice, and decentralized public health systems all exacerbated the pandemic in the United States. Dahl's analysis draws parallels to other warning failures that preceded major catastrophes from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, placing current events in context.

The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure is a wake-up call for the United States and the international community to improve their national security, medical, and public health intelligence systems and capabilities.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner.

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The History of 19th-Century Quarantine Politics: A Conversation with David S. Barnes Jun 05, 2023

David S. Barnes, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about his book, Lazaretto: How Philadelphia Used an Unpopular Quarantine Based on Disputed Science to Accommodate Immigrants and Prevent Epidemics(Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Barnes and Vinsel discuss how quarantine was always a controversial public health method and yet appears to have been effective in curbing epidemics. They also discuss the role of historians in preserving historical sites, such as the former quarantine site outside Philadelphia that Barnes writes about in the book.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Jen Ross, "Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies" (Routledge, 2022) Jun 04, 2023

What is the future of education? In Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies (Routledge, 2022), Jen Ross, a senior lecturer in digital education at the University of Edinburgh, analyses the way ideas about the future are produced and become accepted in education (and in society). This analysis is the basis for offering radical alternatives. In the educational context, the book reflects on four research projects that demonstrate the power of particular approaches- speculative methods- to engaging with digital pedagogy and research. The book has a rich theoretical engagement with a range of social and educational theory, as well as giving detailed practical guidance for educators. The detailed guidance for researchers and teachers who want to make alternative digital futures make the book essential reading for anyone interested in the future of education.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell, "The Smartness Mandate" (MIT Press, 2023) Jun 04, 2023

Over the last half century, "smartness"—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and the environment. Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart homes. Smart cities. The imperative to make our world ever smarter in the face of increasingly complex challenges raises several questions: What is this "smartness mandate"? How has it emerged, and what does it say about our evolving way of understanding—and managing—reality? How have we come to see the planet and its denizens first and foremost as data-collecting instruments?

In The Smartness Mandate(MIT Press, 2023), Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell radically suggest that "smartness" is not primarily a technology, but rather an epistemology. Through this lens, they offer a critical exploration of the practices, technologies, and subjects that such an understanding relies upon—above all, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Orit Halpern is Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden.

Robert Mitchell is Professor of English at Duke University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Gender and Equality in Art and Exploration Jun 03, 2023

Featured episode from Between Art and Science, a new podcast from Leonardo.

This episode, hosted by Erica Hruby, features a conversation between two authors published in the Leonardo special issue “Cosmos and Chaos:” Bettina Forget and Lindy Elkins-Tanton. Listen as these authors discuss the connection between art and science, the flawed idea of the hero, exploration of both land and space, and the complexities of being a woman in male dominated fields.

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Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023) Jun 02, 2023

The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation?

In ¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground(MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Reddy surveys this innovation to shed light on what it means to imagine a world where sirens could sound out an ¡alerta sísmica! at any moment—and what it would be like to live in such a world.

Proponents of earthquake early warnings have long held that the technology can save lives and limit economic losses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, Reddy conducts a thorough, qualitative analysis of these claims and considers the requirements and uses of the alert system. She embeds her study in a rich narrative of the engineers who designed the system in conjunction with contingent political and environmental conditions. The result demonstrates how addressing earthquake dangers is no small task: it means trying to change relationships between the environment, society, and technology. Doing so, she critiques universalist and techno-centric approaches to hazard risk mitigation and celebrates the potential of contextually appropriate and broadly supported efforts.

¡Alerta! takes readers on a vivid journey into the world of Mexican earthquake risk mitigation, with critical insights for anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars, as well as specialists in the geosciences, engineering, and emergency management.

Mentioned in this episode:

Donna Riley’s interview with Lee Vinsel on the NBN Peoples & Things series.

Elizabeth Reddy is Assistant Professor of Engineering, Design, & Society at the Colorado School of Mines, with a joint appointment in Geophysics.

Liliana Gil is an anthropologist. She is incoming Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at the Ohio State University.

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Amber Knight and Joshua Miller, "Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jun 01, 2023

The routinization of non-invasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) raises urgent questions about disability rights and reproductive justice. Supporters defend NIPT on the grounds that genetic information about the fetus helps would-be parents make better family planning choices. Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice challenges that assessment by exploring how NIPT can actually constrain pregnant women's options. Prospective parents must

balance a complicated array of factors, including the familial, social, and financial support they can reasonably expect to receive if they choose to carry a disabled fetus to term and raise after birth, causing many pregnant women to “choose” termination.

Focusing on the US, the book explores the intent and effects of prenatal screening in connection to women's bodily autonomy and disability rights, addressing themes at the intersection of genetic medicine, policymaking, critical disabilities studies, and political theory. Knight and Miller shift debates about reprogenetics from bioethics to political practice, as well as thoroughly critiquing the neoliberal state and the eugenic technologies that support it. Providing concrete suggestions for reforming medical practice, welfare policy, and cultural norms surrounding disability, this book highlights sites of necessary reform to envision how prospective parents can make truly free choices about prenatal genetic testing and selection abortion.

Amber Knight, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Joshua Miller, Assistant Teaching Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw.

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Orly Lobel, "The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future" (PublicAffairs, 2022) May 31, 2023

The fear of algorithmic decision-making and surveillance capitalism dominate today's tech policy discussions. But instead of simply criticizing big data and automation, we can harness technology to correct discrimination, historical exclusions, and subvert long-standing stereotypes.

Orly Lobel is the author of The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future and Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. Lobel is one of the nation's foremost legal experts on labor and employment law. She is also one of the nation's top-cited young legal scholars.

Orly and Greg discuss how collecting more data and adding more inputs into decision algorithms may be beneficial to expose disparities in current frameworks in the real world, and help us to right past injustices and ongoing inequities.

Gregory LaBlanc is a lifelong educator with degrees in History, PPE, Business, and Law, Greg currently teaches at Berkeley, Stanford, and HEC Paris. He has taught in multiple disciplines, from Engineering to Economics, from Biology to Business, from Psychology to Philosophy. He is the host of the unSILOed podcast. unSILOed is produced by University FM.

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Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, "The 'Third' United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think" (Oxford UP, 2021) May 31, 2023

Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss' book The "Third" United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the Third UN: the ecology of supportive non-state actors—intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media—that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN (member states) and the Second UN (staff members of international secretariats) to formulate and refine ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; many thus help the UN “think.”

Dr. Tatiana Carayannis is director of the Social Science Research Council’s Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF), Understanding Violent Conflict (UVC) program, and China-Africa Knowledge Project.

Prof. Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

Sally Sharif is Simons Foundation Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. She was previously a Political Affairs Analyst at the UN Headquarters. Her most recent co-authored paper is “Proto-insurgencies, State Repression, and Civil War Onset.”

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Jaime Green, "The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Vision of the Cosmos" (Hanover Square Press, 2023) May 29, 2023

In this episode we talk to Jaime Green about her superb cultural and scientific exploration of alien life and the cosmos. It examines how the possibility of life on other planets shapes our understanding of humanity. Fans of Leslie Jamison, Carl Zimmer and Carlo Rovelli will find a lot to think about.

One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? Yet this very question is inevitably reduced to yes or no, to odds and probabilities that posit answers through complex physics. The science is fascinating, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values and aspirations, our fears and anxieties, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope.

In The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Vision of the Cosmos (Hanover Square Press, 2023), acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green, traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus up through to our contemporary quest for exoplanets in the "Goldilocks zone," where life akin to ours on Earth might exist. Along the way, she interweaves insights from a long-standing tradition of science fiction writers who use the power of imagination to extrapolate and construct worlds that in turn inspire scientists. Weaving in expert interviews, cutting-edge astronomy research, philosophical inquiry and pop culture touchstones ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Star Trek to Avatar, The Possibility of Life explores our evolving conception of the cosmos to ask an even deeper question: What does it mean to be human?

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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John D. Aber, "Less Heat, More Light: A Guided Tour of Weather, Climate, and Climate Change" (Yale UP, 2023) May 29, 2023

Climate change is one of the most hotly contested environmental topics of our day. To answer criticisms and synthesize available information, scientists have been driven to devise increasingly complex models of the climate system. John D. Aber's Less Heat, More Light: A Guided Tour of Weather, Climate, and Climate Change (Yale UP, 2023) conveys that the basics of climate and climate change have been known for decades, and that relatively simple descriptions can capture the major features of the climate system and help the general public understand what controls climate and weather, and how both might be changing.

Renowned environmental scientist and educator John D. Aber distills what he has learned from a long fascination with weather and climate, the process of science, and the telling of the story of science. This is not a book about policies and politics. Instead, it explores how weather happens, how it relates to climate, and how science has been used to answer major questions about the Earth as a system and inform policies that have reversed environmental degradation. By providing a guided tour of the science of weather, this thoughtful survey will contribute clarity and rationality to the public understanding of climate change.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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Lawrence H. White, "Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?" (Cambridge UP, 2023) May 28, 2023

The recent rise of dollar, pound, and euro inflation rates has rekindled the debate over potential alternative monies, particularly gold and Bitcoin. Though Bitcoin has been much discussed in recent years, a basic understanding of how it and gold would work as monetary standards is rare. Accessibly written by a pioneering economist, Better Money explains and evaluates gold, fiat, and Bitcoin standards without hype. White uses simple supply-and-demand analysis to explain how these standards work, evaluating their relative merits and explaining their response to shocks, allowing for informed comparisons between them. This book addresses common misunderstandings of the gold standard and Bitcoin, using historical evidence to review the history of money with emphasis on the contest between market and government provision. Known for his work on alternative monetary institutions, White offers a reasoned discussion of which standard is most likely to provide a better money.

In Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?(Cambridge UP, 2023), Lawrence H. White offers a summary of previous work while explaining differences and similarities of the gold standard and how crypto currencies work in an authoritative yet non technical way with a non-specialist audience in mind. His main idea is to explore alternatives to fiat money in a digital world.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo.

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Kenneth Mondschein, "On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) May 26, 2023

Western culture has been obsessed with regulating society by the precise, accurate measurement of time since the Middle Ages. In On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping(Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Ken Mondschein explores the paired development of concepts and technologies of timekeeping with human thought. Without clocks, he argues, the modern world as we know it would not exist. From the astronomical timekeeping of the ancient world to the tower clocks of the Middle Ages to the seagoing chronometer, the quartz watch, and the atomic clock, greater precision and accuracy have had profound effects on human society--which, in turn, has driven the quest for further precision and accuracy. This quest toward automation--which gave rise to the Gregorian calendar, the factory clock, and even the near-disastrous Y2K bug--has led to profound social repercussions and driven the creation of the modern scientific mindset.

Surveying the evolution of the clock from prehistory to the twenty-first century, Mondschein explains how both the technology and the philosophy behind Western timekeeping regimes came to take over the entire world. On Time is a story of thinkers, philosophers, and scientists, and of the thousand decisions that continue to shape our daily lives.

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Amanda Parrish Morgan, "Stroller" (Bloomsbury, 2022) May 24, 2023

Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its association with wealth dates back to the invention of the first pram in the 1700s, in recent decades, four-figure strollers have become not just status symbols but cultural identifiers.

There are sleek jogging strollers for serious athletes, impossibly compact strollers for parents determined to travel internationally with pre-ambulatory children, and those featuring a ride-on kick board or second, less “babyish” seat, designed with older siblings in mind. Despite the many models available, we are all familiar with the image of a harried mother struggling to use a stroller of any kind in a public space that does not accommodate it. There are anti-stroller evangelists, fervently preaching the gospel of baby wearing and attachment parenting. All of these attitudes, seemingly about an object, are also revealing of how we believe parents and children ought to move through the world.

Amanda Parrish Morgan's book Stroller(Bloomsbury, 2022) is part Object Lessons, a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

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Party May 24, 2023

Sheila Liming talks about the party, social gatherings that occasion joy and dread and various emotions in between. The party is both a pause and an acceleration in the life-work continuum, it can deaden political motivation and engender fresh politics. We discuss the horrible parties in The Office and the wonderful parties in Small Axe, among other things.

Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, where she teaches classes in American literature, writing, and media. She is the author, most recently, of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (Melville House, 2023), and also of the books Office (Bloomsbury, 2020) and What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020). Her writing has appeared in publications like the The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Lapham's Quarterly, LitHub, The Globe and Mail, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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After the Pill: A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt May 23, 2023

The pill has rocked our society to its core: but have we fully examined all its repercussions? Influential author and essayist Mary Eberstadt thinks we've only scratched the surface; in her most recent book, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited(Ignatius Press, 2023) she argues that the papal encyclical Humane Vitae predicted our deep loneliness and other modern woes.

Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic information center in Washington, D.C., and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute.

Number of children per family, broken down by religion
Her recent essay, "1968 is So Over"

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

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Natalie Koch, "Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia" (Verso, 2023) May 22, 2023

The iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For example: In 1856, a caravan of thirty-three camels arrived in Indianola, Texas, led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called "Hi Jolly." This "camel corps," the US government hoped, could help the army secure the new southwest swath of the country just wrested from Mexico. Though the dream of the camel corps - and sadly, the camels - died, the idea of drawing on expertise, knowledge, and practices from the desert countries of the Middle East did not.

As Dr. Natalie Koch demonstrates in Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso, 2023), this evocative, narrative history, the exchange of colonial technologies between the Arabian Peninsula and United States over the past two centuries - from date palm farming and desert agriculture to the utopian sci-fi dreams of Biosphere 2 and Frank Herbert's Dune - bound the two regions together, solidifying the colonization of the US West and, eventually, the reach of American power into the Middle East. Koch teaches us to see deserts anew, not as mythic sites of romance or empty wastelands but as an "arid empire," a crucial political space where imperial dreams coalesce.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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James Poskett, "Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science" (Mariner Books, 2022) May 21, 2023

In Horizons: A Global History of Science (Mariner Books, 2022), James Poskett, Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick, begins by asking, “Where did modern science come from?” Arguing against the traditional narrative focusing on “genius” European men, Poskett invites us to reconsider and expand the geography of the history of modern science. Drawing from a wide range of recent scholarship, Poskett successfully tackles the challenge of presenting a “big picture” history of modern science addressing crucial questions of violence, colonization, resistance, and cultural exchange. This tour de force by Poskett shows that, despite legitimate concerns raised against big picture narratives, it is possible to write compelling, informative, and critical histories of modern science intended to both historians and the general public.

What if a history of modern science began with the Aztecs’ incredible botanical gardens in Mexico, rather than with Galileo Galilei pointing his telescope toward the moons of Jupiter? What if a history of modern science spent more time on the implications of Isaac Newton’s investments in the slave trade than on his famous “annus mirabilis”? Deceiving its readers’ expectations, Horizons focuses on modern science as the product of a global history characterized by cultural exchanges and uneven power relations. Inspiring new ways of making accessible the global history of science without compromising on its most problematic facets, Horizons also gives the opportunity to rethink the responsibilities of historians of science in today’s world.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism" (Bristol UP, 2023) May 21, 2023

The concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and has influenced discussions around AI, brain–computer interfaces, genetic technologies and life extension. Despite its enduring influence in the public imagination, a fully developed philosophy of transhumanism has not yet been presented.

In We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism (Bristol UP, 2023), leading philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explores the critical issues that link transhumanism with digitalization, gene technologies and ethics. He examines the history and meaning of transhumanism and asks bold questions about human perfection, cyborgs, genetically enhanced entities, and uploaded minds.

Offering insightful reflections on values, norms and utopia, this will be an important guide for readers interested in contemporary digital culture, gene ethics, and policy making.

Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

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Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, "Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation" (U Chicago Press, 2023) May 20, 2023

In Split & Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, investigates the “underworld” of experimentation and suggests new avenues for telling the history of experimental sciences.

Divided in two parts, respectively titled “Infra-Experimentality” and “Supra-Experimentality,” Split & Splice is an attempt at defining the phenomenological and historical contours of “experimentation as a knowledge-generating procedure.” The first part explores how researchers mix and match a variety of mediums, technological tools, and visualization techniques to produce new opportunities of knowledge-making. From nucleic acid sequence gels to structural models and experiment sheets, the reader is introduced to the contingency of the experimentation process and the series of fragmentation and mediation it requires. It is this realization that motivates the author’s historiographical considerations in the second part of the book. If the experimental process consists in a complex and changing interplay between various mediums, trace-generating techniques, and modes of visualization, then the narratives of the history of experimental sciences ought to be built around more or less extensive ensembles of experimental apparatus, rather than around retrospectively or abstractly-defined “objects” and “fields.”

In this new book, Rheinberger describes and makes visible the different layers and moving parts of the experimentation process in order to provide historians with new threads to follow and new ways of weaving their stories together.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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America & Democracy Ep. 4: George Zarkadakis on Digital Liberalism May 19, 2023

Around the world, liberal democracies are in crisis. Citizens have lost faith in their government; right-wing nationalist movements frame the political debate. At the same time, economic inequality is increasing dramatically; digital technologies have created a new class of super-rich entrepreneurs. Automation threatens to transform the free economy into a zero-sum game in which capital wins and labor loses. But is this digital dystopia inevitable?

In our final discussion before the election, George Zarkadakis, author of Cyber Republic, reflects on the long term technological challenges and opportunities facing democracy.

George Zarkadakis leads Future of Work at Willis Towers Watson in Great Britain, a global risk and human capital consulting firm. The author of In Our Own Image: The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence and other books, he has written extensively on science and technology for publications including Aeon and Wired.

Hosted by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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The Future of the Human Heart: A Discussion with Vincent M. Figueredo May 19, 2023

Long considered the most important of all organs, the human heart has fascinated artists and scientists alike. Listen to cardiologist Vincent Figueredo discuss knowledge of and attitudes towards the heart in societies ancient and modern. Figueredo is the author of The Curious History of the Heart: A Cultural and Scientific Journey (Columbia UP, 2023).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Meredith Broussard, "More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech" (MIT Press, 2023) May 18, 2023

The word "glitch" implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery--what if they're coded into the system itself? In the vein of heavy hitters such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Cathy O'Neil, and Ruha Benjamin, Meredith Broussard demonstrates in More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech(MIT Press, 2023) how neutrality in tech is a myth and why algorithms need to be held accountable.

Broussard, a data scientist and one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, masterfully synthesizes concepts from computer science and sociology. She explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences.

Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as "other" to begin with. With sweeping implications for fields ranging from jurisprudence to medicine, the ground-breaking insights of More Than a Glitch are essential reading for anyone invested in building a more equitable future.

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America & Democracy Ep. 2: Jonathan M. Berman on Anti-Vaxxers May 18, 2023

In this series of interviews from The MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today.

The second episode of this series features a discussion with the author of Anti-vaxxers, Jonathan M. Berman. Vaccines are a documented success story, one of the most successful public health interventions in history. Yet there is a vocal anti-vaccination movement, featuring celebrity activists including actress Jenny McCarthy, talk-show host Bill Maher, and presidential hopeful Kanye West.

How do we address those with views that might be deemed absurd and confusing? How do we ensure that the public sphere is based upon evidenced and good faith arguments? And what might be redeemed from world-views built upon misinformation?

Jonathan M. Berman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Basic Sciences at NYITCOM–Arkansas. An active science communicator, he served as national cochair of the 2017 March for Science.

Hosted by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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Misinformed: The Covid Lab Leak Theory and the Politics of Misinformation May 17, 2023

The COVID-19 lab leak theory went from being dismissed as mere misinformation, to now a credible matter of debate amongst media, scientific, and intelligence organizations. What’s changed, and what does this teach us about science journalism and science communication? Is it time to let go of our obsession over “misinformation”?

First, Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic lays out the political problems with the idea of misinformation. Later, Nicole M. Krause, a PhD candidate focussing on science communication, looks at conceptual problems in the research itself. What’s “True,” and who gets to decide?

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Michelle R. Warren, "Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet" (Stanford UP, 2022) May 16, 2023

Medieval books that survive today have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. In Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet(Stanford UP, 2022), Michelle Warren tells the story of one such manuscript—an Arthurian romance with textual origins in twelfth-century England now diffused across the twenty-first century internet. This trajectory has been propelled by a succession of technologies—from paper manufacture to printing to computers. Together, they have made literary history itself a cultural technology indebted to colonial capitalism.

Bringing to bear media theory, medieval literary studies, and book history, Warren shows how digital infrastructures change texts and books, even very old ones. In the process, she uncovers a practice of "tech medievalism" that weaves through the history of computing since the mid-twentieth century; metaphors indebted to King Arthur and the Holy Grail are integral to some of the technologies that now sustain medieval books on the internet. This infrastructural approach to book history illuminates how the meaning of literature is made by many people besides canonical authors: translators, scribes, patrons, readers, collectors, librarians, cataloguers, editors, photographers, software programmers, and many more. Situated at the intersections of the digital humanities, library sciences, literary history, and book history, Holy Digital Grail offers new ways to conceptualize authorship, canon formation, and the definition of a "book."

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt, "Prison Media: Incarceration and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology" (MIT Press, 2023) May 13, 2023

Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the development of media technologies, how might that change our understanding of both media systems and carceral systems? In Prison Media: Incarceration and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology(MIT Press, 2023), Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt foreground the ways in which the prison is a model space for the control and transmission of information, a place where media is produced, and a medium in its own right.

Examining the relationship between media and prison architecture, as surveillance and communication technologies are literally built into the facilities, this study also considers the ways in which prisoners themselves often do hard labor as media workers—labor that contributes in direct and indirect ways to the latest technologies developed and sold by multinational corporations like Amazon. There is a fine line between ankle monitors and Fitbits, and Prison Media helps us make sense of today's carceral society.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy, "Secret Cinema and the Immersive Experience Industry" (Manchester UP, 2022) May 13, 2023

What is the future of media? In Secret Cinema and the Immersive Experience Industry(Manchester UP, 2022), Sarah Atkinson, a Professor of Screen Media at Kings College London, and Helen W Kennedy, Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries, at the University of Nottingham, explore the rise of immersive experiences using the detailed case study of Secret Cinema. The book offers both a rich and extensive history of Secret Cinema, as well as analysis of the evolution of key trends in media production and consumption more generally. The book covers the key performances, including mainstream hits such as Back To The Future, Casino Royale, and Stranger Things, as well as the companies evolution and smaller projects. As live experiences and media industries evolve in the post-pandemic era, the book will be essential reading across media and cultural studies, as well as across humanities and social sciences, and for anyone interested in the future of media and live performance industries.

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Pharmacological Histories Ep. 1: Nancy D. Campbell on Naloxone May 12, 2023

Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists; Nancy D. Campbell has drawn together a history of a defining tragedy of contemporary life; the overdose. I ask her about the reality of drug overdoses and one of the tools being used by activists to prevent more deaths--Naloxone.

For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys--an ugly death awaiting social deviants--neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD, Nancy Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned--and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and "reversal" after an overdose possible, became a tool for shifting law, policy, clinical medicine, and science toward harm reduction. Liberated from emergency room protocols and distributed in take-home kits to non-medical professionals, it also became a tool of empowerment.

After recounting the prehistory of naloxone--the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of "reanimatology"--Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists--whom she calls the "protagonists" of her story--Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster.

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Mark Carrigan and Lambros Fatsis, "The Public and Their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media" (Bristol UP, 2021) May 12, 2023

As social media is increasingly becoming a standard feature of sociological practice, this timely book The Public and Their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media(Bristol UP, 2021) rethinks the role of these mediums in public sociology and what they can contribute to the discipline in the post-COVID world. It reconsiders the history and current conceptualizations of what sociology is, and analyses what kinds of social life emerge in and through the interactions between ‘intellectuals’, ‘publics’ and ‘platforms’ of communication. Cutting across multiple disciplines, this pioneering work envisions a new kind of public sociology that brings together the digital and the physical to create public spaces where critical scholarship and active civic engagement can meet in a mutually reinforcing way.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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The Politicization of Science: A Conversation with Dorian Abbot, Anna Krylov, David Romps, and Bernhardt Trout May 11, 2023

How are hiring and admissions decisions made in the hard sciences if not by merit? What are the risks of allowing science to be politicized? Professors Dorian Abbot (University of Chicago), Anna Krylov (University of Southern California), David Romps (University of California, Berkeley), and Bernhardt Trout (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), join the show to answer these questions and others.

Resources:

Dorian Abbot "The Views That Made Me Persona Non Grata at MIT"
Yascha Mounk "Why the Latest Campus Cancellation Is Different"
Bret Stephens, "What Does a University Owe Democracy?"

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Karen Schrier, "We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics" (Oxford UP, 2021) May 11, 2023

Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like #PlayApartTogether, games have become increasingly acknowledged as platforms for civic deliberation and value sharing. We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics(Oxford UP, 2021) explores these possibilities by examining how we connect, communicate, analyze, and discover when we play games. Combining research-based perspectives and current examples, this volume shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change.

We the Gamers introduces and explores various educational frameworks through a range of games and interactive experiences including board and card games, online games, virtual reality and augmented reality games, and digital games like Minecraft,Executive Command, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Fortnite, When Rivers Were Trails, Politicraft, Quandary, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The book systematically evaluates the types of skills, concepts, and knowledge needed for civic and ethical engagement, and details how games can foster these skills in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings. We the Gamers also explores the obstacles to learning with games and how to overcome those obstacles by encouraging equity and inclusion, care and compassion, and fairness and justice.

Featuring helpful tips and case studies, We the Gamers shows teachers the strengths and limitations of games in helping students connect with civics and ethics, and imagines how we might repair and remake our world through gaming, together.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Hasok Chang, "Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge UP, 2022) May 10, 2023

For a certain kind of standard realist, science aims at getting the absolute truth about the universe. For Hasok Chang, this view is unrealistic because we have no way of judging whether we are getting at that truth. In his new book, Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science (Cambridge UP, 2022), Chang argues that we should understand scientific inquiry and its epistemic fruits in terms of what we do to acquire, justify, and use scientific knowledge. Drawing on Dewey and other pragmatists, plus a neo-Kantian view of phenomena, Chang – who is Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge – affirms the basic realist commitment to a mind-independent world, though only in the sense that the world is “mind-framed” by our concepts, not “mind-controlled”. The aim of science, however, is operationally coherent active knowledge, not description of some inaccessible reality.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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Michael Brown, "Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912" (Cambridge UP, 2022) May 10, 2023

In this innovative analytical account of the place of emotion and embodiment in nineteenth-century British surgery, Michael Brown examines the changing emotional dynamics of surgical culture for both surgeons and patients from the pre-anaesthetic era through the introduction of anaesthesia and antisepsis techniques. Drawing on diverse archival and published sources, Brown explores how an emotional regime of Romantic sensibility, in which emotions played a central role in the practice and experience of surgery, was superseded by one of scientific modernity, in which the emotions of both patient and practitioner were increasingly marginalised. Demonstrating that the cultures of contemporary surgery and the emotional identities of its practitioners have their origins in the cultural and conceptual upheavals of the later nineteenth century, this book challenges us to question our perception of the pre-anaesthetic period as an era of bloody brutality and casual cruelty. Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912 (Cambridge UP, 2022) is available as open access.

Dr Michael Brown is a lecturer in Modern British History at Lancaster University.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023) May 09, 2023

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed--and in some cases demolished--our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation's most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?

These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin, 2023), Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation's parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems--from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster--ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking's cruel yoke.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and chairs the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy.

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Nina Hall, "Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local" (Oxford UP, 2022) May 08, 2023

Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the role of digital advocacy organizations, a major new addition to the international arena. Organizations such as MoveOn, GetUp, and Campact derive power and influence from their ability to rapidly mobilize members on-line and off-line and are shaping public opinion on many issues including climate change, trade, and refugees. Research in international relations (IR) has highlighted the influence of non-governmental organizations, which wield power through their expertise and long-term, moral commitment to an issue. However, no IR scholars have explored the spread and power of digital advocacy organizations. Nina Hall provides a detailed investigation of how these organizations have harnessed digitally networked power and can quickly respond to the most salient issues of the day, and mobilize large memberships, to put pressure on politicians. She finds that these organizations operate in a globalized world but tackle transnational problems by focusing on national targets. This new generation of activists have formed a strong transnational network, but still see the state as the locus of power.

Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Europe. Her research explores the role of transnational advocacy and international organizations in international relations. Her first book explored how international organizations have adapted to climate change: Displacement, Development and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? (Routledge, 2016). Nina holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a master's degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

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Barbara Penner et al., "Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects" (Reaktion Books, 2021) May 08, 2023

So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (Reaktion Books, 2021) gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more. In eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world. Extinct is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never came to pass. It is also a visual treat, full of interest and delight.

Barbara Penner is professor of architectural humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Adrian Forty is professor emeritus of architectural history at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Jason C. Cash and Craig T. Olsen, "The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays on the Game and Its Legacy" (McFarland, 2023) May 07, 2023

Final Fantasy VII altered the course of video game history when it was released in 1997 on Sony's PlayStation system. It converted the Japanese role-playing game into an international gaming standard with enhanced gameplay, spectacular cutscenes and a vast narrative involving an iconic cast. In the decades after its release, the Final Fantasy VII franchise has grown to encompass a number of video game sequels, prequels, a feature-length film, a novel and a multi-volume remake series.

Jason C. Cash and Craig T. Olsen's The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays on the Game and Its Legacy (McFarland, 2023), the first edited collection of essays devoted only to the world of Final Fantasy VII, blends scholarly rigor with fan passion in order to identify the elements that keep Final Fantasy VII current and exciting for players. Some essays specifically address the game's perennially relevant themes and scenarios, ranging from environmental consciousness to economic inequity and posthumanism. Others examine the mechanisms used to immerse the player or to improve the narrative. Finally, there are several essays devoted specifically to the game's legacy, from its influence on later games to its characters' many crossovers and cameos.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture, editor-in-chief at Suisse cultural journal Nahaufnahmen.ch and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Sarrah Kassem, "Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization" (Bristol UP, 2023) May 06, 2023

How have platforms transforming the world of work? In Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organisation (Bristol UP, 2023), Sarrah Kassem, a Lecturer and Research Associate in the field of Political Economy at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen, uses a case study of Amazon to explore issues of alienation and resistance in contemporary working life. The book adapts and develops key Marxist inspired theories to chart the rise of the platforms, and Amazon’s role within this set of both digital and physical industries. Examining warehouses, MTurk, and the broader gig economy, the book offers strategies for resistance and solidarity as well as detailed analysis. It will be essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in work and labour today.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" (PublicAffairs, 2023) May 05, 2023

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a groundbreaking work by bestselling authors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in which they challenge conventional wisdom about the role of technology in driving prosperity. The authors argue that technology is not a neutral force working in the public interest but is shaped by the interests and beliefs of the powerful. Those who control technology are the ones who benefit from it, leaving the rest of society with the illusion of progress.

The authors provide a historical account of how technological choices have shaped the course of history, from the appropriation of the economic surplus of the Middle Ages by an ecclesiastical elite to the making of vast fortunes from digital technologies today, while millions of people are pushed towards poverty. The authors emphasize that technological progress can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The book presents a manifesto for building a better society by using the tremendous digital advances of the last half century to create useful and empowering tools, rather than marginalizing most people through automated work and political passivity. The authors argue that to achieve the true potential of innovation, we need to ensure that technology is creating new jobs and opportunities for everyone. The book offers a vision to reimagine and reshape the path of technology, ensuring that it leads to true shared prosperity.

Power and Progress offers a fresh perspective on how technology shapes our lives and highlights the need for a more democratic approach to technological progress. The book provides a compelling argument that the path of technology is not predetermined but can be brought under control to ensure that it benefits everyone, not just a few powerful individuals or corporations. The authors provide an insightful analysis of the power dynamics that underlie technological progress, and their manifesto for a better society is a call to action for policymakers, business leaders, and individuals alike.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

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Eva Haifa Giraud, "What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion" (Duke UP, 2019) May 05, 2023

By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes After Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion (Duke UP, 2019), for all their conceptual power in implicating humans in ecologically damaging practices, these theories can undermine scope for political action. Drawing inspiration from activist projects between the 1980s and the present that range from anticapitalist media experiments and vegan food activism to social media campaigns against animal research, Giraud explores possibilities for action while fleshing out the tensions between theory and practice. Rather than an activist ethics based solely on relationality and entanglement, Giraud calls for what she describes as an ethics of exclusion, which would attend to the entities, practices, and ways of being that are foreclosed when other entangled realities are realized. Such an ethics of exclusion emphasizes foreclosures in the context of human entanglement in order to foster the conditions for people to create meaningful political change.

Dr Eva Haifa Giraud (@evahaifa_) is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media & Society in the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield. Her latest book is Veganism: Politics, Practice and Theory(Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter.

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Jack Buffington, "Reinventing the Supply Chain: A 21st-Century Covenant with America" (Georgetown UP, 2023) May 05, 2023

When the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global economic "shutdown" in March 2020, our supply chains began to fail, and out-of-stocks and delivery delays became the new norm. Contrary to public perception, the pandemic strain did not break the current system of supply chains; it merely exposed weaknesses and fault lines that were decades in the making, and which were already acutely felt in deindustrialized cities and depopulated rural towns throughout the United States.

Reinventing the Supply Chain: A 21st-Century Covenant with America(Georgetown UP, 2023) explores the historical role of supply chains in the global economy, outlines where the system went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it, and demonstrates how a retooled supply chain can lead to the revitalization of American communities. Jack Buffington proposes a transformation of the global supply chain system into a community-based value chain, led by the communities themselves and driven by digital platforms for raising capital and blockchain technology.

Buffington proposes new solutions to problems that have been decades in the making. With clear analysis and profound insight, Buffington provides a clear roadmap to a more durable and efficient system.

Jack Buffington is an assistant professor of the practice in supply chain management in the marketing department at the Daniels College of Business.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Spatial Computing May 04, 2023

Shashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold, authors of Spatial Computing, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, discuss the reach, risks and importance of spatial computing in confronting COVID-19.

An accessible guide to the ideas and technologies underlying such applications as GPS, Google Maps, Pokémon Go, ride-sharing, driverless cars, and drone surveillance.

Billions of people around the globe use various applications of spatial computing daily--by using a ride-sharing app, GPS, the e911 system, social media check-ins, even Pokémon Go. Scientists and researchers use spatial computing to track diseases, map the bottom of the oceans, chart the behavior of endangered species, and create election maps in real time. Drones and driverless cars use a variety of spatial computing technologies. Spatial computing works by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places. It has changed our lives and infrastructures profoundly, marking a significant shift in how we make our way in the world. This volume in the MIT Essential Knowledge series explains the technologies and ideas behind spatial computing.

The book offers accessible descriptions of GPS and location-based services, including the use of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and RFID for position determination out of satellite range; remote sensing, which uses satellite and aerial platforms to monitor such varied phenomena as global food production, the effects of climate change, and subsurface natural resources on other planets; geographic information systems (GIS), which store, analyze, and visualize spatial data; spatial databases, which store multiple forms of spatial data; and spatial statistics and spatial data science, used to analyze location-related data.

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Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023) May 04, 2023

The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force behind the development and decline of civilizations across the centuries. The author, Peter Frankopan, takes readers on a journey through history, showcasing how natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and solar flare activity have shaped the course of human events. Frankopan's extensive research, coupled with his accessible writing style, makes for an engaging read that reframes our understanding of the world and our place in it.

One of the strengths of The Earth Transformed is the way in which Frankopan connects seemingly disparate events to highlight the far-reaching impact of climate change. For example, he explains how the Vikings emerged as a result of catastrophic crop failure, and how the collapse of cotton prices due to unusual climate patterns led to regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad. Through such connections, Frankopan demonstrates how past empires that failed to act sustainably were met with catastrophe, providing valuable lessons for our current environmental crisis.

Overall, The Earth Transformed is a timely and important book that sheds light on the enduring relationship between humans and the natural world. It challenges readers to reckon with our species' impact on the environment and to consider how we can act sustainably to prevent further harm. Frankopan's interdisciplinary approach, combining historical research with scientific insights, makes for a compelling and thought-provoking read that will leave readers with a new perspective on the world around us.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

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Jan Recker, "Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide" (Springer, 2021) May 03, 2023

Listen to this interview of Jan Recker, Professor for Information Systems and Digital Innovation at the University of Hamburg, Germany and author of Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide (Springer, 2021). We talk about how your research is what you write.

Jan Recker : "Very few of us scientists are gifted readers, and very few of us are gifted writers, but those who are, I do think that they have an advantage in science. It's not that they're the better scientists, but they just understand the literature better, or they can help a reader understand their own research better. And these are just really key and fundamental techniques of the research."

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Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson, "Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept" (U Missouri Press, 2022) May 03, 2023

Journalists around the world agree that autonomy is central to their work, but what exactly is it journalists should be autonomous from, and for what should they use this autonomy? Henrik Örnebring and Michael Karlsson discuss their book Journalistic Autonomy: The Genealogy of a Concept (University of Missouri Press, 2022), which traces the genealogy of the idea of journalistic autonomy from the press freedom debates of the 17th century up to the digital, networked world of the 21st century.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, the authors talk about what is ‘autonomy’ and what it means in the context of journalism, and the journey of exploring the concept, using a theoretical framework that draws upon Friedrich Nietzsche, feminist philosophy, theoretical biology, and other disciplines. They reflect on whether the concept could be applied not only in liberal democracies but also in totalitarian regimes, and also discuss their ideals of journalism as an institution and what conditions are needed to facilitate that.

Henrik Örnebring is Professor of Media and Communication in the Department of Geography, Media, and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden. Dr. Örnebring has published widely on journalism, media history, and new media in anthologies and scholarly journals and his most recent book is Newsworkers: Comparing Journalists in Six European Countries. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies.

Michael Karlsson is Professor of Media and Communication in the Department of Geography, Media and Communication at Karlstad University, Sweden. He has primarily published on issues pertaining to the digitalization of journalism. He is also the author of Transparency and Journalism: A Critical Appraisal of a Disruptive Norm. His is co-editor of Rethinking Research Methods in an Age of Digital Journalism. He is a Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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Felix Flicker, "The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life" (Simon and Schuster, 2023) May 02, 2023

If you were to present the feats of modern science to someone from the past, those feats would surely be considered magic. In The Magick of Physics: Uncovering the Fantastical Phenomena in Everyday Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023) theoretical physicist Dr. Felix Flicker proves that they are indeed magic—just familiar magic. The name for this magic is “condensed matter physics.” Most people haven’t heard of the field, yet more than a third of physicists identify as condensed matter researchers, making it the most active area in the subject—with good reason. Condensed matter is the solids, liquids, and gasses that surround us—and the more exotic matters—which dictate every aspect of our present existence, and hold the keys to a brighter future, from quantum computing to real-life invisibility cloaks.

Dr. Flicker teases out the magical threads that run through our daily lives. Condensed matter physics allows you to create anything abiding by the laws of reality—and often, we find that those laws can be bent. Dr. Flicker explains how to create new particles which never existed before, how to make crystals shoot out such intense light they can cut through metal, how to separate the poles of a magnet. And more.

The book’s endearing conceit is that you, the reader, are an aspiring wizard whose ability to cast spells (i.e. to do science) is dependent on your grasp of the fundamentals of our universe. This book contains no equations or charts—instead, it’s full of owls and mountains and infinite libraries, and staffs and wands, and martial arts and mythical islands ruled by sage knot-makers. Part of the book’s magic is that, for all these fanciful trappings, it still feels practical and applicable. The Magick of Physics will open your eyes to the miracles that surround us.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Michael W. Hankins, "Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia" (Cornell UP, 2021) May 02, 2023

Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia (Cornell UP, 2021) brings us back to the post-Vietnam era, when the US Air Force launched two new, state-of-the art fighter aircraft: the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon. It was an era when debates about aircraft superiority went public--and these were not uncontested discussions. Michael W. Hankins delves deep into the fighter pilot culture that gave rise to both designs, showing how a small but vocal group of pilots, engineers, and analysts in the Department of Defense weaponized their own culture to affect technological development and larger political change.

The design and advancement of the F-15 and F-16 reflected this group's nostalgic desire to recapture the best of World War I air combat. Known as the "Fighter Mafia," and later growing into the media savvy political powerhouse "Reform Movement," it believed that American weapons systems were too complicated and expensive, and thus vulnerable. The group's leader was Colonel John Boyd, a contentious former fighter pilot heralded as a messianic figure by many in its ranks. He and his group advocated for a shift in focus from the multi-role interceptors the Air Force had designed in the early Cold War towards specialized air-to-air combat dogfighters. Their influence stretched beyond design and into larger politicized debates about US national security, debates that still resonate today.

A biography of fighter pilot culture and the nostalgia that drove decision-making, Flying Camelot deftly engages both popular culture and archives to animate the movement that shook the foundations of the Pentagon and Congress.

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Extraterrestrials May 02, 2023

An interview with Wade Roush, author of Extraterrestrials, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. Are we alone in the universe? If not, where is everybody? And which might be more meaningful?

Soundtrack produced by artist and author of High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press, December 2018) Kristen Gallerneaux.

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 evidence of extraterrestrial activity--but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?

This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays out the problem in its historical and modern-day context and summarizes the latest thinking among astronomers and astrobiologists. He describes the long history of speculation about aliens (we've been debating the idea for thousands of years); the emergence of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) as a scientific discipline in the 1960s, and scientists' use of radio and optical techniques to scan for signals; and developments in astrobiology (the study of how life might arise in non-Earth like environments) and exoplanet research (the discovery of planets outside our solar system). Finally, he discusses possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox and suggests way to refocus SETI work that might increase the chances of resolving the paradox--and finding extraterrestrials.

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Collaborative Society May 01, 2023

An interview with Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska about Collaborative Society (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) and how networked technology enables the emergence of a new collaborative society.

Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of communication act as a super-amplifier of our natural collaborative mindset. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the emergence of a new kind of social collaboration enabled by networked technologies. This new collaborative society might be characterized as a series of services and startups that enable peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions though technology. Some believe that the economic aspects of the new collaboration have the potential to make society more equitable; others see collaborative communities based on sharing as a cover for social injustice and user exploitation.

The book covers the "sharing economy," and the hijacking of the term by corporations; different models of peer production, and motivations to participate; collaborative media production and consumption, the definitions of "amateur" and "professional," and the power of memes; hactivism and social movements, including Anonymous and anti-ACTA protest; collaborative knowledge creation, including citizen science; collaborative self-tracking; and internet-mediated social relations, as seen in the use of Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder. Finally, the book considers the future of these collaborative tendencies and the disruptions caused by fake news, bots, and other challenges.

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The History of Contraception May 01, 2023

An interview with Donna J. Drucker, author of Contraception, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. We discuss reproductive justice, the history of contraceptive technology and how the future of contraception can offer more choice and more freedom for every kind of person.

The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, viewed from the perspective of reproductive justice.

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily.

Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access worldwide.

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Ian Hembrow, "Ralph Edwards: Rare Events--The Inside Story of a Worldwide Quest for Safer Medicines" (Springer, 2023) Apr 30, 2023

Medical treatments designed to help people can also be harmful or fatal. Around 2.5 million people die this way each year. So if any kind of medicine makes someone unwell, they or their doctor should report it. Those reports, from nearly every country in the world, go to the Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) in Sweden. As the Centre’s first director, Professor Ivor Ralph Edwards transformed it from a tiny operation with limited horizons into an internationally acclaimed scientific organization at the heart of the World Health Organization’s Programme for International Drug Monitoring. He was then succeeded by his wife, Dr Marie Lindquist.

Ian Hembrow's Ralph Edwards: Rare Events--The Inside Story of a Worldwide Quest for Safer Medicines (Springer, 2023) is the story of how a new science developed and a passionate and dedicated pursuit of worldwide medicines safety, with an unerring focus on the welfare of patients. The pioneering work of Ralph, Marie and their collaborators on every continent protected the lives of millions of people. It may yet improve the lives of billions more.

Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History.

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Technologies of the Human Corpse Apr 29, 2023

In this episode we hear from John Troyer, author of Technologies of the Human Corpse and the Director of The Center for Death and Society at The University of Bath. We discuss the way technology is blurring the distinctions between life and death, the emergence of death studies from the 70s social and political milieu and how his own experiences of bereavement inform his research.

The relationship of the dead body with technology through history, from nineteenth-century embalming machines to the death-prevention technologies of today.

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 is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways.

Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

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Wendy Lynne Lee, "This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022) Apr 28, 2023

Wendy Lynne Lee's This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction (John Wiley & Sons, 2022) provides students and scholars with a comprehensive introduction to the growing field of environmental philosophy and ethics.

Mitigating the effects of climate change will require global cooperation and lasting commitment. Of the many disciplines addressing the ecological crisis, philosophy is perhaps best suited to develop the conceptual foundations of a viable and sustainable environmental ethic. This is Environmental Ethics provides an expansive overview of the key theories underpinning contemporary discussions of our moral responsibilities to non-human nature and living creatures.

Adopting a critical approach, author Wendy Lynne Lee closely examines major moral theories to discern which ethic provides the compass needed to navigate the social, political, and economic challenges of potentially catastrophic environmental transformation, not only, but especially the climate crisis. Lee argues that the ethic ultimately adopted must make the welfare of non-human animals and plant life a priority in our moral decision-making, recognizing that ecological conditions form the existential conditions of all life on the planet. Throughout the text, detailed yet accessible chapters demonstrate why philosophy is relevant and useful in the face of an uncertain environmental future.

This is Environmental Ethics is essential reading for undergraduate students in courses on philosophy, geography, environmental studies, feminist theory, ecology, human and animal rights, and social justice, as well as an excellent graduate-level introduction to the key theories and thinkers of environmental philosophy.

Wendy Lynne Lee is a professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University. Lee has published about 45 scholarly essays in her areas of expertise—philosophy of language (particularly later Wittgenstein), philosophy of mind/brain, feminist theory, theory of sexual identity, post-Marxian theory, nonhuman animal welfare, ecological aesthetics, aesthetic phenomenology, and philosophy of ecology. Her previous work includes the book Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse (Lexington 2017).

Özlem Yılmaz is a philosopher of science, with a focus on issues related to plant biology.

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Jonathan E. Abel, "The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023) Apr 28, 2023

Jonathan Abel’s The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji (U of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a history of our relationships to new media. The book centers on different modalities of mimesis and mediation and more as it explores the important transformation of “new media” into “the new real.” Abel describes this “new real” as the phase when the newer, better, faster, more realistic media of marketing hype becomes absorbed into the fabric of society and daily life. The New Real uses diverse case studies from over a century of modern Japanese history―including stereoscopic photographs, the phonograph, the television, video games, and even emoji―to explore the social effects of the new real.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Elaine H. Ecklund and David R. Johnson, "Varieties of Atheism in Science" (Oxford UP, 2021) Apr 27, 2023

Not all atheists are New Atheists, but thanks in large part to the prominence and influence of New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, New Atheism has claimed the pulpit of secularity in Western society. New Atheists have given voice to marginalized nonreligious individuals and underscored the importance of science in society. They have also advanced a derisive view of religion and forcefully argued that science and religion are intrinsically in conflict. Many in the public think that all scientists are atheists and all atheist scientists are New Atheists, militantly against religion and religious people. But what do everyday atheist scientists actually think about religion?

Drawing on a survey of 1,293 atheist scientists in the U.S. and U.K., and 81 follow-up in-depth interviews, Varieties of Atheism in Science (Oxford Academic Press, 2021) by Professors Elaine Howard Ecklund and David R. Johnson, explains the pathways that led to atheism among scientists, the diverse views of religion they hold, their perspectives on the limits of what science can explain, and their views of meaning and morality. The findings reveal a vast gulf between the rhetoric of New Atheism in the public sphere and the reality of atheism in science. The story of the varieties of atheism in science is consequential for scientific and religious communities and points to tools for dialogue between these seemingly disparate groups.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Boniuk Institute at Rice University, Houston TX. Her research examines social and institutional change, especially when individuals leverage aspects of their religious, racial, and gender identities to change institutions. Elaine is the author of seven books, over 100 research articles, and numerous op-eds. She has received grants and awards from multiple organizations.

David R. Johnson is an associate professor of higher education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. His research agenda examines how universities are shaped by changes in their institutional environments, especially as it relates to capitalism, religion, and politics. He has previously published in numerous academic journals, a book with Johns Hopkins University Press, A Fractured Profession: Commercialism and Conflict in Academic Science (2017), and co-authored another book with Elaine Ecklund, Secularity and Science: What Scientists around the World Actually Think, from Oxford University Press (2019). In fact, they joined Carrie Lynn on New Books in Secularism in September 2019 to discuss that book; listen here.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland

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Computer Graphics Apr 27, 2023

In this episode of High Theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan talks with us about computer graphics. Emerging from tools for sailing and warmaking, like sea charts and radar, modern computer graphics are technologies of mapping and managing risk. They seem intent on absorbing the human sensorium into the machine.

In the episode Bernard refers to computer graphics as “techniques of addressing,” a term he attributes to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal. He also uses the term “operational images” which comes from the work of Harun Farocki, and talks about SAGE, the US Government’s Cold War era Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense System. Bernard references Paul Edward’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2013). He also mentions the German scholar Christoph Borbach who has written on auditory computer interfaces, and American disability studies scholar Mara Mills, who has written on the Deaf history of computing. He was kind enough to give us an extensive bibliography on this topic, which is posted below.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London. He has a brand new book out on the cybernetic history of French theory, called Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023). Kim met him when he came to give a talk at the Stanford Humanities Center in January 2023. He wore denim and had a slightly manic affect. People came all the way from Berkeley to hear what he had to say, which is quite impressive in the Bay Area.

This week’s image is a radar loop of the December 16 2007 Eastern North America winter storm, found on Wikimedia Commons. The loop runs from Saturday Morning at 7 AM (Dec 15) to Sunday Night at 7 PM (Dec 16). The image is in the public domain because it was made by someone who works for the National Weather Service.

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Alan Lightman, "The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science" (Pantheon, 2023) Apr 26, 2023

Are science and spirituality incompatible? From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to that question...

Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?

According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems?

In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (Pantheon, 2023), Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”—the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution.

What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Paul A. Lombardo, "Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) Apr 25, 2023

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough” were the infamous words U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in 1927. In Buck v. Bell, an almost unanimous Court upheld a Virginia law allowing the sterilization of people the state found to be “socially inadequate” and “feebleminded.” This landmark decision allowed the eugenics movement to take full effect, with multiple states passing similar laws.

In Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell(Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Dr. Paul Lombardo unpacks the case of an individual – Carrie Buck – to argue that the case not only represents the collective power of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century but an individual miscarriage of justice. Using extensive archival sources, Dr. Lombardo demonstrates that Carrie Buck was neither a “moral degenerate” or “feeble-minded.” She was a rape victim of sound mind. Her sterilization was based on fraudulent evidence. The powerful eugenics lobby manufactured a case – and a sympathetic court gave them a precedent that justified Carrie Buck’s sterilization – and over 60,000 sterilizations in the following decades.

Three Generations, No Imbeciles frames the history of sterilization as essential to understanding contemporary legal fights over birth control and abortion. Does the constitution’s promise of “liberty” include the right to become pregnant or end a pregnancy? Dr. Lombardo’s epilogue and afterward outlines the connections between Buck and modern cases involving abortion, disability rights, and reparations for those sterilized. Originally published in 2008, the book has been updated in 2022 with a terrific epilogue and afterward with an eye towards contemporary events in reproductive politics.

Dr. Paul A. Lombardo is Regents’ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University. He has published extensively on topics in health law, medico-legal history, and bioethics and is best known for his work on the legal history of the American eugenics movement. His website houses the images and all documents discussed in the podcast including the petition for rehearing created by the National Council of Catholic Men.

Daniela Campos served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Rachel Robison-Greene, "Edibility and in Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations" (Lexington Books, 2022) Apr 24, 2023

Consumers and policy makers have unprecedented choices to make in the years to come about how and what we eat. If we continue down our current path of food production, we risk ever-increasing levels of animal exploitation, environmental destruction, biodiversity loss, and challenges to human health. In vitro meat production, or the process of growing meat in a lab, has the potential to reduce the severity of these problems. This proposal would change our food systems dramatically. Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations (Lexington Books, 2022) explores the ethical questions that it’s important to ask every stage of this process. Rachel Robison-Greene considers arguments for and against the production of in vitro meat, as well as challenges for implementation. She argues that in vitro meat should be implemented and that we should re-think how we use the term “edible.”

Rachel Robison-Greene is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University. Her research interests are largely in meta-ethics, epistemology, and applied ethics, especially as it pertains to animals, the environment, and technology. Rachel serves as the Secretary of the Public Philosophy Network, the Secretary of the Culture and Animals Foundation, and is the Chair Elect of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl.

Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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Quantitative Science Studies: A Discussion with Editor-in-Chief Ludo Waltman Apr 23, 2023

Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) is a newly launched open access journal that was born out of a collaboration between the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) and the MIT Press. In this episode, Editor-in-Chief Ludo Waltman discusses the origins of QSS, its growing inaugural issue, and its future as a publishing outlet run for and by the scientometric community.

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John Lisle, "The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare" (St. Martin's Press, 2023) Apr 22, 2023

In the summer of 1942, Stanley Lovell, a renowned industrial chemist, received a mysterious order to report to an unfamiliar building in Washington, D.C. When he arrived, he was led to a barren room where he waited to meet the man who had summoned him. After a disconcerting amount of time, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS, walked in the door. “You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course,” Donovan said as an introduction. “Professor Moriarty is the man I want for my staff…I think you’re it.”

Following this life-changing encounter, Lovell became the head of a secret group of scientists who developed dirty tricks for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Their inventions included bat bombs, suicide pills, fighting knives, silent pistols, and camouflaged explosives. Moreover, they forged documents for undercover agents, plotted the assassination of foreign leaders, and performed truth drug experiments on unsuspecting subjects.

Based on extensive archival research and personal interviews, The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare(St. Martin's Press, 2023) tells the story of these scheming scientists, explores the moral dilemmas that they faced, and reveals their dark legacy of directly inspiring the most infamous program in CIA history: MKULTRA.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin, "Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures: New Approaches for Historicising, Politicising and Imagining the Digital" (Emerald, 2023) Apr 21, 2023

What is digital politics? What new creative and experimental tools can we use to study digital politics historically and analyse and create future imaginaries of digital politics? Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin about their co-edited book Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures: New Approaches for Historicising, Politicising and Imagining the Digital (2023, Emerald Publishing Limited).

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin speak about how they managed to bring together contributions from junior and experienced scholars in a book that examines digital politics theoretically, methodologically, and ethically, offering interdisciplinary perspectives and innovative pedagogies.

The first part of the book presents research chapters that look at misinformation and reactionary online activism, digital imperialism and capitalism, future internet governance, digital memory, digital waste, and environmental imagination. The second part showcases several creative and experimental tools for studying digital politics historically, and for analysing and creating future imaginaries of digital politics.

Adi Kuntsman is Reader in Digital Politics at the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Adi’s work lies at the intersection of cybercultures/digital and social media; anti-colonial and feminist scholarship; queer theory; and social research on war, nationalism and colonialism. Read more on the Digital Politics blog.

Liu Xin is a senior lecturer at the Center for Gender Studies, Karlstad University, Sweden. Her recent research projects are located at the intersection of feminist theory, environmental humanities, critical race studies, science and technology studies, social theory and digital media research. Find her on Twitter @LiuxinYB.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020) Apr 21, 2023

Arleen Marcia Tuchman’s book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale UP, 2020), tells the American history of a disease that continues to defy categorizations. Researchers for more than a century have worked to create distinctions between “types” of diabetes to parse people who all share the trait of high levels of sugar in their blood. Tuchman shows how efforts to divide diabetes into types tracked efforts to divide people into different types—specifically by race. For Tuchman, this move reflects an American obsession with race that too often overlooks racism as a fundamental cause of disease.

The book won the 2022 Rosen Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine and will be of immediate interest to readers interested in Science & Technology Studies, American History, and social justice.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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How Attention Works: Finding Your Way in a World Full of Distraction Apr 19, 2023

Stefan Van der Stigchel discusses how we filter out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we need to know.

We are surrounded by a world rich with visual information, but we pay attention to very little of it, filtering out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we think we need to know. Advertisers, web designers, and other "attention architects" try hard to get our attention, promoting products with videos on huge outdoor screens, adding flashing banners to websites, and developing computer programs with blinking icons that tempt us to click. Often they succeed in distracting us from what we are supposed to be doing. In How Attention Works, Stefan Van der Stigchel explains the process of attention and what the implications are for our everyday lives.

The visual attention system is efficient, Van der Stigchel writes, because it doesn't waste energy processing every scrap of visual data it receives; it gathers only relevant information. We focus on one snippet of information and assume that everything else is stable and consistent with past experience; that's why most people miss even the most glaring continuity errors in films. If an object doesn't meet our expectations, chances are we won't see it. Van der Stigchel makes his case with examples from real life, explaining, among other things, the limitations of color perception (and why fire trucks shouldn't be red); the importance of location (security guards and radiologists, for example, have to know where to look); the attention-getting properties of faces and spiders; what we can learn from someone else's eye movements; why we see what we expect to see (magicians take advantage of this); and visual neglect and unattended information.

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The Making of "Ways of Hearing" Apr 18, 2023

Bonus to the Ways of Hearing podcast and book

A behind-the-scenes conversation with the creators of Ways of Hearing, the podcast and book. Hosted by author Damon Krukowski, with Radiotopia and Showcase executive producer Julie Shapiro, sound designer Ian Coss, MIT Press editor Matthew Browne, and graphic designer James Goggin. Recorded live before a studio audience at the PRX Podcast Garage, April 9, 2019. Mixed by Ian Coss.

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Cristina Mejia Visperas, "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" (NYU, 2022) Apr 14, 2023

An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientists’ experiments on captive men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison are well known, thanks to the brave and important testimony of former captive-subjects in books like Allen Hornblum’s Acres of Skin. Building on this documentary work, Visperas turns attention to the prison experiments’ “optical rationality,” the way of seeing images that came out of a space that was simultaneously prison and laboratory. For Visperas, skin is a scientific apparatus and a metaphor for what science makes visible—and what it leaves as a void, namely, the endurance of anti-Black racism in the US, from slavery to mass incarceration. At its core, the book asks “What is the relationship between science and the project of freedom?”—and it hopes towards a reparative bioethics that dismantles scientific racism and the prison nation that it upholds.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Critical Bioethics.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom.

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Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023) Apr 11, 2023

"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK (Bloomsbury, 2023), by Dr. Michelle McSweeney and published by Bloomsbury in 2023, explores this story

OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for “all correct” when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Rajesh Veeraraghavan, "Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Reform in India" (Oxford UP, 2022) Apr 11, 2023

Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford University Press, 2022) offers the first ethnographically grounded perspective on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005), which was promulgated as a welfare oriented ‘right to work’ scheme by the Indian Parliament at the recommendation of civil society organizations and development economists like Jean Dréze.

The book presents a granular case study of the implementation of the scheme in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, and more specifically, the process of “auditing” that addresses many of the information and technological asymmetries that exist on-the-ground. Veeraraghavan also takes us to Araria, Bihar and his initial research forays in the field (where I first met him as one of the volunteer facilitators of a social audit myself) to show the tensions in the production of these audits, and the difficulty in having marginalized citizens’ voices heard in the face of local elite pressure. Given the complexities that animate the delivery of a scheme from abstract law to tangible results like finished roads and money received by those who performed the labor to finish those roads, success itself is never a guarantee.

In order mitigate these kinds of uncertainties, he argues that these landscapes are navigated by bureaucrats to produce a socio-technical, infrastructural system reliant on the mechanism of ‘patching,’—instantly familiar to anyone who has done any work in software development. Patching, here, implies an iterative and evolving practice of measuring and responding to outcomes. In the process, Veeraraghavan powerfully and persuasively makes the case for playing closer attention to how information technology and politics mix, in rural India—unsettling the narrative of urban spaces as the primary bearers of and responders to technology, and urging a thorough reexamination of development studies and science and technology studies paradigms.

Archit Guha is a PhD researcher in the Duke University History Department.

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The Cooperative Extension System Apr 10, 2023

In this episode of High Theory, Karl Dudman tells us about the Cooperative Extension System.

Formed in 1914 as an extension of the Land Grant University system in the United States, the Cooperative Extension System is an extraordinarily public model of scientific communication. There is an extension officer in every county of the US. The original goal was to transmit academic scientific knowledge on agriculture to America’s farmers, but the program’s remit has expanded over the past hundred years. And it varies widely from place to place. You might go to an extension office to test the soil of your rose bed, to find a food pantry, or attend a kids exercise class. You might also have a conversation about climate change.

In the full version of our conversation, Karl discussed the National Extension Climate Initiative which aims to unite climate change education and research across the cooperative extension system and Christopher Henke’s book, Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (MIT Press, 2008).

Karl Dudman is doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science Technology and Society. He does qualitative research on climate science in the US. His ongoing fieldwork, hosted by the North Carolina State Climate Office, examines how actors within climate science, coastal management and local politics navigate accelerating sea level rise in the context of widespread ambivalence towards the mainstream climate change narrative. Karl is also a photographer, and through his work explores the politics of competing cultural relationships with landscapes, and their subsequent representation.

This week’s image is a photograph of two men in a field of tall grass taken November 11, 2008 by Dennis Pennington, Bioenergy Educator, Michigan State University Extension.

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Tiger C. Roholt, "Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones" (Bloomsbury, 2022) Apr 10, 2023

Social scientists have long studied the ways in which smartphone use can distract us from the proper performance of means-ends tasks, such as driving or medical procedures. In Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones(Bloomsbury, 2022), Tiger Roholt discusses a distinct type of distraction: when smartphone use interferes with our active engagement with meaningful experiences, such as dinner with friends or a musical performance or gardening. In these cases, Roholt argues, we risk stunting the experiences that would otherwise give meaning to our lives, or even missing out on discovering new types of meaningful experiences.

Roholt, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Montclair State University, draws on writings from John Dewey, Susan Wolf, Albert Borgmann and others in this engagingly written meditation on how ubiquitous uses of smartphones and wearable technologies affects our lives in ways that other types of interruptions do not.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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Tiago Forte, "Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential" (Atria Books, 2022) Apr 09, 2023

Today I talked to Tiago Forte about his new book Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential (Atria Books, 2022).

For the first time in history, we have instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge. There has never been a better time to learn, to contribute, and to improve ourselves. Yet, rather than feeling empowered, we are often left feeling overwhelmed by this constant influx of information. The very knowledge that was supposed to set us free has instead led to the paralyzing stress of believing we’ll never know or remember enough.

Now, this eye-opening and accessible guide shows how you can easily create your own personal system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain. As a trusted and organized digital repository of your most valued ideas, notes, and creative work synced across all your devices and platforms, a Second Brain gives you the confidence to tackle your most important projects and ambitious goals.

Tiago Forte is the Second Brain Guy. Here's how he describes himself:

"I am a first-generation American, born and raised in Orange County in Southern California. I grew up in a mixed Brazilian and Filipino household with two brothers and a sister. Our home was filled with culture and the arts for as long as I can remember. My mother is a talented musician and singer who exposed us to the distinct rhythms of Brazilian music and the Portuguese language from our earliest years. My father is a professional artist who covered every wall of our home with his paintings and sketches."

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website.

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Johnny Walker, "Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-92" (Edinburgh UP, 2022) Apr 07, 2023

Nostalgia for the 1980s is in the air. From Stranger Things to the relaunch of 80s franchises like Top Gun, the American entertainment industry casts the period as an age of simpler things, clearer dichotomies, and less technology. Yet not all was simple. The 1980s were the heyday of the Cold War. They were the decade of rapid social change, of deregulation and selfish consumption, of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They were also the decade when a new technology swept the world, setting the stage for our all-too-digital present.

A lot has been written about the rise of video in the United States, the format wars, the impact it had on the entertainment industry, on personal entertainment consumption habits, and new business models. But the rise of video was not a uniquely American phenomenon, nor was the American experience normative. In fact, wherever the new technology arrived, from the US, to the Middle East, to Eastern Europe, it reshaped social and business practices, as well as government responses to it, in ways that reflected the political, social, and economic arrangements of each space.

Johnny Walker’s Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1972-1992 (Edinburgh UP, 2022) tells the story of Britain’s vide boom in the 1980s by focusing on the first video distributors who took chances on a wide range of films, from documentaries, to horror, to kids entertainment, in order to attract consumer interest. The new video shops that mushroomed across Britain turned video rental into a common practice among the public. Soon, despite a crushing recession, more and more industry players started to invest into what media at the time was dismissing as a mere ‘plaything.’ Rewind, Replay chronicles the idiosyncratic ways in which British distributors and store owners navigated various local political and economic pressures including piracy, the infamous video nasties moral panic and the government crackdown on the industry, as well as the corporate expansion of the industry which, by the end of the decade, eliminated independent distributors, and turned the pre-recorded videocassette from morally questionable enterprise into a staple of high street retail.

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is Teaching Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, came out in 2022. Twitter: @OanaGodyKenw. Oana’s webpage.

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Seeing Truth in Physics Apr 06, 2023

Stephon Alexander talks about a better way of thinking about the interconnections between music, physics, and creativity and how as someone often seen as “outside” the field, he has found freedom to think harder, pursue ideas, and carve a place for himself in the story of science. Alexander and Alexis Boylan discuss how we should be thinking about physics, art, and the meaning of life all together, all the time.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod

Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute

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Antero Garcia, "All through the Town: The School Bus as Educational Technology" (U Minnesota Press, 2023) Apr 06, 2023

Everyone knows the yellow school bus. It’s been invisible and also omnipresent for a century. Dr. Antero Garcia shows how the U.S. school bus, its form unaltered for decades, is the most substantial piece of educational technology to ever shape how schools operate. As it noisily moves young people across the country every day, the bus offers the opportunity for a necessary reexamination of what “counts” as educational technology.

Particularly in light of these buses being idled in pandemic times, All through the Town: The School Bus as Educational Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) questions what we take for granted and what we overlook in public schooling in America, pushing for liberatory approaches to education that extend beyond notions of school equity.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Joseph Giacomelli, "Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America" (U Chicago Press, 2023) Apr 05, 2023

Even people who still refuse to accept the reality of human-induced climate change would have to agree that the topic has become inescapable in the United States in recent decades. But as Joseph Giacomelli shows in Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America(University of Chicago Press, 2023), this is actually nothing new: as far back as Gilded Age America, climate uncertainty has infused major debates on economic growth and national development.

In this ambitious examination of late-nineteenth-century understandings of climate, Giacomelli draws on the work of scientists, foresters, surveyors, and settlers to demonstrate how central the subject was to the emergence of American modernity. Amid constant concerns about volatile weather patterns and the use of natural resources, nineteenth-century Americans developed a multilayered discourse on climate and what it might mean for the nation’s future. Although climate science was still in its nascent stages during the Gilded Age, fears and hopes about climate change animated the overarching political struggles of the time, including expansion into the American West. Giacomelli makes clear that uncertainty was the common theme linking concerns about human-induced climate change with cultural worries about the sustainability of capitalist expansionism in an era remarkably similar to the United States’ unsettled present.

Joseph Giacomelli is Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Duke Kunshan University.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Ben Shneiderman, "Human-Centered AI" (Oxford UP, 2022) Apr 04, 2023

The remarkable progress in algorithms for machine and deep learning have opened the doors to new opportunities, and some dark possibilities. However, a bright future awaits those who build on their working methods by including HCAI strategies of design and testing. As many technology companies and thought leaders have argued, the goal is not to replace people, but to empower them by making design choices that give humans control over technology.

In Human-Centered AI(Oxford UP, 2022), Professor Ben Shneiderman offers an optimistic realist's guide to how artificial intelligence can be used to augment and enhance humans' lives. This project bridges the gap between ethical considerations and practical realities to offer a road map for successful, reliable systems. Digital cameras, communications services, and navigation apps are just the beginning. Shneiderman shows how future applications will support health and wellness, improve education, accelerate business, and connect people in reliable, safe, and trustworthy ways that respect human values, rights, justice, and dignity.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Has Peer Review Hit a Point of No Return? Apr 04, 2023

Vivian Berghahn joins to discuss what is broken with the peer review system in general, how it impacts book publishing, and some creative solutions for how it can be rectified. Also, hear the surprising reason why small, independent publishers tend to have more robust quality review processes than big corporate publishers.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Rhea Myers, "Proof of Work: Blockchain Provocations 2011-2021" (MIT Press, 2023) Apr 03, 2023

NFT, BTC, DAO, ETH, WAGMI, HODL. It would have been hard to avoid these acronyms only a year ago. The hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchain art was almost as annoying as the glee with which crypto sceptics welcomed the sudden onset of the crypto winter.

But for all the popularity of Bored Apes and Ponzi scheme stories, there seems to have been little serious engagement with the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the blockchain. The academy appears to have dismissed the crypto world out of hand, citing its financial unviability and the deeply ‘problematic’ philosophical foundations of its technology.

Rhea Myers is a crypto artist, writer, and hacker who searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Her engagement in the technical history and debates in blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy.

Remodelling the tropes of conceptual art and net art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.

Rhea Myers speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about art’s role in mapping and shaping the emergent properties of blockchain technologies, the crypto-libertarian, anarchy-capitalist nexus, and the enduring legacy of the conceptual art movement.

Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks with essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous.

PostScript Viruses, 1993
Portrait of V.I. Lenin with Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock III by Art & Language
Futherfield Gallery, London
Is Art, 2014/15, Art Is, 2014/17
Pierre's essay on the speculative deficit and NFT art
Certificate of Inauthenticity, 2020

Rhea Myers is an artist, writer, and blockchain developer and activist. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers focussed on blockchain tech in 2011, becoming one of the first artists to enter into creative, speculative, and conceptual engagement with ‘the new internet’.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management Apr 03, 2023

JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita and Professor of Managerial Communication and Work and Organization Studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, talks about her classic and award-winning 1989 book, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Johns Hopkins University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel.

Control Through Communication tells the fascinating story of how corporations came to adopt modern communications systems, including typewriters, filing cabinets, card catalogs, memos, and reports. Over the past twenty years, the book has been hugely influential in history, communications, and media studies. Yates and Vinsel also talk about how Yates came to move from literature to business history and organization studies, what it was like working as a woman in a business school in the 1980s, how she managed to have a dual writing career in history and business school journals, and much more.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.

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Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023) Apr 02, 2023

In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains(Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost.

Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual—a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence.

Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

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Susan R. Grayzel, "The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Apr 01, 2023

On this episode, we sit down with Dr. Susan R. Grayzel, Professor of History at Utah State University to discuss The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Professor Grayzel compellingly and skillfully explores the history of one object - the civilian gas mask - to reveal the reach of modern, total war and the limits of the state trying to safeguard civilian life in an extensive empire. The First World War introduced the widespread use of lethal chemical weapons. In its aftermath, the British government, like that of many states, had to prepare civilians to confront such weapons in a future war. Over the course of the interwar period, it developed individual anti-gas protection as a cornerstone of civil defense. Drawing on records from Britain's Colonial, Foreign, War and Home Offices and other archives alongside newspapers, journals, personal accounts and cultural sources, she connects the histories of the First and Second World Wars, combatants and civilians, men and women, metropole and colony, illuminating how new technologies of warfare shaped culture, politics, and society.

Dr. Julia M. Gossard hosts this episode. She is Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at Utah State University.

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Julia H. Lee, "The Racial Railroad" (NYU Press, 2022) Apr 01, 2023

Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for American national identity, manifest destiny, and imperial ambitions. It’s no surprise, then, that the train continues to endure in depictions across literature, film, ad music.

The Racial Railroad (NYU Press, 2022) highlights the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played―and continues to play―in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Julia H. Lee argues that the train is frequently used as the setting for stories of race because it operates across multiple registers and scales of experience and meaning, both as an invocation of and a depository for all manner of social, historical, and political narratives.

Lee demonstrates how, through legacies of racialized labor and disenfranchisement―from the Chinese American construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and the depictions of Native Americans in landscape and advertising, to the underground railroad and Jim Crow segregation―the train becomes one of the exemplary spaces through which American cultural works explore questions of racial subjectivity, community, and conflict. By considering the train through various lenses, The Racial Railroad tracks how racial formations and conflicts are constituted in significant and contradictory ways by the spaces in which they occur.

Julia H. Lee is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California at Irvine and author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 and Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

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Karen Frost-Arnold, "Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet" (Oxford UP, 2023) Apr 01, 2023

The Internet plays a central role in how we communicate, share information, disseminate ideas, maintain social connections, and conduct business. The Internet also exacerbates existing problems regarding irrationality, bias, wrongful discrimination, exploitation, and dehumanization. Moreover, the Internet gives rise to new ethical and epistemological problems – fake news, sock-puppetry, internet hoaxes, disinformation, and so on.

In Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet (Oxford University Press 2023), Karen Frost-Arnold proposes a multi-layered social epistemology designed to assist us in navigating the fraught normative landscape of the online world.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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Elizabeth M. Renieris, "Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse" (MIT Press, 2023) Mar 31, 2023

Why laws focused on data cannot effectively protect people—and how an approach centered on human rights offers the best hope for preserving human dignity and autonomy in a cyberphysical world.

Ever-pervasive technology poses a clear and present danger to human dignity and autonomy, as many have pointed out. And yet, for the past fifty years, we have been so busy protecting data that we have failed to protect people. In Beyond Data: Reclaiming Human Rights at the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Renieris argues that laws focused on data protection, data privacy, data security and data ownership have unintentionally failed to protect core human values, including privacy. And, as our collective obsession with data has grown, we have, to our peril, lost sight of what’s truly at stake in relation to technological development—our dignity and autonomy as people.

Far from being inevitable, our fixation on data has been codified through decades of flawed policy. Renieris provides a comprehensive history of how both laws and corporate policies enacted in the name of data privacy have been fundamentally incapable of protecting humans. Her research identifies the inherent deficiency of making data a rallying point in itself—data is not an objective truth, and what’s more, its “entirely contextual and dynamic” status makes it an unstable foundation for organizing. In proposing a human rights–based framework that would center human dignity and autonomy rather than technological abstractions, Renieris delivers a clear-eyed and radically imaginative vision of the future.

At once a thorough application of legal theory to technology and a rousing call to action, Beyond Data boldly reaffirms the value of human dignity and autonomy amid widespread disregard by private enterprise at the dawn of the metaverse.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Life Extension Therapies Mar 29, 2023

The story of the Fountain of Youth is as old as history itself. Herodotus, the father of ancient Greek history, wrote of a mythical spring that extended the life of its bathers. Today, biotech entrepreneurs, scientists, and health influencers are still searching for that mythical spring.

Longevity and anti-aging research has recently blossomed, with a number of tantalizing discoveries. Still, this research hasn't delivered any magic bullets. Yet, that hasn't stopped a cottage industry of folks hawking a plethora of dubious supplements and bizarre health regimens.

Jay Cockburn tries to make sense of what's real, what's hype, who could benefit, and who would pay. Do we even want to live in the world the longevity researchers are looking for? Should we keep looking for that fountain?

We'll hear from: CEO of BioViva, Liz Parish, who has stepped outside of the regular drug approval process and experimented on herself; Dr. Charles Brenner, a scientist and vocal critic of the claims of life extension; and Dr. Keisha S. Ray, a bioethicist who reminds us that while the rich look for fanciful new ways to live longer, the poor lack access to basic health care.

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Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, "The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games" (U California Press, 2023) Mar 28, 2023

The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games(University of California Press, 2023) creatively examines the parallels between spiritual and digital activities to explore the roles that symbolic second selves—avatars—can play in our lives. The use of avatars can allow for what anthropologists call ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, meaning "standing outside oneself." The archaic techniques of promoting spiritual ecstasy, which remain central to religious healing traditions around the world, now also have contemporary analogues in virtual worlds found on the internet. In this innovative book, Jeffrey G. Snodgrass argues that avatars allow for the ecstatic projection of consciousness into alternate realities, potentially providing both the spiritually possessed and gamers access to superior secondary identities with elevated social standing. Even if only temporary, self-transformations of these kinds can help reduce psychosocial stress and positively improve health and well-being.

Jeffrey G. Snodgrass is Professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.

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Woodrow Hartzog, "Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies" (Harvard UP, 2018) Mar 28, 2023

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves―even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy's Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies (Harvard UP, 2018), Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Mar 28, 2023

Reaching net zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, but only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures will remain elevated; climate damages will continue to accrue and sea levels will continue to rise. Even the urgent and utterly essential task of reaching net zero cannot be achieved rapidly by emissions reductions alone. To hasten net zero and minimize climate damages thereafter, we will also need massive carbon removal and storage. We may even need to reduce incoming solar radiation in order to lower unacceptably high temperatures. Such unproven and potentially risky climate interventions raise mind-blowing questions of governance and ethics.

Wake Smith's book Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers readers an accessible and authoritative introduction to both the hopes and hazards of some of humanity's most controversial technologies, which may nevertheless provide the key to saving our world.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality.

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The Science of Security Mar 27, 2023

Listen to this interview of Cormac Herley, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. We talk about the science of security and as well, about the communication of security science.

Cormac Herley : "For very many projects, all through, I sort of have this kind of imaginary dialogue going on with my imagined audience or with representatives of my imagined audience, where what I'm doing on my side of the talk is to convince them. And for me personally, the point of the dialogue is kind of, What am I trying to convince them of? Because, I mean, if I can't tell myself first what it is I'm trying to convince them of, well then, success is going to be very unlikely."

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Winning & Losing in the Emerging EV Wars/The Aftershocks of the EV Transition Could Be Ugly Mar 27, 2023

Robert Charette, engineer, consultant, and contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum magazine, talks about his twelve-part series, “The Electric Vehicle Transition Explained,” with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The series takes a systems perspective on electric vehicles, and talks about all of the potential barriers – from a lack of minerals, to stressing out the electricity grid, to being short on consumers or workers – that face EVs, which are too often cast as a climate change cure-all. Charette and Vinsel also talk about the kinds of thinking that are necessary if we are to have realistic policies around EVs.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.

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Felix Zimmermann, "Virtual Realities: Atmospheric Experience of the Past in Digital Games (Büchner-Verlag, 2023) Mar 26, 2023

Today I talked to Felix Zimmermann about his book Virtual Realities: Atmospheric Experience of the Past in Digital Games (Virtuelle Wirklichkeiten: Atmosphärisches Vergangenheitserleben im Digitalen Spiel (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)

Atmospheres are everywhere: at the workplace, in the soccer stadium, in front of the crackling fireplace. They shape our everyday language and have become quite natural expressions of how we find ourselves in certain environments and how we feel about them. Their influence is far-reaching: aesthetic atmospheres are closely linked to a contemporary experience-oriented historical culture whose products and practices claim to establish an immediate contact with the past.

With 'Vergangenheitsatmosphären' Felix Zimmermann offers for the first time a term to adequately describe this striving for immediacy. Using in-depth analyses of the digital games Anno 1800 (2019), Assassin's Creed Syndicate (2015), and Dishonored: The Mask of Wrath (2012), the concept is contoured and the productivity of atmospheric research trained on theories and methods of public history, game studies, and phenomenology is demonstrated.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Reinhold Martin, "Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University" (Columbia UP, 2021) Mar 25, 2023

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia UP, 2021) reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.

Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Dominique A. Tobbell, "Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Mar 24, 2023

An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II. Nurses represent the largest segment of the US health care workforce and spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the health care team.

Dominique A. Tobbell's book Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing (U Chicago Press, 2022) probes their history to examine major changes that have taken place in American health care in the second half of the twentieth century. The book examines the major changes in nursing education and the place of nursing in the post-war research university, revealing how federal and state health and higher education policies shaped education within health professions after World War II. Starting in the 1950s, academic nurses sought to construct a science of nursing--distinct from that of the related biomedical or behavioral sciences--that would provide the basis of nursing practice. Facing broad changes in patient care driven by the introduction of new medical innovations, they worked both to develop science-based nursing practice and to secure their roles within the post-war research university. By their efforts, academic nurses transformed nursing's labor into a valuable site of knowledge production and demonstrated how the application of this knowledge was integral to improving patient outcomes and healthcare delivery. Exploring the knowledge claims, strategies, and politics involved as academic nurses negotiated their roles and nursing's future, Dr. Nurse reveals how state-supported health centers have profoundly shaped nursing education and health care delivery.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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David J. Halperin, "Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO" (Stanford UP, 2020) Mar 24, 2023

In his book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO (Stanford University Press, 2020), David J. Halperin explores the phenomena of UFO's through a psychological lense.

UFOs became part of our cultural landscape in 1947, and they've been with us ever since. Debunked innumerable times, they refuse to go away. Made the subject of great expectations by their believers, they invariably disappoint. They've been called a myth, both in disparagement and, more properly, in appreciation of their power and significance.

This book argues that they are actually a mythology, as gripping and profound as the great mythologies of antiquity to which they're linked. The question it asks about them is not, "What are they?" nor "Where do they come from?" but "What do they mean?" Halperin begins his exploration with his own longish teenage foray into the UFOs that he began to believe in as his mother lay dying of cancer. Despite the fact that he was only a high school student, Halperin joined and then became the director of "New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena" (NJAAP), an organization of amateur observers with members across the States. He goes on to revisit a range of famous cases of UFO sightings and abductions while introducing his own approach, which is informed by the study of religion, folklore, and Jungian psychology. Ultimately arguing for UFOs as evidence of the inner trauma of individuals as well as entire societies, he posits that the rise of the UFO in post-World War II America coincides with that moment in the nuclear age when we first became capable of imagining our death as a species,

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Gordon Barrett, "China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Mar 23, 2023

During the early decades of the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China remained far outside mainstream international science — right?

Gordon Barrett’s new book, China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy(Cambridge University Press, 2022), counters this straightforward narrative and shows a very different side of China’s engagement with the outside world during this period. Barrett shows how scientists became crucial interlocutors for the early PRC, engaging in international and cross-bloc organizations, conferences, and networks. In China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy we follow scientists as they travel to international meetings, advocate for China’s position in international organizations, and correspond with collaborators and peers abroad. Overall, by piecing together a wide range of archival and published materials, Barrett shows how scientists developed transnational networks and interacted closely with overseas counterparts in ways that anticipated and lay the groundwork for China’s emergence as a science and technology powerhouse. Meticulously researched and carefully written, this book is sure to be of interest to those interested in modern Chinese history, science and technology, the Cold War period, and the role that scientists can play in diplomacy and diplomatic work.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu.

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Alvin Hall, "Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance" (HarperOne, 2023) Mar 21, 2023

For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep.

Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country TV show. Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Along the way, they gathered memories from some of the last living witnesses for whom the Green Book meant survival--remarkable people who not only endured but rose above the hate, building vibrant Black communities against incredible odds.

Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance(HarperOne, 2023) is a vital work of national history as well as a hopeful chronicle of Black resilience and resistance.

Nicole Trujillo-Pagán is a sociologist and Associate Professor at Wayne State University who studies race, the Latina/o/x population, and socio-spatial mobility. You can follow her on Twitter @BorderStruggles.

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Left to Our Own Devices: A Conversation with Julia Ticona Mar 20, 2023

Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age(Oxford UP, 2022), Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets.

A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

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The Challenge of AI to Publishing: A Discussion with Sally Wilson Mar 18, 2023

Sally Wilson, VP of Publishing at Emerald opens up about the challenges publishers are facing in contending with the onset of the mass adoption of AI tools including ChatGPT, and its ramifications for scholarly publishing. She also talks about the potential positive use cases for ChatGPT for reducing inequality in publishing. In addition, Sally discusses the nature of mission-based publishing and leading the charge in tackling United Nations SDG goals in publishing.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Bleddyn E. Bowen, "Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space" (Oxford UP, 2022) Mar 17, 2023

Space technology was developed to enhance the killing power of the state. The Moon landings and the launch of the Space Shuttle were mere sideshows, drawing public attention away from the real goal: military and economic control of space as a source of power on Earth.

Today, as Bleddyn E. Bowen vividly recounts in Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space (Oxford UP, 2022), thousands of satellites work silently in the background to provide essential military, intelligence and economic capabilities. No major power can do without them. Beyond Washington, Moscow and Beijing, truly global technologies have evolved, from the ground floor of the nuclear missile revolution to today's orbital battlefield, shaping the wars to come. World powers including India, Japan and Europe are fully realizing the strategic benefits of commanding Earth's 'cosmic coastline', as a stage for war, development and prestige.

Yet, as new contenders spend more and more on outer space, there is scope for cautious optimism about the future of the Space Age-if we can recognize, rather than hide, its original sin.

Bleddyn E. Bowen is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Leicester, specializing in space policy and military uses of outer space. The internationally recognized author of War in Space, he consults on space policy for institutions including the UK Parliament, the European Space Agency, and the Pentagon.

Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated.

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John Miller, "The Philosophy of Tattoos" (British Library, 2021) Mar 17, 2023

The Philosophy of Tattoos (British Library, 2021) by Dr. John Miller presents an impressively broad yet personal account, exploring tattooing as a unique expression of individual, cultural and national identity.

Dr. Miller explores tattooing as an innate human impulse throughout history, following its suppression and revival in cultures around the world. A bold and nuanced story of colonial oppression, social deviance and tattooing in the age of social media, the book features original tattoo designs from London-based tattoo artist Luca Ortis, as well as illustrations from the British library collections.

The Philosophy of Tattoos returns to its origins in cultural locations as disparate as Polynesia, the Amazon and the Arctic to interrogate the innate human desire to mark the skin. It asks what the history of tattooing might tell us about that fundamental question: what does it mean to be human?

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Eric Porter, "A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport" (U California Press, 2023) Mar 16, 2023

What can an airport tell us about a city? Quite a bit, according to UC-Santa Cruz history professor Eric Porter in A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport(University of California Press, 2023). San Francisco's SFO airport has been reshaping the Bay Area's politics and reflecting the region's inequalities since its founding in 1927, Porter argues. From the dispossessed Native land on which it was built, to the class dynamics shaping airport noise and amenities, to the airport's mid-century racist hiring practices, the facility served as a microcosm of Bay Area problems, promise, and growth. Even in recent years, with the airport serving as a site for pro-immigrant activism during the Trump era, SFO continues to be a symbol for the city s a whole. As sea level rises threaten to swamp the runways, the airport's future is uncertain, but its past is a useful lens for viewing western urban history in the twentieth century.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Computer Music and Human Computer Interaction Mar 15, 2023

Michael Gurevich, lecturer at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at the Queen’s University, Belfast School of Music and Sonic Arts, serves as guest editor of the Winter 2010 issue of Computer Music Journal. In this podcast, Michael discusses the fields of Computer Music and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). He describes how these fields intersect and what they can learn from each other, touching on how the field of Computer Music has grown and how this affects performance and composition of electronic music. This conversation was recorded on December 14, 2010.

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Illuminations Episode 3: Divine Technology Mar 14, 2023

It’s common to feel that technology removes the magic of the world, but Hindu worshippers in Bangalore have shown that it's all in the approach.

Guest

Tulasi Srinivas, associate professor of anthropology at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society. Author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism, among other books.

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Traveling Black, A Story of Race and Resistance: A Conversation with Mia Bay Mar 13, 2023

Mia Bay, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about her book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance(Harvard University Press, 2023), with Peoples & Things, Lee Vinsel. From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. Bay unearths troves of supporting evidence, rescuing forgotten stories of undaunted passengers who made it back home despite being insulted, stranded, re-routed, or ignored. Black travelers never stopped challenging these humiliations and insisting on justice in the courts. Traveling Black upends our understanding of Black resistance, documenting a sustained fight that falls outside the traditional boundaries of the civil rights movement. Bay and Vinsel also talk about where Traveling Black fits in Bay’s broader career as a historian and which project she is turning to next.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Illuminations Episode 2: Beyond Belief Mar 13, 2023

Do scientists ever reject science? Research data on the controversial topic of extraterrestrial life has met with resistance from some in the scientific community and openness from communities of faith.

Guests

Avi Loeb, professor of astrophysics and cosmology at Harvard University, where he serves as the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science. Author of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

Kate Dorsch, associate director of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania .

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), longtime U.S. Senator (1987-2017) from the state of Nevada and former Senate Majority Leader (2007-2015. *The Senator died in December 2021.

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Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, "The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left" (Hurst, 2023) Mar 12, 2023

During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting that ‘the science’ was all politics and time reveals the horrific human and economic cost of these policies.

The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left(Hurst, 2023) provides an internationalist-left perspective on the world’s Covid-19 response, which has had devastating consequences for democratic rights and the poor worldwide. As the fortunes of the richest soared, nationwide shutdowns devastated small businesses, the working classes, and the Global South’s informal economies.

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi argue that these policies grossly exacerbated existing trends of inequality, mediatisation and surveillance, with grave implications for the future. Rich in human detail, The Covid Consensus tackles head-on the refusal of the global political class and mainstream media to report the true extent of the erosion of democratic processes and the socioeconomic assault on the poor.

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the emergence of a global consensus, the abject failure of the left to hold power to account, and the sometimes fine line between critique and conspiracy theorising.

Richard Seymour’s critique of the book on Politics, Theory, Other.

Toby Green is Professor of African History at King’s College London, and author ofA Fistful of Shells and The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa.

Thomas Fazi is the author and co-author of several books on economic and political issues, including Reclaiming the State. His article with Toby Green for UnHerd, The Left’s Covid Failure, was translated into ten languages. He is a regular contributor to Compact.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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James W. Cortada, "Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments and Businesses" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Mar 12, 2023

For over twenty years, James W. Cortada has pioneered research into how information shapes society. In Birth of Modern Facts: How the Information Revolution Transformed Academic Research, Governments and Businesses (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), he tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. Cortada argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it easier to manage and access. He looks at what major disciplines have done to shape the nature of modern information, devoting chapters to the most obvious ones. Cortada argues that understanding how some features of information evolved is useful for those who work in subjects that deal with their very construct and application, such as computer scientists and those exploring social media and, most recently, history. The Birth of Modern Facts builds on Cortada's prior books examining how information became a central feature of modern society, most notably as a sequel to All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (OUP, 2016) and Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L, 2021).

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Jessa Lingel, "The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom" (U California Press, 2023) Mar 12, 2023

The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable.

The Gentrification of the Internet: How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom (U California Press, 2023) argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people—not businesses—online.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Publishing Science: A Discussion with Tiffany Gasbarrini, Senior Science Editor, Johns Hopkins University Press Mar 11, 2023

"It is not only for science to give to publishing, but the time has come for publishing to start giving back to science." Tiffany Gasbarrini clarifies the difference between commercial and mission-driven publishers and how publishers who aren't bound by commercial interests alone can make brave ideological publishing decisions. She also makes a passionate case for why telling stories in science can make all the difference in the way we perceive and trust science as a community and society.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Seeing Truth in the Lab Mar 09, 2023

Max Liboiron founder of Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist, anti-colonial laboratory talks about making better science and how they aren’t interested in dismantling the masters house (because who cares about that place) but they definitely are taking those tools.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod

Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute

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Miguel Sicart, "Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture" (MIT Press, 2023) Mar 08, 2023

The play element at the heart of our interactions with computers—and how it drives the best and the worst manifestations of the information age.

Whether we interact with video games or spreadsheets or social media, playing with software shapes every facet of our lives. In Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture (MIT Press, 2023), Miguel Sicart delves into why we play with computers, how that play shapes culture and society, and the threat posed by malefactors using play to weaponize everything from conspiracy theories to extractive capitalism. Starting from the controversial idea that software is an essential agent in the information age, Sicart considers our culture in general—and our way of thinking about and creating digital technology in particular—as a consequence of interacting with software's agency through play.

As Sicart shows, playing shapes software agency. In turn, software shapes our agency as we adapt and relate to it through play. That play drives the creation of new cultural, social, and political forms. Sicart also reveals the role of make-believe in driving our playful engagement with the digital sphere. From there, he discusses the cybernetic theory of digital play and what we can learn from combining it with the idea that playfulness can mean pleasurable interaction with human and nonhuman agents inside the boundaries of a computational system. Finally, he critiques the instrumentalization of play as a tool wielded by platform capitalism.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Once Upon an Algorithm: How Stories Explain Computing Mar 07, 2023

In this episode, Martin Erwig show us how we can find computational concepts inside some of our favorite stories.

Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the study of systematic problem solving. Erwig points out that many daily activities involve problem solving. Getting up in the morning, for example: You get up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. This simple daily routine solves a recurring problem through a series of well-defined steps. In computer science, such a routine is called an algorithm.

Erwig illustrates a series of concepts in computing with examples from daily life and familiar stories. Hansel and Gretel, for example, execute an algorithm to get home from the forest. The movie Groundhog Day illustrates the problem of unsolvability; Sherlock Holmes manipulates data structures when solving a crime; the magic in Harry Potter's world is understood through types and abstraction; and Indiana Jones demonstrates the complexity of searching. Along the way, Erwig also discusses representations and different ways to organize data; "intractable" problems; language, syntax, and ambiguity; control structures, loops, and the halting problem; different forms of recursion; and rules for finding errors in algorithms.

This engaging book explains computation accessibly and shows its relevance to daily life. Something to think about next time we execute the algorithm of getting up in the morning.

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Measure for Measure Episode 6: IQ Mar 07, 2023

The Intelligence Quotient is a measure of intelligence that has life-or-death consequences. Should we trust it?

GUEST

Alan Gouddis is a Partner with Sherman & Sterling. He was recognized by The Legal 500 as a “Leading Lawyer” in M&A Litigation Defense in 2021.

This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman.

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Radio Broadcasting Along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950 Mar 06, 2023

Sonia Robles, an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware, talks about her book, Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting Along Mexico’s Northern Border, 1930-1950(University of Arizona Press, 2019), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Mexican Waves tells the fascinating history of radio stations entrepreneurs set up along the Mexican side of the Mexico-USA border, primarily to reach laborers working in the United States. Robles covers fascinating dimensions of the radio broadcasting industry, including advertisements that played over the airwaves, how regulation shaped the behavior of radio station owners, and how radio fit into the lives of touring performers. Robles and Vinsel also discuss recent efforts of historians to capture the history of local radio stations throughout North America.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education Mar 05, 2023

In this episode, Chris Gondek interviews author John Palfrey about how diversity and free expression can coexist on a modern campus.

Safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, the disinvitation of speakers, demands to rename campus landmarks—debate over these issues began in lecture halls and on college quads but ended up on op-ed pages in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, on cable news, and on social media. Some of these critiques had merit, but others took a series of cheap shots at “crybullies” who needed to be coddled and protected from the real world. Few questioned the assumption that colleges must choose between free expression and diversity. In Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces, John Palfrey argues that the essential democratic values of diversity and free expression can, and should, coexist on campus.

Palfrey, currently Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, and formerly Professor and Vice Dean at Harvard Law School, writes that free expression and diversity are more compatible than opposed. Free expression can serve everyone—even if it has at times been dominated by white, male, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied citizens. Diversity is about self-expression, learning from one another, and working together across differences; it can encompass academic freedom without condoning hate speech.

Palfrey proposes an innovative way to support both diversity and free expression on campus: creating safe spaces and brave spaces. In safe spaces, students can explore ideas and express themselves with without feeling marginalized. In brave spaces—classrooms, lecture halls, public forums—the search for knowledge is paramount, even if some discussions may make certain students uncomfortable. The strength of our democracy, says Palfrey, depends on a commitment to upholding both diversity and free expression, especially when it is hardest to do so.

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Girish Shambu, "The New Cinephilia" (Caboose, 2022) Mar 04, 2023

Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today's "new cinephilia" and the classical cinephilia of the 1950s is the robust sociability which these new technologies have facilitated. Each activity of today's cinephilic practice - viewing, thinking, reading and writing about films - is marked by an unprecedented amount of social interaction facilitated by the Internet. As with their classical counterparts, the thoughts and writings of today's cinephiles are born from a vigorous and broad-ranging cinephilic conversation. Further, by dramatically lowering the economic barriers to publication, the Internet has also made possible new hybrid forms and outlets of cinephilic writing that draw freely from scholarly, journalistic and literary models.

The New Cinephilia (Caboose, 2022) both describes and theorises how and where cinephilia lives and thrives today. In this expanded second edition, author Girish Shambu revisits some of his original ideas and calls into question the focus in cinephilia on the male canon in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the lack of racial and gender diversity in contemporary cinema. As Dr. Shambu writes:"There is more to the cinephile experience than simply surfing from one link to another in a state of perpetual motion. How does this movement - this daily proliferation of encounters - power one's cinephilia? What special affective charge does this experience hold? In other words, how is the experience of the Internet cinephile affectively different from that of a 'traditional' cinephile who spends little time online?"

In this conversation with host Annie Berke, Dr. Shambu talks working as a Professor of Management while maintaining his profile as a prolific cinephile, explains why auteurism is a "manspreading machine," and offers recommendations on what films exemplify a "cinema of the future."

Girish Shambu is Professor of Management at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he teaches sustainability and supply chain management. In a dual career as film blogger, critic and scholar, Girish is also the author of The New Cinephilia (Caboose, 2020, 2nd ed.) and editor of Film Quarterly’s online column Quorum. His writings have appeared in The Criterion Collection, Framework Journal of Film & Media, and Film Quarterly.

In addition to being a host on New Books in Film, Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television. You can read her reviews and essays at Literary Hub, Public Books, LA Review of Books, The A.V. Club, Little White Lies, Film Quarterly, and The Washington Post.

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Elizabeth T. Hurren, "Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Mar 03, 2023

In Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death.

Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. Dr. Hurren investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Dr. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Mar 03, 2023

We are in the midst of a new space race that pairs billionaire space barons with governments in an effort to exploit the cosmos for human gain. While Elon Musk and SpaceX work to establish a human presence on Mars, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin work toward mining operations on the moon, missions to asteroids to extract resources, and millions of people living in rotating near-Earth satellite dwellings. Despite the differences in their visions, these two billionaires share a core utopian project: the salvation of humanity though the colonization of space. But we have already seen the destructive effects of this frontier spirit in the centuries-long history of European colonialism.

Philosopher of religion and space enthusiast Mary-Jane Rubenstein wants to pull back the curtain on the not-so-new myths these space barons are peddling. In Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (U Chicago Press, 2022), she explains why these myths are so problematic and offers a vision for how we might approach the exploration of space in ways that don't reproduce the atrocities of humanity's previous colonial endeavors.

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Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (EF, JP) Mar 02, 2023

John and Elizabeth, in this special Centennial episode of Recall this Book, explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Grey Zone (University of California Press, 2023) is based on several years of fieldwork in coastal Fukushima after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. Ryo's book shows how residents of the region live with and through the "nuclear ghost" that resides with them.

The trio discuss ways that residents acclimatize themselves to the presence of radiation, efforts to live their lives in ways not only shaped by catastrophe and irradiation, and the Geiger counter as a critical object.

Ryo relates the astonishing--but when you stop to think unsurprising—fact that "once you have [a Geiger counter] you actually want to see higher scores."

Mentioned in this episode:

Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Roadside Picnic
Tarkovksy, Stalker (the film)
Stalker (the video game)
Haruki Murakami 1Q84
Pat Barker The Ghost Road

Read the episode here

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Measure for Measure Episode 1: Fathom Mar 02, 2023

We love a good chart or graph but we think measurement is more complex and interesting than the data points. The fathom is a measure of depth from the surface to the ocean floorwhich is critical for navigating the Mississippi River and the Suez Canal. The fathom also shows us what’s beyond measurement: The unfathomable.

This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman.

Measure for Measure is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas. The show is executive produced by Liya Rechtman, created by Andrew Middleton, and sound engineered by Greg Fredle.

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What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing Mar 02, 2023

In this episode Chris Gondek interviews Ed Finn, author of the new book What Algorithms Want. Tune in for an interesting discussion on algorithm disconnect revolving around things humans regularly use, like Siri. And listen in for a definition of the phrase "culture machines".

We depend on--we believe in--algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations--the marriage vow, the shaman's curse--do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm--in practical terms, "a method for solving a problem"--has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.

Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.

If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of "algorithmic reading" and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.

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Isabel Huacuja Alonso, "Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders" (Columbia UP, 2022) Mar 02, 2023

From news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders(Columbia University Press, 2023) by Isabel Huacuja Alonso examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners.

Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians’ efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp. She demonstrates that the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being merely a tool of nation building in South Asia, radio created affective links that defied state agendas, policies, and borders. It forged an enduring transnational soundscape, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility.

The book traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of “radio resonance” to understand how radio relied on circuits of oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this “talk” created. By analyzing Hindi film-song radio programs, she demonstrates how radio spurred new ways of listening to cinema. Drawing on a rich collection of sources, including newly recovered recordings, listeners’ letters to radio stations, original interviews with broadcasters, and archival documents from across three continents, Radio for the Millions rethinks assumptions about how the medium connects with audiences.

Isabel Huacuja Alonso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asia, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is a historian of sound media and modern South Asia.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media Mar 01, 2023

In this episode, author Ryan Milner talks to Chris Gondak about the rise of the internet meme, and the five logics that factor into the foundation, growth, and success of a meme.

Internet memes--digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection--are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It's hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn't generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations.

Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent.

For better or worse--and Milner offers examples of both--memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.

Ryan Milner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston.

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Celeste Vaughan Curington et al., "The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance" (U California Press, 2021) Mar 01, 2023

The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance(U California Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five in-depth interviews with daters of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual identities, Curington, Lundquist, and Lin illustrate how the seemingly open space of the internet interacts with the loss of social inhibition in cyberspace contexts, fostering openly expressed forms of sexual racism that are rarely exposed in face-to-face encounters. The Dating Divide is a fascinating look at how a contemporary conflux of individualization, consumerism, and the proliferation of digital technologies has given rise to a unique form of gendered racism in the era of swiping right--or left.

The internet is often heralded as an equalizer, a seemingly level playing field, but the digital world also acts as an extension of and platform for the insidious prejudices and divisive impulses that affect social politics in the "real" world. Shedding light on how every click, swipe, or message can be linked to the history of racism and courtship in the United States, this compelling study uses data to show the racial biases at play in digital dating spaces.

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Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023) Feb 28, 2023

In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America(U California Press, 2023) makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair.

Anchored by interviews, data, and riveting firsthand narratives from three leading experts—an addiction psychiatrist, a policy advocate, and a drug historian—Whiteout reveals how a century of structural racism in drug policy, and in profit-oriented medical industries led to mass white overdose deaths. The authors implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers. Whiteout is an unflinching account of how racial capitalism is toxic for all Americans.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt: A Conversation with Andrew Simon Feb 27, 2023

Andrew Simon, a historian of media, popular culture, and the Middle East at Dartmouth College, discusses his new bookMedia of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt(Stanford University Press, 2022) , with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Media of the Masses is an engaging book that examines the impact of cassettes, cassette players, and their users during a particular period in Egypt's recent past. It provides a brilliant example of how disparate and surprising sources can be used to uncover the extraordinary story of an ordinary technology. Along the way, Simon directs our attention to a significant truth: audiocassettes provided countless people with the opportunity to create and circulate cultural content long before the internet and social media ever entered our daily lives. This book will captivate anyone interested in the history of technology, mass media, or popular culture.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Bernard D. Geoghegan, "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke UP, 2023) Feb 25, 2023

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes.

In Code: From Information Theory to French Theory(Duke UP, 2023), Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization.

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David H. Price, "The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent" (Pluto Press, 2022) Feb 23, 2023

When the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged. Now, in our post-9/11 world, it's accepted that corporations are vested with human rights, and government agencies and corporations use computers to monitor our private lives. In The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent (Pluto Press, 2022), David H. Price pulls back the curtain to reveal how the FBI and other government agencies have always functioned as the secret police of American capitalism up to today, where they luxuriate in a near-limitless NSA surveillance of all.

Price looks through a roster of campaigns by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and corporations to understand how we got here. Starting with J. Edgar Hoover and the early FBI's alignment with business, his access to 15,000 pages of never-before-seen FBI files shines a light on the surveillance of Edward Said, Andre Gunder Frank and Alexander Cockburn, Native American communists, and progressive factory owners.

Price uncovers patterns of FBI monitoring and harassing of activists and public figures, providing the vital means for us to understand how these new frightening surveillance operations are weaponized by powerful governmental agencies that remain largely shrouded in secrecy.

David H. Price is Professor of Anthropology at Saint Martin’s University’s Department of Society and Social Justice. He is the author of a number of books on the FBI and CIA, and has written articles for The Nation, Monthly Review, CounterPunch, Guardian and Le Monde. His work has been translated into five languages.

Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus.

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Social Media Influencers and Digital Media Regulation in Vietnam Feb 23, 2023

In 2021, a famous Vietnamese businesswoman hosted a three-hour long Facebook livestream, in which she named and shamed celebrities for their controversial public behaviours. This formed part of a regular pattern of personal attacks, in which she weaponised livestreaming to denounce media and charity organisations in front of huge online audiences. This case marked a turning point in Vietnam, forcing the government to contend with growing political activity in the online environment, and prompting new digital media regulation.

In this episode, Dr Jonathon Hutchinson joins Dr Natali Pearson to discuss this case and other examples of online socio-political activism in Vietnam, reflecting on the tension between social media influencing and digital media regulation, and highlighting its potential positive and negative effects.

About Jonathon Hutchinson:

Dr Jonathon Hutchinson is a Senior Lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University of Sydney. He is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Online News and Media Pluralism, and is also a Chief Investigator on the eSafety Commission Research project, Emerging online safety issue: co-creating social media education with young people. His research explores cultural production, public service media, cultural intermediation, everyday social media, automated media, and algorithms in media. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Policy & Internet journal and the Treasurer for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association. Dr Hutchinson is on the Board of Directors for the Wholistic World Innovation Trophy as part of the Diplomatic World Institute and is an active and regular contributor to the media. He is an award-winning author with articles in a number of national and international Scimago Q1 journals, government submissions, and his book, Cultural Intermediaries: Audience Participation and Media Organisations (2017), is published through Palgrave Macmillan.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Seeing Truth in Photographs Feb 23, 2023

Artist Penelope Umbrico talks about her work, images as currency, and how technology and various platforms herd images. And is photography tyrannical? Umbrico has some thoughts.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod

Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute

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Pete Millwood, "Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Feb 21, 2023

In 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy.

Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations (Cambridge UP, 2022) reveals how a diverse cast of Chinese and Americans – athletes and physicists, performing artists and seismologists – played a critical, but to date overlooked, role in remaking US-China relations. Based on new sources from more than a dozen archives in China and the United States, Pete Millwood argues that the significance of cultural and scientific exchanges went beyond reacquainting the Chinese and American people after two decades of minimal contact; exchanges also powerfully influenced Sino-American diplomatic relations and helped transform post-Mao China.

Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

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David Bond, "Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment" (U California Press, 2022) Feb 21, 2023

So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment (U California Press, 2022) is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hydrocarbon harm that lay the groundwork for environmental science and policy, this book brings into clear focus the dialectic between the negative ecologies of fossil fuels and the ongoing discovery of the environment. Exploring iconic sites of the oil economy, ranging from leaky Caribbean refineries to deepwater oil spills, from the petrochemical fallout of plastics manufacturing to the extractive frontiers of Canada, Negative Ecologies documents the upheavals, injuries, and disasters that have long accompanied fossil fuels and the manner in which our solutions have often been less about confronting the cause than managing the effects. This history of our present promises to re-situate scholarly understandings of fossil fuels and renovate environmental critique today. David Bond challenges us to consider what forms of critical engagement may now be needed to both confront the deleterious properties of fossil fuels and envision ways of living beyond them.

David Bond is the Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action and teaches on the environment and public action. Trained as an anthropologist, Bond studies oil spills and their imprint on environmental science and governance. His work shows how toxic disruptions can fix vital relations with new forms of knowledge and care.

Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, media and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog here where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books.

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Garima Garg, "Heavens and Earth: The Story of Astrology Through Ages and Cultures" (Penguin, 2023) Feb 20, 2023

What will the future bring? The ancient astrologer turned the impulse to answer this question into something meaningful by mapping the night skies and attempting to see in the movement of planets and stars an impact on human lives. But did all astrologers see the same night sky? Did the observations of the Hindu astrologer match those of the Greek? How did the Egyptians and the Chinese understand the influence of the Sun and the Moon on our lives? Over the centuries, as astrology developed and evolved, it also seeped into our philosophies, religions, literature and arts. And it grew and shape-shifted in step with the times. Whereas the ancient astrologer was as much seer as astronomer, the modern counterpart is a tech-savvy innovator.

Garima Garg's Heavens and Earth: The Story of Astrology Through Ages and Cultures (Penguin, 2023) examines the history of astrology, its many different systems and its development as a modern cultural phenomenon. Deeply researched and expertly narrated, the book contextualises the role of astrology in the ever-evolving human perspective of the cosmos and in understanding our place in it.

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Jacob Birken, "Video Games: Digital Image Cultures" (Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2022) Feb 19, 2023

Let's plays are among the most popular genres on YouTube. The visual worlds of video games shape the worldviews of millions. Gaming is a hobby and a mass spectacle.

For a long time, the history of video games was primarily one of technical progress: from pixelated figures in 2D to increasingly convincing illusions of reality in games like Control. At the same time, independent game worlds emerge, such as in the expressionist dystopia Disco Elysium.

In Video Games: Digital Image Cultures (Videospiele: Digitale Bildkulturen), Jacob Birken vividly analyzes the different types and generations of games, provides insights into the interaction of hardware and software, and shows how newer video games stylistically reference the past of their own medium. But does this also revive the unfulfilled promises of the future of the information society?

Jacob Birken writes and researches on the history, aesthetics, and theory of media technologies. In 2018, he published "The California Institution" on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He currently works at the UAS Düsseldorf and the University of Cologne.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Alan Meades, "Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade" (MIT Press, 2022) Feb 18, 2023

The story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present.

Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications, he tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline.

Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade (MIT Press, 2022) highlights the differences between British and North American arcades, especially in terms of the complex relationship between gambling and amusements. He also underlines Britain’s role in introducing coin-operated technologies into Europe, as well as the industry’s close links to America and, especially, Japan. He shows how the British arcade is a product of centuries of public play, gambling, entrepreneurship, and mechanization. Examining the arcade’s history through technological, social, cultural, biographic, and legislative perspectives, he describes a pendulum shift between control and liberalization, as well as the continued efforts of concerned moralists to limit and regulate public play.

Finally, he recounts the impact on the industry of legislative challenges that included vicious taxation, questions of whether copyright law applied to video-game code, and the peculiar moment when every arcade game in Britain was considered a cinema.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, "Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy" (Henry Holt, 2023) Feb 18, 2023

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy (Henry Holt, 2023) is the inside story of a worldwide investigation, sparked by the leak which revealed that cyber-intrusion and cyber-surveillance are happening with exponentially increasing frequency, across the globe. Pegasus, it turns out, is less a law enforcement tool than a weapon for hire and not only a threat to privacy but also to democracy, as the most notorious human-rights-violating governments and autocrat-wannabes are licensing and utilizing Pegasus spyware in the most vulnerable democracies in the world. Pegasus follows the personal stories of real victims--intrepid individuals who have spoken truth to some of the most corrupt, risible powers around the globe.

Laurent Richard is a Paris-based award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist who was named the 2018 European Journalist of the Year at the Prix Europa in Berlin. He is the founder of Forbidden Stories, a network of investigative journalists devoted continuing the unfinished work of murdered reporters to ensure the work they died for is not buried with them.

Sandrine Rigaud is a French investigative journalist. As editor of Forbidden Stories since 2019, she coordinated the award-winning Pegasus Project and the Cartel Project, an international investigation of assassinated Mexican journalists.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Alvarez, "Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space" (MIT Press, 2021) Feb 18, 2023

Why technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers.

In Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space (MIT Press, 2021), Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. Technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play—in the sense of acting for one's own enjoyment rather than to achieve a goal—that we explore new territories, create new devices and languages, and transform ourselves. Only then can innovative spatial design create resonant spaces that go beyond functionalism to evoke an emotional response in those who use them.

The authors show how creativity emerges in moments of instability, when a new technology overthrows an established one, or when internal factors change a technology until it becomes a different technology. Exploring the role of fantasy in design, they examine Disney World and its outsize influence on design and on forms of social interaction beyond the entertainment world. They also consider Las Vegas and Dubai, desert cities that combine technology with fantasies of pleasure and wealth. Video games and interactive media, they show, infuse the design process with interactivity and participatory dynamics, leaving spaces open to variations depending on the users' behavior. Throughout, they pinpoint the critical moments when technology plays a key role in reshaping how we design and experience spaces.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Victor Roy, "Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines" (U California Press, 2023) Feb 17, 2023

Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines (U California Press, 2023) takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued.

Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to determine who heals and who suffers and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England.

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The Politics of Bicycling Feb 16, 2023

Zack Furness, an associate professor of communications at Penn State Greater Allegheny, talks about his 2010 book, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility (Temple University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. One Less Car examines the history of how bicycles became a tool and object of advocacy and activism. With roots going back 1960s countercultures and growing through punk subcultures and the Critical Mass movement, bicycle activism has been an important focus of environmentalism and countering what Furness calls the “automobile-industrial complex.” Over a wide-ranging conversation, Furness and Vinsel also discuss Furness’s more recent research project on the history of Israeli punk bands.

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A Primer for Teaching Digital History Feb 16, 2023

Today’s book is: A Primer for Teaching Digital History: Ten Design Principles(Duke UP, 2022), which is a guide for those who are teaching digital history for the first time, and for experienced instructors who want to reinvigorate their pedagogy. Offering design principles for approaching digital history that represent the possibilities that digital research and scholarship can take, Dr. Jennifer Guiliano outlines potential strategies and methods for building syllabi and curricula. Taking readers through the process of selecting data, identifying learning outcomes, and determining which tools students will use in the classroom, Guiliano outlines popular research methods including digital source criticism, text analysis, and visualization. She also discusses digital archives, exhibits, and collections as well as audiovisual and mixed-media narratives such as short documentaries, podcasts, and multimodal storytelling. Throughout, Guiliano illuminates how digital history can enhance understandings of not just what histories are told but how they are told and who has access to them.

Our guest is: Dr. Jennifer Guiliano, who is a white academic living and working on the lands of the Myaamia/Miami, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Wea, and Shawnee peoples. She currently holds a position as Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty in both Native American and Indigenous Studies and American Studies at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is co-director with Trevor Muñoz of the Humanities Intensive Teaching + Learning Initiative (HILT). She is the author of Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America , and of A Primer for Teaching Digital History: 10 Design Principles . She is co-editor with Roopika Risam of Reviews in Digital Humanities, of DevDH.org with Simon Appleford, and of Digital Humanities Workshops with Laura Estill. She is also completing a co-authored work Getting Started in the Digital Humanities (Wiley & Sons).

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication, by Alex D. Ketchum
Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time: Models for Higher Education Researchers, by Adriana J. Kezar et al
Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross
What is Digital History? by Hannu Salmi
The Unessay as Native-Centered History and Pedagogy [an open journal article]
This episode on teaching about race and racism in the college classroom
This episode on From Equity Talk to Equity Walk with Dr. Tia Brown McNair
This podcast the Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education

Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy.

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99* Gael McGill Visualizes Intracellular Data (JP, GT) Feb 16, 2023

What’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence.

For this scientific conversation taped back in 2021, Recall this Book host John is joined once again by Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (think ep 4 Madeline Miller; think ep 2 Addiction!).

You may want to check out Digizyme‘s images of the spike protein attaching the SARS-CoV2 virus to a hapless cell and fusing their membranes. Or click through to watch a gorgeous video Gael and his team have created.

Mentioned in the Episode:

Gael praised Galileo’s revolutionary images (drawings? diagrams?) of Jupiter’s moons:
Leonardo’s stunning anatomical drawings:
The DNA Double-Helix: We all knew that Watson and Crick‘s revelation came with this model: But it’s easy to forget this indispensable antecedent: the enigmatic yet foundational x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin:
“All models are wrong; some are useful.”smiley statistician George Box
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 115
And what sort of deceptive picture did Wittgenstein have in mind? well, how about the 1904 “Plum-pudding model” of what the atom might look like? Wrong, and productive of all sorts of mistaken hypotheses.
Gina credited the beautiful drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal with inspiring and illuminating generations of neuroscientists.
John credits Science in the Marketplace, an edited collection reminding us that even in crowded lecture-halls, to display science may also mean doing science…..
Gael ended his historical tour by praising David Goodsell, cell-painter extraordinaire:
John also raved (as he is wont to do) about cave paintings as the first animation in the world (e.g. these horses from Peche-Merle).

Listen and Read Here:

47 Glimpsing COVID: Gael McGill on Data Visualization

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Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media" (Princeton UP, 2023) Feb 15, 2023

Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media(Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other.

Drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews with leading social media influencers, brand executives, marketers, talent managers, trend forecasters, and others, Emily Hund shows how early industry participants focused on creating and monetizing digital personal brands as a means of exerting control over their professional destinies in a time of acute economic uncertainty. Over time, their activities coalesced into an industry whose impact has reached far beyond the dreams of its progenitors--and beyond their control. Hund illustrates how the methods they developed for creating, monetizing, and marketing social media content have permeated our lives and untangles the unforeseen cultural and economic costs.

The Influencer Industry reveals how, in an increasingly fractured and profit-driven communications environment, the people we think of as "real" are merely those who have learned to exploit the industry's ever-shifting constructions of authenticity.

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Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World" (Little, Brown, 2023) Feb 14, 2023

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.

In Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Little, Brown, 2023), the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. Palo Alto is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, CA and graduated from the University of Maryland. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Lisa Haushofer, "Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition" (U California Press, 2022) Feb 14, 2023

From Gail Borden’s meat biscuit to John Harvey Kellogg’s peptogenic foods for race betterment and Fleishmann’s yeast as both technology of empire and imperfect tool of the global struggle with malnutrition, Lisa Haushofer’s Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition (University of California Press, 2022) brings together case studies of American and British foods developed and marketed in the century 1840-1940 as modern, scientific miracles of nutritional efficiency―of “doing more.”

Wonder Foods deepens our understanding of the dramatic transformations of science, commerce, and their relationship during that century; the effects that those changes had on how food was conceptualized and consumed; and the ways in which these foods were entangled with destructive forces including imperialism and eugenics, racism and sexism.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Bioethics, Humility, and Responsibility: A Conversation with Arthur Caplan Feb 13, 2023

For this episode we welcome Dr. Arthur Caplan, who is currently the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. Dr. Caplan is the author or editor of 35 books and more than 800 papers in peer reviewed journals. His most recent books are Vaccination Ethics and Policy (MIT Press, 2017, with Jason Schwartz) and Getting to Good: Research Integrity in Biomedicine (Springer, 2018, with Barbara Redman). Our conversation ranges from Dr. Caplan’s own experiences with polio as a child, intellectual and epistemic humility and bioethics, the shift “customerization” of patients and students, and professor watchlists.

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American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D Feb 13, 2023

Eric Hintz, a historian and fellowship coordinator with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, talks about his book, American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The two discuss why independent inventors are often invisible in histories of 20th century invention and innovation, the role that independent inventors played in the two world wars, and the complicated history of gender and race around invention, which was a path of both promise and risk for women and black people.

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Lee D. Baker, "From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954" (U California Press, 1998) Feb 13, 2023

On today’s podcast we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Lee D. Baker’s book From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (University of California Press, 1998). From Savage to Negro examines the relationship between the discipline of anthropology and the construction of racial categories used for African Americans in the United States. He analyzes how “ideas about racial inferiority were supplanted by notions of racial equality in law, science, and public opinion” (2). Dr. Baker and I had a conversation about his intellectual foundations, how he came to write the book, his work doing public anthropology by appearing in documentaries, Zora Neale Hurston, and more.

Lee D. Baker is the Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology, African & African-American Studies, and Sociology at Duke University. He is the author of From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (University of California Press, 1998) and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Duke University Press, 2010). He edited Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (Blackwell, 2004).

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Gun-Detecting AI, Infrastructure, and Bureaucracy Feb 12, 2023

Aaron Gordon, Senior Writer at Motherboard, Vice’s science and technology website, talks about his co-authored article, “‘The Least Safe Day’: Rollout of Gun-Detecting AI Scanners Has Been a ‘Cluster,’ Emails Show,” with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. They also discuss Gordon’s career trajectory, going from a sports reporter to a writer focused on infrastructure, maintenance, bureaucracy, and related topics. Additionally, the two chat about systematic bottlenecks around electric vehicles, a promising technology too-often cast as a cure-all.

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Ijlal Naqvi, "Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan" (Oxford UP, 2022) Feb 11, 2023

Pakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn't. Despite prioritization by successive governments, targeted reforms shaped by international development actors, and featuring prominently in Chinese Belt and Road investments, the Pakistani power sector continues to stifle economic and social life across the country. Why?

In Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan (Oxford UP, 2022), Ijlal Naqvi explores state capacity in Pakistan by following the material infrastructure of electricity across the provinces and down into cities and homes. Naqvi argues that the national-level challenges of crippling budgetary constraints and power shortages directly result from conscious strategic decisions that are integral to Pakistan's infrastructural state. As he shows, electricity governance in Pakistan reinforces unequal relations of power between provinces and the federal center, contributes to the marginalization of subordinate groups in the city, and cements the patronage-based relationships between Pakistani citizens and the state that have been so detrimental to development progress.

Looking through the lens of the electrical power sector, Access to Power reveals how Pakistan actually works, and to whose benefit.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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The Future of the News: A Discussion with Roger Mosey Feb 11, 2023

What is the future of news? In the twentieth century Western-educated journalists championed impartial, unbiased news – which always seemed rather odd as everyone agreed it wasn’t possible for journalists to shed all their biases. That fundamental contradiction has been replaced by something even more problematic – fake news and worse than that, fake news which people believe and even the idea that everyone can publish their own news. So where are we headed in the twenty first century. Roger Mosey was a senior BBC editor and is now master of Selwyn College Cambridge

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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James Raven, "The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book" (Oxford UP, 2022) Feb 11, 2023

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book(Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope.

The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craftsmanship, dissemination, reading and debate.

Yet the history of books is not simply a question of material form, nor indeed of the history of reading and reception. The larger question is of the effect of textual production, distribution and reception - of how books themselves made history. To this end, each chapter of this volume, succinctly bounded by period and geography, offers incisive and stimulating insights into the relationship between books and the story of their times.

James Raven is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Formerly he was Reader in Social and Cultural History, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. He is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous books in early modern and modern British, European and colonial history, including Judging New Wealth (1992); The Practice and Representation of Reading (1996); The English Novel 1770-1829 (2000); Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing (2000); London Booksellers and American Customers (2002); Lost Libraries (2004); The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (2007); Books between Europe and the Americas (2011); Publishing Business (2014) and Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (2014).

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm.

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The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication Feb 10, 2023

Communication researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt talks about her book, The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication, as well as some of her recent and forthcoming pieces on the digital technology industry with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Weiss-Blatt’s work examines both the rise of the “techlash”—the development of negative public and expert sentiment about the digital technology industry—and how company public relations efforts responded to this development. Weiss-Blatt and Vinsel also talk about how some claims about the negative impacts of social media do not seem to hold up to empirical scrutiny and what all of this means for regulation of the digital technology industry.

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The Geopolitics of Microchips: China, the EU, and the US Feb 10, 2023

What would happen if microchips suddenly disappeared from our world? From phones to cars, medical equipment to heating units, they are crucial for the safe and smooth functioning of much of society. While they may not actually disappear anytime soon, we have learned from the COVID pandemic about the real and potential consequences of an essential microchips shortage. Listen to Hermann Aubié, senior researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku in Finland, speak about the current state of the complex global microchips industry and attempts by governments to control its technology and supply-chain. Dr. Aubié focuses in particular on the United States' 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and October Export Rules, largely considered to target China's capacity to produce advanced microchips. Learn about responses by Taiwan, the largest producer of advanced microchips with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), as well as the position of the European Union, itself dealing with ongoing negotiations to finalize the EU Chips Act. Dr. Aubié speaks to Satoko Naito, also of the Centre for East Asian Studies.

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Seeing Truth in the Archives Feb 09, 2023

Joel Sweimler, Exhibition Specialist at the American Museum of Natural History, talks about his career at the museum, working on Seeing Truth, and what his favorite object in the collection happen to be this week.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod

Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute

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How a California Electricity Utility Caused Deadly Wildfires Feb 08, 2023

Journalist Katherine Blunt, who writes about renewable energy and utilities for the Wall Street Journal, talks about her new book, California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America’s Power Grid with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book tells the fascinating story of how declining performance at an electrical utility eventually led to wildfires and staggering loss of human life. Blunt and Vinsel also talk about what this story means for the future of electricity utilities in the face of global climate change.

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Jeremiah McCall, "Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History" (Routledge, 2022) Feb 07, 2023

Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History(Routledge, 2022) is a complete handbook to help pre-service teachers, current teachers, and teacher educators use historical video games in their classes to develop critical thinking skills. It focuses on practical information and specific examples for integrating critical thinking activities and assessments using video games into classes. Chapters cover the core parts of planning, designing, and implementing lessons and units based on historical video games.

Topics include:

Talking to administrators, parents, and students about the educational value of teaching with historical video games.
Selecting games that are aligned to curricular goals by considering the genres of historical games.
Planning and implementing game-based history lessons ranging from whole class exercises, to individual gameplay, to analysis in groups.
Employing instructional strategies to help students learn to play and engage in higher level analysis
Identifying and avoiding common pitfalls when incorporating games into the history class.
Developing activities and assessments that facilitate interpreting and creating established and new media.

Gaming the Past also includes sample unit and lesson plans, worksheets and assessment questions, and a list of historical games currently available, both commercial and freely available Internet games.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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“Tech” Journalism and the Many Lives of Stewart Brand Feb 07, 2023

Journalist John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for over forty years. In this interview with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel, Markoff talks about his long career, how he became a “tech journalist” long before that term even existed, and how he came to write his new book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Markoff and Vinsel also talk about how Brand’s life is interwoven with the history of Silicon Valley and the technology its companies have made.

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Christiaan De Beukelaer, "Trade Winds: A Sailing Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping" (Manchester UP, 2023) Feb 05, 2023

How can we build greener infrastructure in the face of the global climate emergency? In Trade Winds: A Sailing Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping(Manchester UP, 2023), Christiaan De Beukelaer, a Senior Lecturer in Arts and Cultural Management at the University of Melbourne intertwines an depth analysis of modern shipping, with a memoir of being aboard a sailing ship during the 2020 pandemic. The book is a fascinating read, with both an extensive critique of the failures of the global shipping and trade system to be sustainable, as well as offering moving insights into a unique experience of a very different form of 2020’s lockdown. Concluding with both the return to land, and a detailed consideration of how shipping, trade, and the world might adapt to the climate crisis, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in a sustainable future for the planet.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Emily Strasser, "Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History" (UP of Kentucky, 2023) Feb 05, 2023

In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees—from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers—were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs.

It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world, learned the true purpose of the local industry. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project for the express purpose of developing the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Emily Strasser exposes the toxic legacy—political, environmental, and personal—that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world. Sifting through archives and family memories, and traveling to the deserts of Nevada and the living rooms of Hiroshima, she grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work. She learns that during the three decades he spent building nuclear weapons, George suffered from increasingly debilitating mental illness. Returning to Oak Ridge, Strasser confronts the widespread contamination resulting from nuclear weapons production and the government's disregard for its impact on the environment and public health. With brilliant insight, she reveals the intersections between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy within the nuclear industry, which persists, with grave consequences, to this day.

Emily Strasser: Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist’s Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow.

Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books.

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The Promises and Perils of Hype in Science and Technology Feb 05, 2023

Journalist and STS graduate student Gemma Milne talks about her book, Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book examines how hype works and how it plays out in a number of scientific and technical fields, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, brain implants, cancer drugs, fusion energy, and the future of food.

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Thomas Poell et al., "Platforms and Cultural Production" (Polity, 2022) Feb 04, 2023

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our co-hosts Aswin Punathambekar and Jing Wang discusses the book Platforms and Cultural Production (2021) by Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg, and Brooke Erin Duffy.

You’ll hear about:

How this collaborative project came about, given each of the authors has distinct interests and disciplinary orientations;
Given the two keywords of “platforms” and “cultural production,” how did the authors make sense of these keywords in relation to broader processes of digital infrastructures and imaginaries;
How three key sections – social media, games, and journalism – were identified by the authors to explain the idea of “platformization”;
How the platforms work as multi-sided markets and the approaches to account for the dynamism and lifecycles at work in platform economies;
A discussion of Twitter as a useful case of platformization to grasp the challenges of platform governance;
Why the authors chose to specifically focus on the role and agency of cultural producers;
How to study cultural practices in various platforms across a wide variety of sociopolitical contexts in both Global North and South;
The structural inequalities of platform economies, the precarity of the platform-dependent labor market, and the efforts of cultural producers to face insecurity;
The cultural meanings of “creativity” and “authenticity” and the tension between the profit-driven platform logic and the individual search for belonging in social media such as TikTok;
The relevance of cultural production and platforms to understanding the present and future of democratic governance and civic life in the post-truth era;
The next collaborative project, such as a second volume, conferences, and research networks.

About the book

Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. You can find the book from Polity Press HERE.

Authors:

Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam, program director MA Media Studies, and director of the Research Priority Area on Global Digital Cultures.

David B. Nieborg is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough with a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information.

Brooke Erin Duffy is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she is also a member of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty.

Co-Hosts: Aswin Punathambekar is Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

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The Internet, Inequality, and the “Digital Divide” Feb 04, 2023

Information scholar Daniel Greene, an assistant professor at University of Maryland, talks about his book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The Promise of Access examines how the “digital divide” became a policy problem, and draws on fascinating ethnographies of a “tech” startup, a public library, and a charter school to examine how organizations come to chase technological solutions to social problems.

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The Future of Nuclear Fusion: A Discussion with Sharon Ann Holgate Feb 04, 2023

How useful will nuclear fusion be? In a major breakthrough last year at the National Ignition Facility in California, 192 lasers achieved fusion – and created energy - for the first time. It was clearly an important moment. But might the development of fusion technology come too late? Owen Bennett Jones speaks with Sharon Ann Holgate, author of Nuclear Fusion: The Race to Build a Mini Sun on Earth (Icon Books, 2022).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Amy S. Bruckman, "Should You Believe Wikipedia?: Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Feb 03, 2023

As we interact online we are creating new kinds of knowledge and community. How are these communities formed? How do we know whether to trust them as sources of information? In other words, should we believe Wikipedia?

Should You Believe Wikipedia?: Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores what community is, what knowledge is, how the internet facilitates new kinds of community, and how knowledge is shaped through online collaboration and conversation. Along the way the author tackles issues such as how we represent ourselves online and how this shapes how we interact, why there is so much bad behavior online and what we can do about it. And the most important question of all: What can we as internet users and designers do to help the internet to bring out the best in us all?

Amy Bruckman is Regents’ Professor and Senior Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on social computing, with interests in collaboration, social movements, content moderation, and internet research ethics. She is an ACM Fellow and a member of the ACM CHI Academy. Bruckman received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab's Epistemology and Learning group in 1997, and a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1987.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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Curtis Runstedler, "Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) Feb 03, 2023

Curtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of this relationship between alchemical narrative and exemplum in the poetry of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century before exploring its diffusion in lesser-known anonymous poems and recipes in the fifteenth century, namely alchemical dialogues between Morienus and Merlin, Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves, and an alchemical version of John Lydgate’s poem The Churl and the Bird. It investigates how this exemplarity can be read as inherent to understanding poetic narratives containing alchemy, as well as enabling the reader to reassess the understanding and expectations of science and narrative within medieval English poetry.

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Computers, Information, and Decision-Making Feb 03, 2023

Samantha Kleinberg, an associate professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, talks about a book she’s been writing on how we can (and can’t) use information to make better decisions with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Kleinberg and Vinsel also talk about barriers to artificial intelligence getting dramatically better anytime soon, and why ideas, like “the singularity,” are mere fantasies.

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Nick Seaver, "Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Feb 02, 2023

The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver describes how the makers of music recommendation navigate these tensions: how product managers understand their relationship with the users they want to help and to capture; how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing; and how engineers imagine the geography of the world of music as a space they care for and control.

Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation(U Chicago Press, 2022) rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, drawing attention to the people who build and maintain them. In this vividly theorized book, Seaver brings the thinking of programmers into conversation with the discipline of anthropology, opening up the cultural world of computation in a wide-ranging exploration that travels from cosmology to calculation, myth to machine learning, and captivation to care.

Nick Seaver is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts University.

Mathew Gagné is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University.

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Horton's Cosmic Zoom: A Discussion with Zachary Horton Feb 02, 2023

Today Recall this Book welcomes Zachary Horton, Associate Professor of Literature and director of the Vibrant Media Lab at University of Pittsburgh; game designer, filmmaker and camera designer. Out of all these endeavors, he came to talk about his book The Cosmic Zoom Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation.

This dizzying book begins with a bravura description of a movie we both loved as kids: The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. It's a view of two people enjoying a picnic zooms up and away to show their surroundings, all the way up into space then zooms back in for a close-up of the hand of the picnicker, ending top at the atomic level . The book, uses the cosmic zoom as a starting point to develop a cross-disciplinary theory of scale as mediated difference.

Zack shares his worries about scale literacy, and what happens when we diverge from the "meso-scale of the human sensorium." John approaches scale by way of Naturalism and SF in the late 19th century, both of which refuse the meso-scale aesthetic realism of their day in order to anchor it at a different scale. Elizabeth asks about temporal scales and geology's activation of human sense of humans' scalar insignificance.

Mentioned in this episode:

Italo Calvino The Complete Cosmicomics
The Holy Bible
Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: the University in 40 Jumps
PBS, The Bigger Picture
Voltaire, Micromegas
Mark Twain, 3000 Years Among the Microbes

Read transcript here.

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Inventing American Telecommunications Feb 01, 2023

Historian Richard John, professor of journalism at Columbia University, talks about his book, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Network Nation is a history of the telegraph and telephone in the United States, and one of its key findings is that, from the very beginning of these technologies, thinking about the state, regulation, and ideas of political economy was at the heart of business strategy. John and Vinsel also talk about the nature of historical research and why it is so important to go back to primary sources.

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Angela Vanhaelen, "The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths" (Penn State UP, 2022) Jan 30, 2023

Angela Vanhaelen's The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths(Penn State University Press, 2022) opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures (automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub gardens—where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated artifacts—shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform.

Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century. It will appeal in particular to scholars in art history and early modern studies.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Public Thinking: Social Media and the New 'Public Intellectual' Jan 30, 2023

We have usually relied on public intellectuals to provide facts, ideas, and cultural leadership--though not all have lived up to the ideal of “speaking truth to power.” Today, however, online networks and social media mean we are all public intellectuals, and we have new responsibilities that come with this role.

Guests:

Cornel West, professor at Union Theological Seminary and author of, among other works, Black Prophetic Fire.
George Scialabba, author of What Good Are Intellectuals Good For?, and many other works.

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The History of Teletherapy Jan 30, 2023

Hannah Zeavin, lecturer in the department of History and member of the executive committees of both the Center for New Media and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at University of California, Berkeley, talks about her book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The booktracks the history of teletherapy, which Zeavin defines as therapeutic interaction over distance, and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. The book starts with letters sent through the mail and ends in our current coronavirus catastrophe. Zeavin and Vinsel also talk about the complexities and potential harms of going back fully in-person, including how it will negatively affect disabled people.

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Collaborations between Cold War Scientists and Artists Jan 29, 2023

Patrick McCray, Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, talks about his book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The book shows how artists eagerly collaborated with engineers and scientists to explore new technologies and create visually and sonically compelling multimedia works after World War II. McCray and Vinsel also discuss how this history connects to more recent developments such as the creation of the MIT Media Lab and so-called “STEAM education.”

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Peter Jones and Kristel van Ael, "Design Journeys Through Complex Systems" (Bis Publishers, 2022) Jan 29, 2023

As I slowly settle into 2023 — reflecting on the blur that was 2022 — I can’t help but think about the complex problems (aka big messes!) we face at every turn: from increasingly devastating manifestations of the climate emergency, to the ubiquitous homelessness crisis, to the perplexing challenge of accessing a family physician in prosperous regions such as British Columbia, Canada. At the same time I am buoyed by the promise of Systems Thinking. Systems practices can take many forms and have the potential to inform — and guide us through — sensible, comprehensive and creative problem-solving.

Here on this channel, we have explored some of the origins of systems and cybernetics by talking to knowledgeable experts from across the globe. Today’s systems thinkers and practitioners are building upon a rich tradition, and are activating systems lineages in incredibly interesting ways. I’ve recently been drawn to works that highlight the application of systems — especially those with intriguing connections to other disciplines. The book that is the subject of this episode does just that by exploring the intersection of systems and design thinking. Design Journeys for Complex Systems: Practice Tools for Systemic Design (Bis Publishers, 2022) is a designer's handbook to learn systemic design tools to engage stakeholder groups in collaborative design to address complex societal systems.

Authors Peter Jones and Kristel Van Ael describe how systemic design uses systems thinking and service design to address large-scale societal contexts and complex socio-technical systems. These are contexts characterized by social and technological complexity, high uncertainty, and often problematic outcomes. They describe the function of design as “system sensemaking” and using a tour guide metaphor, the book trains people's mindsets and provides tools for dealing with hyper complexity, to enable understanding of systemic problems, and to build capacity to collaborate in teams to produce action proposals.

A little bit about the authors of Design Journeys for Complex Systems:

Dr. Peter Jones teaches systemic design and health service design in the MDes programs at Toronto’s OCAD University, is a co-founder of the Systemic Design Association. Kristel Van Ael is a business partner at Namahn, a humanity-centered design agency based in Brussels, and is lead author of the Service Design and Systemic Design toolkits.

It was a pleasure to talk to Peter and Kristel. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

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The Future of Computer Chips: A Discussion with Julian Kamasa Jan 28, 2023

Microchips are both important and in short supply. So how important? And what can be done to make them more plentiful? Also, what are the geopolitical implications of having the production of microchips concentrated in relatively few hands. Owen Bennett Jones talks microchips with Julian Kamasa of the Centre for Security Studies in Zurich.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 2) Jan 28, 2023

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents shouldn’t ignore: how to overcome aggression and tribalism, and how to sustain cooperation in a modern pluralist world.

Guests:

Diane Paul, professor emerita of the University of Massachusetts, Boston and research associate at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Ben Allen, associate professor of mathematics at Emmanuel College.
Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard University and bestselling author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and many others.

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The History of Electricity in Mexico Jan 27, 2023

In her detailed cultural history of technological change, Electrifying Mexico, Diana Montaño argues that ordinary Mexicans became electrifying agents who actively negotiated the extent and manner electricity entered their lives and lived spaces in Mexico City. An Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Montaño's teaching and research interests broadly include the construction of modern Latin American societies with a focus on technology and its relationship to nationalism, everyday life and domesticity.

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Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023) Jan 27, 2023

Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 (Oxford UP, 2023) traces the history of unregulated drug use and dependency before 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act limited sales of opiates and cocaine under US law. Many Americans used opiates and other drugs medically and became addicted. Some tried ‘Hasheesh Candy’, injected morphine, or visited opium dens, but neither use nor addiction was linked to crime, due to the dearth of restrictive laws. After the Civil War, American presses published extensively about domestic addiction. Later in the nineteenth century, many people used cocaine and heroin as medicine.

As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK.

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Dissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 1) Jan 27, 2023

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents shouldn’t ignore: how to overcome aggression and tribalism, and how to sustain cooperation in a modern pluralist world.

Guests:

Diane Paul, professor emerita of the University of Massachusetts, Boston and research associate at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Ben Allen, associate professor of mathematics at Emmanuel College.
Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard University and bestselling author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and many others.

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Virtually Violent: Are Online Attacks "Violence?" Jan 26, 2023

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, vulnerable communities have been hit especially hard by disruptive online attacks. But calling these attacks "violent" could jeopardize the future of disruptive protests designed to protest those same communities.

Guests:

Erica Chenoweth, professor of human rights and international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and author of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know.
Dr. Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.
Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.

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The Archaeology of Innovation Jan 26, 2023

Catherine Frieman, an associate professor of European Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, talks about her recent book, An Archaeology of Innovation: Approaching Social and Technological Change in Human Society, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Her book offers a long-term perspective on innovation that only archaeology can offer and draws on case studies from across human history, from our earliest hominin ancestors to the present. The book makes several different arguments, but one of them is that our present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations—especially so called “disruptive innovations”—ignores the complex social, technological, and environmental systems that undergirds successful societies.

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Postscript: Narrative and Influence Activities in the Russo-Ukraine War Jan 26, 2023

For almost a year now, we have been absorbing news and information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There are a variety of different, or competing, narratives to explain and define what we understand about the origins of this conflict and the ongoing military successes and failures on the ground in Ukraine and in Russia. I had the chance to interview Jordan Miller for PostScript (a special series that allows scholars to comment on pressing contemporary issues) about his work on narrative and attempts to influence the activities within the field of battle in Ukraine. Miller is finishing his dissertation on this topic at the War Studies Program at the Royal Military College of Canada. Miller’s research specifically focusses on these narrative dynamics, which are influential to battlefield success and potentially the outcome of this war. In our discussion, we examine the various points of information that were being put forward by Russia and by the United States before Russia moved into Ukraine in February of 2022. The intention of this approach is to “inoculate” the public by highlighting the misleading or false narratives that will be forthcoming to try to shape global understandings of the war. As the war progressed, Ukraine also actively tried to shape perception of its own capacity, heroics, and commitment to success against Russian aggressions. We also saw a shift in approaches in the fall and winter since there was concern about the impact of energy scarcity in western Europe and in Ukraine.

Miller’s work builds on basic concepts like propaganda – and what ultimately makes this effective within situations like Ukraine, or other global military contests. As we discuss on the podcast, the images and ideas that have come out of Ukraine—of humanized citizens and soldiers, of the citizen army there that has come forward to push against the Russian war machine, of soldiers adopting cats and dogs as they continue to fight—all contribute to an overall concept of the Ukrainian people and their capacity to potentially defeat the Russian Army. Ukrainian efforts in this regard also speak to particular audiences, like NATO member countries and their citizens, the United Nations General Assembly, as well as to Russian citizens and soldiers. This kind of effort—to communicate ideas and images to key audiences is an important component of the useful implementation of narrative within the field of battle, even if it is not on the battlefield itself.

Join us for this conversation about the capacity to manage narrative within global political situations – and how this applies, in particular, the current war in Ukraine.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Engineering and Social Justice Jan 25, 2023

Donna Riley, professor and head of the school of engineering education at Purdue University, talks about her path, her work, and her 2008 book, Engineering and Social Justice, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. If technologies and infrastructures embody moral and political values, what should engineering students be taught about their roles in society? Riley and Vinsel also talk about how universities have changed since Riley’s book came out and Riley’s hopes for social justice in engineering education going forward.

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Ajay Agrawal et al., "Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence" (HBR Press, 2022) Jan 24, 2023

Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines describe what you can do to prepare. Banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, retail. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into many industries around the world. But the truth is, it has just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions to drive strategic business decisions--powering and accelerating business. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform. The disruption that comes with such transformation is yet to be felt--but it is coming. How do businesses prepare?

In Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence (HBR Press, 2022), they go further to reveal AI as a prediction technology directly impacting decision-making and to teach businesses how to identify disruptive opportunities and threats resulting from AI. Their exhaustive study of new developments in artificial intelligence and the past history of how technologies have disrupted industries highlights the striking phase we are now in: after witnessing the power of this new technology and before its widespread adoption--what they call "the Between Times." While there continue to be important opportunities for businesses, there are also threats of disruption. As prediction machines improve, old ways of doing things will be upended. Also, the process by which AI filters into the many systems involved in application is very uneven. That process will have winners and losers. How can businesses leverage, or protect, their positions? Filled with illuminating insights, rich examples, and practical advice, Power and Prediction is the must-read guide for any business leader or policy maker on how to make the coming AI disruptions work for you rather than against you.

Interviewee Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab and the CDL Rapid Screening Consortium, a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute and the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy.

He has published academic articles in marketing, statistics, law, management, medicine, political science, refugee studies, physics, computing, and economics. Avi is a former Senior Editor at Marketing Science. His work on online advertising won the INFORMS Society of Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award. He testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on competition and privacy in digital advertising. His work has been referenced in White House reports, European Commission documents, the New York Times, the Economist, and elsewhere.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Climate of Denial: Why Do Americans Doubt Climate Change? Jan 23, 2023

Human-caused climate change is real and growing in impact. Yet many Americans see climate change as a belief that they can opt out of. Two belief structures are to blame: American Protestantism and postmodernism.

Guests:

Tanya Luhrmann, professor of anthropology and psychology at Stanford University and author of When God Talks Back.
Gary Aylesworth, professor emeritus of philosophy at Eastern Illinois University.
Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and author of Post-Truth.

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Amy Kohout, "Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers" (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Jan 22, 2023

The US military didn't just conquer its way across the US West and the Pacific - it also collected and categorized across these spaces too. In Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Colorado College's Amy Kohout examines the role of soldiers in the construction of imperial knowledge. By examining how soldiers interpreted the people and places they encountered in the West and in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, Kohout explains how science and the military worked hand in hand to define ideas like wilderness and nature in places newly acquired and explored by the growing American empire. The book addresses a range of topics, from birds to the Black Hills to World's Fairs, and shows how following one's sources can lead a historian to some very interesting, as well as messy, places and conclusions.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Deafness “Cures” in History Jan 22, 2023

Jaipreet Virdi talks about her book Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The book details the long history of attempts to “fix” deaf people, including a great deal of quackery. Towards the end of the conversation, Virdi and Vinsel also talk about what a world beyond solutionist fantasies that disability can be “cured” would look like.

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Helen Anne Curry, "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction" (U California Press, 2022) Jan 21, 2023

In Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction(U California Press, 2022), historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.

Isobel Akerman is a History PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying biodiversity and botanic gardens.

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Trend Forecasting and the Business of the Future Jan 21, 2023

Devon Powers, a professor of advertising, media, and communication at Temple University, talks about her book, On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Powers’ book examines the world of futurists, cool hunters, and forecasters who sell people advice about tomorrow. Powers and Vinsel discuss about how we should think about the influence of such individuals, given that their predictions are often misleading and inaccurate. They also talk how the making of futures can become more just and inclusive.

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The Thought of Ivan Illich Jan 20, 2023

Author L. M. Sacasas talks about the life, thought, and legacy of the Catholic priest, philosopher, and social critic Ivan Illich with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Sacasas and Vinsel discuss Illich’s critiques of bureaucracy, technology, scale, and expertise and how these critiques apply to medicine, education, our credential society, and life with media technologies.

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Automating Finance Jan 19, 2023

Sociologist Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a professor at University of California San Diego, talks about his book Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The book traces the long, largely anonymous, and in some senses boring history of how experts applied computers to financial systems since the 1970s, creating a digital infrastructure of the trading world. The conversation also touches on Pardo-Guerra’s more recent work on how systems of quantitative metrics have been applied to the management of universities and what might be done about it.

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Jennifer Forestal, "Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments" (Oxford UP, 2021) Jan 19, 2023

Political Theorist Jennifer Forestal’s new book is a fascinating exploration of contemporary democracy and how it operates in different spaces. Forestal’s avenue into the question of democracy and the space in which it functions comes out of the idea of how spaces are designed and for what reasons. This idea of built environments—be they city centers in urban areas, software architecture, or the existence and width of sidewalks—contribute to how we, as individuals and community members, operate in those spaces. Forestal is paying particular attention to participatory democracy, where community members come together to solve problems collectively.

Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments (Oxford UP, 2021)weaves together the concrete, the actual spaces where we can gather together or where we are pushed apart, and the theoretical, the way democracy, as a concept, draws on the will of the people to govern themselves. In examining democratic theory, Forestal integrates work from Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Dewey, all of whom provide frameworks for thinking about and understanding interactions between individuals and the effort to share responsibility to govern in common.

Forestal unpacks the many ways that built environments guide our choices and behavior—from how the layout of a grocery store pushes us towards certain kinds of purchases, to the design of sidewalks or the absence of sidewalks as determining our public engagement or disengagement—and how this is an often overlooked or obscured exertion of power, especially political power. The power of the built environment trains us in a variety of ways, and this is an area where changing the design of the space in which we exist can also change our behavior and can shift our perspectives. Democratic theory is predicated on individuals acting together, and the space in which we do this contributes to the success of these efforts, or their fragmentation. Social media spaces are very much like the physical built environment, and Forestal examines three different social media spaces, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, exploring how they are and are not hospitable spaces for democracy.

Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments is an original analysis of how physical and virtual spaces provide individuals with barriers or openings to engagement, and how these spaces can shift our behavior and our priorities. Ultimately, democracy is an idea that must be translated by real people in real spaces and places, and how we all engage with one another is not just important, it is the basis for the implementation of this concept of self-government.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Lorraine Daston Books In Dark Times (JP) Jan 19, 2023

Our Books in Dark Times series offered John this 2021 chance to speak with Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her list of publications outstrips our capacity to mention here; John particularly admires her analysis of “epistemic virtues” such as truth to nature and objectivity in her 2007 Objectivity (coauthored with Peter Galison).

Although she “came of age in an era of extreme contextualism” Daston is anything but time-bound. She starts things off in John’s wheelhouse with Henry James, before moving on to Pliny the Younger–no, not the scientist, the administrator! Then she makes a startling flanking maneuver to finish with contemporary Polish poetry. John puffs to keep up…

Discussed in this episode:

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
(Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, American abroad, in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady)
Pliny the Younger, Letters (“the very model of the good civil servant”)
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty
Ovid, Tristia
Zbigniew Herbert, e.g. Mr. Cogito
Wislawa Szymborska View with a Grain of Sand
D. H. Lawrence, “Snake” (and other animal poems)
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (“This [octopus encounter] is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”)
George Herbert, “The Rose“
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961) and The Futurological Congress (1971)

Listen and Read:

41 RTB Books in Dark Times 13: Lorraine Daston, Historian of Science

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BONUS EPISODE: New Books Network and Future Plans Jan 19, 2023

A special bonus episode. Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks about the podcast’s recent move to the New Books Network and plans the Peoples & Things team have for the next year or two.

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Spiritual Machines: Transhumanism and Religion Jan 19, 2023

Ever since early scientists began experimenting with immortality elixirs in the middle ages, religion has been influencing transhumanism. Now, we’re beginning to see transhumanism influencing religion.

Guests

Calvin Mercer, Professor of Religious Studies at East Carolina University
Meghan O’Gieblyn, writer
Blaire Ostler, Director and Former President of the Mormon Transhumanist Association

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Shoddy: Recycled Textiles in History Jan 18, 2023

Historian Hanna Rose Shell, a professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, talks about her book Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Along the way, Shell raises a number of important and interesting things, including the long history of reuse and recycling and how forms of technology and work become tied to social status. With shoddy, it was the anxieties of low class, low social status work and poverty. Shell also discusses how individual technologies become mirrors for the worries, fears, hatreds, and other feelings of society – how when we look into the history of any technology we often see ourselves reflected back.

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South Korea, Technology, and Globalization Jan 16, 2023

Patrick Chung, assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, talks about his research on the rise of shipping and manufacturing in South Korea with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Along the way, Chung provides fascinating insights into the role that both the US Department of Defense and local South Korean actors played in globalization.

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Benjamin Hegarty, "The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2022) Jan 15, 2023

In The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia(Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty.

The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.

Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in:

David Reeve, To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham
Lynette J. Chua, The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life
Anjalee Cohen, Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and Sticking Out

Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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Infrastructure and Inequality Jan 15, 2023

Daniel Armanios, associate professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about his work on infrastructure and inequality with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Armanios’ recent work has focused on coming up with quantitative measures of how infrastructure relates to inequalities around race, gender, and class, both to address historical injustices and to inform future infrastructure construction. Armanios also talks about how he brings these topics into his teaching and his larger project around engineering and social justice.

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Christopher Bartel, "Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time" (Bloomsbury, 2020) Jan 14, 2023

Is it ever morally wrong to enjoy fantasizing about immoral things? Many video games allow players to commit numerous violent and immoral acts. But should players worry about the morality of their virtual actions? A common argument is that games offer merely the virtual representation of violence. No one is actually harmed by committing a violent act in a game. So, it cannot be morally wrong to perform such acts. While this is an intuitive argument, it does not resolve the issue.

Focusing on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies, Christopher Bartel's book Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time (Bloomsbury, 2020) advances debates about the ethical criticism of art, not only by shining light on the interesting and under-examined case of virtual fantasies, but also by its novel application of a virtue ethical account. Video games are works of fiction that enable players to entertain a fantasy. So, a full understanding of the ethical criticism of video games must focus attention on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies.

Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy engages with debates and critical discussions of games in both the popular media and recent work in philosophy, psychology, media studies, and game studies.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Bridget Whearty, "Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor" (Stanford UP, 2022) Jan 14, 2023

Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor(Stanford UP, 2022) demystifies digitization, revealing what it's like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet.

Examining classic late-1990s projects like Digital Scriptorium 1.0 alongside late-2010s initiatives like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and world-famous projects created by the British Library, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Stanford University, and the Walters Art Museum against in-house digitizations performed in lesser-studied libraries, Bridget Whearty tells never-before-published narratives about globally important digital manuscript archives. Drawing together medieval literature, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and imaging sciences, Whearty shines a spotlight on the hidden expert labor responsible for today's revolutionary digital access to medieval culture. Ultimately, this book argues that centering the modern labor and laborers at the heart of digital cultural heritage fosters a more just and more rigorous future for medieval, manuscript, and media studies.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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The Politics of Digital Technology Jan 14, 2023

Meredith Whittaker, co-founder and faculty director of the AI Now Institute and Minderoo Research Professor at New York University, talks about the politics of digital technologies with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The conversation examines Whittaker’s fascinating career moving between industry and academia, her role in the Google walkout, and her hopes for the future, including the role of social movements in fomenting political change.

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The Future of Inequality: A Discussion with Mike Savage Jan 13, 2023

Most people in developed countries think inequality is increasing. And most would also agree that in terms of the global poor, the last 20 years have seen vast improvements with hundreds of millions living much better lives than their parents. These are some of the themes Professor Mike Savage addresses in his book The Return of Inequality: Social change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard UP, 2021).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World Jan 13, 2023

Data journalist Meredith Broussard talks about her book, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The book how artificial intelligence systems do and don’t work and why people have come to have such unrealistic understandings of the technologies’ capabilities. One central factor is what Broussard calls technochauvinism, “the belief that technology is always the solution.” Broussard also discusses her early career as a computer scientist, why she became her journalist, and her hopes for a more humane technological future.

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Harald Koberg, "Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness" (Büchner-Verlag, 2021) Jan 13, 2023

What needs are satisfied in digital gaming? And what does the shift of these need satisfactions into the digital space say about the social realities in which they are embedded?

Harald Koberg lets gamers themselves have their say and follows their traces of the described fascinations and passions in his latest book Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness (Freies Spiel: Digitales Spielen und die Sehnsucht nach Wirkmächtigkeit). The answers found aim at experiences of efficacy: digital games and the communication spaces around them offer particular opportunities to experience one's own decisions and actions as relevant and effective. It is not only about narrated stories and interactions with the game, but also about the rules and limits of communication, spaces of unfolding, self-dramatization, and norm-setting.

Using the examples of adolescent search for free spaces, insecure masculinity, and achievement society overload, Harald Koberg shows why critique of the medium of video games must focus on people and how much can be determined about larger social contexts along the way.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America Jan 12, 2023

Andrew Jewett is the author of Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (2020) and Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (2012). He has taught at Harvard, Yale, NYU, Vanderbilt, and Boston College and held fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the National Academy of Education, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022) Jan 12, 2023

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way.

The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India’s ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar’s Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War(Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India’s nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay’s book can be found here)

Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here.

In this interview, Jay and I talk about India’s nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world’s—or, at least, the U.S.’s–nuclear good graces in 2008.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Understanding Technology Bubbles Jan 11, 2023

Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch, professors of entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, talk about their book, Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Bubbles and Crashes puts forward a parsimonious model of how and when economic bubbles develop around new technologies. In the conversation, Goldfarb and Kirsch reflect on a variety of topics, including why it matters that Elon Musk is such a good story teller, whether we are currently in a technology bubble, and what we can do to prevent bubbles in the future.

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Ciara Breathnach, "Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902" (Oxford UP, 2022) Jan 10, 2023

Ciara Breathnach's book Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902(Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on the evolution of the Dublin City Coroner's Court and on Dr Louis A. Bryne's first two years in office. Wrapping itself around the 1901 census, the study uses gender, power, and blame as analytical frameworks to examine what inquests can tell us about the impact of urban living from lifecycle and class perspectives. Coroners' inquests are a combination of eyewitness testimony, expert medico-legal language, detailed minutiae of people, places, and occupational identities pinned to a moment in time. Thus they have a simultaneous capacity to reveal histories from both above and below. Rich in geographical, socio-economic, cultural, class, and medical detail, these records collated in a liminal setting about the hour of death bear incredible witness to what has often been termed 'ordinary lives'. The subjects of Dr Byrne's court were among the poorest in Ireland and, apart from common medical causes problems linked to lower socio-economic groups, this volume covers preventable cases of workplace accidents, neglect, domestic abuse, and homicide.

Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref

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Poverty, Race, and Rural Sanitation Jan 10, 2023

Catherine Coleman Flowers, activist, author, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and MacArthur “genius prize” winner, talks about her book Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Waste examines the brutal realities of rural sanitation issues, particularly the lack of septic tanks, and how they affect poor, often black, people. Flowers also reflects on growing up in Lowndes County, Alabama and how her family, the Civil Rights Movement, and her faith life led her to be the leader she is today.

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The History of Household Technology from Open Hearth to the Microwave Jan 09, 2023

Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan talks about her book, More Work for Mother, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The book examines the history of how Americans industrialized their homes over the past two hundred years and how supposedly labor-saving technologies led women to do increased housework. Cowan also reflects on what it was like to work as a professor as a woman and mother in the 1970s and how families have changed their relationship to technology and housework in the nearly forty years since the book was published.

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Albert Glinsky, "Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2022) Jan 07, 2023

The Moog synthesizer ‘bent the course of music forever’ Rolling Stone declared.

Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstein hair and pocket protectors. He walked into history in 1964 when his homemade contraption unexpectedly became a sensation---suddenly everyone wanted a Moog. The Beatles, The Doors, The Byrds, and Stevie Wonder discovered his synthesizer, and it came to be featured in seminal film scores including Apocalypse Now and A Clockwork Orange. The Moog's game-changing sounds saturated 60's counterculture and burst into the disco party in the 70's to set off the electronic dance music movement. Bob had singlehandedly founded the synth industry and become a star in the process.

But he was also going broke. Imitators copied his technology, the musicians' union accused him of replacing live players, and Japanese competitors started overtaking his work. He struggled to hang on to his inventions, his business, and his very name. Bob's story upends our notions of success and wealth, showing that the two don't always go together.

In Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution(Oxford UP, 2022), author Albert Glinsky draws on exclusive access to Bob Moog's personal archives and his probing interviews with Bob's family and a multitude of associates, for this first complete biography of the man and his work. Switched On takes the reader on a roller coaster ride at turns triumphant, heart-breaking, and frequently laugh out loud absurd---a nuanced trip through the public and private worlds of this legendary inventor who altered the course of music.”

Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University. He can be reached at nathan.smith@yale.edu.

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Mirror Image: New Technologies and the Self Jan 07, 2023

16th-century glass mirrors and 21st-century camera phones actually share a lot in common; they both are technologies that shaped new forms of the self.

Guests

Ian Mortimer, historian and author of Millennium: From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed Over a Thousand Years
Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and author of I Love My Selfie

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Char Miller, "Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril" (Chin Music, 2022) Jan 07, 2023

A collection of 42 essays meditating on both California’s natural gifts and its natural disasters, Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril(Chin Music, 2022) urges readers to consider their role in the environment, no matter where they live. Char Miller’s approach to his topic is intimate and immediate but also incorporates his perspective as a historian. He weaves the present dilemma of Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite into a reflection on the injustices wreaked upon Indigenous peoples, and a discussion of the Weeks Act of 1911 (read the essay “Upper Reaches” if you’re wondering what that is) into a tale of two environmental historians’ conferences.

Organized into six sections, the book is like a meander through a broad topography, including urban areas, total wilderness, and the uneasy liminal spaces between. Throughout, Miller acknowledges his own, and our collective, role in arriving at this perilous place – and manages to strike a balance between hope and concern. His disarmingly brief essays linger after the words are gone.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author living in Cambridge, England. Long before moving to the UK, she was an Environmental Studies student at UC Santa Cruz.

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Robert M. Geraci, "Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S." (Oxford UP, 2021) Jan 05, 2023

Twenty-first century life is increasingly governed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning, big data analysis, facial recognition, and robotics. For decades, an ideology of apocalyptic progress and cosmic transformation has accompanied the advancement of AI in the United States; that vision is intimately connected to transhumanism, the idea that humanity can transcend its limits, even mortality, using technology. By describing the arrival and reconfiguration of transhumanist ideas in India, Robert M. Geraci's book Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S. (Oxford UP, 2021) reveals how the nexus of religion and technology contributes to public life and our modern self-understanding while suggesting that the apocalyptic approach to AI should be tempered by other visions.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Lorraine Daston Rules the World (EF, JP) Jan 05, 2023

Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022).

Historian of science Lorraine Daston's wonderful new book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022). is just out. Daston's earlier pathbreaking works include Against Nature, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and many co-authored books, including Objectivity (with Peter Galison) which introduced the idea of historically changeable "epistemic virtues."

In this Recall this Book conversation, Daston--Raine to her friends--shows that rules are never as thin (as abstract and context-free) as they pretend to be. True, we love a rule that seems to brook no exceptions: by the Renaissance, even God is no longer allowed to make exceptions in the form of miracles. Yet throughout history, Raine shows, islands of standardized stability are less stable than they seem. What may feel like oppressively general norms and standards are actually highly protected ecotopes within which thin rules can arise. Look for instance at the history of sidewalks (Raine has)!

Raine, Elizabeth and John dive into the details. Implicit and explicit rules are distinguished in the case of e.g. cookbooks and monasteries--and then the gray areas in-between are explored. When students unconsciously ape their teachers, that is a tricky form of emulation--is it even possible to "follow but not ape"? Perhaps genres do this work: The Aeneid is not the Iliad and yet older writers are somehow internalized in the later ones.

Mentioned in the Episode

Karl Polanyi, 1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, on the embeddedness of markets in norms and rules.
John Locke's Second Treatise on Government (1690) denounces the "arbitrary will of another," an early case of seeing will simply qua will is unacceptable.
Arnold Davidson sees genre variation (like Milton learning from Homer) also happening in musical invention.
Michael Tomasello works on children's rule-following and enforcement against violations,
Johannes Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938) with its notion of demarcated "sacred spaces of play" is a touchstone of rule-following Lorraine and John both adore.

Recallable Books

The Rule of Saint Benedict (516 onwards)
Irma Rombauer, Joy of Cooking (1931 onwards) As Elizabeth says, it's from following the rules that joy emerges....
Walter Miller's Canticle for Liebowitz
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864) an instance of the notion that one establishes free will by caprice or defiance against natural laws ("damnit, gentleman, sometimes 2+2=5 is a nice thing too!")

Read the transcript here.

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Samantha Muka, "Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Jan 04, 2023

In Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Samantha Muka, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Stevens Institute of Technology, dives into the unexpected world of tank crafting. Throughout the book, Muka tells the stories behind the development of various kinds of aquariums, such as photography tanks and reef tanks. She explains how the knowledge and ingenuity of a variety of actors have been contributing to furthering our knowledge of oceanic environments. The myriad of technical and technological challenges that arise when attempting to maintain aquatic species in artificial environments has been the source of at least as many experiments in tank tinkering.

Focusing on aquariums as complex, situated, and constantly evolving technological devices, Muka shows how the production of knowledge about the ocean depends on interactions between communities holding different knowledge, expertise, and interests: public aquarists, academic researchers, and hobbyists. Analyzing the “craft circulation” between these three groups, the author provides us with a dynamic picture that challenges a series of assumptions on how scientific knowledge is and can be produced.

More than a history and sociology of tank craft, Oceans under Glass offers a meditation on the necessity of aquariums and their artificiality not only to learn about the ocean, but also to preserve some of their biodiversity. “Imagined worlds”, as Muka puts it, aquariums should also be understood as critical places where our future relationship to the oceans, for better and for worst, is being shaped.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is teaching the Humanities and French language to undergraduates.

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John P. Gluck, "Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey" (U Chicago Press, 2016) Jan 03, 2023

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh the costs of the traumatic effects on the animals; but today, even the researchers themselves have come to question the practice. John P. Gluck has been one of the scientists at the forefront of the movement to end research on primates, and in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey (U Chicago Press, 2016) he tells a vivid, heart-rending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist for animal protection.

Gluck begins by taking us inside the laboratory of Harry F. Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, where Gluck worked as a graduate student in the 1960s. Harlow’s primate lab became famous for his behavioral experiments in maternal deprivation and social isolation of rhesus macaques. Though trained as a behavioral scientist, Gluck finds himself unable to overlook the intense psychological and physical damage these experiments wrought on the macaques. Gluck’s sobering and moving account reveals how in this and other labs, including his own, he came to grapple with the uncomfortable justifications that many researchers were offering for their work. As his sense of conflict grows, we’re right alongside him, developing a deep empathy for the often smart and always vulnerable animals used for these experiments.

At a time of unprecedented recognition of the intellectual cognition and emotional intelligence of animals, Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals is a powerful appeal for our respect and compassion for those creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Through the words of someone who has inflicted pain in the name of science and come to abhor it, it’s important to know what has led this far to progress and where further inroads in animal research ethics are needed.

John P. Gluck is professor emeritus of psychology and a senior advisor to the president on animal research ethics and welfare at the University of New Mexico. He is also research professor of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and coauthor of The Human Use of Animals.

Callie Smith is a poet and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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Why are Insects so Scary? On Insects in Films. Jan 03, 2023

This episode from the Vault is a lecture by May Berenbaum about why insects are so scary. Professor Berenbaum is an American entomologist whose research focuses on the chemical interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants. She teaches entomology at the University of Illinois, and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2014. She is also the organizer of the annual Insect Fear Film Festival.

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Paul Nelles and Rosa Salzberg, "Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World: The Practice and Experience of Movement" (Amsterdam UP, 2022) Jan 02, 2023

Paul Nelles (Carleton University) and Rosa Salzberg (University of Trento) talk about early modern culture, travel and the joys of editing their new volume, Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World: The Practice and Experience of Movement (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). This book offers a panorama of movement, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world. While the pre-modern centuries have long been portrayed as static and self-contained, it is now acknowledged that Europe from the Middle Ages onwards saw increasing flows of people and goods. Movement also connected the continent more closely to other parts of the world. The present work challenges dominant notions of the 'fixed,' immobile nature of pre-modern cultures through study of the inter-connected material, social, and cultural dimensions of mobility. The case studies presented here chart the technologies and practices that both facilitated and impeded movement in diverse spheres of social activity such as communication, transport, politics, religion, medicine, and architecture. The chapters underscore the importance of the movement of people and objects through space and across distance to the dynamic economic, political, and cultural life of the early modern period.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Donovan O. Schaefer, "Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin" (Duke UP, 2022) Jan 02, 2023

In Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin(Duke UP, 2022), Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer reconceptualizes rationality as defined by affective processes at every level. He introduces the model of "cogency theory" to reconsider the relationship between evolutionary biology and secularism, examining mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s. Along the way, Schaefer reappraises a range of related issues, from secular architecture at Oxford to American eugenics to contemporary climate denialism. These case studies locate the intersection of thinking and feeling in the way scientific rationality balances excited discovery with anxious scrutiny, in the fascination of conspiracy theories, and in how racist feelings assume the mantle of rational objectivity. The fact that cognition is felt, Schaefer demonstrates, is both why science succeeds and why it fails. He concludes that science, secularism, atheism, and reason itself are not separate from feeling but comprehensively defined by it.

This episode's host, Alison Renna, is a PhD candidate in religion and modernity at Yale University.

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Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022) Jan 02, 2023

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez discusses the book The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (2022) by Dr. Lilie Chouliaraki and Dr. Myria Georgiou.

You’ll hear about:

What The Digital Border is about, its importance, and its implication;
How the authors’ previous works helped build the foundation for writing this book collaboratively;
Why and how the authors chose to focus on specific forms of media such as social media and journalism;
A discussion of humanitarian securitization vis a vis entrepreneurial securitization;
How to understand the theoretical shift from the “crisis of migration” to the “crisis of responsibility”;
How do we contend the different temporalities of resistance as various actors produce or respond to border technologies and infrastructures;
As the displacement of people are intensifying, what frameworks and toolkits can be useful for us to rethink global migration against the “crisis of imaginary” (imaginary as a representational framework that people normatively think about certain issues);
What are the futures of globalization and its counter movements in Global North from the perspectives of migration and bordering;
What are the areas the authors wish to further explore in the future.

About the book

What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. You can find this book on the NYU Press website.

Authors:

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director.

Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director.

Host: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he researches and teaches global media cultures, digital technologies, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American media.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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Felicity M. Turner, "Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2022) Jan 01, 2023

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America(UNC Press, 2022) documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before.

Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Ethical AI Dec 31, 2022

In this episode of High Theory, Alex Hanna talks with Nathan Kim about Ethical AI. Their conversation is part of our High Theory in STEM series, which tackles topics in science, technology, engineering, and medicine from a highly theoretical perspective. In this episode, Alex helps us think about the complicated recipes we call “artificial intelligence” and what we mean when we ask our technologies to be ethical.

In the episode Alex references an article by Emily Tucker, called “Artifice and Intelligence,” (Tech Policy Press, 17 March 2022) which suggests we should stop using terms like “artificial intelligence” and an opinion piece in the Washington Post, on a similar theme, by Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, “We warned Google that people might believe AI was sentient. Now it’s happening” (17 June 2022). She also mentions a claim by Blake Lemoine that Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is sentient. We’ll leave that one to your googling, if not your judgment.

Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. You can read her recent article, “AI Ethics Are in Danger. Funding Independent Research Could Help,” co-authored with Dylan Baker in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and learn more about her work on her website.

This week’s image was produced by DALL-E 2 responding to the prompt: "generate the image of an artificial intelligence entity, deciding to protect shareholder interests over public good, in the style of Van Gogh."

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Seeing Truth in Picturing the Pandemic: Dec 29, 2022

Professor Sarah Willen talks about her part in creating the Pandemic Journaling Project and how that has morphed into a series of visual exhibitions that emphasis how we all can work to create new histories, shape archives, and reclaim our own creativity and power.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod

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Ed Cohen, "On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know" (Duke UP, 2022) Dec 28, 2022

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility.

In On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know(Duke UP, 2022), Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

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Luke Munn, "Automation Is a Myth" (Stanford UP, 2022) Dec 27, 2022

For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes. There is the myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone, the generic figure of "the human" at the heart of automation claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation's fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants, people of color, women) than others.

In Automation Is a Myth (Stanford UP, 2022), Munn moves from machine minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to explore the ways that new technologies do (and don't) reconfigure labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced, localized, and racialized understanding of the "future of work."

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Sayan Dey, "Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems" (Routledge, 2022) Dec 26, 2022

Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems(Routledge, 2022) can be read as a systemic long-term counter-intervention strategy against any form of impending pandemics in the post-COVID era and beyond. It argues that anti-nature and capitalistic knowledge systems have contributed to the evolution and growth of COVID-19 across the globe and emphasises the merits of reinstating nature-based and environment-friendly pedagogical and curricular infrastructures in mainstream educational institutions. The volume also explores possible ways of weaving ecology and the environment as a habitual practice of teaching and learning in an intersectional manner with Science and Technology Studies. With detailed case studies of the green schools in Bhutan and similar practices in India, Kenya, and New Zealand, the book argues for different forms of eco-friendly education systems and the possibilities of expanding these local practices to a global stage.

This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of sociology, cultural studies, decolonial studies, education, ecology, public policy social anthropology, sustainable development, sociology of education, and political sociology.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Mariëlle Wijermars et al., "The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) Dec 24, 2022

How has digitalisation changed Russian politics? How has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed Russia studies? What is special about Russia’s approach to algorithmic governance and internet control? Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics from Maastricht University, Mariëlle Wijermars, talks about her ongoing research on Russian politics, internet policy and platform governance.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Mariëlle Wijermars also talks about The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies. This open-access handbook was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020 and was edited by Mariëlle together with Daria Gritsenko and Mikhail Kopotev.

This handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization.

Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars is an Assistant Professor in Cyber-Security and Politics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She is currently a CORE Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where she researches internet freedom and the human rights’ implications of internet policy and platform governance, in particular in authoritarian states.

You can connect with Mariëlle Wijermars on Twitter @Marielle_W_ and on Mastodon @Marielle_W@mastodon.social.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Newsrooms. Her research interests centre around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or on Twitter @JoanneKuai.

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Neurasthenia Dec 23, 2022

In this episode of High Theory, Kim talks with Saronik about neurasthenia. A disease that no longer exists, neurasthenia was a nineteenth century American epidemic of energy depletion. Thinking about this diagnosis can help us understand the social functions of medical knowledge, and how that knowledge changes over time.

In the episode Kim discusses two nineteenth-century medical texts: American Nervousness: It’s Causes and Consequences (New York: Putnam, 1881) by George Miller Beard, which popularized the diagnosis, and Fat and Blood: And How to Make Them (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1877), by S. Weir Mitchell, which popularized the “rest cure” treatment. She also references three scholarly texts: Tom Lutz’s American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Cornell UP, 1992); Carolyn Tomas de la Pena’s The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (NYU Press, 2003); and Anson Rabinbach’s The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (UC Press, 1992).

Kim Adams is one of the co-hosts of High Theory. She works as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Humanities Institute, where she is writing a book about electricity and the body in American medicine and literature. She also runs a working group on pain management as a cultural process, called Politics of the Prescription Pad. She lives in Rhode Island and has a very large dog named Tag.

This week’s image is a 1907 painting titled “On the Southern Plain” by Frederic Remington. The painting shows soldiers on horseback in the American West. Remington was diagnosed with neurasthenia and treated with the “west cure” (discussed in the episode) by S. Weir Mitchell himself.

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Geert Lovink, "Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism" (Pluto Press, 2019) Dec 22, 2022

Why is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money?

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app.

Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism(Pluto Press, 2019) by Geert Lovink offers a critical analysis of the controversies which drive our online media behaviours. Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies because boredom is the first stage of overcoming ‘platform nihilism’.

Geert Lovink speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the frustrations of studying the internet as it evolves from networks to platforms, the politically-contingent notions of online 'communities', and cycles of ideological production and capture.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic who has chronicled the development of internet and network cultures as they came of age alongside him. He is the author of Zero Comments, Networks Without a Cause, Social Media Abyss, and most recently Struck on the Platform. He is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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John D. Wong, "Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s-1998" (Harvard UP, 2022) Dec 22, 2022

On July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor.

Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong Kong’s aviation, as told in Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s–1998(Harvard University Press, 2022) by John D. Wong and published by Harvard University Press.

Hong Kong’s growth as a hub for commercial aviation was often unplanned, often the result of compromise–and yet wildly successful. The city was able to carve a niche for itself, in both the declining British empire and the wider world, while also having to deal with colonial bureaucracy, geopolitics, fierce competition and an entirely new Communist government across the border.

In this interview, John and I talk about Hong Kong’s history with aviation, from its very start with flying boats and puddlejumpers right through to the jumbo jet era.

John D. Wong is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong. He is also the author of Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hong Kong Takes Flight. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Heather Ford, "Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age" (MIT Press, 2022) Dec 21, 2022

A close reading of Wikipedia's article on the Egyptian Revolution reveals the complexity inherent in establishing the facts of events as they occur and are relayed to audiences near and far.

Wikipedia bills itself as an encyclopedia built on neutrality, authority, and crowd-sourced consensus. Platforms like Google and digital assistants like Siri distribute Wikipedia's facts widely, further burnishing its veneer of impartiality. But as Heather Ford demonstrates in Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age(MIT Press, 2022), the facts that appear on Wikipedia are often the result of protracted power struggles over how data are created and used, how history is written and by whom, and the very definition of facts in a digital age.

In Writing the Revolution, Ford looks critically at how the Wikipedia article about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution evolved over the course of a decade, both shaping and being shaped by the Revolution as it happened. When data are published in real time, they are subject to an intense battle over their meaning across multiple fronts. Ford answers key questions about how Wikipedia's so-called consensus is arrived at; who has the power to write dominant histories and which knowledges are actively rejected; how these battles play out across the chains of circulation in which data travel; and whether history is now written by algorithms.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Jenny L. Davis, "How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things" (MIT Press, 2020) Dec 20, 2022

A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective.

Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things(MIT Press, 2020), offers a useful analytical tool in technology studies—but, Jenny L. Davis argues in How Artifacts Afford, it is in need of a conceptual update. Davis provides just such an update, introducing the mechanisms and conditions framework, which offers both a vocabulary and necessary critical perspective for affordance analyses.

The mechanisms and conditions framework shifts the question from what objects afford to how objects afford, for whom, and under what circumstances. Davis shows that through this framework, analyses can account for the power and politics of technological artifacts. She situates the framework within a critical approach that views technology as materialized action. She explains how request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow are mechanisms of affordance, and shows how these mechanisms take shape through variable conditions—perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy.

Putting the framework into action, Davis identifies existing methodological approaches that complement it, including critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), app feature analysis, and adversarial design. In today's rapidly changing sociotechnical landscape, the stakes of affordance analyses are high. Davis's mechanisms and conditions framework offers a timely theoretical reboot, providing tools for the crucial tasks of both analysis and design.

Jenny L. Davis is Associate Professor of Sociology at Australian National University.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Renee M. P. Teate, "SQL for Data Scientists: A Beginner's Guide for Building Datasets for Analysis" (John Wiley & Sons, 2021) Dec 19, 2022

Economists and other social scientists are used to working with data that comes nicely organized into a table with a series of variable names across the top and a list of observations or datapoints down the right hand side. Data also naturally falls into this format when it comes from surveys we run. But the vast amounts of data generated by businesses and by all our online activities are usually organized in different ways. In corporate settings that first step of getting the right data and putting it into a table where it can be analyzed can be as important and challenging as the subsequent analyses. SQL (Structured Query Language) has been the standard language for accessing information in databases since the 1980s.

In this episode I interview Renee Teate, also known as “Data Science Renee” on Twitter, about her new book, SQL for Data Scientists: A Beginner’s Guide for Building Datasets for Analysis (Wiley, 2022). I learned about Renee from her popular blog and podcast, “Becoming a Data Scientist,” in which she talked about the paths she and others took to becoming a data scientist. While she was coming from more of an engineering background, many economists have been becoming data scientists from the other direction. They are building up their skills with databases and programming to complement their statistical and social science training, either because of new jobs in the tech sector or because of the new academic research possibilities this opens up. SQL is a crucial part of this toolkit, and this book is a great way to get started learning it.

In our conversation, we also discuss her current role as a lead data scientist at higher education analytics company Heliocampus, and some of her tips for aspiring data scientists as they apply for and interview for their first jobs.

Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he created a new Master’s degree in Applied Economics designed specifically to train students in a combination of economics and data science skills that equips them to succeed in the new digital economy.

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Pamela H. Smith, "From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Dec 19, 2022

How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge. In From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (U Chicago Press, 2022), Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today. Focusing on metalworking from 1400-1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present-day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter. Please visit MS FR 640 at The Making and Knowing Project.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Michael Weeks, "Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado" (U Nebraska Press, 2022) Dec 17, 2022

In 1870 several hundred settlers arrived at a patch of land at the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre Rivers in Colorado Territory. Their planned agricultural community, which they named Greeley, was centered around small landholdings, shared irrigation, and a variety of market crops. One hundred years later, Greeley was the home of the world’s largest concentrated cattle-feeding operation, with the resources of an entire region directed toward manufacturing beef. How did that transformation happen? Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado(U Nebraska Press, 2022) is animated by that question.

Expanding outward from Greeley to all of northern Colorado, Cattle Beet Capital shows how the beet sugar industry came to dominate the region in the early twentieth century through a reciprocal relationship with its growers that supported a healthy and sustainable agriculture while simultaneously exploiting tens of thousands of migrant laborers. Michael Weeks shows how the state provided much of the scaffolding for the industry in the form of tariffs and research that synchronized with the agendas of industry and large farmers. The transformations that led to commercial feedlots began during the 1930s as farmers replaced crop rotations and seasonal livestock operations with densely packed cattle pens, mono-cropped corn, and the products pouring out of agro-industrial labs and factories. Using the lens of the northern Colorado region, Cattle Beet Capital illuminates the historical processes that made our modern food systems.

Michael Weeks is a lecturer of history at Utah Valley University.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB. MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or Department of Defense.

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Kelly I. Aliano, "The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture Through Play" (McFarland, 2022) Dec 17, 2022

When viewed through the context of an interactive play, a video game player fulfills the roles of both actor and spectator, watching and influencing a game's story in real time. This book presents video gaming as a virtual medium for performance, scrutinizing the ways in which a player's interaction with the narrative informs personal, historical, social and cultural understanding.

Centering the author's own experiences as both video game player and performance scholar, The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture Through Play (McFarland, 2022) thoroughly applies concepts from theatre and performance studies. Chapters argue that the posthuman player position now challenges what can be contextualized as a lived experience, and how video games can change players' relationships with historical events and contemporary concerns, ultimately impacting how they develop a sense of self.

Using the author's own gaming experiences as a framework, the book focuses on the intersection between player and narrative, exploring what engagement with a storyline reveals about identity and society.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

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Danielle Keats Citron, "The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age" (Norton, 2022) Dec 17, 2022

The boundary that once protected our intimate lives from outside interests is an artefact of the 20th century. In the 21st, we have embraced a vast array of technology that enables constant access and surveillance of the most private aspects of our lives. From non-consensual pornography, to online extortion, to the sale of our data for profit, we are vulnerable to abuse. As Citron reveals, wherever we live, laws have failed miserably to keep up with corporate or individual violators, letting our privacy wash out with the technological tide. And the erosion of intimate privacy in particular, Citron argues, holds immense toxic power to transform our lives and our societies for the worse (and already has).

With vivid examples drawn from interviews with victims, activists and lawmakers from around the world, The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age (Norton, 2022) reveals the threat we face and argues urgently and forcefully for a reassessment of privacy as a human right. And, as a legal scholar and expert, Danielle Citron is the perfect person to show us the way to a happier, better protected future.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Previously, Jake has done some research in mixed reality, human-robot interaction, and AI ethics.

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The Future of the Arms Industry: A Discussion with Pieter D. Wezeman Dec 17, 2022

If you read the business pages of most newspapers, they are filled with stories about the sort of companies that people do business with – airlines, retail outlets, football clubs and the like. There tend to be far fewer stories about the arms industry - unless it’s about some scandal – generally bribes or sales to governments with poor human rights records. So today we are discussing the future of the arms industry with Pieter D. Wezeman who researches these matters at the leading institute in this area, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute or SIPRI.

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Shelley Fraser Mickle, "Borrowing Life: How Scientists, Surgeons, and a War Hero Made the First Successful Organ Transplant a Reality" (Imagine, 2020) Dec 17, 2022

Performed at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1954, the first successful kidney transplant was the culmination of years of grit, compassion, and the pursuit of excellence by a remarkable medical team--Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Joseph Murray, his boss and fellow surgeon Francis Moore, and British scientist and fellow Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. Drawing on the lives of these members of the Greatest Generation, Shelley Fraser Mickle's Borrowing Life: How Scientists, Surgeons, and a War Hero Made the First Successful Organ Transplant a Reality (Imagine, 2020) creates a compelling narrative that begins in wartime and tracks decades of the ups and downs, personal and professional, of these inspiring men and their achievements, which continue to benefit humankind in so many ways.

Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History.

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Matthew Hall et al., "Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations" (Routledge, 2022) Dec 16, 2022

This groundbreaking book argues that the fundamental issues around how victim-survivors of digital gender-sexual violations (DGSVs) are abused can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics, constructions, positioning and logics. Digital Gender-Sexual Violations: Violence, Technologies, Motivations (Routledge, 2022) builds upon Hall and Hearn's previous work, Revenge Pornography, but has been substantially reworked to examine other forms of DGSV such as upskirting and sexual deepfakes, as well as the latest research and debates in the field.

Facilitated by developments in internet and mobile technologies, the non-consensual posting of real or fake sexually explicit images of others for revenge, entertainment, homosocial status or political leverage has become a global phenomenon. Using discourse and thematic analytical approaches, this text examines digital, survey and interview data on gendered sexual violences, abuses, and violations. The words of both the perpetrators and victim-survivors are presented, showing the impact on victim-survivors and the complex ways in which phallocentric power relations and existing hegemonic masculinities are reinforced and invoked by perpetrators to position girls and women as gendered and sexualised commodities to be traded, admired, violated or abused for the needs of individual men or groups of men.

Hall, Hearn, and Lewis explore their research in a broader social and political context, evaluating and suggesting changes to existing legislative frameworks, education, victim support, and practical and policy interventions against DGSV, along with wider political considerations. This is a unique resource for students, academics and researchers as well as professionals dealing with issues around digital gender-sexual violations.

Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their latest book: The Other #MeToos. Follow them on Twitter.

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Samuel J. Redman, "Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums" (Harvard UP, 2022) Dec 15, 2022

In Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Harvard University Press, 2022 for paperback edition), Samuel J. Redman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, uncovers the equally fascinating and disturbing history behind the vast collections of human remains assembled by medical and natural history museums since the mid-nineteenth-century across the United States. The book shows how, in the aftermaths of the Civil War, human remains, and especially those of Indigenous people, were seen as valuable specimens for the advancement of medicine, before turning into crucial pieces of evidence for scientific racism, and eventually serving as material for the study and exhibition of human prehistory.

Bone Rooms charts the trouble waters of the birth and evolution of bone rooms and offers a most timely historical account, as debates around the restitution of human remains and cultural artifacts held in museums have been gaining momentum in the recent years. Behind this important past lies the profound question of how to ensure that the quest for scientific knowledge does not, even if inadvertently, erase the humanity or cultural value of what have been seen as specimens only. As Redman advocates, “Museums can serve as key spaces to attempt to come to terms with the colonial legacy attached to archaeology and anthropology, through partially redressing past wrongs while continuing the search for new knowledge.”

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Karen Levy, "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" (Princeton UP, 2022) Dec 15, 2022

Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance(Princeton UP, 2022) examines how digital surveillance is upending life and work on the open road, and raises crucial questions about the role of data collection in broader systems of social control.

Karen Levy takes readers inside a world few ever see, painting a bracing portrait of one of the last great American frontiers. Federal regulations now require truckers to buy and install digital monitors that capture data about their locations and behaviors. Intended to address the pervasive problem of trucker fatigue by regulating the number of hours driven each day, these devices support additional surveillance by trucking firms and other companies. Traveling from industry trade shows to law offices and truck-stop bars, Levy reveals how these invasive technologies are reconfiguring industry relationships and providing new tools for managerial and legal control--and how truckers are challenging and resisting them.

Data Driven contributes to an emerging conversation about how technology affects our work, institutions, and personal lives, and helps to guide our thinking about how to protect public interests and safeguard human dignity in the digital age.

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Seeing Truth in Variability, Creativity, and Building Biological Collections Dec 15, 2022

In this episode, scientists speak back to ideas about collection building, knowledge making, and the role of art and creativity in research. Bernard Goffinet and Eric Schultz, professors in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, discuss their roles in building and maintaining UConn’s Biodiversity Research Collections and their vision for how scientific knowledge, data, and research will shape our future.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod

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Yasmine Ali, "Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America" (Citadel Press, 2023) Dec 14, 2022

The first book to examine the rarely-acknowledged Waverly Train Disaster of 1978 - the catastrophic accident that changed America forever and led to the formation of FEMA.

Coinciding with the 45th anniversary of the event, Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America (Citadel Press, 2023) is a tribute to the first responders, as well as an examination of the strengths and vulnerabilities in rural America. On the night of February 22, 1978, a devastating freight train derailment drastically altered Waverly, Tennessee, and its place in history. This was one of the worst train explosions of the twentieth century, killing 16 people, injuring hundreds more, and causing millions of dollars in damage. What could have been dismissed as a single community's terrible misfortune instead became the catalyst for radical change, including the formation of FEMA, much-needed reforms in emergency response training, and the creation and enforcement of national and state safety regulations. Response to the disaster reshaped American infrastructure and laid the groundwork for the future of emergency management and disaster relief . . . and yet most Americans have never heard of Waverly.

Dr. Yasmine S. Ali, an award-winning medical writer and Waverly native, sets out to change this in Walk Through Fire, drawing from over a decade of meticulous research and interviews with survivors, first responders, and other firsthand accounts, including those of her own parents, first-generation Americans who were on call at the local hospital that treated the victims. Ali weaves a compelling narrative of small-town tragedy set against the broader backdrop of U.S. railroad history, rural healthcare, and other elements of American infrastructure that played a part in the creation--and the aftermath--of the Disaster. A tribute to resiliency and a call to action, Walk Through Fire tells the harrowing story of the Waverly Train Disaster from the perspectives of those who survived it, and those who still feel its impact today, illuminating how much a nation still has to learn from one small town in Tennessee.

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Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022) Dec 13, 2022

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future(Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. This book helps foreign countries, companies, and other organizations prepare for a future shaped by sustainability, technology—and a dramatic new chapter for China and our world.

Sample takeaways:

China-linked political + economic risk isn’t going away and will get worse. No-regrets supply chain diversification will only make more sense over time.
Environmental sustainability will become a bigger and bigger priority in the China market because of growing regulatory + consumer pressure. This is both in direct operations & larger supply chains.
Data privacy, security, and surveillance will pose growing dilemmas for multi-national companies. Data governance is becoming more fragmented, and compliance and cross-border transfer more difficult. Firms need to prepare for “data de-globalization.”
China is becoming a more isolated, but still large & important, innovation ecosystem. How to access & leverage this ecosystem, and the talent within it, will become a bigger challenge as China-global research collaborations, student flows, etc. shrink.
China’s frothy biotech sector is cooling, but will still be a major growth driver in the years ahead. And developments in biotech will disrupt and reshape many sectors and industries via biometrics, biomaterials, etc.

Dr. Scott Moore is an acclaimed authority on China, sustainability, and technology whose career has spanned the U.S. government, multi-lateral institutions, and academia. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives. Before returning to academia, Dr. Moore worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change at the U.S. Department of State and at the World Bank. He graduated from Princeton University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), distinguished professor of history at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

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Jacalyn Duffin, "Covid-19: A History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) Dec 12, 2022

For two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world. The physician and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin presents a global history of the virus, with a focus on Canada.

In Covid-19: A History( McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Duffin describes the frightening appearance of the virus and its identification by scientists in China; subsequent outbreaks on cruise ships; the relentless spread to Europe, the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere; and the immediate attempts to confront it. COVID-19 next explores the scientific history of infections generally, and the discovery of coronaviruses in particular. Taking a broad approach, the book explains the advent of tests, treatments, and vaccines, as well as the practical politics behind interventions, including quarantines, barrier technologies, lockdowns, and social and financial supports. In concluding chapters Duffin analyzes the outcome of successive waves of COVID-19 infection around the world: the toll of human suffering, the successes and failures of control measures, vaccine rollouts, and grassroots opposition to governments' attempts to limit the spread and mitigate social and economic damages. Closing with the fraught search for the origins of COVID-19, Duffin considers the implications of an "infodemic" and provides a cautionary outlook for the future.

Corinne Doria is a historian specializing in the social history of medicine. She is a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen and teaches Disability Studies at Sciences-Po (Paris). Her work focuses on the history of ophthalmology and visual impairment in the West.

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Barbara Katz Rothman, "The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic" (Stanford UP, 2021) Dec 11, 2022

We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity—drivers of our access to basic goods and services—rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. Moreover, a vast and powerful global market has risen up around the empire, making it one of the largest economic forces in the world.

In The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic (Stanford UP, 2021), Katz Rothman shows that biomedicine has the key elements of an imperial power: economic leverage, the faith of its citizens, and governmental rule. She investigates the Western colonial underpinnings of the empire and its rapid intrusion into everyday life, focusing on the realms of birth and death. This provides her with a powerful vantage point from which to critically examine the current moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the power structures of the empire in unprecedented ways while sparking the most visible resistance it has ever seen.

Barbara Katz Rothman is Professor of Sociology, at the City University of New York. She has served as President of Sociologists for Women in Society; the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. Her awards include the Jesse Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association, and an award for "Midwifing the Movement" from the Midwives Alliance of North America, and a distinguished Chair in Health Sciences from the Fulbright Association. She is the author of numerous books, most recently A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization (2016).

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Nancy J. Nersessian, "Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science" (MIT Press, 2022) Dec 10, 2022

Based on examining physics and the practices of physicists, philosophers of science often see models in science as representational intermediaries between scientific theories and the world. But what do scientists do when they don’t yet have the models or the theories?

In Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science (MIT Press, 2022), Nancy Nersessian reveals the bootstrapping creation of models in two biomedical engineering and two integrated system biology labs. Based on her cognitive ethnographic investigations, she argues that models are cognitive artifacts that are central components in distributed cognitive-cultural systems that include the scientists that create and use them. Nersessian, who is Regents’ Professor of Cognitive Science (emerita) at Georgia Institute of Technology, shows how the scientists build the epistemic infrastructure they need, along with the novel modeling practices that their cognitive artifacts enable, in order to do the science they want to do. Her teams’ investigations also led to developing award-winning curricula for science students.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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Matthew Thaler, "No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Dec 10, 2022

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. In No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World(Cambridge UP, 2021), Mathias Thaler examines expressions of the utopian imagination, with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now.

Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com.

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Julia Ticona, "Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age" (Oxford UP, 2022) Dec 09, 2022

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Florence Madenga discusses the book Left to Our Own Devices

Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (2022) by Dr. Julia Ticona.

You’ll hear about:

Dr. Ticona’s intellectual trajectory and how her first monograph has been transformed from a dissertation project into a book
What audience the book is intended for and what critical scholarship means for the author
The design of the research project and the processes and ethics of conducting research about the gig economy
How the ongoing pandemic has changed or altered the way Dr. Ticona thinks about this book
The core arguments and take-away points from the book around keywords such as “digital inequality,” “precarity,” “platform economy,” and “digital hustle”
The global implications of a study on low-wage gig economy workers in the American labor market
The question of agency in workers’ everyday life and how people survive in the global platform economy
The gendered nature of labor in the gig economy and what Dr. Ticona calls “tethered care work”
How we can better understand the complexity of our mediated worlds and precarious work beyond the tech companies and digital platforms

About the book

Over the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.

You can find this book on the Oxford University Press website.

Author: Julia Ticona is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Host: Florence Madenga is a doctoral fellow at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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The Future of AI in Work: A Discussion with Daniel Susskind Dec 09, 2022

What exactly can artificial intelligence do? It’s an issue some of the professions are grappling with – on the face of it, law is an area that rests on fine human judgment – but in fact many of tasks it involves can be performed by AI and if that is true for law then presumably it is also true for many other areas too. Daniel Susskind of Oxford University discusses his book The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the World of Human Experts (Oxford UP, 2022),

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Dan Bouk, "Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them" (MCD, 2022) Dec 08, 2022

Dan Bouk is a writer, professor, and cultural historian of quantification, or as Bouk puts it, the history all fascinating things “shrouded in the cloak of borningness.” In Bouk’s book, Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (2022), the author invites readers into the social life of 1940 US Census. The stories of the people who wrote the question, asked the questions, and answered them—or refused—is a lesson in how power is negotiated on the ground. Bouk shows that the census questions were—and are—not only queries but also statements about what matters, who counts, and the values and lifeways celebrated and suppressed in American democracy.

The book is written with such humor, tenderness, and insight that it is worth offering friends as a gift. It received a rave review in the New York Times and will be of immediate interest to readers interested in Science & Technology Studies, American History, the data sciences, and social justice.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Dec 08, 2022

Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), addresses scholars and readers interested in literary studies, visual culture, and transformative justice in modern America. The book also transcends these areas to speak to readers in science & technology studies, in history of technology, or broadly interested in science justice.

The premise of the book is that America was living through two collective experiments as it suffered the aftermath of the failed Reconstruction following the US Civil War. The first was the experiment of Black freedom and the second was the experiment of new technologies to document (Black) life at a time when standards for how to use and to read their outputs were excitingly wide-open. In the hands of Black cultural producers, the yield of these technologies was “undisciplined data,” which pointed to the possibility of true freedom not mere social reform as defined by White progressives.

Readers follow writer Zora Neale Hurston working with anthropological film, WEB Dubois working with the social survey as a foundation for his urban sociology as well as for his literary novels, and other historical actors who were using documentary technologies to demonstrate the impossibility of capturing the fullness of Black sociality with those very technologies. Producing “undisciplined data,” Womack suggests, is not only a practice of the past, but the hope for greater justice in the present day.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Science & Technology Studies.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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James A. Geraghty, "Inside the Orphan Drug Revolution: The Promise of Patient-Centered Biotechnology" (Cold Springs Harbor Lab Press, 2022) Dec 06, 2022

Advances in medicine have made possible better treatments for widespread, familiar human illnesses like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Yet there are thousands of much less common diseases, most of genetic origin, each classed as rare because it afflicts only a small number of people. These patient groups were long ignored by a pharmaceutical industry that judged them too small to provide a return on the investment needed to develop an effective remedy. Yet these orphaned diseases collectively caused misery and expense, often far greater than did more common ailments, for tens of millions of individuals and their families.

Forty years ago, a revolution that transformed the prospects of patients with rare diseases was lit by three sparks. The passage of the 1983 U.S. Orphan Drug Act resulted from public pressure brought by rare disease patients, their families, and advocates. The AIDS epidemic triggered additional activism, compounded when patients with the rare disease hemophilia became HIV-positive after infusion of tainted blood products. And the third spark was the emergence in the early 1980s of biotechnology companies like Genentech, Amgen, and Biogen employing then-new genetic engineering instead of conventional approaches to pharmaceutical development. Soon after, Genzyme became the first company to develop a treatment for a rare genetic disorder, Gaucher disease, which would come to transform the industry.

Jim Geraghty has been a passionate participant in the orphan drug revolution since its inception--a leader in the field as a strategy consultant, biotechnology executive, and venture entrepreneur. Inside the Orphan Drug Revolution: The Promise of Patient-Centered Biotechnology (Cold Springs Harbor Lab Press, 2022) is in part a history, with eyewitness accounts of advances as they occurred and portraits of the pioneering scientists and physicians, tireless activists, and visionary business leaders who made the revolution happen. And it tells deeply personal stories of patients and parents willing to risk new, untried therapies. But Geraghty also uses his exceptional experience and vantage point to look forward to the immense promise of the newest technologies like gene therapy and gene editing for the treatment of patients today and tomorrow. He concludes with thoughtful consideration of important questions. Why do drugs to treat orphan diseases cost so much? How can we ensure they are affordable? How can their effectiveness be responsibly assessed? And how can access to them be expanded internationally? This book graphically and poignantly illustrates how far an important healthcare revolution has come and reminds us that if not nurtured, it could end before its immense promise has been fulfilled.

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Melissa Kagen, "Wandering Games" (MIT Press, 2022) Dec 04, 2022

In Wandering Games(MIT Press, 2022), Melissa Kagen analyzes wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022) Dec 01, 2022

The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam(Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing states embraced global governance in hopes of a bright and peaceful tomorrow. While fears of nuclear war were ever-present, it was the perceived threat to their preeminence that drove Washington, Moscow, and London to throw their weight behind the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) banishing nuclear testing underground, the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco banning atomic armaments from Latin America, and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) forbidding more countries from joining the most exclusive club on Earth.

International society, the Cold War, and the imperial U.S. presidency were reformed from 1945 to 1970, when a global nuclear order was inaugurated, averting conflict in the industrial North and yielding what George Orwell styled a "peace that is no peace" everywhere else. Today the nuclear order legitimizes foreign intervention worldwide, empowering the nuclear club and, above all, the United States, to push sanctions and even preventive war against atomic outlaws, all in humanity's name.

Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics of American grand strategy during World War II.

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94 Elizabeth Kolbert on the Nature of the Future (GT, JP, NS, HY) Dec 01, 2022

How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide underground.

"You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel called to some kind of action when you see what we humans have done." But Elizabeth wonders what the best alternatives are. Should we set aside half the earth for biodiversity? Why is it that genetic engineering has become the cultural flashpoint for fear of unintended consequences? There are no easy answers at this point. Elizabeth thinks that if you're not frightened by what's going right now, including American politics around vaccination refusal, you're not paying attention.

Because this episode is associated with the annual Brandeis New Student Book Forum, first-year students Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman (who also goes by Nidhi) jump in with some thoughts.

Noticing repeated mentions of Henry David Thoreau in the book, Nidhi inquires about his role in inspiring Elizabeth's writing. Hedy's question about environmental justice and the comparative agency of rich and poor countries moves Elizabeth to talk about the staggering inequities in consumption and the goal of convergence in carbon emissions. What is the mechanism by which this happens, though? Do humans have the right to implement these technologies? Is the solution to issues created by human control really more control?

Mentioned in the Episode

E.O. Wilson, Half Earth
"Gene editing could revive a nearly lost tree"; the chestnut gene splicing debate in a recent Washington Post article. (Elizabeth has reported on Bill Powell's work)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Cli-fi: climate fiction in all its bleakness. For example, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence: how to see things happening at different time scales.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
Henry David Thoreau, "the touchstone" of American nature writing. e.g Walden (1854); dated yes, but "in most ways ahead of his time"
Des Poissons dans le Desert: Elizabeth's book title in French!

Listen to the episode here.

Read the transcript here.

Special credit and thanks for this episode goes to Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman, who took part in the audio editing and the preparation of the show notes, respectively.

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Huw J. Davies, "The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War" (Yale UP, 2022) Dec 01, 2022

In The Wandering Army: The Campaigns that Transformed the British Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022), Dr. Huw J. Davies presents a compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe.

At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Army’s military tactics were tired and outdated, stultified after three decades of peace. The army’s leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic and the force was in dire need of modernization—both in terms of strategy and in leadership and technology.

In this wide-ranging and highly original account, Dr. Davies traces the British Army’s accumulation of military knowledge across the following century. An essentially global force, British armies and soldiers continually gleaned and synthesized strategy from warzones the world over: from Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Dr. Davies records how the army and its officers put this globally acquired knowledge to use, exchanging information and developing into a remarkable vehicle of innovation—leading to the pinnacle of its military prowess in the nineteenth century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz, "The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Nov 30, 2022

Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but also the very nature of people's everyday lives. It is of vital importance that we understand the economic principles governing how these platforms operate. Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz's book The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy (Cambridge UP, 2021) explains the driving forces behind any platform business with a focus on network effects. The authors use short case studies and real-world applications to explain key concepts such as how platforms manage network effects and which price and non-price strategies they choose. This self-contained text is the first to offer a systematic and formalized account of what platforms are and how they operate, concisely incorporating path-breaking insights in economics over the last twenty years.

Martin Peitz is professor of economics at the University of Mannheim (since 2007), a director of the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation – MaCCI (since 2009). He has been member of the economic advisory group on competition policy (EAGCP) at the European Commission (2013–2016), an academic director of the Centre on Regulation in Europe, CERRE (2012–2016) and head of the Department of Economics (2010–2013). Martin has widely published in leading economics journals. He also frequently trains and advises government agencies in Europe and abroad on competition and regulation issues.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Sofya Glazunova, "Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) Nov 30, 2022

Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) examines various forms of Russian online anti-establishment resistance, focusing in particular on the period between 2016 and 2019. Grounded in qualitative content analysis of the YouTube videos and social media activities of opposition activist Alexey Navalny and his associates, the book covers the history of digital resistance associated with this cohort, its style and strategies, and the impact that this form of political communication has had on the Russian public sphere.

Sofya Glazunova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Glazunova specialises in political communication, digital resistance, Russian media, disinformation, fake news, and digital propaganda. In addition to Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (2022), she is the co-author of the Global Disinformation Index report entitled Disinformation Risk Assessment: The Online News Market in Australia (2021).

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Michael Bess, "Planet in Peril: Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Nov 29, 2022

Michael Bess is the Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His fifth and most recent book is Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. This study focuses on the existential risks posed by climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics (natural or bioengineered), and artificial intelligence – surveying the solutions that have been tried, and why they have fallen short thus far. Bess describes a pathway for gradually modifying the United Nations over the coming century so that it becomes more effective at coordinating global solutions. Planet in Peril explores how to get past ideological polarization and global political fragmentation, drawing lessons from the experiences of environmental movements and European integration.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

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Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021) Nov 29, 2022

Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a time of intensified interest in issues of race and racism, the burgeoning influence of corporations like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has sparked debates about the commodification of identity, the antiracist potential of genetic science, and the promises and pitfalls of using DNA as a source of "objective" knowledge about the past.

Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) engages these debates by looking at the ways genomic ancestry testing has been used in Brazil and the United States to address the histories and legacies of slavery, from personal genealogical projects to collective racial politics. Reckoning with the struggles of science versus capitalism, "race-blind" versus "race-positive" public policies, and identity fluidity versus embodied experiences of racism, Permanent Markers seeks to explain why those of us in societies that have broadly embraced the social construction of race continue to search for, and find, evidence that our bodies are marked permanently by the past.

Sarah Abel is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Centre of Latin American Studies.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California.

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Tim Walker and Lucian Morris, "The Handbook of Banking Technology" (John Wiley & Sons, 2021) Nov 28, 2022

In The Handbook of Banking Technology (John Wiley & Sons, 2021), Walker and Morris provide a first comprehensive view of the systems that support a bank. During the interview, they bring out the interactions of these components and how the themes they touch on in the book come together. Years of first-hand experience combined with detailed research come together to explain the intricacies of the technological architecture of modern banking. Quite often the authors provide a long-term perspective of how these applications develop in order to provide a better understanding of how we got to where we are.

The other podcast mentioned in this interview is James Bessen "The New Goliaths".

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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Joseph Silk, "Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind" (Princeton UP, 2022) Nov 28, 2022

Just over half a century since Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the lunar surface, a new space race to the Moon is well underway and rapidly gaining momentum. Laying out a vision for the next fifty years, Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind(Princeton UP, 2022) is astrophysicist Joseph Silk's persuasive and impassioned case for putting scientific discovery at the forefront of lunar exploration.

The Moon offers opportunities beyond our wildest imaginings, and plans to return are rapidly gaining momentum around the world. NASA aims to build a habitable orbiting space station to coordinate lunar development and exploration, while European and Chinese space agencies are planning lunar villages and the mining of precious resources dwindling here on Earth. Powerful international and commercial interests are driving the race to revisit the Moon, but lunar infrastructures could also open breathtaking vistas onto the cosmos. Silk describes how the colonization of the Moon could usher in a thrilling new age of scientific exploration, and lays out what the next fifty years of lunar science might look like. With lunar telescopes of unprecedented size situated in permanently dark polar craters and on the far side of the Moon, we could finally be poised to answer some of the most profound questions confronting humankind, including whether we are alone in the Universe and what our cosmic origins are.

Addressing both the daunting challenges and the immense promise of lunar exploration and exploitation, Back to the Moon reveals how prioritizing science, and in particular lunar astronomy, will enable us to address the deepest cosmic mysteries.

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Christopher Willoughby, "Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools" (UNC Press, 2022) Nov 24, 2022

Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be viable as experimental subjects, as cadavers, and for use in the training of medical students. By taking a hard look at the racial ideas of both northern and southern medical schools, Christopher D. E. Willoughby reveals that racist ideas were not external to the medical profession but fundamental to medical knowledge.

In this history of racial thinking and slavery in American medical schools, the founders and early faculty of these schools emerge as singularly influential proponents of white supremacist racial science. They pushed an understanding of race influenced by the theory of polygenesis—that each race was created separately and as different species—which they supported by training students to collect and measure human skulls from around the world. Medical students came to see themselves as masters of Black people's bodies through stealing Black people’s corpses, experimenting on enslaved people, and practicing distinctive therapeutics on Black patients. In documenting these practices Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools(UNC Press, 2022) charts the rise of racist theories in U.S. medical schools, throwing new light on the extensive legacies of slavery in modern medicine.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, "Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back" (Beacon Press, 2022) Nov 23, 2022

Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both.

In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back (Beacon, 2022), scholar Dr. Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.

By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.

In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.

Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away—before it’s too late.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Aynne Kokas, "Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty" (Oxford UP, 2022) Nov 22, 2022

On August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese government refused to let Bytedance sell TikTok on national security grounds. As it turns out, the pandemic era platform for dance challenges is a Chinese government asset.

As digital technologies and social media have evolved into organizing forces for the way in which we conduct our work and social lives, the business logic that undergirds these digital platforms has become clear: we are their product. We give these businesses information about everything--from where we live and work to what we like to do for entertainment, what we consume, where we travel, what we think politically, and with whom we are friends and acquaintances. We do this willingly, but often without a full understanding of how this information is stored or used, or what happens to it when it crosses international boundaries. As Aynne Kokas argues, both corporations and governments traffic much of this data without our consent--and sometimes illegally--for political and financial gain.

In Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty(Oxford UP, 2022), Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens, putting US national security at risk. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fuelled China's technological goldrush. In turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Ann-Christine Duhaime, "Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2022) Nov 22, 2022

Why is it so difficult to adopt a more sustainable way of life, even when convinced of the urgency of the environmental crisis? If adopting new behaviors beneficial for the environment is so challenging at the individual level, no wonder it is even harder at the community or governmental levels. Seeing individual and collective behaviors not changing, or not rapidly enough, eventually leads to the belief that nothing can be done and that human beings are just “hard-wired” that way.

This is where, quite unexpectedly, neuroscience can help us tackle the multidimensional and unprecedented problem that is the environmental crisis. In Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis(Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime argues that by considering the long evolutionary history of the human brain and its reward-system, one can better understand, and therefore grow less frustrated about, why adopting sustainable behaviors can be so challenging. “Our brains are amazing," writes Dr. Duhaime, "– fine-tuned, capable, adaptable, to handle the incredible tasks of human life in its infinite variety and with its infinite day-to-day challenges. […] But there is a mismatch between the pace of evolution of this extraordinary able, pulsating, three-pound bundle of sparks and what we need to meet the challenge of this extraordinary rapid Age of the Anthropocene.”

It is this mismatch that Dr. Duhaime proposes to analyze in this surprising book. Using insights provided by research at the intersection of neuroscience, environmental sciences and a number of other fields, Minding the Climate invites us to think about what a “sustainable brain” might look like and how to achieve it.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Probability Nov 22, 2022

In this episode of High Theory, Justin Joque talks with Júlia Irion Martins about Probability. This conversation is part of our High Theory in STEM series, which tackles topics in science, technology, engineering, and medicine from a highly theoretical perspective. If you want to learn more about the philosophical, technical, and economic implications of probability, check out Justin’s new book, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism (Verso, 2022).

Justin Joque is a visualization librarian at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Justin’s research focuses on philosophy, media, and technology and he is also the author of Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

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Anna Pendergrast and Kelly Pendergrast, "More Zeros and Ones: Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand" (Bridget Williams Books, 2022) Nov 21, 2022

Many of today’s digital technologies inadvertently amplify the power structures and prejudices of wider society. By examining the way digital tools and platforms are designed, built, and maintained, this BWB Text aims to identify how we can do better for everyone in Aotearoa.

Following on from the success of Shouting Zeros and Ones (BWB Texts), More Zeros and Ones: Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2022) includes writers with speciﬁc expertise in applying topics such as environmental science, law, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi to recent developments in technology. More Zeros and Ones continues the exploration of emerging issues for digital technology and society in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Contributors

Dr Nessa Lynch, Amber Craig, Hīria Te Rangi, Dr Sarah Bickerton, Sarah Pritchett, Hannah Blumhardt, Dr Paul Smith, Professor Graeme Austin, Siobhan McCarthy, Dr Karaitiana Taiuru, Dr Andrew Chen, Dr Karly Burch, Dr Moana Nepia, Nicholas Jones, Dr Marama Muru-Lanning, Dr Henry Williams, Mira O’Connor, and Professor Anna Brown.

Key Point About the Book:

Highlights the opportunities created when using inclusive approaches in the development of new technology
Discusses ‘systemic oppression’ in the creation of technology for the general consumer
Brings to light the dangers of creating new technologies without input from the people most affected by them

Ed Amon has a Master of Indigenous Studies from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is a columnist at his local paper: Hibiscus Matters, and a Stand-up Comedian. His main interests are indigenous studies, politics, history, and cricket. Follow him on twitter @edamoned or email him at edamonnz@gmail.com

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Robert P. Crease with Peter D. Bond, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022) Nov 18, 2022

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a world-class, Nobel Prize-winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world's finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory.

A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues such as vaccines, climate change, and toxic chemicals. This story has all the elements of a thriller, with vivid characters and dramatic twists and turns. Key players include congressmen and scientists; journalists and university presidents; actors, supermodels, and anti-nuclear activists, all interacting and teaming up in surprising ways. The authors, each with insider knowledge of and access to confidential documents and the key players, reveal how a fact of no health significance could be portrayed as a Chernobyl-like disaster. The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory (MIT Press, 2022) reveals the gaps between scientists, politicians, media, and the public that have only gotten more dangerous since 1997.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Plumbing the Depths of Wikipedia: A Conversation with Annie Rauwerda Nov 17, 2022

In 2020, during the nadir of the pandemic, Annie Rauwerda began posting strange, humorous, and obscure Wikipedia entries on social media. She dubbed her project Depths of Wikipedia, and after several hundred posts on Instagram and Twitter, she began to amass a following of fellow Wikipedians. More than two years later, Depths of Wikipedia has more than one million followers and a touring live comedy show.

In addition to professionally browsing Wikipedia, Annie works with the Wikimedia Foundation on a number of exciting projects. In this interview, Annie describes her spectacular rise to Wiki-fame, her burgeoning career as a comedian, and the future of the internet.

Depths of Wikipedia is a bright spot in our fraught social media landscape. Follow Annie's work on Instagram (@depthsofwikipedia) and Twitter (@depthsofwiki). You can also find her other projects, live shows, and a submission form for Wiki finds here: https://linktr.ee/depthsofwiki...

Annie Rauwerda is a writer and the creator of Depths of Wikipedia (Twitter: @anniierau).

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Anita Guerrini, "Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) Nov 16, 2022

Experimentation on animals—particularly humans—is often assumed to be a uniquely modern phenomenon. But the ideas and attitudes that encourage biological and medical scientists to experiment on living creatures date from the earliest expressions of Western thought. In Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Aristotle to CRISPR (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) (Johns Hopkins UP), Anita Guerrini looks at the history of these practices and examines the philosophical and ethical arguments that justified them.

Guerrini discusses key historical episodes in the use of living beings in science and medicine, including the discovery of blood circulation, the development of smallpox and polio vaccines, and recent research in genetics, ecology, and animal behavior. She also explores the rise of the antivivisection movement in Victorian England, the modern animal rights movement, and current debates over gene therapy and genetically engineered animals. We learn how perceptions and understandings of human and animal pain have changed; how ideas of class, race, and gender have defined the human research subject; and that the ethical values of science seldom stray far from the society in which scientists live and work.

Thoroughly rewritten and updated, with new material in every chapter, the book emphasizes a broader understanding of experimentation and adds material on gene therapy, self-experimentation, and prisoners and slaves as experimental subjects. A new chapter brings the story up to the present while reflecting on the current regulatory scene, new developments in science, and emerging genomics. Experimenting with Humans and Animals offers readers a context within which to understand more fully the responsibility we all bear for the suffering inflicted on other living beings in the name of scientific knowledge.

Anita Guerrini is a historian of science and medicine, recently retired as Horning Professor in the Humanities at Oregon State University, where she's been since 2008. Before that she was a professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was educated at Connecticut College and Oxford University and received a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University.

Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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Adam Laats, "Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2020) Nov 16, 2022

Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution(Oxford UP, 2021), Adam Laats reveals that common misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a full century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, America does not now and never has had deep, fundamental disagreement about evolution. Not about the actual science of evolution, that is, and not in ways that truly matter to public policy. Americans do have significant disagreements about creationism, though, and Laats offers a new way to understand those battles. By describing the history of creationism and its many variations, this book demonstrates that the real conflict about evolution is not between creationists and evolution. The true landscape of American creationism is far more complicated than headlines suggest.

Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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On H. G. Well's "The Time Machine" Nov 15, 2022

When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invention, the professionalization of science was still developing. Wells viewed science as an incredibly powerful force. He knew it could either help or hurt humanity--even with that risk, he believed society should fully embrace science. When Wells wrote his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895, he kicked off a 50-year-long writing career. He was a pioneer in the science fiction genre, and his stories have inspired generations of audiences, artists, filmmakers, and other writers around the world. Sarah Cole is the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century and At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, among other works. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod.

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The Future of Data Control: A Discussion with Sarah Lamdan Nov 15, 2022

A few big companies are selling information about us to governments and companies. But beyond a general sense of unease, what do we need to know about this and what do we need to do about it? Professor Sarah Lamdan gives answers to those questions in her book Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolise our Information(Stanford UP, 2022). Listen to her conversations with Owen Bennett Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Matthew Crain, "Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Nov 15, 2022

The contemporary internet's de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising.

The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences of the internet's rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous business model called "surveillance advertising." He draws on a range of primary resources from government, industry, and the press and highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial surveillance.

The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is the result of political choices--not the inevitable march of technology. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google and Facebook, Profit over Privacy argues that the internet did not have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better.

Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Janaki Srinivasan, "The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India" (MIT Press, 2022) Nov 15, 2022

The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India(MIT Press, 2022), written by Janaki Srinivasan and published by MIT Press in October 2022, examines how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications of this for development. Information, says Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice.

In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change.

Countering claims that information is naturally and universally empowering, Srinivasan shows how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender. Srinivasan draws on archival and ethnographic research to challenge the idea of information as objective and factual. Using the concept of an “information order,” she examines how the meaning and value of information reflect the social relations in which it is embedded. She asks why casting information as a tool of development and solution to poverty appeals to actors across the political spectrum. She also shows how the power to label some things information and others not is at least as significant as the capacity to subsequently produce, access, and leverage information.

The more faith we place in what information can do, she cautions, the less attention we pay to its political lives and to the role of specific social structures, individual agency, and material form in the defining, production, and use of that information.

Janaki Srinivasan is Associate Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, in Bangalore, India.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto, "(Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media" (Oxford UP, 2022) Nov 14, 2022

How do transnational Filipino families remain connected through mobile media technologies?

In (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media (Oxford UP, 2022), Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto explains the different ways in which smartphones, messaging apps, and social media facilitate transnational connectivity. He explains how relationships of care, intimacy, and connection to the homeland are established through digital routines shaped by power relations and familial expectations. Aside from providing an overview of the book’s key themes, the podcast goes deep into the methodological complexities of documenting intimate lives through mobile phone technologies as well as the ethical challenges of writing intimate portraits of Filipinos’ everyday lives.Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto is a lecturer at Deakin University in Australia.

Like this interview? You may also be interested in:

Elizaveta Friesem, Media is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Flame (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)
Zoetanya Sujon, The Social Media Age (SAGE, 2021).

Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel.

This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University.

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Ernest M. Valea, "Artificial Intelligence, Reincarnation, and Resurrection: An Inquiry Into the Ultimate Fulfillment of Human Nature" (Resource Publications, 2021) Nov 14, 2022

Ernest M. Valea's Artificial Intelligence, Reincarnation, and Resurrection: An Inquiry Into the Ultimate Fulfillment of Human Nature (Resource Publications, 2021) explores old and new hopes that have emerged in the human quest to defeat death. On the one hand, it answers questions such as: Are we just physical machines of great complexity, with the brain as the hardware on which consciousness operates as its software? If so, can we speculate on ways in which the mind could be uploaded to a machine and no longer suffer the frailty of this biological body? And could an android robot or a mindfile in a computer simulation be conscious? On the other hand, the book examines the hope of survival through reincarnation according to the teachings of Eastern religions and New Age thought. All these topics are discussed from the perspectives of Christian theology and the philosophy of mind. This dual investigation will help Christians formulate a coherent response to old and new challenges to their faith.

Ernest M. Valea is the author of The Buddha and the Christ: Reciprocal Views (2008), Buddhist-Christian Dialogue as Theological Exchange (2015), and The Spiritual Dimension of Alternative Medicine (2020).

Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago.

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Karen Bakker, "The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants" (Princeton UP, 2022) Nov 11, 2022

The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life.

At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton UP, 2022)shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge. We meet scientists using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon. We discover the shocking impacts of noise pollution on both animals and plants. We learn how artificial intelligence can decode nonhuman sounds, and meet the researchers building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. At the frontiers of innovation, we explore digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. Technology often distracts us from nature, but what if it could reconnect us instead?

The Sounds of Life offers hope for environmental conservation and affirms humanity's relationship with nature in the digital age. After learning about the unsuspected wonders of nature's sounds, we will never see walks outdoors in the same way again.

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Sofi Thanhauser, "Worn: A People's History of Clothing" (Vintage, 2022) Nov 11, 2022

Worn: A People's History of Clothing (Vintage, 2022) by Sofi Thanhauser explores linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, wool: through the stories of these five fabrics, she illuminates the world we inhabit in a startling new way, travelling from China to Cumbria to reveal the craft, labour and industry that create the clothes we wear.

From the women who transformed stalks of flax into linen to clothe their families in nineteenth century New England to those who earn their dowries in the cotton-spinning factories of South India today, this book traces the origins of garment-making through time and around the world. Exploring the social, economic and environmental impact of our most personal possessions, Worn looks beyond care labels to show how clothes reveal the truth about what we really care about.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Sarah E. Wagner, "What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home from the Vietnam War" (Harvard UP, 2019) Nov 10, 2022

For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans— and more than 300,000 Vietnamese—involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains: Bringing America's Missing Home from the Vietnam War (Harvard UP, 2019), Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America’s missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America’s most fraught war.

Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace—a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones’ sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.

Sarah Wagner is Professor of Anthropology at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University. Professor Wagner is a social anthropologist whose research explores loss through the lens of war, memory, prolonged mourning, and uncertain death. Studying forensic responses to missing persons, she has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Bosnia and Herzegovina and with the US military, including in Vietnam, in its attempts to account for the Missing In Action (MIA) from the past century's conflicts. Since 2020, she has focused on COVID-19 death and remembrance.

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Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish, "Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Nov 10, 2022

Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish’s edited book Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022) explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power.

Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Veronica Kirin, "Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don't" (2018) Nov 09, 2022

America’s Greatest Generation (born before 1945) witnessed incredible changes in technology and social progress. From simple improvements in entertainment to life-changing medical advances, technology changed the way they live, work, and identify. Sadly, with each passing year, fewer members of the Greatest Generation remain alive to share their wisdom as the last Americans to grow up before the digital revolution.

In 2015, Millennial author and cultural anthropologist Veronica Kirin drove 12,000 miles across more than 40 states to interview the last living members of the Greatest Generation. Stories of Elders is the result of her years of work to capture and share their perspective for generations to come.

Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don't (2018) preserves the wisdom, thoughts, humor, knowledge, and advice of the people who make up one of America’s finest generations, including the Silent Generation. Their stories include the devastation that came from major events in U.S. history like World War I, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and World War II.

The Greatest Generation (many of whom are now centenarians) saw the routine use of airplanes, cars, microwave ovens, telephones, radios, electricity, and the Internet come to fruition in their lifetimes. Their childhoods were simple, relying on outdoor games and imagination for fun. How they went to school, pursued their careers, and raised their kids was radically different than the way we live today.

By chronicling more than 8,000 years of life lived during the most transitional time in American history, Stories of Elders offers old-fashioned wisdom and insight for America’s future generations.

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Andrew Fiss, "Performing Math: A History of Communication and Anxiety in the American Mathematics Classroom" (Rutgers UP, 2020) Nov 09, 2022

Performing Math: A History of Communication and Anxiety in the American Mathematics Classroom(Rutgers University Press, 2020) by Dr. Andrew Fiss tells the history of expectations for math communication—and the conversations about math hatred and math anxiety that occurred in response.

Focusing on nineteenth-century American colleges, this book analyzes foundational tools and techniques of math communication: the textbooks that supported reading aloud, the burnings that mimicked pedagogical speech, the blackboards that accompanied oral presentations, the plays that proclaimed performers’ identities as math students, and the written tests that redefined “student performance.” Math communication and math anxiety went hand in hand as new rules for oral communication at the blackboard inspired student revolt and as frameworks for testing student performance inspired performance anxiety.

With unusual primary sources from over a dozen educational archives, Performing Math argues for a new, performance-oriented history of American math education, one that can explain contemporary math attitudes and provide a way forward to reframing the problem of math anxiety.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The Future of Rules: A Discussion with Lorraine Daston Nov 08, 2022

Which rules do we obey and which ones can we find a way around? What distinctions can be drawn between rules, models to be emulated and algorithms. Lorraine Daston has published widely on the history of science, probability, scientific objectivity and observation, and many other such matters, and she has now published Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton UP, 2022). Listen to her discussion with Owen Bennett Jones about rules.

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Timothy W. Burns, "Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education" (SUNY Press, 2021) Nov 03, 2022

There are few thinkers who engender as much debate about their legacy as Leo Strauss (1899 –1973). His critics and biographers often don’t even agree about what scholarly discipline he practiced. Political theory or philosophy? Was he a proto-neoconservative or a middle-of-the-road Cold War defender of liberal democracy? He is often depicted as a major intellectual influence on sections of the national security state right, especially during the presidency of George W. Bush when he was portrayed as a puppeteer pulling from the grave the strings of such notable hawks as Paul Wolfowitz.

But the writings of Strauss often go unexamined. That is partly because they lean towards the abstruse. Strauss was not a general-audience-friendly public intellectual in his day and much of the homage to and attacks on him at this point are to be found in the pages of academic journals and in the halls of think tanks.

We are fortunate, therefore, that we can turn to the 2021 book, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education by Timothy W. Burns for elucidation of Strauss's thinking about how we can preserve liberal democracy in the face of apathy from moderates, classical liberals and traditional conservatives flummoxed by the rise of an aggressive left that questions whether the United States is a democracy at all and an alienated alt-right that regards liberal democracy as now practiced as a character-sapping anachronism leading to civilizational decline.

We learn from Burns of Strauss's admiration for Winston Churchill and touting of him as an exemplar of greatness within democracy. In one of the most absorbing sections of the book we learn of a 1941 lecture by Strauss entitled, “German Nihilism” in which he examined the arguments of such groups as rightist German students in the 1920s that liberal democracy fostered moral mediocrity.

Burns contrasts in detail the ideas of Strauss and Martin Heidegger and shows that Strauss foresaw that the other man’s emphasis on resoluteness would metastasize into Heidegger’s support for Nazism. Burns tells us that Strauss can speak to us today via his call to defend democratic constitutionalism and its spiritual and religious traditions.

That call can lead to charges of elitism against Strauss because it entailed his championing of the idea of an “aristocracy within democracy,” a cadre of cultivated, well-educated leaders who would help maintain the intellectual and cultural moorings of democracies.

Let’s hear now from Professor Burns about who Leo Strauss was and what he actually wrote and thought.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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Gerd Gigerenzer, "How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms" (MIT Press, 2022) Nov 03, 2022

Doomsday prophets of technology predict that robots will take over the world, leaving humans behind in the dust. Tech industry boosters think replacing people with software might make the world a better place--while tech industry critics warn darkly about surveillance capitalism. Despite their differing views of the future, they all agree: machines will soon do everything better than humans. In How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms(MIT Press, 2022), Gerd Gigerenzer shows why that's not true, and tells us how we can stay in charge in a world populated by algorithms.

Machines powered by artificial intelligence are good at some things (playing chess), but not others (life-and-death decisions, or anything involving uncertainty). Gigerenzer explains why algorithms often fail at finding us romantic partners (love is not chess), why self-driving cars fall prey to the Russian Tank Fallacy, and how judges and police rely increasingly on nontransparent "black box" algorithms to predict whether a criminal defendant will reoffend or show up in court. He invokes Black Mirror, considers the privacy paradox (people want privacy, but give their data away), and explains that social media get us hooked by programming intermittent reinforcement in the form of the "like" button. We shouldn't trust smart technology unconditionally, Gigerenzer tells us, but we shouldn't fear it unthinkingly, either.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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David Kaiser, "Well, Doc, You're In: Freeman Dyson’s Journey through the Universe" (MIT Press, 2022) Nov 02, 2022

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on to explore foundational topics in mathematics, astrophysics, and the origin of life. General readers were introduced to Dyson’s roving mind and heterodox approach in his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, a poignant autobiographical reflection on life and science.

"Well, Doc, You're In": Freeman Dyson’s Journey through the Universe(MIT Press, 2022) (the title quotes Richard Feynman’s remark to Dyson at a physics conference) offers a fresh examination of Dyson’s life and work, exploring his particular way of thinking about deep questions that range from the nature of matter to the ultimate fate of the universe. The chapters—written by leading scientists, historians, and science journalists, including some of Dyson’s colleagues—trace Dyson’s formative years, his budding interests and curiosities, and his wide-ranging work across the natural sciences, technology, and public policy. They describe Dyson’s innovations at the intersection of quantum theory and relativity, his novel nuclear reactor design (and his never-realized idea of a spacecraft powered by nuclear weapons), his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, and his foray into cosmology. In the coda, Dyson’s daughter Esther reflects on growing up in the Dyson household. “Well, Doc, You’re In” assesses Dyson’s successes, blind spots, and influence, assembling a portrait of a scientist’s outsized legacy. Contributors: Jeremy Bernstein, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Esther Dyson, George Dyson, Ann Finkbeiner, Amanda Gefter, Ashutosh Jogalekar, David Kaiser, Caleb Scharf, William Thomas.

Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.

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Ashley Sweetman, "Cyber and the City: Securing London’s Banks in the Computer Age" (Springer, 2022) Nov 01, 2022

Dr.Ashley Sweetman works in cyber security for a London-based global bank and holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. While studying for his PhD he spent a short time as Researcher-in-Residence at No. 10 Downing Street while working for The Strand Group in the Policy Institute at King's. Before this, Ashley studied History at Queen Mary, University of London. Ashley is a proud Welshman and was brought up in Neath, South Wales. He currently lives in North London.

In his first book Cyber and the City: Securing London's Banks in the Computer Age(Springer, 2022), Sweetman provides evidence that cyber security is a long-lived phenomenon. Banks started to worry about it early in the adoption of computers in the late 1950s. The UK has a particular feature where banks rapidly agree on the measures to be taken, making the overall system more resilient.

Sweetman uses a wealth of archival material and introduces de concepts of proportionality and the confidentiality-integrity-availability triumvirate to explain and interconnect the evolution and articulation of security in bank networks.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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Brian A. Wong, "The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That Is Changing the World" (PublicAffairs, 2022) Nov 01, 2022

This podcast features Brian A. Wong, discussing his new book, The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That is Changing the World (Public Affairs, 2022). Brian joined Alibaba early, as its 52nd employee and first American employee, and worked for them for nearly twenty years. His book provides both insider insights and an analytical perspective on how Alibaba grew to become one of the most important companies in the global digital economy. This well-written and engaging book explains Alibaba’s unique organizational culture and how the Alibaba platform has helped spread economic opportunity beyond the elites in China’s big cities to the broader world of small and medium businesses throughout the country.

Brian Wong’s Radii China is an independent media platform founded in 2017 dedicated to bridging the East and West by highlighting topics and issues that connect the world’s young, globally-minded citizens. Listeners interested in the development of the US-China relationship are encouraged to participate in the NCUSCR’s CHINA Town Hall, on November 17th, featuring a national webcast by former Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. Local partner events around the US, including one at the University of San Francisco, provide opportunities to discuss the topic further in person with other community members and local experts on China. In the interview, we also discuss Benjamin Ho’s book Why Trust Matters, featured on this show last year.

Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China and he is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) and USF’s new Center on Business Studies and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific.

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Chris Salter, "Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life" (MIT Press, 2022) Nov 01, 2022

Sensing machines are everywhere in our world. As we move through the day, electronic sensors and computers adjust our thermostats, guide our Roombas, count our steps, change the orientation of an image when we rotate our phones. There are more of these electronic devices in the world than there are people--in 2020, thirty to fifty billion of them (versus 7.8 billion people), with more than a trillion expected in the next decade. In Sensing Machines: How Sensors Shape Our Everyday Life(MIT Press, 2022), Chris Salter examines how we are tracked, surveilled, tantalized, and seduced by machines ranging from smart watches and mood trackers to massive immersive art installations.

Salter, an artist/scholar who has worked with sensors and computers for more than twenty years, explains that the quantification of bodies, senses, and experience did not begin with the surveillance capitalism practiced by Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google but can be traced back to mathematical and statistical techniques of the nineteenth century. He describes the emergence of the "sensed self," investigating how sensor technology has been deployed in music and gaming, programmable and immersive art environments, driving, and even eating, with e-tongues and e-noses that can taste and smell for us. Sensing technology turns our experience into data; but Salter's story isn't just about what these machines want from us, but what we want from them--new sensations, the thrill of the uncanny, and magic that will transport us from our daily grind.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Darts Transit Commission: Silicon Valley’s Car Culture Oct 31, 2022

Paris Marx is one of the sharpest modern writers on Silicon Valley and transit. We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable, of paving over the continent to keep everyone in their cars.

With Paris we’ll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus especially on their ideas for transportation policy. Do they have a radical vision for a different transportation future, or is it a vision of maintaining the status quo? Marx is author of the book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, out now from Verso Books.

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Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, "Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing)" (MIT Press, 2022) Oct 31, 2022

What are teens actually doing on their smartphones? Contrary to many adults' assumptions, they are not simply "addicted" to their screens, oblivious to the afterlife of what they post, or missing out on personal connection. They are just trying to navigate a networked world. In Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing)(MIT Press, 2022), Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, Harvard researchers who are experts on teens and technology, explore the complexities that teens face in their digital lives, and suggest that many adult efforts to help--"Get off your phone!" "Just don't sext!"--fall short.

Weinstein and James warn against a single-minded focus by adults on "screen time." Teens worry about dependence on their devices, but disconnecting means being out of the loop socially, with absence perceived as rudeness or even a failure to be there for a struggling friend. Drawing on a multiyear project that surveyed more than 3,500 teens, the authors explain that young people need empathy, not exasperated eye-rolling. Adults should understand the complicated nature of teens' online life rather than issue commands, and they should normalize--let teens know that their challenges are shared by others--without minimizing or dismissing. Along the way, Weinstein and James describe different kinds of sexting and explain such phenomena as watermarking nudes, comparison quicksand, digital pacifiers, and collecting receipts. Behind Their Screens offers essential reading for any adult who cares about supporting teens in an online world.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Sian E. Harding, "The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart" (MIT Press, 2022) Oct 31, 2022

Your heart is a miracle in motion, a marvel of construction unsurpassed by any human-made creation. It beats 100,000 times every day--if you were to live to 100, that would be more than 3 billion beats across your lifespan. Despite decades of effort in labs all over the world, we have not yet been able to replicate the heart's perfect engineering. But, as Sian Harding shows us in The Exquisite Machine: The New Science of the Heart(MIT Press, 2022), new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart. And this explosion of new science--ultrafast imaging, gene editing, stem cells, artificial intelligence, and advanced sub-light microscopy--has crucial, real-world consequences for health and well-being.

Harding--a world leader in cardiac research--explores the relation between the emotions and heart function, reporting that the heart not only responds to our emotions, it creates them as well. The condition known as Broken Heart Syndrome, for example, is a real disorder than can follow bereavement or stress. The Exquisite Machine describes the evolutionary forces that have shaped the heart's response to damage, the astonishing rejuvenating power of stem cells, how we can avoid heart disease, and why it can be so hard to repair a damaged heart. It tells the stories of patients who have had the devastating experiences of a heart attack, chaotic heart rhythms, or stress-induced acute heart failure. And it describes how cutting-edge technologies are enabling experiments and clinical trials that will lead us to new solutions to the worldwide scourge of heart disease.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly, "Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry" (MIT Press, 2022) Oct 28, 2022

In this episode, we discuss a book that will be appealing to a general audience and which helps to bridge the gap of the story of communication in the broad history of computer technology. In Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry(MIT Press, 2022), Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly make a splendid job to portray the evolution of this industry from the times of Marconi all the way to 5G networks, while considering developments in places as diverse as China, Mexico, New Zealand and of course, Europe, Japan and the USA.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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Krystale E. Littlejohn, "Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics" (U California Press, 2021) Oct 27, 2022

The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often taken for granted in the United States as natural and beneficial.

In Just Get On the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics(University of California Press, 2021), a keenly researched and incisive examination, Krystale Littlejohn investigates how birth control becomes a fundamentally unbalanced and gendered responsibility. She uncovers how parents, peers, partners, and providers draw on narratives of male and female birth control methods to socialize cisgender women into sex and ultimately into shouldering the burden for preventing pregnancy. Littlejohn draws on extensive interviews to document this gendered compulsory birth control—a phenomenon in which people who give birth are held accountable for preventing and resolving pregnancies in gender-constrained ways. She shows how this gendered approach encroaches on reproductive autonomy and poses obstacles for preventing disease. While diverse cisgender women are the focus, Littlejohn shows that they are not the only ones harmed by this dynamic. Indeed, gendered approaches to birth control also negatively impact trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people in overlooked ways. In tracing the divisive politics of pregnancy prevention, Littlejohn demonstrates that the gendered division of labor in birth control is not natural. It is unjust.

Nicole Bourbonnais is Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational, historical perspective. Profile here.

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Andrei Nae, "Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games" (Routledge, 2021) Oct 26, 2022

Andrei Nae's book Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games (Routledge, 2021) investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context.

In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design norms of the action genre, the author differentiates between classical and postclassical survival horror games to show how the former reject the norms of the action genre and deliver a critique of the conservative gender politics of action games, while the latter are more heterogeneous in terms of their game design and, implicitly, gender politics.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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Adrian Hon, "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All" (Basic Books, 2022)Adrian Hon, "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All" (Basic Books, 2022) Oct 25, 2022

Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.

Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You’ve Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You’ve Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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On Social Media and Hinduism Oct 25, 2022

Dheepa Sundaram (she/her/hers) is scholar of performance, ritual, yoga, and digital culture in South Asia at the University of Denver which sits on the unceded tribal lands of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe people. Her research examines the formation of Hindu virtual religious publics through online platforms, social media, apps, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Sundaram's current monograph project titled Globalizing Dharma examines how commercial ritual websites fashion a new, digital canon for Hindu religious praxis, effectively "branding" religious identities through a neoliberal "Vedicizing" of virtual spaces. Her most recent article explores how West Bengal’s Tourism initiatives use Instagram to foster virtual, ethnonationalist, social networks during Durga puja. Spotlighting issues of access/accessibility to religious spaces and the viability and visibility of online counter-narratives, especially those from minoritized/marginalized caste, gender, and class communities, Sundaram shows how Asur tribal groups who seek to recover an alternative history of their ancestor Mahisasura, are not only excluded, but, effaced through this kind of digital cultural marketing campaign. A forthcoming piece examines so-called YouTube yogis and how the commercial landscape of yoga as part of lifestyle "cures" becomes an unwitting partner in Hindu nationalist project of repatriating yoga as a national cultural artifact.

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Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis, "Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility" (Rutgers UP, 2020) Oct 21, 2022

Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis's book Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility (Rutgers UP, 2020) focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. Before moving to the UK in 2021 she was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego.

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Seeing Truth in Data Oct 20, 2022

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun sees value in the truth, but worries what data we might be looking at to find it. Chun discusses her new book, Discriminating Data (MIT Press, 2021), and how we might use data, objects, and truth in better ways. She also considers the violence of a drawing of a gorilla and the one thing she knows is true.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at here.

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod.

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Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson, "Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future" (HBR Press, 2022) Oct 20, 2022

Today I talked to Jim Wilson about his book (co-authored with Paul Daugherty) Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future (HBR Press, 2022).

Technology has evolved from device intelligence to data intelligence (big data) to now the new stage of a more human-centric approach where the user/worker’s needs, wants and biases are being taken into account to make technology easier to deploy and more of an equal partner. That’s the progression Jim Wilson champions in this book and on-air conversation. Covid-19 ushered in not only a host of human behavior changes, e.g., hybrid work arrangements and the Great Resignation, the pandemic also spurred the Great Acceleration as companies rushed to adopt technology that will transform their business practices. How to do so in a way that will democratize technology, empowering employees and rewarding customers along the way, is the challenge that Wilson addresses here. After all, technology innovations that don’t also safeguard and enhance trust will instead create “algorithm aversion,” and undercut the promise of how technology can benefit companies, societies and individuals alike.

Jim Wilson is the Managing Director of Thought Leadership & Technology Research at Accenture Research. Jim speaks to business audiences worldwide, is a long-time contributor to the Harvard Business Review and has been cited as one of the top 50 Business Innovators by CODEX.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Technocracy Now! Part 3: Technocracy in the Private Sector Oct 19, 2022

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise.

However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by unaccountable private tyrannies—tyrannies that employ ruthlessly efficient technocratic systems, with even less democratic input than the technocracies of old.

For instance, many modern workplaces function like technocracies. The Amazon warehouse is the most technologically-sophisticated and totalizing manifestation of this. Their algorithmically-managed systems micro-manage workers’ every step, turning their bodies into machines. On part #3 of our technocracy series, we take a look inside the new frontiers of digital Taylorism.

Plus, what is the future of technocracy? An emerging slew of Peter Thiel-funded neo-reactionaries want to install a Silicon Valley CEO as our new techno-monarch. We discuss Thiel and Blake Masters, their broader intellectual trajectory from seasteaders to techno-populists, and the technocratic liberal disinformation machine that wants to defeat the neo-reactionaries.

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Orli Fridman, "Memory Activism and Digital Practices After Conflict: Unwanted Memories" (Amsterdam UP, 2022) Oct 19, 2022

With Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories(Amsterdam UP, 2022), Orli Fridman traces the emergence of memory activism in the aftermath of conflict and war, with a focus on Serbia after the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The study offers in-depth accounts of memory activism both on-site and online, analysing the evolution of this practice in the context of generational belonging. In doing so, this work provides a framework for the study of phenomena such as alternative commemorations and commemorative solidarity.

Orli Fridman is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, where she heads the Center for Comparative Conflict Studies. She is also the Academic Director of the School for International Training Learning Center in Belgrade, Serbia. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on critical peace and conflict studies, memory politics and digital memory activism. Her recent works include Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories (2022) and chapters in Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (2020) and in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies (2020).

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Josh Bowsher, "The Informational Logic of Human Rights" (Edinburgh UP, 2022) Oct 19, 2022

What happens to the cultural politics of human rights when atrocities are rendered calculable, abuses are transformed into data, and victims become vectors? As human rights organizations have increasingly embraced information technologies this ‘datafication’ of rights has become both a reality and a pressing concern, one inextricably tangled up with questions regarding the broader political valences of human rights.

In The Informational Logic of Human Rights(Edinburgh UP, 2022), Josh Bowsher resituates recent critiques of human rights within ongoing theoretical discussions concerning informational capitalism, digital culture and the politics of data.

Critically analysing the contemporary human rights movement as an informational politics, Bowsher provides a new conceptual agenda for both exploring and overcoming the limits of human rights in an era shaped by the data flows, network infrastructures and informational logic of late capitalism.

Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com.

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Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain" (Mariner Books, 2020) Oct 19, 2022

Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain (Mariner Books, 2020), Feldman reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You’ll learn where brains came from, how they’re structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you’ll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a “lizard brain” and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behavior.

Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humor, and important implications for human nature—a gift of a book that you will want to savor again and again.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D.is among the top one percent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior.

She is the author of two books How Emotions are Made, and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. In addition, Dr. Barrett has published over 260 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. She has also given two popular TED talks one of which has over 6.5 million views.

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website.

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Asim Sajjad Akhter, "The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons" (Pluto Press, 2022) Oct 18, 2022

The collapse of neoliberal hegemony in the western world following the financial crash of 2007-8 and subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarian personalities has been described as a crisis of 'the political' in western societies. But the crisis must be seen as global, rather than focusing on the west alone.

Pakistan is experiencing rapid financialisation and rapacious capture of natural resources, overseen by the country's military establishment and state bureaucracy. Under their watch, trading and manufacturing interests, property developers and a plethora of mafias have monopolised the provision of basic needs like housing, water and food, whilst also feeding conspicuous consumption by a captive middle-class.

In The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons (Pluto Press, 2022), Aasim Sajjad Akhtar explores neoliberal Pakistan, looking at digital technology in enhancing mass surveillance, commodification, and atomisation, as well as resistance to the state and capital. Presenting a new interpretation of our global political-economic moment, he argues for an emancipatory political horizon embodied by the 'classless' subject.

Iqra Shagufta Cheema teaches and writes in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter.

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Robert P. Crease, "The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory" (MIT Press, 2022) Oct 18, 2022

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a world-class, Nobel Prize-winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world's finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory.

A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues such as vaccines, climate change, and toxic chemicals. This story has all the elements of a thriller, with vivid characters and dramatic twists and turns. Key players include congressmen and scientists; journalists and university presidents; actors, supermodels, and anti-nuclear activists, all interacting and teaming up in surprising ways. The authors, each with insider knowledge of and access to confidential documents and the key players, reveal how a fact of no health significance could be portrayed as a Chernobyl-like disaster. The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory (MIT Press, 2022) reveals the gaps between scientists, politicians, media, and the public that have only gotten more dangerous since 1997.

Peter Bond is a retired physicist who worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory for 43 years in a wide variety of roles, including interim laboratory director during much of the period covered by this book.

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Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022) Oct 17, 2022

How do digital technologies shape the experiences and meanings of migration?

As the numbers of people fleeing war, poverty, and environmental disaster reach unprecedented levels worldwide, states also step up their mechanisms of border control. In this, they rely on digital technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and institutional journalism to manage not only the flow of people at crossing-points, but also the flow of stories and images of human mobility that circulate among their publics. What is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility?

Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities.

The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power(NYU Press, 2022) is a story of exclusion, marginalization, and violence, but also of care, conviviality, and solidarity. Through it, the border emerges neither as strictly digital nor as totally controlling. Rather, the authors argue, the digital border is both digital and pre-digital; datafied and embodied; automated and self-reflexive; undercut by competing emotions, desires, and judgments; and traversed by fluid and fragile social relationships—relationships that entail both the despair of inhumanity and the promise of a better future.

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director. She is the author of several books, including The Spectatorship of Suffering and The Ironic Spectator, Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication

Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of five books, including Diaspora, Identity and the Media; Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference; and the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration.

Padmapriya Vidhya-Govindarajan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Her research interests lie at the intersection of environmental justice, digital and film cultures, and community media-use practices.

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Leslie A. Geddes, "Watermarks: Leonardo Da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature" (Princeton UP, 2020) Oct 17, 2022

Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. For Leonardo da Vinci, water was an enduring fascination, appearing in myriad forms throughout his work. In Watermarks, Leslie Geddes explores the extraordinary range of Leonardo’s interest in water and shows how artworks by him and his peers contributed to hydraulic engineering and the construction of large river and canal systems.

In this interview, Allison Leigh talks to Leslie Geddes about transforming your dissertation into a book, how one tackles a body of scholarly literature as immense as that on Leonardo, and whether or not the famous Salvator Mundi was indeed painted by Leonardo. Their conversation ranges from what it is like to examine the artist’s Renaissance drawings in person to the power of comparisons within art historical writing and research.

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Geert Lovink, "Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet" (Valiz, 2022) Oct 13, 2022

We’re all trapped. No matter how hard you try to delete apps from your phone, the power of seduction draws you back. Doom scrolling is the new normal of a 24/7 online life. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call center and you’re too fried to log out of Facebook? We’re addicted to large-scale platforms, unable to return to the frivolous age of decentralized networks. How do we make sense of the rising disaffection with the platform condition? Zoom fatigue, cancel culture, crypto art, NFTs and psychic regression comprise core elements of a general theory of platform culture. Geert Lovink argues that we reclaim the internet on our own terms.Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet(Valiz 2022) is a relapse-resistant story about the rise of platform alternatives, built on a deep understanding of the digital slump.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His center organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the creative sector. In December, 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the Art History Department, Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam for one day a week.

Reuben Niewenhuis is interested in philosophy, theory, technology, and interdisciplinary topics. Subscribe to his interviews here.

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Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022) Oct 13, 2022

“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West.

Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford University Press, 2022). With reference to issues like public health, A.I and biotechnology, he gives his views on how the U.S. should approach China–cooperation, competition or conflict.

In this interview, Scott and I talk about the U.S.-China relationship, how it’s changed–and how U.S.-China competition could, under the right circumstances, still lead to global progress.

Scott M. Moore is Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives in the Office of the Provost as well as a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Moore was previously a Young Professional with the World Bank Group and served as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State. He is also the author of Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press: 2018). You can follow Scott on Twitter at @water_futures.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China’s Next Act. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Suzana Sawyer, "The Small Matter of Suing Chevron" (Duke UP, 2022) Oct 12, 2022

In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years, a US federal court and an international tribunal determined that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and was unenforceable.

In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron(Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Suzana Sawyer delves into this legal trilogy to explore how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through crude oil. In Sawyer’s analysis, chemistry proves crucial. Analytically, it affords a grammar for appreciating how molecular, technical, and legal agencies catalyzed distinct jurisdictional renderings. Empirically, the chemistry of hydrocarbons (its complexity, unfathomability, and misattribution) significantly shaped competing judicial determinations. Ultimately, chemical, scientific, contractual, and litigating techniques precipitated this legal saga’s metamorphic transformation, transmuting a contamination claim into an environmental liability, then a racketeering scheme, and then a breach of treaty.

Holding the paradoxes of complicity in suspension, Dr. Sawyer deftly demonstrates how crude matters, technoscience, and liberal legality configure how risk and reward, deprivation and disavowal, suffering and surfeit become legally and unevenly distributed.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Christopher Lukman, "Control Machines: Toward a Dispositive Theory of Computer Games" (Lit Verlag, 2022) Oct 11, 2022

Today I talked to Christopher Lukman about his new book Control Machines: Toward a Dispositive Theory of Computer Games (Lit Verlag, 2022).

In light of its immense popularity, a critical examination of the medium of the videogame is due. This particular anthology – Control Machines. Computergames and the theory of the dispositifs – works on a theory of the 'dispositif' of the videogame and is thus dedicated to the connections between knowledge and power.

The medium of the videogame is looked at in its complicity with neoliberalism and the control society as well as in its media-technological conditionality and its qualities of self-reflection and self-criticism.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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Technocracy Now! Part 2: Exploring Technocracy through Cybernetics Oct 10, 2022

On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies.

First, we hear the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political scientists who proposed a cybernetic computer system that claimed to predict conflicts before they happened. With this information, US policy makers could usher in a new age of peace and stability (and forever ensure a US-dominated global order). The project never accomplished everything it set out to do, but it is now being resurrected behind closed doors by Lockheed Martin. It's a techno-utopian dream of mathematical certainty in an uncertain world.

Then, why not cyber-socialism? In Salvador Allende's Chile, they were building a cybernetic computer network that connected factories to state planners. It seems technocratic, but these cyber-revolutionaries saw it as anything but. The short-lived Cybersyn Project promised using science to develop a more rationally-ordered economy. However, it also promised to guarantee the freedom and autonomy of workers. The project was destroyed in the brutal coup of 1973. However, did it work, and is it a dream worth resurrecting?

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Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP) Oct 06, 2022

Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality.

Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and America, recap the history of early VR headset adapters on trains and compare various Japanese words for "virtual" and their antonyms. Paul wonders if the ephemerality of the views glimpsed in a rock garden served as guiding paradigm for how VR is experienced.

Mentioned in the episode

Yoshikazu Nango, "A new form of 'solitary space'...." (2021)
Haruki Murakami's detailed fictional worlds of the 1980's onwards: real-feeling yet not actual history.
Walter Scott's Waverley novels: can we also understand the novel as an immersive machine that leaves readers half in their actual world?
Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with its interplay between enclosure and expansion, and its shrinking/expanding motif)
Ian Bogost on e-readers
C S Lewis's wardrobe as portal in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
Lukacs focuses on the dizzying and transformative scale in Naturalism in "Narrate or Describe?" (1936)
Wearable heart monitors as feedback machines for watching scary movies.
The pre-history of Pokemon Go is various games played by early users of VR headsets on trains.
Sword Art Online is a breakout popular example of Japanese stories of players trapped inside a game-world
Thomas Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life
We Met in Virtual Reality
Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined the concept of the metaverse.

Recallable Books

Madeline L'Engle The Wind in the Door (1973).
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1606/1615)
Futari Okajima Klein Bottle (1989)
Collections such as Immersed in Technology, Future Visions, Virtual Realities and their Discontents; also, other early VR criticism of the 1990s including early feminist critique, scattered across journals in the early to mid 1990s . Paul feels someone should put together those germane articles into a new collection.

Read the transcript here.

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Elizabeth Ellcessor, "In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality" (NYU Press, 2022) Oct 05, 2022

Dr. Elizabeth Ellcessor presents a much-needed look at the growth of emergency media and its impact on our lives in In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality (NYU Press, 2022).

In an emergency, we often look to media: to contact authorities, to get help, to monitor evolving situations, or to reach out to our loved ones. Sometimes we aren’t even aware of an emergency until we are notified by one of the countless alerts, alarms, notifications, sirens, text messages, or phone calls that permeate everyday life. Yet most people have only a partial understanding of how such systems make sense of and act upon an “emergency.” In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of “emergency” as an opposite of “normal.” Looking broadly across a range of contemporary emergency-related devices, practices, and services, Dr. Ellcessor illuminates the cultural and political underpinnings and socially differential effects of emergency media.

By interweaving in-depth interviews with emergency-operation and app-development experts, archival materials, and discursive and technological readings of hardware and infrastructures, Dr. Ellcessor demonstrates that emergency media are powerful components of American life that are rarely, if ever, neutral. The normalization of ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. As emergency media undergo massive growth and transformation in response to digitization and attendant entrepreneurial cultures, Dr. Ellcessor asks where access, equity, and accountability fit in all of this.

The first book to develop a typology of emergency media, In Case of Emergency opens a much-needed conversation around the larger cultural meanings of “emergency,” and what an ethical and care-based approach to emergency could entail.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Technocracy Now! Part 1: Noam Chomsky on Intellectuals and Expertise Oct 03, 2022

Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges just about everywhere across the ideological spectrum. Technocracy is seductive. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself.

This episode is the first in a three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future. First, Gordon takes us through the story of Technocracy, Inc. - the 1930s movement that wanted to install a non-democratic “technate” in North America. And then, you’ll hear a wide-ranging conversation on intellectuals and expertise with perhaps the most influential intellectual of our time: Noam Chomsky.

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James Bessen, "The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation" (Yale UP, 2022) Sep 29, 2022

In The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation (Yale UP, 2022), James Bessen explores the idea of how software can actually slow innovation. He makes the case that big companies in one industry after another have built "complex" software systems for managing their sales, marketing, operations and product offerings that are essentially moats against competitors. This mastery of software by major corporations, he argues, helps explain the "myth of disruptive innovation", rising economic concentration, increasing inequality and slowing innovation.

James Bessen, an economist and technologist, serves as Executive Director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University School of Law. He has also been a successful innovator and CEO of a software company. His profile in the New York Times is here.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert, "Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)" (Verso, 2022) Sep 29, 2022

Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?

We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century.

Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert book Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back) (Verso, 2022) explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their own interests. However, this dominance is under threat. Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new order emerged in which the digital platform is the central new technology of both production and power. This offers new opportunities for counter hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century.

Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com.

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Social Media and Political Participation in the Philippines Sep 29, 2022

We are all familiar with the spread of disinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But just when we thought we’d seen the worst of it, along comes TikTok. What started out as an app for dance challenges and musical duets has, in recent times, emerged as one of the most concerning tools for amplifying political propaganda and lies. What does this mean in a country like the Philippines, where there are more than 89 million social media users?

Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Assistant Professor Maria Elize Mendoza analyses the influential role of social media in Philippine political affairs, revealing intricate webs of disinformation, propaganda, and citizen mobilisation, with colossal political ramifications.

About Maria Elize Mendoza:

Maria Elize H. Mendoza is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines Diliman. She obtained her BA (magna cum laude) and MA degrees in Political Science under the BA-MA (Honours) Program of the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines Diliman. She teaches courses on Philippine politics and social, economic, and political thought. Her research interests include Philippine local politics, the politics of education, and the relationship between social media and political participation.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Tripp Mickle, "After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul" (William Morrow, 2022)) Sep 28, 2022

Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs's spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator's death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration.

In many ways, Cook was Ive's opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions.

Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple's valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world's stock market into freefall with a single sentence.

Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple's history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul (William Morrow, 2022). His research shows the company's success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive's departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple's shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.

Tripp Mickle is a technology and corporate reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Digital Lethargy Sep 27, 2022

In this episode of High Theory, Tung-Hui Hu talks with Júlia Irion Martins about Digital Lethargy, as part of our High Theory in STEM series. As a modern ailment, digital lethargy is a societal pathology, like earlier forms of acedia, otium, and neurasthenia, but also a disease of performing selfhood within the disposable identities of contemporary, digital service work. In this episode, Tung-Hui Hu makes the argument that digital lethargy helps us turn away from the demand to constantly “be ourselves” and see the potential of quieter, more ordinary forms of survival in the digital age such as collective inaction.

In the episode he discusses Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (Semiotexte/Native Agents, 2018, trans. Katy Derbyshire). He also references the film Sleeping Beauty (dir. Julia Leigh, 2011), Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor, 2008), Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (Semiotexte/Native Agents, 2018, trans. Katy Derbyshire), and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (Penguin Random House, 2020). Other mentions include the artist Aria Dean and scholar Achille Mbembe.

Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and scholar. His new website has the best domain ending: tunghui.hu He is a 2022-23 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome and an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan. His book on this topic, Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection (MIT Press, 2022), will be published on October 4

This week’s image was made by Saronik Bosu.

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Kathryn Harkup, "Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts" (Bloomsbury, 2020) Sep 26, 2022

William Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters, and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions – shock, sadness, fear – that they did more than 400 years ago when these plays were first performed. But how realistic are these deaths, and did Shakespeare have the knowledge to back them up?

In the Bard's day death was a part of everyday life. Plague, pestilence and public executions were a common occurrence, and the chances of seeing a dead or dying body on the way home from the theatre were high. It was also a time of important scientific progress. Shakespeare kept pace with anatomical and medical advances, and he included the latest scientific discoveries in his work, from blood circulation to treatments for syphilis. He certainly didn't shy away from portraying the reality of death on stage, from the brutal to the mundane, and the spectacular to the silly.

Elizabethan London provides the backdrop for Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts(Bloomsbury, 2020), as Dr. Kathryn Harkup turns her discerning scientific eye to the Bard and the varied and creative ways his characters die. Was death by snakebite as serene as Shakespeare makes out? Could lack of sleep have killed Lady Macbeth? Can you really murder someone by pouring poison in their ear? Dr. Harkup investigates what actual events may have inspired Shakespeare, what the accepted scientific knowledge of the time was, and how Elizabethan audiences would have responded to these death scenes. Death by Shakespeare will tell you all this and more in a rollercoaster of Elizabethan carnage, poison, swordplay and bloodshed, with an occasional death by bear-mauling for good measure.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kirsti Niskanen and Michael J. Barany, "Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) Sep 26, 2022

In Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona. Incarnations and Contestations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Professors Kirsti Niskanen and Michael J. Barany present a rich collection of essays on the historical construction and reinvention of scholarly personae. The book carries this investigation by focusing on three contextual conditions that play a decisive role in the fashioning of such personae: international travels, embodiment, and gender. The book also pays great attention to the role of incomes and funding opportunities in the evolution of scholarly personae in disciplines as varied as mathematics, philosophy, experimental psychology, pedagogy, history, and medicine.

Niskanen and Barany “see the history of scholarly personae as occupying a vital space in cultural theories of science and scholarship”. This statement should be understood in at least two ways. Firstly, the study of scholarly personae delves into the dynamic interactions between personalities, institutions, professional ethos, social norms, international exchanges, and explains how these interactions generate ways of conducting and presenting one’s life. Secondly, uncovering such histories of scholarly personae eventually leads to a better understanding of contextual forces that prevent or encourage the emergence of greater diversity and equity within academia today.

At the intersection of a wide range of scholarly disciplines and geographical contexts, Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona represent a major contribution to the historical study of scientific personae since Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum’s special issue, “Scientific Personae and Their Histories”, published in 2003.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is teaching the Humanities and French language to undergraduates.

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NBN Classic: Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017) Sep 25, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

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 people analytics by metrics?

Phoebe Moore's The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts(Routledge, 2017) highlights how,whether it be in insecure ‘gig’ work or office work, such digitalisation is not an inevitable process – nor is it one that necessarily improves working conditions. Indeed, through unique research and empirical data, Moore demonstrates how workplace quantification leads to high turnover rates, workplace rationalisation and worker stress and anxiety, with these issues linked to increased rates of subjective and objective precarity.

Scientific management asked us to be efficient. Now, we are asked to be agile. But what does this mean for the everyday lives we lead?

With a fresh perspective on how technology and the use of technology for management and self-management changes the ‘quantified’, precarious workplace today, The Quantified Self in Precarity will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Science and Technology, Organisation Management, Sociology and Politics.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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NBN Classic: Mark Bartholomew, "Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing" (Stanford Law Books, 2017) Sep 25, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

Advertising is everywhere. By some estimates, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements each day. Whether we realize it or not, "adcreep"―modern marketing's march to create a world where advertising can be expected anywhere and anytime―has come, transforming not just our purchasing decisions, but our relationships, our sense of self, and the way we navigate all spaces, public and private.

In Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing (Stanford Law Books, 2017), Mark Bartholomew journeys through the curious and sometimes troubling world of modern advertising. Bartholomew exposes an array of marketing techniques that might seem like the stuff of science fiction: neuromarketing, biometric scans, automated online spies, and facial recognition technology, all enlisted to study and stimulate consumer desire. This marriage of advertising and technology has consequences. Businesses wield rich and portable records of consumer preference, delivering advertising tailored to your own idiosyncratic thought processes. They mask their role by using social media to mobilize others, from celebrities to your own relatives, to convey their messages. Guerrilla marketers turn every space into a potential site for a commercial come-on or clandestine market research. Advertisers now know you on a deeper, more intimate level, dramatically tilting the historical balance of power between advertiser and audience.

In this world of ubiquitous commercial appeals, consumers and policymakers are numbed to advertising's growing presence. Drawing on a variety of sources, including psychological experiments, marketing texts, communications theory, and historical examples, Bartholomew reveals the consequences of life in a world of non-stop selling. Adcreep mounts a damning critique of the modern American legal system's failure to stem the flow of invasive advertising into our homes, parks, schools, and digital lives.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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NBN Classic: Jonathan Sadowsky, "The Empire of Depression: A New History" (Polity, 2020) Sep 24, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

When is sorrow sickness? That is the question that this book asks, exploring how our understandings of sadness, melancholy, depression, mania and anxiety have changed over time, and how societies have tried to treat something which lies on the border between the natural and the pathological. Jonathan Sadowsky's book The Empire of Depression: A New History (Polity, 2020) explores the various medical treatments for depression, classed as a modern illness with definite (but changing) symptoms from the 20th century onwards, in relation to a longer history of treatments for ‘melancholia’ and related states considered either as biological or social sicknesses or as a natural part of some people’s constitution. He also compares the western history of medicalising depression with the experiences of both sadness and clinical depression in non-western cultures, such as Nigeria and Japan. He asks, what have we lost as a consequence of the hegemony of the western clinical model, and how can we reclaim the patient experience in the face of sometimes hostile doctors and pharmaceutical companies? The book is poetic but well-researched, written by a leading medical historian, and distinguished from the crowd of books about depression through its global focus, and its historical rigour.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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NBN Classic: Virginia Eubanks, "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (St. Martin's, 2018) Sep 24, 2022

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems―rather than humans―control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martin's, 2018), Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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James Belich, "The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe" (Princeton UP, 2022) Sep 23, 2022

In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion.

In The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2022) Dr. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how the plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and the plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons.

Setting the rise of Western Europe in a global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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David Max Moerman, "The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination" (U Hawaii Press, 2021) Sep 23, 2022

From the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. Expansively illustrated with multiple maps and illustrations, The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) by D. Max Moerman is the first monograph of its kind to explore the largely unknown archive of Japanese Buddhist world maps and analyze their production, reproduction, and reception. In examining these fascinating sources of visual and material culture, Moerman argues for an alternative history of Japanese Buddhism—one that compels us to recognize the role of the Buddhist geographic imaginary in a culture that encompassed multiple cartographic and cosmological world views.

The contents and contexts of Japanese Buddhist world maps reveal the ambivalent and shifting position of Japan in the Buddhist world, its encounter and negotiation with foreign ideas and technologies, and the possibilities for a global history of Buddhism and science. Moerman’s visual and intellectual history traces the multiple trajectories of Japanese Buddhist world maps, beginning with the earliest extant Japanese map of the world: a painting by a fourteenth-century Japanese monk charting the cosmology and geography of India and Central Asia based on an account written by a seventh-century Chinese pilgrim-monk. He goes on to discuss the cartographic inclusion and marginal position of Japan, the culture of the copy and the power of replication in Japanese Buddhism, and the transcultural processes of engagement and response to new visions of the world produced by Iberian Christians, Chinese Buddhists, and the Japanese maritime trade. Later chapters explore the transformations in the media and messages of Buddhist cartography in the age of print culture and in intellectual debates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries over cosmology and epistemology and the polemics of Buddhist science.

The Japanese Buddhist World Map offers a wholly innovative picture of Japanese Buddhism that acknowledges the possibility of multiple and heterogeneous modernities and alternative visions of Japan and the world.

D. Max Moerman is a Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research interests lie in the visual and material culture of Japanese religions.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019) Sep 22, 2022

Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water(Duke UP, 2019) traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.

Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Southern California.

Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez.

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The Future of Nuclear Weapons: A Conversation with Fred Kaplan Sep 20, 2022

For much of the Cold War the United States had thousands more nuclear weapons than it needed. And it took decades for American political leaders to realise no one had ever asked: ‘how many nuclear weapons is enough?’ As for Ronald Reagan, he went into office a nuclear hawk and came out considering total disarmament. These aspects of the history the US nuclear programme are described in Fred Kaplan’s book The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War(Simon & Schuster, 2021). Owen Bennett-Jones has been speaking with Fred Kaplan.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Amber Sinha, "The Networked Public: How Social Media is Changing Democracy" (Rupa Publications, 2019) Sep 20, 2022

Amber Sinha works at the intersection law, technology and society, and studies the impact of digital technologies on socio-political processes and structures. His research aims to further the discourse on regulatory practices around internet, technology, and society. He is currently a Senior Fellow-Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation studying models for algorithmic transparency.

Networks, whether in the form of Facebook and Twitter or WhatsApp groups, are exerting immense, unchecked power in subverting political discourse and polarizing the public in India. If people’s understandings of their political reality can be so easily manipulated through misinformation, then what role can they play in fostering deliberative democracies? Amber Sinha asks this much ignored and often-misunderstood question in his book The Networked Public: How Social Media is Changing Democracy(Rupa Publications, 2019). In search for an answer, he investigates the history of misinformation and the biases that make the public susceptible to it, how digital platforms and their governance impacts the public’s behaviour on them, as well as the changing face of political targeting in this data-driven world.

The book weaves sharp analysis with academic rigour to show that while the public can be irrational and gullible, their actions—be it mob violence or spreading fake news—are symptoms of deeper social malaise and products of their technological contexts.The Networked Public is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how social media and the Internet is transforming democracy not only in India, but across the world.

Alok Prasanna Kumar is Co-Founder and Lead, Vidhi Karnataka. Sarayu Natarajan is the Founder of Aapti Institute. In the past, she has worked in management consulting and the venture fund industry before the plunge into researching politics.

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Alex Nathanson, "A History of Solar Power Art and Design" (Routledge, 2021) Sep 19, 2022

Alex Nathanson's book A History of Solar Power Art and Design (Routledge, 2021) examines the history of creative applications of photovoltaic (PV) solar power, including sound art, wearable technology, public art, industrial design, digital media, building integrated design, and many others.

The growth in artists and designers incorporating solar power into their work reflects broader social, economic, and political events. As the cost of PV cells has come down, they have become more accessible and have found their way into a growing range of design applications and artistic practices. As climate change continues to transform our environment and becomes a greater public concern, the importance of integrating sustainable energy technologies into our culture grows as well.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design history, design studies, environmental studies, environmental humanities, and sustainable energy design.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. btoepfer@toepferarchitecture

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Stefan Höltgen, "Open History: The Archaeology of Retrocomputing" (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021) Sep 16, 2022

Today I talked to Stefan Höltgen about his book Open History: The Archaeology of Retrocomputing (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021).

How can historical computers be described properly from the viewpoint of computer science? By considering media archaeology’s theory of operative and thus a-historical media computer archaeology combines an interdisciplinary set of theories and methods to answer this question. At first, the problems of computer historiography (technical inaccuracy, inconsistency, and idiosyncrasy) will be deconstructed with the help of history criticism (H. Whyte, R. G. Collingwood), discourse archaeology (M. Foucault), and media archaeology (W. Ernst). Following that, technology–oriented tools and methods are gathered for describing ‘old’ computers within an ‘archaeography’ and analyzing them within a mid-range theory. Methods of computer science (from theoretical, practical, and technical c.s.), electronics, logics, mathematics, and diagrammatics supersede hermeneutical methods of historiography. Additional tools (re-enactment, demonstration, computer philology) from media science and other disciplines complement this set of methods. The objects of the following analyzation are early microcomputers (1975-95).

Retro computing, that has been practiced for decades as a hobbyistic way of computer archaeology, sets the frame for four computer archaeological projects that had been implemented within media scientific seminars (and other occasions): 1. a computer philological analysis of a ‘traditional’ computer demo (simulating a jumping ball) on different platforms and in different programming languages since the 1960s; 2. the development of a “Game of Life” on an 8-bit platform to examine the didactical and ‘historiographical’ potentialities of cellular automata; 3. the development of a new computer game for a 1978 gaming console to examine the differences between software emulation and material hardware; 4. the reparation of an 8-bit computer from 1976 done by a hardware hacker to analyze the tools, methods and knowledge-gaining process of such a non-professional approach.

These projects are discussed afterwards to gain the specific didactical modus operandi of retro computing hobbyists. Just like historical home computing (starting from the late 1970s) retro computing autodidactically gathers theoretical, historical, and practical knowledge by trial and error, gamification, and e-learning through a “learning by doing” procedure. The confrontation of three historical examples with three actual retro computing projects will prove this. The didactical reflection of retro computing projects describes a ‘retro didactic’ that would be useful for a broad application of historic sensitive, computer scientific knowledge with the help of less complex systems (like early microcomputers are).

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021) Sep 15, 2022

We know that plants are important. They maintain the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. They nourish other living organisms and supply psychological benefits to humans as well, improving our moods and beautifying the landscape around us. But plants don't just passively provide. They also take action.

Beronda L. Montgomery explores the vigorous, creative lives of organisms often treated as static and predictable. In fact, plants are masters of adaptation. They "know" what and who they are, and they use this knowledge to make a way in the world. Plants experience a kind of sensation that does not require eyes or ears. They distinguish kin, friend, and foe, and they are able to respond to ecological competition despite lacking the capacity of fight-or-flight. Plants are even capable of transformative behaviors that allow them to maximize their chances of survival in a dynamic and sometimes unfriendly environment.

Lessons from Plants(Harvard UP, 2021) enters into the depth of botanic experience and shows how we might improve human society by better appreciating not just what plants give us but also how they achieve their own purposes. What would it mean to learn from these organisms, to become more aware of our environments and to adapt to our own worlds by calling on perception and awareness? Montgomery's meditative study puts before us a question with the power to reframe the way we live: What would a plant do?

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Felicia Wu Song, "Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age" (InterVarsity Press, 2021) Sep 14, 2022

We're being formed by our devices. Unpacking the soft tyranny of the digital age, Felicia Wu Song combines insights from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and theology as she considers digital practices through the lens of "liturgy" and formation. The book is called Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age (IVP Academic: 2021). Exploring pathways of meaningful resistance found in Christian tradition, this resource offers practical experiments for individual and communal change.

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Esther Wright, "Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity" (de Gruyter, 2022) Sep 13, 2022

For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses.

But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity(de Gruyter, 2022) offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian.

By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past – and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

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Karen Hunger Parshall, "The New Era in American Mathematics, 1920–1950" (Princeton UP, 2022) Sep 12, 2022

In The New Era in Mathematics, 1920-1950 (Princeton University Press, 2022) Karen Parshall explores the institutional, financial, social, and political forces that shaped and supported the American Mathematics community in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing from extensive archival and primary-source research, Professor Parshall uncovers the key players in American mathematics who worked together to effect change. She highlights the educational, professional, philanthropic, and governmental entities that bolstered progress and uncovers the strategies implemented by American mathematicians in their quest for the advancement of knowledge. Through an examination of how the American Mathematical community asserted itself on the international state, The New Era in Mathematics, 1920-1950 shows the way one nation became the focal point for the field.

Karen Hunger Parshall is the Commonwealth Professor of History and Mathematics at the University of Virginia. She is the author of James Joseph Sylvester: Jewish Mathematician in a Victorian World and the coauthor of Taming the Unknown: A History of Algebra from Antiquity to the Early Twentieth Century.

Marc Goulet is Professor in mathematics and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

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Josh Chin and Liza Lin, "Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (St. Martin's Press, 2022) Sep 09, 2022

As we build the AI-powered digital economy, how far do we want to go? Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St. Martin's Press, 2022) explores how China’s Communist Party is harnessing new technologies in an effort to achieve an unprecedented level of social control. The authors outline the most brutal and extreme applications of these technologies to the Uighur people of western China. They contrast this with the relatively benign-seeming applications to traffic control, crime, and public order in the prosperous Han Chinese heartland, where a little loss of privacy can feel like a small price to pay.

They also make clear that these developments are not isolated to China. They show how America faces similar tradeoffs between using the benefits these tools can bring for crime fighting and other goals, against the risks of losing privacy and potentially making our criminal justice system even less fair. They examine the role of US companies in selling crucial elements of the technology package to Chinese firms and government agencies and challenge their defense that they had no way of knowing how or where these technologies would be used. And they examine China’s export of surveillance technologies to other countries around the world.

This book is essential reading for anyone thinking about how the digitization of the economy and our lives can benefit us or be turned against us.

Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin are award-winning journalists with the Wall Street Journal. The book grows out of years of reporting on these developments within China, as well as an extensive investigation into the roots of these trends and their connections around the world.

Host Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China.

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Elise Vernon Pearlstine, "Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance" (Yale UP, 2022) Sep 08, 2022

Plants have long harnessed the chemical characteristics of aromatic compounds to shape the world around them. Frankincense resin from the genus Boswellia seals injured tissues and protects trees from invading pathogens. Jasmine produces a molecule called linalool that attracts pollinating moths with its flowery scent. Tobacco uses a similarly sweet-smelling compound called benzyl acetone to attract pollinators. Only recently in the evolutionary history of plants, however, have humans learned to co-opt their fragrances to seduce, heal, protect, and alter moods themselves.

In this wide-ranging and accessible Scent: A Natural History (Yale University Press, 2022), biologist-turned-perfumer Dr. Elise Vernon Pearlstine turns our human-centered perception of fragrance on its head and investigates plants' evolutionary reasons for creating aromatic molecules. Delving into themes of spirituality, wealth, power, addiction, royalty, fantasy, and more, Pearlstine uncovers the natural history of aromatic substances and their intersection with human culture and civilization.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Georg Striedter, "Model Systems in Biology: History, Philosophy, and Practical Concerns" (MIT Press, 2022) Sep 07, 2022

Biomedical research using various animal species and in vitro cellular systems has resulted in both major successes and translational failure. In Model Systems in Biology: History, Philosophy, and Practical Concerns (MIT Press, 2022), comparative neurobiologist Georg Striedter examines how biomedical researchers have used animal species and in vitro cellular systems to understand and develop treatments for human diseases ranging from cancer and polio to Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Although there have been some major successes, much of this “translational” research on model systems has failed to generalize to humans. Striedter explores the history of such research, focusing on the models used and considering the question of model selection from a variety of perspectives—the philosophical, the historical, and that of practicing biologists.

Striedter reviews some philosophical concepts and ethical issues, including concerns over animal suffering and the compromises that result. He traces the history of the most widely used animal and in vitro models, describing how they compete with one another in a changing ecosystem of models. He examines how therapies for bacterial and viral infections, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological disorders have been developed using animal and cell culture models—and how research into these diseases has both taken advantage of and been hindered by model system differences. Finally, Striedter argues for a “big tent” biology, in which a diverse set of models and research strategies can coexist productively.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021.

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J. Bradford DeLong, "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century" (Basic Books, 2020) Sep 05, 2022

From one of the world's leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870-2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.

Brad DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2022) tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe--and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it uncovers the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford University.

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Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022) Sep 05, 2022

From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data gives unprecedented insights into fundamental questions in the social sciences, humanities, and industry. Meanwhile new machine learning tools are rapidly transforming the way science and business are conducted. Text as Data shows how to combine new sources of data, machine learning tools, and social science research design to develop and evaluate new insights.

Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences(Princeton UP, 2022) is organized around the core tasks in research projects using text--representation, discovery, measurement, prediction, and causal inference. The authors offer a sequential, iterative, and inductive approach to research design. Each research task is presented complete with real-world applications, example methods, and a distinct style of task-focused research.

Bridging many divides--computer science and social science, the qualitative and the quantitative, and industry and academia--Text as Data is an ideal resource for anyone wanting to analyze large collections of text in an era when data is abundant and computation is cheap, but the enduring challenges of social science remain.

Overview of how to use text as data
Research design for a world of data deluge
Examples from across the social sciences and industry

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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Truck Nuts: The Political History of Trucks and Trucking Sep 05, 2022

The pickup truck is the symbol of rural conservative masculinity. So, it often takes centre stage in the tired culture wars between reactionary neo-populists and liberal moralists. Like today, with Canada’s right crudely embracing the truck–and tweeting furiously about those ‘Laurentian elites,‘ and ‘Toronto columnists‘ who thumb their nose at it. But, if you really want to piss off the libs: don’t just post about it. Why not hang some big veiny nuts from your truck? Today on the show, we talk about the political history of trucks and trucking.

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Lucía Fernández-Amaya, "A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication" (Brill, 2022) Sep 05, 2022

Digital discourse has become a widespread way of communicating worldwide, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication(Brill, 2022) offers a critical state-of-the-art review of WhatsApp linguistic studies. After evaluating a wide range of sources, and seeking to identify relevant works, two major thematic domains were found. On the one hand, references addressing WhatsApp linguistic characteristics: status notifications, multimodal elements such as emojis or memes, and language variation, among others. On the other, the volume offers an overview of references describing the use of WhatsApp to learn English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL). The author provides a broad critical review of previous works to date, which has enabled her to detect areas of research still unexplored.

Lucia Fernandez Amaya is Professor in English at the Department of Philology and Translation, Pablo de Olavide University in Seville.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Jerry C. Zee, "Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System" (U California Press, 2022) Sep 05, 2022

Today Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, published by University of California Press in 2022.

Continent in Dust offers a political anthropological account of strange weather. It is an ethnography of China’s meteorological contemporary - the transformed weather patterns whose formations and fallouts have accompanied decades of breakneck economic development. Focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere and society, Jerry Zee’s research is beautifully articulated taking the reader on a journey from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspace in Beijing, and beyond. Timely and original, Continent in Dust considers contemporary China as a weather system to reconsider how we can better understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air.

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The Tamiflu Trials: Profit and Public Health Sep 02, 2022

Before Remdesivir and Hydroxycloroquin there was Tamiflu.

To prepare for Swine Flu and Bird Flu, governments spent billions stockpiling this drug called Tamiflu. You’d think governments used the best evidence-based advice, but the story of Tamiflu raises questions about how money shaped the process.

On this episode of Cited, Darts and Letters predecessor, we open up the black box of pharmaceutical and public health expertise. We tell the story of a drug, from its days as middling flu treatment through its meteoric rise to international blockbuster. How do experts decide what makes a good drug, and how do pharmaceutical companies make billions from pandemic panic?

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88 Underwater Eye: Margaret Cohen explores the Film Aquatic Sep 01, 2022

Margaret Cohen joins John to discuss The Underwater Eye, which explores "How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy." Margaret's earlier prizewinning books include The Novel and the Sea and The Sentimental Education of the Novel, but this project brings her places even her frequent surfing forays hadn't yet reached. She charts the rise of "wet for wet" filming both in the ocean itself and in various surrogates, exploring the implications of entering a domain that humans can explore and come to know, but never master.

She and John discuss the rarity of professional divers in early 19th century (Henri Edwards 1843) and Natasha Adamowsky on the abiding fear of the depths. Conversation also pivots towards such SF classics as Stanislas Lem Solaris (1961), featuring a sentient underwater being which controls the planetary tides, though this wrinkle disappears in the 1971 Tarkovsky film. Margaret wittily labels the unintended consequences of human agency the "dialectic of the anthropocene."

Mentioned in the episode

1916 20,000 Leagues was Hollywood’s first great underwater filming project. Underwater scenes of a length and complexity not seen again until modern films like The Deep (1977).
Man Ray The Starfish is proof of high art's shared investment (also in Jean Painleve's science and sexlife films) in the same oceanic aspects that thrilled popular filmmakers.
Esther William's Jupiter's Darling may be the apotheosis of bathing beauty breath-holding.
Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges as underwater beefcake.
Luc Besson, The Big Blue

Recallable Books/Films

Margaret chose Creature from the Black Lagoon 1954 which inspired Benicio del Toro's The Shape of Water (a "dry for wet" film, shot in studio rather than underwater) and was in its turn inspired by Gabriel Figueora, cinematographer of The Pearl'

John favored a SF novel about space aliens who on landing seek out the oceanic depths, John Wyndham The Kraken Wakes (1953)

Read a transcript here.

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Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, "Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of Our Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2022) Sep 01, 2022

One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about "bad" speech, hate speech, disinformation, propaganda campaigns, incitement of violence on the internet, and, in particular, speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy(Oxford University Press, 2022), Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors--including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Warner, Newt Minow, Tim Wu, Cass Sunstein, Jack Balkin, Emily Bazelon, and others--to explore the various dimensions of this problem in the American context. They stress how difficult it is to develop remedies given that some of these forms of "bad" speech are ordinarily protected by the First Amendment. Bollinger and Stone argue that it is important to remember that the last time we encountered major new communications technology-television and radio-we established a federal agency to provide oversight and to issue regulations to protect and promote "the public interest." Featuring a variety of perspectives from some of America's leading experts on this hotly contested issue, this volume offers new insights for the future of free speech in the social media era.

Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University's 19th president in 2002 and is the longest-serving Ivy League president. He is also Columbia's first Seth Low Professor of the University, and a member of the Law School faculty.

Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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The Heroin Clinic Sep 01, 2022

At Crosstown Clinic, doctors are turning addiction treatment on its head: they’re prescribing heroin-users the very drug they’re addicted to. This is the story of one clinic’s quest to remove the harms of addiction, without removing the addiction itself.

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This is Your Brain on Trial Aug 31, 2022

Imagine reading or watching The Minority Report and thinking of that as a model for the criminal justice system. Well, plenty of forensic types are doing just that. Can you figure out if you are a criminal by scanning your brain? On this episode of Darts and Letters, guest-host Jay Cockburn and our guests explore the study of the criminal mind, from the history of madness, to spotty personality tests, to the emerging neuroscientific frontier.

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Pathological: The Work of Dr. Charles Smith Aug 30, 2022

Dr. Charles Smith performed autopsies at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, ON. The cops kept turning to him with new corpses, and he kept claiming that these deaths were the result of foul play. He was thought of as a God in his field–few people were willing to question his work. That is until a 2008 inquiry, which found evidence of errors in 20 of the 45 autopsies they reviewed. Dr. Smith’s judgements played a role in 13 wrongful convictions. On this episode, we tell one of those stories.

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Property Technology Aug 30, 2022

In this episode of High Theory, Erin McElroy talks with Nathan Kim about Property Technology. This is the first episode in the High Theory in STEM series, that tackles topics in science, technology, engineering, and medicine from a highly theoretical perspective.

Not only is “property technology” a term for digital tools and other methods used by landlords to track and dispossess tenants, but property itself is a technology. In the episode, Nathan references Erin’s article “Property as Technology,” in which they write that "property itself has long served as a technology of racial dispossession, constituting a palimpsest for the contemporary gentrifying moment." You can read the whole article here: McElroy, Erin. "Property as technology: temporal entanglements of race, space, and displacement." City 24, no. 1-2 (2020): 112-129. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604813.2020.1739910>

Erin McElroy is an assistant professor in American Studies at UT Austin, a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and an editor of the Radical Housing Journal. They are fighting the good fight. We hope you do too.

This week’s image was made by Saronik Bosu for this episode.

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Jennifer Jill Fellows and Lisa Smith, "Gender, Sex, and Tech!: An Intersectional Feminist Guide" (Canadian Scholars, 2022) Aug 29, 2022

In this timely collection, gender, sex, and technology are explored through an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens. Gender, Sex, and Tech!: An Intersectional Feminist Guide (Canadian Scholars, 2022) provides insight into the ways that technology affects, and is affected by, cultural perceptions of gender and sex. Through an examination of a range of past and present issues, the text highlights our relationships to technology and illustrates how gendered relations are shaped and transformed through social and technological innovations. Contributors bring to the fore feminist, decolonizing, and anti-racist methods to examine our everyday uses of technology, from the mundane to the surreal to the playful to the devastating. Original research and scholarship is skillfully grounded in real-world scenarios like revenge pornography, gender bias in artificial intelligence, menstrual tracking, online dating, and the COVID-19 pandemic, inviting students to take a closer look at technological transformations and their impact on gendered lived experience and to consider how the benefits of technology are inequitably shared within society. Centring Canadian scholars and Canadian perspectives without losing sight of the broader global connection, Gender, Sex, and Tech! is bursting with timely and of-the-moment content, making this collection a must-read for courses focused on gender and technology.

Dr. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches about transnational feminisms, Global South #MeToos, postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, and global cinema.

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Derailed: The Crisis of Forensic Expertise Aug 29, 2022

When it comes to complex social problems, us “sensible” types turn to the experts, but what if they don’t actually know what they’re talking about? That happens to be the case with many forensic experts. Blood spatter, ballistics, hand-writing analysis, fingerprints, etc. They aren’t Gods, they aren’t magicians, they ain’t anything like what you see on CSI. In fact, they get things terribly wrong; and when they do, the consequences can be catastrophic. We’ll reveal the crisis in forensic expertise, and look for ways to fix it, featuring the American lawyer falsely arrested for the 2004 Madrid bombings because of a fingerprint.

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Julie A. Turnock, "The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism" (U Texas Press, 2022) Aug 26, 2022

Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood—by one company specifically: Industrial Light & Magic.

The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light & Magic and the Rendering of Realism(University of Texas Press, 2022) shows how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on tropes suggesting the authenticity to which viewers were accustomed. ILM’s style, on display in the most successful films of the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were forced to follow suit, and today, ILM is a victim of its own success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Don’t Hate the Player: The World of E-Sports Aug 26, 2022

On this episode of Darts and Letters, we took a personal journey into virtual sport. Listen in as guest host (and regular lead producer) Jay Cockburn gets ready to enter the world of e-sports, with a lesson in Super Smash Bros from a top player and professional coach. Find out why he won’t make it (spoiler alert: he doesn’t have that reaction time he used to); but also, find out why he might not want to make it. Unfortunately, e-sports have many of the problems that ‘real’ sports do, and some are even worse. E-sports have lower pay, more stringent IP regimes, singular corporate control, and less labour organizing. However, could things be changing? Jay talks to Alexander Lee, esports and games reporter at Digiday. He takes us through the booming world of esports: the good, the bad, the repetitive stress injuries, and what to do about it.

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Enter the Zuckerverse: On the Metaverse and its Corporatization Aug 25, 2022

The term “metaverse” was coined in a 1993 science fiction novel. Since then, it’s grown from a dystopian literary concept to a reality that corporations want to sell you. Strap on some VR goggles and escape your tired analog life! Except that the systemic issues we already have seem to be creeping into the metaverse, too.

As the lines between virtuality and physicality continue to blur, companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta are setting their sights on virtual worlds. It’s a new frontier, full of potential – and full of our valuable data. Metaverses like Second Life or World of Warcraft can be positive and even game-changing experiences on the individual level, but when it comes to navigating a virtual society with a capitalist backdrop…things get a bit dicey.

On this episode, guest host and producer Ren Bangert explores the metaverse. First, we hear a love story from the glory days of Second Life, told to us by Sandrine Han – a scholar of virtual worlds and a long-time Second Lifer. Then, writer and game developer Ian Bogost takes us on a deep dive into the corporatization of the metaverse. We’ll hear how the metaverse has grown from a dystopian warning from science fiction to a sinister data-mining reality – and how even the shiniest of tech utopias are still functioning under the same old capitalism.

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Cassidy Puckett, "Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Aug 25, 2022

Picture a typical computer geek. Likely white, male, and someone you’d say has a “natural instinct” for technology. Yet, after six years teaching technology classes to first-generation, low-income middle school students in Oakland, California, Cassidy Puckett has seen firsthand that being good with technology is not something people are born with—it’s something they learn. In Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens (U Chicago Press, 2022), she overturns the stereotypes around the digitally savvy and identifies the habits that can help everyone cultivate their inner geek.

Drawing on observations and interviews with a diverse group of students around the country, Puckett zeroes in on five technology learning habits that enable tech-savvy teens to learn new technologies: a willingness to try and fail, management of frustration and boredom, use of models, and the abilities to use design logic and identify efficiencies. In Redefining Geek, she shows how to measure and build these habits, and she demonstrates how many teens historically marginalized in STEM are already using these habits and would benefit from recognition for their talent, access to further learning opportunities, and support in career pathways. She argues that if we can develop, recognize, and reward these technological learning habits in all kids—especially girls and historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups—we can address many educational inequities and disparities in STEM.

Revealing how being good with technology is not about natural ability but habit and persistence, Redefining Geek speaks to the ongoing conversation on equity in technology education and argues for a more inclusive technology learning experience for all students.

Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Candidate in Sociology of Education at the New York University.

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Brett Scott, "Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets" (Harper Business, 2022) Aug 24, 2022

In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets(Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our various forms of money and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.

Cloudmoney takes us to the front lines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom, from marketing strategies against cash to the weaponization of COVID-19 to push fintech platforms, and from there to the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back. It asks the most pressing questions:

Who benefits from a cashless society and who gets left behind?
Is the end of cash the end of true privacy?
And is our cloudmoney future closer than we think it is?

Brett Scott is an economic anthropologist, financial activist, and former broker. In 2013 he published The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, and since then has spoken at hundreds of events across the globe and has appeared across international media, including BBC World News and Sky News. He has written extensively on financial reform, digital finance, alternative currency, blockchain technology, and the cashless society for publications like the Guardian, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Wired, and CNN.com, and also publishes the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter. He has worked on financial reform campaigns and alternative currency systems with a wide range of groups and is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab (UK). He currently resides in Berlin.

Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at utsavsaksena@protonmail.com. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are purely personal and do not reflect the official position of NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India.

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Alfie Bown, "Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships" (Pluto Press, 2022) Aug 24, 2022

We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organising and mapping the future. What we don’t seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself.

Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. Digital technologies are transforming the subject at the deepest level of desire – re-mapping its libidinal economy - in ways never before imagined possible. From sexbots to smart condoms, fitbits to VR simulators and AI to dating algorithms, the 'love industries' are at the heart of the future smart city and the social fabric of everyday life.

Alfie Bown's Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships (Pluto Press, 2022) considers these emergent technologies and what they mean for the future of love, desire, work and capitalism.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Gamify Everything: Turning Work Into Play . . . for Better and for Worse Aug 24, 2022

Setting goals for the new year? Learning a language? Going for a run? Delivering food? Picking packages off a warehouse shelf for delivery? There’s a game for that. Or, at least, a gamified system designed to nudge you in a series of pre-programmed directions in the service of the state, techno-capitalist overlords, or any number of other groups and entities that chart the course of our hyper-connected, cutting-edge, dystopian 21st century lives. On this episode of Darts and Letters, guest host Jay Cockburn and our guests take us through the gamification of…everything.

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Save the Whales: The Addictive Psychology Behind Video Games Aug 23, 2022

We’ll save the Moby Dick puns for the episode itself, but suffice it to say that sinister game developers are on a whale hunt. This episode, originally published last fall, is about the sophisticated psychological tactics they use to hunt and capture their prey. Free to play mobile games as glorified slot machines, in-game purchases even for triple-A titles, game design that keep gamers hooked to their rigs. These practices are often exploitative and, for some who fall victim to them, devastating. Some countries, like China, are pushing back. But their restrictions are overbearing and unlikely to work as people skirt the restrictions. There are better ways. On this episode of Darts and Letters, we take a journey to save the whales.

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Ann Blair et al., "Information: A Historical Companion" (Princeton UP, 2021) Aug 23, 2022

Information is everywhere. We live in an “Information” Society. We can get more of it faster, quicker, and in more different shapes and sizes than at probably any other time in history. Meanwhile, misinformation (a very old word) and disinformation (a neologism of the 20th century) have worked their way into our collective cultural lexicon.

Like everything, information has a history and Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton UP, 2021)—just shy of 900 pages, comprising 13 narrative essays, followed by 100 shorter pieces on particular technologies, practices, etc. relevant to information history—is an invaluable and highly readable reference work to help us orient in that history. This collaboration of 107 contributing experts has been brought to fruition by a team of four editors: Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton. In the interview, we talk with Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton, experts who know, among a great many other things, as much anybody about the history of one of the earliest and stable means of storing and transmitting information, the book. They have also been paying close attention to how the information ecosystem of our own day is evolving. Listen in for this wide-ranging conversation.

Erika Monahan is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico.

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Moral Kombat: How Mortal Kombat Caused Moral Outrage Aug 22, 2022

You can learn much about a media and political culture by examining when it panics, and who it panics about. And we’ve always panicked about video games, from the early arcades until this very day. Whether you are a prudish Christian conservative, or a concerned liberal-minded paternalist, demonizing video games has long been good politics.

On this episode: guest host and lead producer Jay Cockburn travels back to the 90s, and looks at the story of Mortal Kombat. The game was violent, gory, glorious. It was a youth rebellion in miniature. Parents rebelled against the rebellion, staging their own petulant counter-revolution, and politicians embraced it. It triggered a moral panic and even congressional hearings into violence in games. But why did it happen, who did it serve, and what does it tell us about our own culture?

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Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Aug 22, 2022

As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a "racial data revolution," one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own kind of revolution, un-disciplining racial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life.

Autumn Womack's The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2022) excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production that shaped late nineteenth-century social, cultural, and literary atmosphere. Through assembling previously overlooked archives and seemingly familiar texts, Womack shows how these artists and writers recalibrated the relationship between data and Black life. The result is a fresh and nuanced take on the history of documenting Blackness. The Matter of Black Living charts a new genealogy from which we can rethink the political and aesthetic work of racial data, a task that has never been more urgent.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Adam Nocek, "Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Aug 17, 2022

In Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Adam Nocek, Assistant Professor in the Philosophy of Technology and Science and Technology Studies at Arizona State University, investigates the collusion between entertainment and scientific visualization in the case of molecular animation. “The very same tools that were invented to animate a character like Shrek or Nemo are now being applied to set in motion protein domains and cellular processes.” Opening with this quote by animator and scientist Gaël McGill, the book retraces the complex genealogy of molecular animation and analyses its pretension to scientific value. While the first half of the book deals with “molecular capture” as the cinematographic process of producing moving images of the molecular world, the second half thinks about that same “capture” as a form of governmental rationality, a kind of apparatus rendering life visible and available down to its most fundamental mechanisms. This discussion leads the author to consider the elusiveness of life and how the current codes of molecular animation are blurring the line between knowledge, data, speculation, and imagination. At the source of fascinating images, granting consumers with the impression of directly accessing the invisible processes defining life, molecular animation stands at the intersection of important questions relating to the history of scientific visualization, the evolving relationship between science and entertainment, and the production of biopolitical forms of governance.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Paris Marx, "Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation" (Verso, 2022) Aug 16, 2022

In Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation(Verso, 2022), Paris Marx identifies two convergent forces in the 20th century: the growth of the climate killing automobile industry and the rise of Silicon Valley with its California Ideology (a hypocritical self-rationalization). Their narrative shows how these two forces merged in the early 21st century with less-than-ideal, even deadly, results. Marx challenges many of the tech industry’s myths, misrepresentations, and lies and offers some suggestions for how we can build a better world. While Road to Nowhere is a book about our current crisis it situates our this mess in its historical context. Marx illustrates how many of the most problematic aspects of automobility are the consequences of specific policy decisions, often made in the interest of capital and not the social good. Marx is not shy about naming names, specifically calling out Elon Musk and Über.

Paris Marx is Canadian tech critic and host of the award-winning Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. Their work has been published in Business Insider, NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, and Tribune. And just this week, they published a piece in Time Magazine on Elon Musk. Paris earned a Master’s degree in urban geography from McGill University, researching Silicon Valley’s efforts to transform how we move.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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The Future of Net Zero: A Discussion with Eric Lonergan Aug 16, 2022

There is no shortage of words written about climate change and the goal of reaching net zero - but there is a shortage of practical suggestions about to get to net zero. Even governments committed to net zero are wondering how they are going to do it. Eric Lonergan has tried to address that problem with the book Super Charge Me: Net Zero Faster (Agenda, 2022) - co-authored with Corrine Sawyers - which sets out to suggest ways Net Zero can be achieved.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Eswar S. Prasad, "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance" (Harvard UP, 2021) Aug 16, 2022

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance(The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021) provides a cutting-edge look at how accelerating financial change, from the end of cash to the rise of cryptocurrencies, will transform economies for better and worse. We think we have seen financial innovation. We bank from laptops and buy coffee with the wave of a phone. But these are minor miracles compared with the dizzying experiments now underway around the globe, as businesses and governments alike embrace the possibilities of new financial technologies. As Eswar Prasad explains, the world of finance is at the threshold of major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite how ordinary people live. Above all, Prasad foresees the end of physical cash. The driving force won't be phones or credit cards but rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve unpredictably as global corporations like Facebook and Amazon join the game. The changes will be accompanied by snowballing innovations that are reshaping finance and have already begun to revolutionize how we invest, trade, insure, and manage risk. Prasad shows how these and other changes will redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. The promise lies in greater efficiency and flexibility, increased sensitivity to the needs of diverse consumers, and improved market access for the unbanked. The risk is instability, lack of accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the worst of what is to come.

Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously chief of the Financial Studies Division in the International Monetary Fund's Research Department and, before that, was the head of the IMF's China Division.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Joseph Mileti, "Modern Mathematical Logic" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Aug 15, 2022

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Joe Mileti, associate professor of mathematics at Grinnell College. Even if you are not "into" math, you will enjoy this conversation. We talked about how math is not what you think it is. It's not just memorizing formulas and grinding. It's about thinking and, like all thinking, it involves abstraction, logic, using analogies and metaphors, and a bunch of imagination. We also talked about how math is about talking to other mathematicians and doing a kind of "brainstorming."

Joes's new book is Modern Mathematical Logic (Cambridge UP, 2022).

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Made of Corn: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 2 of 2) Aug 12, 2022

This is part 2 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters.

For the final episode of our “Activism & Academia”-themed week of programming, we’re returning to Cited’s series on genetically modified corn, Indigenous rights, and environmental law in Mexico. Return with us to our story on how the discovery of genetically modified corn in the Mexican highlands resulted in a revelatory battle over science, culture, trade and more. In this episode, we take you even further into the story.

If you missed part 1 of this series, do go back to yesterday’s episode and give it a listen. And stay tuned for next week’s themed programming: we’re talking to you all about left opinion makers.

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Christian Wolmar, "British Rail: A New History" (Michael Joseph, 2022) Aug 11, 2022

You think you know British Rail. But you don't know the whole story. Now, award-winning writer Christian Wolmar provides a new perspective on national loss in a time of privatisation in British Rail: A New History (Michael Joseph, 2022).

From its creation after the Second World War, through its fifty-year lifetime, British Rail was an innovative powerhouse that transformed our transport system. Uniting disparate lines into a highly competent organisation - heralding 'The Age of the Train' - and, for a time, providing one of the fastest regular rail services in the world.

Born into post-war austerity, traumatised, impoverished and exploited by a hostile press, the state-owned railway was dismissed as a dinosaur unable to evolve, and swept away by a government hellbent on selling it off.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Modifying Maize: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 1 of 2) Aug 11, 2022

This is part 1 of a 2-part series from Cited - the predecessor of Darts and Letters.

When genetically modified corn was found in the highlands of Mexico, Indigenous campesino groups took to the streets to protect their cultural heritage, setting off a 20-year legal saga. The battle brought Indigenous rights, scientific methods, academic freedom, and law and trade into the mix. It’s a fascinating and eternally relevant story. You’ll hear from scientists, activists, farmers and more. In an era when food security, environmental protections, and Indigenous rights are as crucial and as fraught as ever before, this story is closer to home than you might think.

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J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, "The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945" (Harvard UP, 2016) Aug 10, 2022

The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke's book The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard UP, 2016) explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism.

More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption.

We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.

J.R. McNeill holds the appointment of University Professor at Georgetown University, serving as a faculty member of the School of Foreign Service and History Department. Professor McNeill is also a past president of American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association.

Peter Engelke is the Deputy Director of Foresight at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and a Nonresident Senior Fellow, Global Energy Center.

Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist at the University of Florida. Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu

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Minh-Ha T. Pham, "Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property" (Duke UP, 2022) Aug 10, 2022

In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” using Balenciaga’s hashtags to circulate memes revealing the source of the bags’ design.

In Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property(Duke UP, 2022), Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Tracing the history of fashion antipiracy efforts back to the 1930s, she foregrounds the work of policing that has been tacitly outsourced to social media. Despite the social media concern for ethical fashion and consumption and the good intentions behind design policing, Pham shows that it has ironically deepened forms of social and market inequality, as it relies on and reinforces racist and colonial norms and ideas about what constitutes copying and what counts as creativity. These struggles over ethical fashion and intellectual property, Pham demonstrates, constitute deeper struggles over the colonial legacies of cultural property in digital and global economies.

Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia.

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Twitter, Intellectual Discourse, and Humility Aug 10, 2022

For this episode of How To Be Wrong, I speak with George Styles, a biochemist and author of the book Contemplation. George is also what we describe these days as an “influencer”—although as we discuss he objects to that label—on social media, with over 37 thousand followers on Twitter. His approach to Twitter is novel in that he focuses on asking probing questions designed to generate discussion, which at times become rather heated. Our conversation moves through topics related to how Twitter is used and how it can be used as a tool for generating civil intellectual discourse.

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Environmental Catastrophe Aug 09, 2022

In this episode John Yargo speaks with Kim about Environmental Catastrophe.

In the episode John quotes Hannah Arendt and N.K. Jemisin, discusses a Shakespeare play and a 17th century Peruvian painting, and optimistically suggests that environmental catastrophe will save us. He references the work of many scholars in the field of environmental humanities, including Geoffrey Parker and Dagomar Degroot on the Little Ice Age in Early Modern Europe, Gerard Passannante’s work on Catastrophizing, and Gavin Bailey on the Andean Baroque. He also talks about Amitav Ghosh’s recent work The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (UChicago Press, 2016) and Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (Penguin Random House, 2010). In the longer version of the conversation, John told Kim about how he teaches the literature of catastrophe in reverse, starting with the present and working backward, to upset teleological readings of cultural history.

The image for this week’s episode is Leonardo DaVinci’s drawing “A deluge” c. 1517-18, held by the Royal Collection Trust. You can read more about the painting in an “Anatomy of an Artwork” feature written by Skye Sherwin on 8 Feb 2019 in The Guardian.

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Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten, "Probability and Forensic Evidence: Theory, Philosophy, and Applications" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Aug 09, 2022

In Probability and Forensic Evidence: Theory, Philosophy, and Applications (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten address the role of statistics and probability in the evaluation of forensic evidence, including both theoretical issues and applications in legal contexts. It discusses what evidence is and how it can be quantified, how it should be understood, and how it is applied (and, sometimes misapplied).

Ronald Meester is Professor in probability theory at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is co-author of the books Continuum Percolation (1996), A Natural Introduction to Probability Theory (2003), Random Networks for Communication (2008), and has written around 120 research papers on topics including percolation theory, ergodic theory, philosophy of science, and forensic probability.

Klaas Slooten works as Statistician at the Netherlands Forensic Institute and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where he is Professor by special appointment. He as published around 30 articles on forensic probability and statistics. He is interested in the mathematical, legal, and philosophical evaluation of evidence.

Marc Goulet is Professor in mathematics and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

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M. I. Franklin, "Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural" (Oxford UP, 2021) Aug 09, 2022

Music sampling has become a predominantly digitalized practice. It was popularized with the rise of Rap and Hip-Hop, as well as ambient music scenes, but it has a history stretching back to the earliest days of sound recording and experimental music making from around the world. Digital tools and networks allow artists to sample music across national borders and from diverse cultural traditions with relative ease, prompting questions around not only fair use, copyright, and freedom of expression, but also cultural appropriation and "copywrongs." For example, non-commercial forms of sharing that are now commonplace on the web bring musicians and their audiences into closer contact with emerging regimes of commercial web-tracking and state-sponsored online surveillance. Moreover, when musicians actively engage in political or social causes through their music, they are liable to both commercial and state forces of control. Shifts back to corporate ownership and control of the global music business—online and offline—highlight competing claims for commercial and cultural ownership and control of sampled music from local communities, music labels, and artists.

Each case study is based on archival research, close listening, and musical analysis, alongside conversations and public reflections from artists such as David Byrne, Annirudha Das, Asian Dub Foundation, John Cage, Brian Eno, Sarah Jones, Gil Scott-Heron, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dunya Yunis, and Sonia Mehta.

Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural(Oxford UP, 2021) provides ways to listen and hear (again) how sampling practices and music making work, on its own terms and in context. In so doing, M.I. Franklin corrects some errors in the public record, addressing some longstanding misperceptions over the creative, legal, and cultural legacy of music sampling in some cases of rich, and complex practices that have also been called musical "borrowing," "cultural appropriation," or "theft." This book considers the musicalities and musicianship at stake in each case, as well as the respective creative practices and performance cultures underscoring the ethics of attribution and collaboration when sampling artists make music.

Marianne Franklin is Professor of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London

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Lindsay Starkey, "Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond" (Amsterdam UP, 2020) Aug 09, 2022

What is holding the oceans back from entirely flooding the earth? While a twenty-first century thinker may approach the answer to this question within a framework of gravity and geologic deep-time, Lindsay Starkey demonstrates in her monograph,Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Redefining the Universe Through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging(Amsterdam University Press, 2020) how thinkers from antiquity to the sixteen-century held their own beliefs explaining the complex relation between dry land and water. After providing a detailed intellectual genealogy connecting the Early Modern Period with antiquity based on the transmission of knowledge through bookish methods, Starkey provides an extensively researched analysis explaining how and why perspectives and concerns about water began shifting in the sixteenth century due to sea voyages that revised medieval speculation about geographic composition of land-mass and oceans in the southern hemisphere. As we join the bookish lineage with Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond please enjoy the episode not just for the incredible insight into the past, but to use as an opportunity to reconsider our current water crisis.

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On Online Churches Aug 08, 2022

Dr. Tim Hutchings is a sociologist of digital religion. His Ph.D. (Durham University, 2010) was an ethnographic study of five online Christian churches. Dr. Hutchings is interested in the relationship between religion, media and culture, with particular attention to digital forms of Christianity. His research has included studies of online worship; digital evangelism and formation; online community; digital publishing and e-reading; apps and games; and death and dying. His research led to the publication of his book Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media (Routledge, 2017).

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Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, "Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie" (Companyédition PUF/Disclose, 2021) Aug 08, 2022

What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, a nuclear scientist, and an investigative journalist? Working together beginning in early 2020, Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, the authors of Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie(Presses universitaires de France and Disclose, 2021) have now shared with readers the meaningful and provocative results of just such a collaboration. Revisiting the history of France's nuclear weapons program over a period of three decades (following an initial set of atmospheric and underground detonations in the Algerian Sahara from 1960 to 1966), Toxique is a scientific and journalistic interrogation of the immediate and long-term health and environmental effects of the 193 bombs the French military exploded in the region, exposing civilians, as well as French military and other personnel to the fallout and radiation emitted by these explosions.

The significance of this interdisciplinary investigation cannot be overstated. As Toxique shows, these nuclear detonations continue to have harmful effects on the everyday lives of thousands of local residents, along with those veterans who served in the area. As Philippe and Statius have shown, the toxicity of these nuclear blasts has been consistently underestimated and misrepresented by the French military and state. Holding important implications for the victims of these detonations in terms of both recognition and financial compensation, the book and its accompanying online platform, Moruroa Files, have made a huge impact. I was thrilled to have the chance to speak with these remarkable researchers and writers and hope listeners will learn from and enjoy our conversation. The more people within and beyond the field of French Studies who are aware of this damaging past and present, the better.

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American Chernobyl, Part 2: The Most Poisonous Place in the USA Aug 05, 2022

Hanford is the most-polluted place in America. In our last episode, you heard about the nuclear plant's largely-forgotten history--how it poisoned the people living downwind. On our season finale: a nuclear safety auditor tries to get it shut down, the downwinders struggle for justice, and we take you into the plant itself.

This is part two, if you haven’t heard part one yet go check out yesterday’s episode.

The story of Hanford reveals that expertise is always a political battle, and never as straightforward as simply collecting facts--whether it’s executives putting profit over a safety auditor’s well-documented warnings, a community-based research pitted against government-backed studies, or turning a world-changing nuclear reactor into a scientific lecture.

This episode is from the pre-Darts and Letters era when we produced a documentary series called Cited.

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America's Chernobyl, Part 1: Living in a Poison Town Aug 04, 2022

In this episode of Cited: What it means to live in a place where your home can give you cancer.

Richland, Washington is a company town that sprang up almost overnight in the desert of southeastern Washington. Its employer is the federal government, and its product is plutonium.

The Hanford nuclear site was one of the Manhattan Project sites, and it made the plutonium for the bomb that devastated Nagasaki. The official history is one of scientific achievement, comfortable houses, and good-paying jobs. But it doesn’t include the story of what happened after the bomb was dropped -- neither in Japan, nor right there in Washington State. In part one of this Cited two-parter we tell the largely-forgotten story of the most toxic place in America. This episode was produced before Darts and Letters existed, when Cited Media was all about a documentary series called Cited.

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Daniel Bergner, "The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches" (Ecco, 2022) Aug 04, 2022

In The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches (Ecco, 3033), Daniel Bergner examines these and other by describing three riveting case studies in the context of the history of psychiatry and psychopharmacology. Alongside the story of his brother Bob’s struggle with bipolar disorder, we learn about Caroline, who is besieged by the hallucinations of psychosis, and David, an attorney who is engulfed by anxiety and depression. In telling their stories while describing the frontiers of brain research, Bergner shows how the pharmaceutical industry has played a key role in perpetuating a biological view of the mind and drug-based cures for its disorders – despite mediocre drug effectiveness, many challenging side effects, and questionable patient outcomes. The Mind and the Moon addresses fundamental issues of selfhood and identity in ways that will challenge basic beliefs about who we are and who we might be.

Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. His recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at steve@stevebeitler.com.

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Nina Rattner Gelbart, "Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France" (Yale UP, 2021) Aug 04, 2022

In Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (Yale University Press, 2021), Nina Gelbart, Professor of History and Anita Johnson Wand Professor of Women’s Studies at Occidental College, shares the stories of six, incredibly resourceful, and dedicated women who contributed substantially to the sciences of their time. While offering valuable comments on the challenges of writing gender-inclusive histories of science, the book restores the legacies of the mathematician Elisabeth Ferrand, the astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, the botanists Jeanne Barret and Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, the anatomist Marie-Marguerite Bihéron, and the chemist Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville. Minerva’s French Sisters also reads as the personal journey of an historian looking for lost evidence and piecing together traces to offer a unique vision of the Enlightenment sciences through the lens of these women.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Streamed: The Intellectual Culture of Twitch Streamers Aug 03, 2022

It was billed as “the biggest event in the history of the terminally online.” A debate: socialism vs. capitalism. On your left side, the esteemed Marxist economist Richard Wolff. On your right, a StarCraft player-turned-online intellectual: Steven Bonnel II, better known as Destiny.

But this debate didn’t take place on TV, or in a university debate club… it was on Twitch.tv. The online streaming platform that is mainly used for watching other people play video games.

We dissect the debate, and its limitations. But more broadly, we ask, why are gamers becoming an emerging political commentariat, and what does that mean for the rest of us? Twitch is reshaping political and intellectual discourse, whether we like it or not; is it making that discourse more vibrant and more inclusive, or more phoney and more bro-y?

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Ellis Jones, "DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2020) Aug 03, 2022

Since the 1970s, there has been a rich, global lineage of broadly guitar-based music scenes which have enacted a political critique of the commercial music industries under the banner of ‘DIY’. DIY music practice has involved taking control of production and distribution processes and lowering barriers to participation and performance, as a form of cultural resistance. In DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2020), Ellis Jones analyses the effects of the internet and social media on the inner lives and the communal music-making of practitioners in contemporary DIY music scenes.

Jones provides a nuanced and original reading of the points of convergence and (substantial) divergence between the emancipatory and participatory rhetoric of digital platforms and the ethical imperatives of DIY music, past and present. He argues that the imperatives toward self-branding, commodification and individualization that are baked into the affordances of social media are fundamentally inimical to the convivial, oppositional politics of DIY music. As digital platforms seep into and mediate more and more facets of everyday life, this book underscores the need for a renewed critique of the conditions of cultural production – and offers valuable points of departure for forms of culturally resistant DIY musicking in the 21st Century.

Ellis Jones is a Lecturer in Music and Management in the Department of Music at the University of Leeds.

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Socialise the Series of Tubes: Toward a Democratic Internet Aug 02, 2022

Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places. So why does one company get so much control over a vital service… the internet?

This is the story in the USA as well as Canada, so at Darts and Letters we wanted to look for a different way. We also don’t necessarily believe the market is the solution… so what is? How do we make a more democratic, socially driven internet?

Gordon Katic interviews Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People, to help us answer these questions - and most importantly, we ask whether the internet is indeed a series of tubes.

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Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs Aug 01, 2022

Techno-utopianism is everywhere. It’s driven by a new tech-bro/crypto culture, supported by online hordes of true believers, and couched in philosophies of meritocracy and technocracy. But this thinking is not new, and World’s Fairs are a perfect example.

One of our ongoing series within Darts and Letters is techno utopias, and we do mean that with all the skepticism it’s due. Silicon Valley is trying to change the world with NFTs and metaverses and electric cars and all kinds of nonsense technologies that will do nothing to improve the lives of the world’s poor, but will increase the wealth of Zuckerburg and Musk, probably while destroying the planet in the process.

To start that series off we decided to go to the original techno-utopia: The World’s Fair. Host Gordon Katic talks to a historian of world’s fairs, and then to a photographer who spends her time in the dilapidated abandoned glory of former world’s fair sites. We’ve got loads of really fun historical footage in this episode too… it’s funny and nostalgic, I think you’re gonna love it.

It’s not all world’s fairs though. We also explore the nature of technology itself… like what actually is a technology?

So that seemed a good place to start off this week’s theme of the politics of technology and techno utopias. We’re doing a different theme every week until we relaunch the show on September 18th.

So here it is… Lost Utopias: A History of World’s Fairs.

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——————-FURTHER READING AND LISTENING——————

Check out Rob Rydell’s books on the history of world’s fairs: All the World’s a Fair, World’s Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, and Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Plus, see more of his work on ResearchGate.
Visit Jade Daskow’s photography project Lost Utopias to see what remains once the fair leaves town. Then, visit her homepage to have a look at her other projects, including The Architecture of Activism.
Have a look at Jennifer Slack’s co-written book Culture and Technology: A Primer. Then, see her faculty page at Michigan Tech to peruse more of her work.

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Mark Solovey, "Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the 'Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation" (MIT Press, 2020) Aug 01, 2022

This is part two of a two part interview.

Mark Solovey’s ‘Social Science for What?’ is essential reading for anyone in either the history of science policy or the history of the social sciences in the United States. The book is not, as the subtitle might imply, merely an institutional history of the social sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Rather, Solovey’s follow-up to his 2013 book, ‘Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America’, is a commanding explanation of certain characteristics of academic social science as commonly practiced in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.

— Audra J. Wolfe, PhD. history and sociology of science, in ISIS Vol. 113, No. 2, June 2022

In our first episode, Professor Solovey shared some of the political and legislative history establishing the National Science Foundation; heated controversy over the social sciences that undermined the effort to include them in the initial legislation for the new science agency; how they nevertheless became included on a small and cautious basis grounded in a scientistic strategy; and some of the landmark developments, controversies, and interesting individuals involved from roughly the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. This included Senator Harris's remarkable legislative proposal in the mid-to-late 1960s to establish a separate national social science foundation.

This second part of the interview opens with the late 1960s' controversy over Project Camelot and draws on Mark’s 2001 journal article in the Social Studies of Science, titled ‘Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution: Rethinking the Politics–Patronage–Social Science Nexus’ - which remains the professor’s most often cited scholarly article. We then move up through the dark days of the Reagan years, along the way discussing key figures, from David Stockman to Talcott Parsons, Clifford Geertz, Thomas Kuhn, Milton Friedman, and Richard Atkinson, the emergence and impact of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), alternatives to the scientistic strategy, and persistent challenges faced by the social sciences at the levels of institutional representation, leadership and funding constraints relative to the natural sciences - all of which continue to the present day.

We end with Professor Solovey’s call for reviving the idea of a new federal agency for the social sciences, a National Social Science Foundation, as first introduced by Senator Harris of Oklahoma, and finally, with some book recommendations.

An open access edition of Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the "Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation (MIT Press, 2020) was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.

Mark Solovey is professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the development of the social sciences in the United States, and especially the controversies regarding the scientific identity of the social sciences, private and public funding for them, and public policy implications of social science expertise. He has written and co-edited a number of books related to the Cold War and social science history.

Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University.

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Erica Gies, "Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Jul 29, 2022

Trouble with water – increasingly frequent, extreme floods and droughts – is one of the first obvious signs of climate change. Meanwhile, urban sprawl, industrial agriculture and engineered water infrastructure are making things worse. As our control attempts fail, we are forced to recognize an eternal truth: sooner or later, water always wins.

In Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (U Chicago Press, 2022), award-winning science journalist Erica Gies follows water 'detectives' as they search for clues to water's past and present. Their tools: cutting-edge science and research into historical ecology, animal life, and earlier human practices. Their discoveries: a deeper understanding of what water wants and how accommodating nature can protect us and other species.

Modern civilizations tend to speed water away. We have forgotten that it must flex with the rhythms of the earth, and that only collaboration with nature will allow us to forge a more resilient future.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The Science Wars: Post-Truth and the Nature of Science Jul 29, 2022

Welcome to the final day of our weeklong deep dive into the politics of education. Today, we’ve got another episode of Cited for you. If you haven’t heard a Cited episode before, it’s the documentary show that came before Darts and Letters and it specialised in immersive storytelling.

This piece takes us on a journey through a little-known, long-past set of debates on the nature of science in democratic society: the Science Wars. They may seem lost to time, but some scholars say the Science Wars might just explain how we got our 'post-truth' moment. Learn about the bold hoax that became a determining factor in the Science Wars and how that moment in history might have foretold the wars on science to come.

Next week, we’ll be bringing you episodes on a whole new theme - activism and academia. You won’t want to miss it. And you really won’t want to miss our brand-new episodes, launching on the New Books Network from September 18th.

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Today’s episode was produced by Gordon Katic, and edited by Cited's Sam Fenn.

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Lachlan Fleetwood, "Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jul 28, 2022

Today, the idea that the Himalayas have the world’s tallest peaks—by a large margin—is entirely uncontroversial. Just about anyone can name Mount Everest and K2 as the world’s tallest and second-tallest mountains respectively.

But the idea that this mountain range had the highest summits used to be quite controversial. Mountaineers claimed that the Himalayas could not be taller than peaks in Europe or South America, like Ecuador’s Chimborazo. Even when it was proven that the Himalayas were taller, mountaineers would praised the aesthetic quality of European and South American peaks—essentially giving the nineteenth-century equivalent of “height isn’t everything”

That’s merely one of the historical details from Lachlan Fleetwood’s Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya(Cambridge University Press, 2022), which studies the first attempts to survey this mountain range. Fleetwood’s book examines not just the expeditions themselves, but also how surveyors procured their equipment, how they handled altitude sickness, and the fossils they found (among other details), in order to analyze the connection between knowledge, the frontier, and empire.

Lachlan Fleetwood is a historian of science, empire, geography and environment. He holds a PhD in history from Cambridge University, and is currently a research fellow at University College Dublin. He is currently developing a new project that examines climatic sciences and environmental determinism in imperial surveys of Central Asia and Mesopotamia in the long nineteenth century.

In this interview, Lachlan and I talk about the Himalayas, how the first surveyors studied them, and why these early efforts to understand this mountain range are important to how we understand the history of science.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Science on the Roof of the World. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Stuart Ellis-Gorman, "The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King" (Pen & Sword Military, 2022) Jul 28, 2022

The crossbow is an iconic weapon of the Middle Ages and, alongside the longbow, one of the most effective ranged weapons of the pre-gunpowder era. Unfortunately, despite its general fame it has been decades since an in-depth history of the medieval crossbow has been published, which is why Dr. Stuart Ellis-Gorman’s detailed, accessible, and highly illustrated book The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King (Pen & Sword, 2022) is so valuable.

The book approaches the history of the crossbow from two directions. The first is a technical study of the design and construction of the medieval crossbow, the many different kinds of crossbows used during the Middle Ages, and finally a consideration of the relationship between crossbows and art.

The second half of the book explores the history of the crossbow, from its origins in ancient China to its decline in sixteenth-century Europe. Along the way it explores the challenges in deciphering the crossbow’s early medieval history as well as its prominence in warfare and sport shooting in the High and Later Middle Ages.

This fascinating book brings together the work of a wide range of accomplished crossbow scholars and incorporates the author’s own original research to create an account of the medieval crossbow that will appeal to anyone looking to gain an insight into one of the most important weapons of the Middle Ages.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The Battle of Buxton: Saving a Lighthouse in the Era of Climate Change Jul 28, 2022

If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor: Cited. (If you didn’t, check it out - there’s everything from science fiction to prison activism back there!)

Today, as we continue exploring the politics of education, we’re bringing you another episode of Cited. This one was produced in collaboration with 99% Invisible. It tells a vivid story of science, politics, nature, and a heated battle over a small town’s beloved lighthouse.

The forces of nature versus the forces of human willpower has been an eternal struggle. This is an evocative short documentary, melding history with salient reminders: in the face of climate change, the struggle is becoming more and more intense.

We’ve got one more episode for this week, and then we’ll be moving on to a different theme! Stay tuned for more of our classic content, and get ready for new episodes of Darts and Letters right here on the New Books Network starting on September 16th.

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You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

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To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly.

———-CREDITS———-

Today’s episode was produced by Gordon Katic, and edited by 99% Invisible’s Delaney Hall and Cited's Sam Fenn.

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Nic Maclellan, "Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests" (ANU Press, 2017) Jul 27, 2022

Nic Maclellan's book Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests(ANU Press, 2017) is a history of Britain’s 1950s program to test the hydrogen bomb, code name Operation Grapple. In 1957–58, nine atmospheric nuclear tests were held at Malden Island and Christmas Island—today, part of the Pacific nation of Kiribati. Nearly 14,000 troops travelled to the central Pacific for the UK nuclear testing program—many are still living with the health and environmental consequences.

Based on archival research and interviews with nuclear survivors, Grappling with the Bomb presents i-Kiribati woman Sui Kiritome, British pacifist Harold Steele, businessman James Burns, Fijian sailor Paul Ah Poy, English volunteers Mary and Billie Burgess and many other witnesses to Britain’s nuclear folly.

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James Steinhoff, "Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) Jul 27, 2022

Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) argues that Marxist theory is essential for understanding the contemporary industrialization of the form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. It includes a political economic history of AI, tracking how it went from a fringe research interest for a handful of scientists in the 1950s to a centerpiece of cybernetic capital fifty years later. It also includes a political economic study of the scale, scope and dynamics of the contemporary AI industry as well as a labour process analysis of commercial machine learning software production, based on interviews with workers and management in AI companies around the world, ranging from tiny startups to giant technology firms. On the basis of this study, Steinhoff develops a Marxist analysis to argue that the popular theory of immaterial labour, which holds that information technologies increase the autonomy of workers from capital, tending towards a post-capitalist economy, does not adequately describe the situation of high-tech digital labour today. In the AI industry, digital labour remains firmly under the control of capital. Steinhoff argues that theories discerning therein an emergent autonomy of labour are in fact witnessing labour’s increasing automation.

James Steinhoff is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Reuben Niewenhuis works as a software developer for a warehouse automation company. He double majored in computer science and philosophy at Calvin University. In addition to philosophical theory, he is interested in interdisciplinary topics.

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Felix Schniz, "Genre and Video Game: Introducing an Impossible Taxonomy" (Springer, 2021) Jul 26, 2022

Felix Schniz's book Genre and Video Game: Introducing an Impossible Taxonomy (Genre und Videospiel: Einführung in eine unmögliche Taxonomie) explains video game genres as multidimensional and deeply mutable concepts enacted by the interplay of three dimensions: In addition to the hybrid approaches of genre theory, fiction genre and game genre, there are also social components that shape the gaming experience.

Working with video games (and working with their genres) turns out to be working with an objet ambigu: an intangible object of art whose potential is revealed and developed, again and again, in the process of interacting with the user.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Effective Altruism: What it is, What it Does, and How You Can Help Jul 25, 2022

80,000 Hours provides research and support to help students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

Benjamin Todd is the president and co-founder of 80,000 Hours. He managed the organisation while it grew from a lecture, to a student society, to the organization it is today. He also helped to get effective altruism started in Oxford in 2011.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Mark Solovey, "Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the 'Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation" (MIT Press, 2020) Jul 25, 2022

This is part one of a two part interview.

"The social sciences have prospered best in the federal government where they have been included under broad umbrella classifications of the scientific disciplines. … In close company with scientific areas which enjoy the prestige and status of biological or physical sciences, the social sciences have enjoyed a protection and nourishment which they normally do not have when they are identified as such and stand exposed, 'naked and alone.'"

— Harry Alpert, sociologist and first social science policy architect, 1960 (Solovey: Ch. 1 lead-in)

In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to “other sciences.” Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major—albeit controversial—source of public funding for them.

Solovey's analysis underscores the long-term impact of early developments, when the NSF embraced a “scientistic” strategy wherein the natural sciences represented the gold standard, and created a social science program limited to “hard-core” studies. Along the way, Solovey shows how the NSF's efforts to support scholarship, advanced training, and educational programs were shaped by landmark scientific and political developments, including McCarthyism, Sputnik, reform liberalism during the 1960s, and a newly energized conservative movement during the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, he provides a balanced assessment of the NSF's relevance in a “post-truth” era.

Solovey's study of the battles over public funding is crucial for understanding the recent history of the social sciences as well as ongoing debates over their scientific status and social value. In this first part of two episodes the professor takes us from the mid-1940s up to the tumultuous 1960s and the (ultimately unsuccessful) legislative proposal for a National Social Science Foundation. Look for the second part which moves from the late 1960s' controversy over Project Camelot up through the dark days of the Reagan years, culminating in a call to revive discussion about the need to create a new federal agency, a National Social Science Foundation.

An open access edition of Social Science for What?: Battles over Public Funding for the "Other Sciences' at the National Science Foundation (MIT Press, 2020) was made possible by generous funding from the MIT Libraries.

Mark Solovey is professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. His research focuses on the development of the social sciences in the United States, and especially the controversies regarding the scientific identity of the social sciences, private and public funding for them, and public policy implications of social science expertise. He has written and co-edited a number of books related to the Cold War and social science history.

Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University.

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Jay Baruch, "Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER" (MIT Press, 2022) Jul 22, 2022

To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor’s most critical task. More technology, more tests, and more data won’t work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. In Tornado of Life: A Doctor's Journey through Constraints and Creativity in the ER (MIT Press, 2022), ER physician Jay Baruch offers a series of short, powerful, and affecting essays that capture the stories of ER patients in all their complexity and messiness.

Patients come to the ER with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. ER doctors must be problem-finders before they are problem-solvers. Cheryl, for example, whose story is a chaos narrative of “and this happened, and then that happened, and then, and then and then and then,” tells Baruch she is "stuck in a tornado of life.” What will help her, and and what will help Mr. K., who seems like a textbook case of post-combat PTSD but turns out not to be? Baruch describes, among other things, the emergency of loneliness (invoking Chekhov, another doctor-writer); his own (frightening) experience as a patient; the patient who demanded a hug; and emergency medicine during COVID-19. These stories often end without closure or solutions. The patients are discharged into the world. But if they’re lucky, the doctor has listened to their stories as well as treated them.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Jason Resnikoff, "Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work" (U Illinois Press, 2021) Jul 21, 2022

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work(U Illinois Press, 2021) traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress.

A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.

Jason Resnifoff is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Groningen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) in the Netherlands.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Lisa Jean Moore, "Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature" (NYU Press, 2022) Jul 20, 2022

The process of manipulating the genetic material of one animal to include the DNA of another creates a new transgenic organism. Several animals, notably goats, mice, sheep, and cattle are now genetically modified in this way. In Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature(NYU Press, 2022), Lisa Jean Moore wonders what such scientific advances portend. Will the natural world become so modified that it ceases to exist? After turning species into hybrids, can we ever get back to the original, or are they forever lost? Does genetic manipulation make better lives possible, and if so, for whom?

Moore centers the story on goats that have been engineered by the US military and civilian scientists using the DNA of spiders. The goat’s milk contains a spider-silk protein fiber; it can be spun into ultra-strong fabric that can be used to manufacture lightweight military body armor. Researchers also hope the transgenically produced spider silk will revolutionize medicine with biocompatible medical inserts such as prosthetics and bandages. Based on in-depth research with spiders in Florida and transgenic goats in Utah, Our Transgenic Future focuses on how these spider goats came into existence, the researchers who maintain them, the funders who have made their lives possible, and how they fit into the larger science of transgenics and synthetics. This book is a fascinating story about the possibilities of science and the likely futures that may come.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021.

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Rosetta S. Elkin, "Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation" (U Minnesota Press, 2022) Jul 20, 2022

In Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation(U Minnesota Press, 2022), Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the large-scale planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments, including grasslands, prairies, and drylands. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Using three supracontinental case studies--scientific forestry in the American prairies, colonial control in Africa's Sahelian grasslands, and Chinese efforts to control and administer territory--Elkin explores the political implications of plant life as a tool of environmentalism. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, this work exposes the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act: rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social. Plant Life ultimately reveals that afforestation cannot offset deforestation, an important distinction that sheds light on current environmental trends that suggest we can plant our way out of climate change. By radicalizing what conservation protects and by framing plants in their total aliveness, Elkin shows that there are many kinds of life--not just our own--to consider when advancing environmental policy.

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The Future of War: A Discussion with Mark Galeotti Jul 19, 2022

Wars have always been fought in different ways, depending not only on the manpower available – elite professional armies to mass mobilization of whole populations - but also on technological developments, all the way from medieval siege engines to modern fighter jets. Recent developments suggest that there is much more rapid change to come as information campaigns, crime and subversion become weaponised in new ways. Mark Galeotti has been thinking about all these things for a long time. Today I talked to him about his book The Weaponization of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (Yale UP, 2022).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Rachael Pells, "Genomics: How Genome Sequencing Will Change Healthcare" (Random House, 2022) Jul 15, 2022

Genome sequencing is one of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the past thirty years. But what precisely does it involve and how is it developing?

In Genomics: How Genome Sequencing Will Change Healthcare (Random House, 2022), Rachael Pells explains the science behind genomics. She analyses its practical applications in medical diagnosis and the treatment of conditions that range from cancer to severe allergic reactions to cystic fibrosis. She considers its potential to help with advances in agriculture and environmental science. She explores the ethics of genetic modification and the dangers involved when humans 'play God'. And she addresses the fundamental question: to what extent will future advances transform human longevity and the quality of life.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Keith W. Campbell, "The New Science of Narcissism: Understanding One of the Greatest Psychological Challenges of Our Time" (Sounds True, 2020) Jul 15, 2022

“Narcissism” is truly one of the most important words of our time―ceaselessly discussed in the media, the subject of millions of online search queries, and at the center of serious social and political debates. But what does it really mean?

In The New Science of Narcissism (Sounds True, 2020), Dr. W. Keith Campbell pulls back the curtain on this frequently misused label, presenting the most recent psychological, personality, and social research into the phenomenon.

Rather than pathologizing all behaviors associated with the label, Campbell reveals that not only does narcissism occur on a spectrum, but almost everyone exhibits narcissistic tendencies in their day-to-day behavior. Drawing from real-life incidents and case studies, The New Science of Narcissism offers tools, tips, and suggestions for softening toxically selfish behaviors both in yourself and others. Here you will discover:

· An exploration of personality disorders connected with and adjacent to narcissism

· Why minor narcissistic tendencies are common in most people

· The foundational difference between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism

· The “recipe” of mental and emotional traits that combine into narcissism

· How to identify when you’re in a relationship with a narcissist and what you can do about it

· Why the 21st century has seen the rise of a “Great Fantasy Migration” into evermore insular subcultures

· The connection between narcissistic tendencies and leadership

· Why “the audience in your pocket” of social media has exacerbated culture-wide narcissistic tendencies

Though narcissism looms large in our cultural consciousness, The New Science of Narcissism offers many different options for understanding and treating it. With Campbell’s straightforward and grounded guidance, you’ll not only discover the latest and best information on the condition, but also a hopeful view of its future.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il.

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Jeannie N. Shinozuka, "Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Jul 15, 2022

In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950(U Chicago Press, 2022), Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today.

Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern fixation on panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia inspired concerns about biodiversity, prompting new categories of "native" and "invasive" species that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated--or annihilated. By highlighting these connections, Shinozuka shows us that this story cannot be told about humans alone--the plants and animals that crossed with them were central to Japanese American and Asian American history. The rise of economic entomology and plant pathology in concert with public health and anti-immigration movements demonstrate these entangled histories of xenophobia, racism, and species invasions.

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Disintermediation Jul 14, 2022

Mark McGurl talks about disintermediation, a key term for internet commerce, and his new book about fiction in the age of digital self-publication. The fantasy of disintermediation lies at the heart of utopian dreams of the internet, but it turns out that not only is the internet actually a medium, and a vast economic engine, but self-publishing is a lot of work!

Mark McGurl is a professor of English at Stanford University. If you want to learn more about the effects of Amazon’s self-publishing mechanism on literature, check out his new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso, 2021). His earlier book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard UP, 2011) takes a similarly materialist perspective on literary production, and it was sort of a thing. His first book The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton UP, 2001), blames Henry James for making American novels into art. In a good way of course.

This week’s image is a photograph of a printing press held in the collections of the Fort Nonquai Eshowe museum in South Africa, posted on Wikimedia commons.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Internet, the day when all humans will disappear’ by Monplaisir

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Veronica S. W. Mak, "Milk Craze: Body, Science, and Hope in China" (U Hawaii Press, 2021) Jul 14, 2022

Veronika Mak’s Milk Craze: Body, Science, and Hope in China (U of Hawaii Press, 2021) mixes historical and ethnographic research on milk to understand the morality politics of class, labor, and identity in modern Hong Kong and the Shunde area of Guangdong. Beginning with the historical “milkscapes” of ancient China, Mak’s book explores the influence of British colonization on dairy culture in Hong Kong; the role of governments and corporations in making China one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of cow’s milk; and the medicalization and moralization of practices and identities around milk, breastmilk, and infant formula in contemporary Hong Kong. Along the way, Milk Craze examines the demolition of indigenous water-buffalo cheesemaking in Shunde, the development of Hong Kong silk-stocking milk tea, and the pressures created by society and pharmaceutical firms on working mothers to choose infant formula over breastfeeding.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Nicole Erin Morse, "Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art" (Duke UP, 2022) Jul 13, 2022

In Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art(Duke University Press, 2022) Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by trans feminist artists, Morse details a set of formal strategies they call selfie aesthetics: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Morse traces these strategies in the work of Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, and Natalie Wynn, showing how these artists present improvisational identities and new modes of performative resistance by conveying the materialities of trans life. Morse shows how the interaction between selfie creators and viewers constructs collective modes of being and belonging in ways that envision trans feminist futures. By demonstrating the aesthetic depth and political potential of selfie creation, distribution, and reception, Morse deepens understandings of gender performativity and trans experience.

Daniela Meneses Sala is Peruvian Academic and Journalist. She holds an MSc in Gender (Sexuality) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In October, she is starting a PhD in Latin American Studies at Cambridge University, funded by the Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Programme.

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Elena Conis, "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT" (Bold Type Books, 2022) Jul 13, 2022

The story of DDT as you’ve never heard it before: a fresh look at the much-maligned chemical compound as a cautionary tale of how powerful corporations have stoked the flames of science denialism for their own benefit In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes. Thirty years later the U.S. would ban the use of DDT—only to reverse the ban in the 1990s when calls arose to bring it back to fight West Nile and malaria. What changed?

How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT(Bold Type Books, 2022) traces the surprising history of DDT’s rapid rise, infamous fall, and controversial revival to reveal to show that we’ve been taking the wrong lesson from DDT’s cautionary tale. Historian Elena Conis uncovers new evidence that it was not the shift in public opinion following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that led to the ban but in fact the behind-the-scenes political machinations of Big Business. She makes a compelling case that the real threat was not DDT itself but the prioritization of profits over public health. If we don't change the ways we make decisions about new scientific discoveries and technologies, Conis argues, we’re doomed to keep making the same mistakes and putting people at risk—both by withholding technologies that could help them and by exposing them to dangerous chemicals without their knowledge or consent. In an age when corporations and politicians are shaping our world behind closed doors and deliberately stoking misinformation around public health issues, from pesticides to vaccines to COVID-19 to climate change, we need greater transparency and a new way of communicating about science—as a discipline of discovery that's constantly evolving, rather than a finite and immutable collection of facts—in order to combat the war on facts and protect ourselves and our environment.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Jamie Susskind, "The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century" (Pegasus Books, 2022) Jul 11, 2022

From one of the leading intellectuals of the digital age, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century(Pegasus Books, 2022) is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? A Financial Times “Book to Read” in 2022. Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired, and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly. The Digital Republic charts a new course. It offers a plan for the digital age: new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. Inspired by the great political essays of the past, and steeped in the traditions of republican thought, it offers a vision of a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand.

Jamie Susskind is a barrister and the author of the award-winning bestseller Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (Oxford University Press, 2018), which received the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2019, and was an Evening Standard and Prospect Book of the Year. He has fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge and currently lives in London.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Trevor Boffone, "TikTok Cultures in the United States" (Routledge, 2022) Jul 11, 2022

Trevor Boffone's book TikTok Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 2022) examines the role of TikTok in US popular culture, paying close attention to the app’s growing body of subcultures. Featuring an array of scholars from varied disciplines and backgrounds, this book uses TikTok (sub)cultures as a point of departure from which to explore TikTok’s role in US popular culture today. Engaging with the extensive and growing scholarship on TikTok from international scholars, chapters in this book create frameworks and blueprints from which to analyse TikTok within a distinctly US context, examining topics such as gender and sexuality, feminism, race and ethnicity and wellness. Shaping TikTok as an interdisciplinary field in and of itself, this insightful and timely volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of new and digital media, social media, popular culture, communication studies, sociology of media, dance, gender studies, and performance studies.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022) Jul 11, 2022

Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom by narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologies, India's leaders served the technopolitical aims of economic modernity and the geopolitical goals of deterring adversaries.

The politically savvy, transnationally connected scientists and engineers who steered the program obtained technologies, materials, and information through a variety of state and nonstate actors from Europe and North America, including both superpowers. They thus maneuvered around Cold War politics and the choke points of the nonproliferation regime. Hyperdiversification increased choices for the leaders of the nuclear program but reduced democratic accountability at home. The nuclear program became a consensus-enforcing device in the name of the nation.

Ploughshares and Swords is a provocative new history with global implications. It shows how geopolitical and technopolitical visions influence decisions about the nation after decolonization.

Thanks to generous funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories. You can access the ebook here.

Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University Of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. Follow her on Twitter @DrJSarkar or check out her website (www.JayitaSarkar.com).

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

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Samuel Ulbricht, "Ethics of Computer Gaming: A Groundwork" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) Jul 08, 2022

Today I talked to Samuel Ulbricht about his book Ethics of Computer Gaming: A Groundwork (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).

Despite the increasing number of gamers worldwide, the moral classification of computer gaming marks an as yet unsolved riddle of philosophical ethics. In view of the explosive nature of the topic in everyday life (as seen in various debates about rampages), it is obvious that a differentiated professional clarification of the phenomenon is needed: Can playing computer games be immoral?

To answer this question, the author first discusses what we do at all when we play computer games: What kind of action are we talking about? The second step is a moral classification that reveals whether (and if so, why) some cases of computer gaming are morally problematic. The considerations made here provide a fundamental insight into the normative dimension of computer gaming.

This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Ethik des Computerspielens by Samuel Ulbricht in 2020.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Samuel Ulbricht, "Ethics of Computer Gaming: A Groundwork" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) Jul 08, 2022

Today I talked to Samuel Ulbricht about his book Ethics of Computer Gaming: A Groundwork (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).

Despite the increasing number of gamers worldwide, the moral classification of computer gaming marks an as yet unsolved riddle of philosophical ethics. In view of the explosive nature of the topic in everyday life (as seen in various debates about rampages), it is obvious that a differentiated professional clarification of the phenomenon is needed: Can playing computer games be immoral?

To answer this question, the author first discusses what we do at all when we play computer games: What kind of action are we talking about? The second step is a moral classification that reveals whether (and if so, why) some cases of computer gaming are morally problematic. The considerations made here provide a fundamental insight into the normative dimension of computer gaming.

This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Ethik des Computerspielens by Samuel Ulbricht in 2020.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Andrew Witt, "Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture" (MIT Press, 2022) Jul 08, 2022

In Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture(MIT Press, 2022), Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects.

Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design.

Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. btoepfer@toepferarchitecture

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Jody Rosen, "Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle" (Crown, 2022) Jul 08, 2022

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike--and nearly everyone does.

In Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Crown Publishing, 2022), journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dream life--and a flash point in culture wars--for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen's book sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a "green machine," an emblem of sustainability in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle-rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world's fastest-growing megacity, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station.

Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle's past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel--a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.

Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His work has appeared in Slate, New York, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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“Vaccine: The Human Story”: A Chat with Historian and Podcaster Annie Kelly Jul 08, 2022

“Vaccine: The Human Story” is a podcast and video series that tells the story of the global fight against smallpox, from its earliest history as a folk demon, to the birth of the anti-vax movement, through to its eradication in the 1960s. It is written and hosted by Dr. Annie Kelly.

Dr. Kelly, a specialist in antifeminism, conspiracy theories and the far right, earned her doctorate in American Studies in 2020 from the University of East Anglia. Her dissertation is entitled: “Fear, Hate and Countersubversion: American Antifeminism Online”. She specializes in research related to contemporary social movements, digital discourse analysis and their relation to race, gender and sexuality in American politics. Her writings have appeared in The New York Times and since 2019 she has been the UK correspondent for “QAnon Anonymous”, which The Washington Post named “Podcast of the Year”. Dr. Kelly is currently a postdoctoral researcher with “Everything Is Connected: Conspiracy Theories in the Age of the Internet”.

You can also find "Vaccine: A Human Story" on YouTube.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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84* Cixin Liu Talk About Science Fiction (JP, Pu Wang) Jul 07, 2022

John and Pu Wang, a Brandeis professor of Chinese literature, spoke with science-fiction genius Cixin Liu back in 2019. His most celebrated works include The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End.

When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record this interview. Liu spoke in Chinese and Pu translated his remarks in this English version of the interview (the original Chinese conversation is at 刘慈欣访谈中文版 Episode 14c).

Mr. Liu, flanked by John and Pu (photo: Claire Ogden)

They discuss the evolution of Mr. Liu’s science fiction fandom, and the powerful influence of Leo Tolstoy on Mr. Liu’s work, which leads to a consideration of realism and its relationship to science fiction. Science fiction is also compared and contrasted with myth, mathematics, and technology.

Lastly, they consider translation, and the special capacity that science fiction has to emerge through the translation process relatively unscathed. This is a testament to science fiction’s taking as its subject the affairs of the whole human community–compared to the valuable but distinctly Chinese concerns of Mo Yan, or the distinctly Russian concerns of Tolstoy.

Discussed in This Episode:

Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops“
Mo Yan, Red Sorghum

Read the transcript here

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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Ben Davis, "Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy" (Haymarket Books, 2022) Jul 06, 2022

It is a scary and disorienting time for art, as it is a scary and disorienting time in general. Aesthetic experience is both overshadowed by the spectacle of current events and pressed into new connection with them. The self-image of art as a social good is collapsing under the weight of capitalism’s dysfunction.

Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (Haymarket Books, 2022), art critic Ben Davis makes sense of our extreme present as an emerging "after-culture"—a culture whose forms and functions are being radically reshaped by cataclysmic events. In the face of catastrophe, he holds out hope that reckoning with the new realities of art, technology, activism, and the media, can help us weather the super-storms of the future.

Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com.

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Frank Close, "Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass" (Basic Book, 2022) Jul 06, 2022

On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle's retiring namesake--the only person in history to have an existing single particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world's most famous scientists. Close finds that scientific competition between people, institutions, and states played as much of a role in making Higgs famous as Higgs's work did.

A revelatory study of both a scientist and his era, Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass(Basic Book, 2022) will remake our understanding of modern physics.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Adrienne Buller, "The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism" (Manchester UP, 2022) Jul 05, 2022

In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish.

The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester UP, 2022) examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us - in the face of crisis - what we really value.

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Daniel M. Davis, "The Secret Body: How the New Science of the Human Body Is Changing the Way We Live" (Princeton UP, 2022) Jul 01, 2022

Imagine knowing years in advance whether you are likely to get cancer or having a personalized understanding of your individual genes, organs, and cells. Imagine being able to monitor your body's well-being, or have a diet tailored to your microbiome. The Secret Body reveals how these and other stunning breakthroughs and technologies are transforming our understanding of how the human body works, what it is capable of, how to protect it from disease, and how we might manipulate it in the future.

Taking readers to the cutting edge of research, Daniel Davis shows how radical new possibilities are becoming realities thanks to the visionary efforts of scientists who are revealing the invisible and secret universe within each of us. Focusing on six important frontiers, Davis describes what we are learning about cells, the development of the fetus, the body's immune system, the brain, the microbiome, and the genome--areas of human biology that are usually understood in isolation. Bringing them together here for the first time, Davis offers a new vision of the human body as a biological wonder of dizzying complexity and possibility.

Written by an award-winning scientist at the forefront of this adventure, The Secret Body: How the New Science of the Human Body Is Changing the Way We Live(Princeton UP, 2022) is a gripping drama of discovery and a landmark account of the dawning revolution in human health.

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Roberto J. González, "War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future" (U California Press, 2022) Jul 01, 2022

A critical look at how the US military is weaponizing technology and data for new kinds of warfare—and why we must resist. War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future (University of California Press, 2022) is the story of how scientists, programmers, and engineers are racing to develop data-driven technologies for fighting virtual wars, both at home and abroad. In this landmark book, Roberto J. González gives us a lucid and gripping account of what lies behind the autonomous weapons, robotic systems, predictive modeling software, advanced surveillance programs, and psyops techniques that are transforming the nature of military conflict. González, a cultural anthropologist, takes a critical approach to the techno-utopian view of these advancements and their dubious promise of a less deadly and more efficient warfare.

With clear, accessible prose, this book exposes the high-tech underpinnings of contemporary military operations—and the cultural assumptions they're built on. Chapters cover automated battlefield robotics; social scientists' involvement in experimental defense research; the blurred line between political consulting and propaganda in the internet era; and the military's use of big data to craft new counterinsurgency methods based on predicting conflict. González also lays bare the processes by which the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have quietly joined forces with Big Tech, raising an alarming prospect: that someday Google, Amazon, and other Silicon Valley firms might merge with some of the world's biggest defense contractors. War Virtually takes an unflinching look at an algorithmic future—where new military technologies threaten democratic governance and human survival.

Dr. Gonzalez is Professor and Chair of the San Jose State University Anthropology Department. He has authored four books including Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network and Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State. You can learn more about his work here.

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Teletherapy Jun 30, 2022

Hannah Zeavin talks about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. If therapy is always mediated, teletherapy is any form of therapy in which that mediation is more clearly legible. This mediated practice is the topic of her new book The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021).

Hannah is a Lecturer in the departments of English and History at UC Berkeley, where she is affiliated with the Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and she is a visiting fellow at Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference. She is currently at work on a second book project, about technology in the American family, called Mother’s Little Helpers, also with MIT Press. You can learn more about Hannah’s research and teaching on her website: zeavin.org

Image: adapted from a 1912 advertisement of the Illinois Telephone and Telegraph Co.

Music used in promotional material: ‘A Better Normal’ by Ian Sutherland

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James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, "Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World" (W. W. Norton, 2021) Jun 30, 2022

Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. In this triumph of visual storytelling, they uncover truths about our past, reveal who we are today, and highlight what we face in the years ahead. In Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World (W. W. Norton, 2021), Cheshire and Uberti explore happiness levels around the globe, trace the undersea cables and cell towers that connect us, examine hidden scars of geopolitics, and illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj. Years in the making, Atlas of the Invisible invites readers to marvel at the promise and peril of data, and to revel in the secrets and contours of a newly visible world.

Winner of the 2021 British Cartographic Society Awards including the Stanfords Award for Printed Mapping and the John C. Bartholomew Award for Thematic Mapping.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Susan H. Brandt, "Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) Jun 29, 2022

In her eighteenth-century medical recipe manuscript, the Philadelphia healer Elizabeth Coates Paschall asserted her ingenuity and authority with the bold strokes of her pen. Paschall developed an extensive healing practice, consulted medical texts, and conducted experiments based on personal observations. As British North America’s premier city of medicine and science, Philadelphia offered Paschall a nurturing environment enriched by diverse healing cultures and the Quaker values of gender equality and women’s education. She participated in transatlantic medical and scientific networks with her friend, Benjamin Franklin. Paschall was not unique, however. Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia(U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries.

Although the history of women practitioners often begins with the 1850 founding of Philadelphia’s Female Medical College, the first women’s medical school in the United States, these students merely continued the legacies of women like Paschall. Remarkably, though, the lives and work of early American female practitioners have gone largely unexplored. While some sources depict these women as amateurs whose influence declined, Susan Brandt documents women’s authoritative medical work that continued well into the nineteenth century. Spanning a century and a half, Women Healers traces the transmission of European women’s medical remedies to the Delaware Valley where they blended with African and Indigenous women’s practices, forming hybrid healing cultures.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

Corinne Doria is a historian specializing in the social history of medicine. She is a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen and teaches Disability Studies at Sciences-Po (Paris). Her work focuses on the history of ophthalmology and visual impairment in the West.

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Victor Seow, "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Jun 29, 2022

Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy: Energy regimes in Modern East Asia (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an account of the modern “world that carbon made” through the case study of the Fushun colliery in Manchuria. “Carbon technocracy” is a system dedicated to the optimal exploitation of fossil fuel resources. It is, as Seow shows, a system of consistent waste, environmental degradation, and labor exploitation, built on a fantasy of inexhaustible energy reserves mobilized toward endless and accelerating development. Fushun exemplifies the violence, contradictions, and, as we discuss in this interview, failures of imagination of successive Japanese, Chinese Nationalist, and Chinese Communist regimes. Carbon Technocracy balances macro-level questions about the mutual constitution of nation and global energy regimes with a sensitivity to individual laborers caught up in these machinations.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky, "Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power" (MIT Press, 2022) Jun 29, 2022

An argument that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. Discard studies is an emerging field that looks at waste and wasting broadly construed. Rather than focusing on waste and trash as the primary objects of study, discard studies looks at wider systems of waste and wasting to explore how some materials, practices, regions, and people are valued or devalued, becoming dominant or disposable.

In Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power (MIT Press, 2022), Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that social, political, and economic systems maintain power by discarding certain people, places, and things. They show how the theories and methods of discard studies can be applied in a variety of cases, many of which do not involve waste, trash, or pollution. Liboiron and Lepawsky consider the partiality of knowledge and offer a theory of scale, exploring the myth that most waste is municipal solid waste produced by consumers; discuss peripheries, centers, and power, using content moderation as an example of how dominant systems find ways to discard; and use theories of difference to show that universalism, stereotypes, and inclusion all have politics of discard and even purification—as exemplified in “inclusive” efforts to broaden the Black Lives Matter movement. Finally, they develop a theory of change by considering “wasting well,” outlining techniques, methods, and propositions for a justice-oriented discard studies that keeps power in view.

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Whitney Trettien, "Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Jun 27, 2022

Today’s guest is Whitney Trettien whose bookCut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookworkwas published through the University of Minnesota Press in 2022. Trettien is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and researches the history of the book spanning print and digital technologies. Cut/Copy/Paste explores makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical, bespoke publications. The book is complemented with a wide array of resources on early modern publishing available on the book’s webpage hosted by the University of Minnesota Press.

John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Ryan North, "How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain" (Riverhead Books, 2022) Jun 27, 2022

Taking over the world is a lot of work. Any supervillain is bound to have questions: What's the perfect location for a floating secret base? What zany heist will fund my wildly ambitious plans? How do I control the weather, destroy the internet, and never, ever die?

Bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North has the answers. In How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain (Riverhead Books, 2022), he details a number of outlandish villainous schemes that harness the potential of today's most advanced technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and elucidating as they are completely absurd.

You don't have to be a criminal mastermind to share a supervillain's interest in cutting-edge science and technology. This book doesn't just reveal how to take over the world--it also shows how you could save it. This sly guide to some of the greatest threats facing humanity accessibly explores emerging techniques to extend human life spans, combat cyberterrorism, communicate across millennia, and finally make Jurassic Park a reality.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Mark Andrejevic, "Automated Media" (Routledge, 2019) Jun 24, 2022

In this era of pervasive automation, Mark Andrejevic provides an original framework for tracing the logical trajectory of automated media and their social, political, and cultural consequences.

Automated Media (Routledge, 2019) explores the cascading logic of automation, which develops from the information collection process through to data processing and, finally, automated decision making. It argues that pervasive digital monitoring combines with algorithmic decision making and machine learning to create new forms of power and control that pose challenges to democratic forms of accountability and individual autonomy alike. Andrejevic provides an overview of the implications of these developments for the fate of human experience, describing the "bias of automation" through the logics of pre-emption, operationalism, and "framelessness."

Automated Media is a fascinating and groundbreaking new volume: a must-read for students and researchers of critical media studies interested in the intersections of media, technology, and the digital economy.

Mark Andrejevic is Professor of Media Studies at Monash University where he heads the Automated Society Working Group in the School of Media, Film and Journalism. He is the author of Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era; and Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on surveillance, popular culture, and digital media.

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Adrienne Mayor, "Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities" (Princeton UP, 2022) Jun 24, 2022

Adrienne Mayor is renowned for exploring the borders of history, science, archaeology, anthropology, and popular knowledge to find historical realities and scientific insights--glimmering, long-buried nuggets of truth--embedded in myth, legends, and folklore. Combing through ancient texts and obscure sources, she has spent decades prospecting for intriguing wonders and marvels, historical mysteries, diverting anecdotes, and hidden gems from ancient, medieval, and modern times. Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities(Princeton UP, 2022) is a treasury of fifty of her most amazing and amusing discoveries.

The book explores such subjects as how mirages inspired legends of cities in the sky; the true identity of winged serpents in ancient Egypt; how ghost ships led to the discovery of the Gulf Stream; and the beauty secrets of ancient Amazons. Other pieces examine Arthur Conan Doyle's sea serpent and Geronimo's dragon; Flaubert's obsession with ancient Carthage; ancient tattooing practices; and the strange relationship between wine goblets and women's breasts since the times of Helen of Troy and Marie Antoinette. And there's much, much more.

Showcasing Mayor's trademark passion not to demythologize myths, but to uncover the fascinating truths buried beneath them, Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws is a wonder cabinet of delightful curiosities.

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Bharat Jayram Venkat, "At the Limits of Cure" (Duke UP, 2021) Jun 23, 2022

Can a history of cure be more than a history of how disease comes to an end? In 1950s Madras, an international team of researchers demonstrated that antibiotics were effective in treating tuberculosis. But just half a century later, reports out of Mumbai stoked fears about the spread of totally drug-resistant strains of the disease. Had the curable become incurable?

Through an anthropological history of tuberculosis treatment in India, Bharat Jayram Venkat examines what it means to be cured, and what it means for a cure to come undone. At the Limits of Cure(Duke UP, 2021) tells a story that stretches from the colonial period—a time of sanatoria, travel cures, and gold therapy—into a postcolonial present marked by antibiotic miracles and their failures. Venkat juxtaposes the unraveling of cure across a variety of sites: in idyllic hill stations and crowded prisons, aboard ships and on the battlefield, and through research trials and clinical encounters. If cure is frequently taken as an ending (of illness, treatment, and suffering more generally), Venkat provides a foundation for imagining cure otherwise in a world of fading antibiotic efficacy.

Garima Jaju holds a Ph.D. in international development from Oxford University and is currently a post-doc in sociology at Cambridge University.

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Drone Life Jun 22, 2022

Amy Gaeta uses the relationship between humans and technology, non-military use of drones being a prime example, to rethink concepts of passivity and how it can bring about change. She makes an intervention in science and technology studies from her position in feminist and disability studies, drawing from diverse theoretical sources like the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Saidiya Hartman, Alexander Weheliye, and Mark Fisher.

Amy Gaeta is not utopian; she is a student of understanding how we survive a world that is killing us on a dying planet, a feminist disability activist and scholar, poet, punk, and PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her academic work specializes in the psychological aspects of human-technology relations under the surveillance state. In poetry, she explores mental illness, desire, and the impossibility of being human.

Image: “‘Little Planet’ style edit of a 180-degree panorama of my daughter’s little league game this summer” by Tim Bish.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Unsunny Sundays’ by Chris Herb.

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Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish, "Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation" (U Illinois Press, 2022) Jun 22, 2022

Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish edit contributions that explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power.

Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (U Illinois Press, 2022) offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives. The book has been dubbed by the experts in the field as “a veritable smorgasbord of perspectives on the all-pervasive and all-important nature of food on visual social media” (Tama Leaver, the co-author of Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures) that “shows how the digital app and the kind of food representations it supports contribute to the building identities and negotiating social and economic relationships” (Fabio Parasecoli, author of Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture). It is a path-blazing, inspirational work offering a vast array of theoretical perspectives, methodological tools, and conceptual innovations.

Emily Contois is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. She holds a PhD in American studies from Brown University along with master's degrees in Gastronomy from Boston University and Public Health Nutrition from University of California, Berkeley. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (2020). She serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, H-Nutrition, and Advertising and Society Quarterly. As a public scholar, she has written for NBC News, Jezebel, and Nursing Clio and has appeared on CBS This Morning, BBC Ideas, and Ugly Delicious on Netflix. Learn more about her work at emilycontois.com or connect on social media (@emilycontois).

Zenia Kish is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa. She earned her PhD in American studies at New York University and was a post- doctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her work explores global digital media, sociotechnical imaginaries of food and agriculture, and philanthrocapitalism and has been published in journals including American Quarterly, Cultural Studies, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Environment and Planning A. She is a member of the Agri-Food Technology Research (AFTeR) Project and is associate editor for the Journal of Cultural Economy, as well as serving on the boards of the Journal of Environmental Media and Communication and Race. She is writing a book on philanthropic media cultures (@ZeniaKish).

Amir Sayadabdi is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism.

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Jonathan Crary, "Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World" (Verso, 2022) Jun 22, 2022

In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso, 2022) surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.

This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

Dr. Jonathan Crary is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University in the Art history and Archeology Department. He is a prolific art and culture critic and is the co-founder (and co-editor) of Zone Books. Professor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005, his teaching and mentoring were recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. Dr. Crary is also the author of Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award), and 24/7 (a finalist for the 2016 Terzani International Literary Prize).

Cody Skahan (cskahan@ksu.edu) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog here where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on.

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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe" (Dey Street Books, 2022) Jun 22, 2022

Today I talked to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz about his new book Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe (Dey Street Books, 2022)

Looking for advice on how to get a date, how to have a successful marriage, or just how to have a happier life? Don’t trust your gut, don’t trust conventional wisdom, and put down that self-help book full of plausible arguments and compelling anecdotes that just happens to contradict the advice you got from the self-help book you. Instead, let Seth Stephens-Davidowitz guide you, using data!

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist, author, keynote speaker, and recovering economist. His first book Everybody Lies, was a New York Times bestseller that showed how social scientists have used new data about our online behavior to gain new insights about who we really are and what we really think. His latest book, Don’t Trust Your Gut, is about how we can use data not just to understand other people but also how to get what we want in life, whether it’s health, wealth, attractiveness, or inner peace.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy.

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Slobodan Perovic, "From Data to Quanta: Niels Bohr’s Vision of Physics" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jun 22, 2022

Niels Bohr was a central figure in quantum physics, well known for his work on atomic structure and his contributions to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. In From Data to Quanta: Niels Bohr’s Vision of Physics (U Chicago Press, 2021), philosopher of science Slobodan Perović explores the way Bohr practiced and understood physics, and analyzes its implications for our understanding of modern science. Perović develops a novel approach to Bohr’s understanding of physics and his method of inquiry, presenting an exploratory symbiosis of historical and philosophical analysis that uncovers the key aspects of Bohr’s philosophical vision of physics within a given historical context.

Ana Georgescu studied astrophysics and physics at Harvard University and is now a science consultant and writer based in New York City.

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Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells, "Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed." (Ubiquity Press, 2022) Jun 21, 2022

Plan S: the open access initiative that changed the face of global research.

Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells's book Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed. (Ubiquity Press, 2022) tells the story of open access publishing - why it matters now, and for the future. In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before - something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing millions from accessing quality, scientific knowledge - and public trust in science is under threat. On 4 September 2018, a bold new initiative known as 'Plan S' was unveiled, kickstarting a world-wide shift in attitudes towards open access research. For the first time, funding agencies across continents joined forces to impose new rules on the publication of research, with the aim of one day making all research free and available to all. What followed was a debate of global proportions, as stakeholders asked: Who has the right to access publicly-funded research? Will it ever be possible to enforce change on a multi-billion dollar market dominated by five major players? Here, the scheme's founder, Robert-Jan Smits, makes a compelling case for Open Access, and reveals for the first time how he set about turning his controversial plan into reality - as well as some of the challenges faced along the way. In telling his story, Smits argues that the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the traditional academic publishing system as unsustainable.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Artificial Intelligence with Chinese Characteristics Jun 17, 2022

What is artificial intelligence (AI) with Chinese characteristics? Why is the Chinese Government labelling AI as a matter of security? How has AI been empowering China’s authoritarian governance? Jinghan Zeng, Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University, talks about his latest book Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Chinese Characteristics: National Strategy, Security and Authoritarian Governance (Palgrave, 2022) at the Nordic Asia Podcast.

In his conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and affiliated PhD at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Jinghan Zeng introduces his book which argues that China’s AI approach is sophisticated and multifaceted, and it has brought about both considerable benefits and challenges to China. The book suggests that a more accurate understanding of AI with Chinese characteristics is essential in order to inform the debate regarding what lessons can be learnt from China’s AI approach and how to respond to China’s rise as the AI leader, if not a superpower.

Jinghan Zeng is Professor of China and International Studies at Lancaster University. He is also Academic Director of China Engagement and Director of Lancaster University Confucius Institute. He plays a key role in supporting the development and implementation of the University’s China strategy. He is the author of Slogan Politics: Understanding Chinese Foreign Policy Concepts (2020) and The Chinese Communist Party's Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion (2015). He is also the co-editor of One Belt, One Road, One Story?: Towards an EU-China Strategic Narrative (2021).

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Catherine Gibson, "Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic" (Oxford UP, 2022) Jun 17, 2022

Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic(Oxford UP, 2022) examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively became a tool that lent legitimacy and an experiential dimension to nationalist arguments, as well as a wide range of alternative spatial configurations that rendered the inhabitants of the Baltic as part of local, imperial, and global geographies.

Catherine Gibson argues that map production and the spread of cartographic literacy as a mass phenomenon in Baltic society transformed how people made sense of linguistic, ethnic, and religious similarities and differences by imbuing them with an alleged scientific objectivity that was later used to determine the political structuring of the Baltic region and beyond. Geographies of Nationhood treads new ground by expanding the focus beyond elites to include a diverse range of mapmakers, such as local bureaucrats, commercial enterprises, clergymen, family members, teachers, and landowners. It shifts the focus from imperial learned and military institutions to examine the proliferation of mapmaking across diverse sites in the Empire, including the provincial administration, local learned societies, private homes, and schools. Understanding ethnographic maps in the social context of their production, circulation, consumption, and reception is crucial for assessing their impact as powerful shapers of popular geographical conceptions of nationhood, state-building, and border-drawing.

Catherine Gibson is a historian of modern eastern Europe, currently a research fellow at the University of Tartu in Estonia.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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David L. Sloss, "Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare" (Stanford UP, 2022) Jun 17, 2022

When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram were first introduced to the public, their mission was simple: they were designed to help people become more connected to each other. Social media became a thriving digital space by giving its users the freedom to share whatever they wanted with their friends and followers. Unfortunately, these same digital tools are also easy to manipulate. As exemplified by Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, authoritarian states can exploit social media to interfere with democratic governance in open societies.

Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare (Stanford UP, 2022) is the first detailed analysis of how Chinese and Russian agents weaponize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to subvert the liberal international order. In addition to examining the 2016 U.S. election, David L. Sloss explores Russia's use of foreign influence operations to threaten democracies in Europe, as well as China's use of social media and other digital tools to meddle in Western democracies and buttress autocratic rulers around the world. Sloss calls for cooperation among democratic governments to create a new transnational system for regulating social media to protect Western democracies from information warfare. Drawing on his professional experience as an arms control negotiator, he outlines a novel system of transnational governance that Western democracies can enforce by harmonizing their domestic regulations. And drawing on his academic expertise in constitutional law, he explains why that system―if implemented by legislation in the United States―would be constitutionally defensible, despite likely First Amendment objections. With its critical examination of information warfare and its proposal for practical legislative solutions to fight back, this book is essential reading in a time when disinformation campaigns threaten to undermine democracy.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Juli Berwald, "Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs" (Riverhead Books, 2022) Jun 16, 2022

Coral reefs are a microcosm of our planet: extraordinarily diverse, deeply interconnected, and full of wonders. When they're thriving, these fairy gardens hidden beneath the ocean's surface burst with color and life. They sustain bountiful ecosystems and protect vulnerable coasts. Corals themselves are evolutionary marvels that build elaborate limestone formations from their collective skeletons, broker symbiotic relationships with algae, and manufacture their own fluorescent sunblock. But corals across the planet are in the middle of an unprecedented die-off, beset by warming oceans, pollution, damage by humans, and a devastating pandemic.

Juli Berwald fell in love with coral reefs as a marine biology student, entranced by their beauty and complexity. Alarmed by their peril, she traveled the world to discover how to prevent their loss. She met scientists and activists operating in emergency mode, doing everything they can think of to prevent coral reefs from disappearing forever. She was so amazed by the ingenuity of these last-ditch efforts that she joined in rescue missions, unexpected partnerships, and risky experiments, and helped rebuild reefs with rebar and zip ties.

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs(Riverhead Books, 2022) is an inspiring, lucid, meditative ode to the reefs and the undaunted scientists working to save them against almost impossible odds. As she also attempts to help her daughter in her struggle with mental illness, Berwald explores what it means to keep fighting a battle whose outcome is uncertain. She contemplates the inevitable grief of climate change and the beauty of small victories.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Andrew Simon, "Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2022) Jun 16, 2022

Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt(Stanford UP, 2022) investigates the social life of an everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt. Over the 1970s and 1980s, cassettes became a ubiquitous presence in Egyptian homes and stores. Audiocassette technology gave an opening to ordinary individuals, from singers to smugglers, to challenge state-controlled Egyptian media. Enabling an unprecedented number of people to participate in the creation of culture and circulation of content, cassette players and tapes soon informed broader cultural, political, and economic developments and defined "modern" Egyptian households.

Drawing on a wide array of audio, visual, and textual sources that exist outside the Egyptian National Archives, Andrew Simon provides a new entry point into understanding everyday life and culture. Cassettes and cassette players, he demonstrates, did not simply join other twentieth century mass media, like records and radio; they were the media of the masses. Comprised of little more than magnetic reels in plastic cases, cassettes empowered cultural consumers to become cultural producers long before the advent of the Internet. Positioned at the productive crossroads of social history, cultural anthropology, and media and sound studies, Media of the Masses ultimately shows how the most ordinary things may yield the most surprising insights.

Avery Weinman is a PhD student in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She researches Jewish history in the modern Middle East and North Africa, with emphasis on Sephardi and Mizrahi radicals in British Mandatory Palestine. She can be reached at averyweinman@ucla.edu.

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Albert Folch, "Hidden in Plain Sight: The History, Science, and Engineering of Microfluidic Technology" (MIT Press, 2022) Jun 15, 2022

Hidden from view, microfluidics underlies a variety of devices that are essential to our lives, from inkjet printers to glucometers for the monitoring of diabetes. Microfluidics--which refers to the technology of miniature fluidic devices and the study of fluids at submillimeter levels--is invisible to most of us because it is hidden beneath ingenious user interfaces. In this book, Albert Folch, a leading researcher in microfluidics, describes the development and use of key microfluidic devices. He explains not only the technology but also the efforts, teams, places, and circumstances that enabled these inventions.

Folch reports, for example, that the inkjet printer was one of the first microfluidic devices invented, and traces its roots back to nineteenth-century discoveries in the behavior of fluid jets. He also describes how rapid speed microfluidic DNA sequencers have enabled the sequencing of animal, plant, and microbial species genomes; organs on chips facilitate direct tests of drugs on human tissue, leapfrogging over the usual stage of animal testing; at-home pregnancy tests are based on clever microfluidic principles; microfluidics can be used to detect cancer cells in the early stages of metastasis; and the same technology that shoots droplets of ink on paper in inkjet printers enables 3D printers to dispense layers of polymers.

In Hidden in Plain Sight: The History, Science, and Engineering of Microfluidic Technology(MIT Press, 2022), Folch tells the stories behind these devices in an engaging style, accessible to nonspecialists. More than 100 color illustrations show readers amazing images of microfluids under the microscope.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Michael Munger, "The Sharing Economy: Its Pitfalls and Promises" (Duke UP, 2021) Jun 15, 2022

Transactions have always taken place. For hundreds of years that 'place' was a market or, more recently, a shopping mall. But in the past two decades these physical locations have increasingly been replaced by their virtual counterparts - online platforms. In this book Michael Munger explains how these platforms act as matchmakers or middlemen, a role traders have adopted since the very first exchanges thousands of years ago. The difference today is that the matchmakers often play no direct part in buying or selling anything - they just help buyers and sellers find each other. Their major contribution has been to reduce the costs of organizing and completing purchases, rentals or exchanges. The Sharing Economy: Its Pitfalls and Promises (Duke UP, 2021) contends that the key role of online platforms is to create reductions in transaction costs and it highlights the importance of three 'Ts' - triangulation, transfer and trust - in bringing down those costs.

Professor Munger trained as an economist at Washington University in St. Louis under Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass North. He has published prolifically across disciplines in the areas of political economy and public choice, and is now a professor of political science at Duke University, with secondary appointments in economics and public policy.

Professor Munger is also an avowed libertarian, and has stood for office as a candidate of the Libertarian Party. In our interview, he explains how the emergence of the platform economy creates concentrations of economic power that are just as concerning to him as concentrations of political power. He also explains how thinking through the many changes and disruptions in our working lives that will result from the platform economy has led him to the view that Universal Basic Income and single-payer healthcare are necessary to creating the kind of free and prosperous society that he and other libertarians want.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics that trains students in the skills of data analytics needed to understand, succeed in, or make positive changes to the evolving digital platform economy.

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John Wills, "Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) Jun 15, 2022

In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units.

In Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture(Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoods, and legends. Arguing that video games toy with Americans' mass cultural and historical understanding, Wills show how games reprogram the American experience as a simulated reality. Blockbuster games such as Civilization, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption repackage the past, refashioning history into novel and immersive digital states of America. Controversial titles such as Custer's Revenge and 08.46 recode past tragedies. Meanwhile, online worlds such as Second Life cater to a desire to inhabit alternate versions of America, while Paperboy and The Sims transform the mundane tasks of everyday suburbia into fun and addictive challenges.

Working with a range of popular and influential games, from Pong, Civilization, and The Oregon Trail to Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill, and Fortnite, Wills critically explores these gamic depictions of America. Touching on organized crime, nuclear fallout, environmental degradation, and the War on Terror, Wills uncovers a world where players casually massacre Native Americans and Cold War soldiers alike, a world where neo-colonialism, naive patriotism, disassociated violence, and racial conflict abound, and a world where the boundaries of fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. Ultimately, Gamer Nation reveals not only how video games are a key aspect of contemporary American culture, but also how games affect how people relate to America itself.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design at the IU International University of Applied Science.

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Gian Maria Campedelli, "Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads" (Routledge, 2022) Jun 14, 2022

Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads (Routledge, 2022) reviews the roots of the intersection between machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and research on crime; examines the current state of the art in this area of scholarly inquiry; and discusses future perspectives that may emerge from this relationship.

As machine learning and AI approaches become increasingly pervasive, it is critical for criminology and crime research to reflect on the ways in which these paradigms could reshape the study of crime. In response, this book seeks to stimulate this discussion. The opening part is framed through a historical lens, with the first chapter dedicated to the origins of the relationship between AI and research on crime, refuting the novelty narrative that often surrounds this debate. The second presents a compact overview of the history of AI, further providing a nontechnical primer on machine learning. The following chapter reviews some of the most important trends in computational criminology and quantitatively characterizing publication patterns at the intersection of AI and criminology, through a network science approach. This book also looks to the future, proposing two goals and four pathways to increase the positive societal impact of algorithmic systems in research on crime. The sixth chapter provides a survey of the methods emerging from the integration of machine learning and causal inference, showcasing their promise for answering a range of critical questions.

With its transdisciplinary approach, Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research is important reading for scholars and students in criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and economics, as well as AI, data sciences and statistics, and computer science.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

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R. John Aitken, "The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jun 13, 2022

A potential crisis in human fertility is brewing. As societies become more affluent, they experience changes that have a dramatic impact on reproduction. As average family sizes fall, the selection pressure for high-fertility genes decreases; exacerbated by the IVF industry which allows infertility-linked genes to pass into the next generation. Male fertility rates are low, for many reasons including genetics and exposure to environmental toxins. So, a perfect storm of factors is contriving to drive fertility rates down at unprecedented rates. If we do not recognize the reality of our situation and react accordingly, an uncontrollable decline in population numbers is likely, which we'll be unable to reverse. R. John Aitken's book The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now (Cambridge UP, 2022) addresses, in a unique and multi-faceted way, how the consequences of modern life affects fertility, so that we can consider behavioural, social, medical and environmental changes which could reduce the severity of what is about to come.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Timothy J. Jorgensen, "Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life" (Princeton UP, 2021) Jun 10, 2022

When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices--or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical.

The story of how we came to understand electricity's essential role in all life is rooted in our observations of its influences on the body--influences governed by the body's central nervous system. Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life (Princeton UP, 2021) explains the science of electricity from this fresh, biological perspective. Through vivid tales of scientists and individuals--from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk--Timothy Jorgensen shows how our views of electricity and the nervous system evolved in tandem, and how progress in one area enabled advancements in the other. He explains how these developments have allowed us to understand--and replicate--the ways electricity enables the body's essential functions of sight, hearing, touch, and movement itself.

Throughout, Jorgensen examines our fascination with electricity and how it can help or harm us. He explores a broad range of topics and events, including the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of the electron and neuron, the history of experimentation involving electricity's effects on the body, and recent breakthroughs in the use of electricity to treat disease.

Filled with gripping adventures in scientific exploration, Spark offers an indispensable look at electricity, how it works, and how it animates our lives from within and without.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Mark Anthony Neal, "Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive" (NYU Press, 2022) Jun 10, 2022

We are living in an era of unprecedented access to popular culture: contemporary digital infrastructure provides anyone with an internet connection access to a dizzying array of cultural objects past and present, which mingle and connect in fascinating, bizarre and sometimes troubling ways.

In Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive(NYU Press, 2022), Mark Anthony Neal considers the opportunities and challenges that this vast archive represents for Black American culture, with a particular focus on music and sound. He suggests that despite the profusion of what he terms ‘Black big data’ and the supposed democratisation of access this entails, the contemporary moment is characterised by a profound amnesia and an absence of attention to the dense web of connections that bind the analogue past with the digital present. Black Ephemera seeks to at once draw out and ‘mystify’ these links, by attending to recordings, historical moments and archival projects which have often been neglected in other studies of Black music. Neal’s explorations have a wide historical scope and operate simultaneously in microscopic and conjunctural registers. The book includes analyses of legendary Memphis record label Stax, the place of Aretha Franklin and Mavin Gaye’s overlooked early recordings in/as the Great American Songbook, the use of musical citation to try and combat the erasure of Black women’s experience from the historical archive, and the significance of archival ephemera to Black mourning practices from Pattie LaBelle to Kendrick Lamar.

We cover a lot of music in this episode, and there’s even more in the book! A good place to start might be with two mixes made in response to Black Ephemera, which you can listen to here and here.

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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On Religion and Photography in 19th-Century America Jun 09, 2022

Dr. Rachel Lindsey is Assistant Professor in Saint Louis University’s Department of Theological Studies. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in American Religion from Princeton University, and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Missouri State University. She is the author of Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth Century America from University of North Carolina Press. We discussed Communion of Shadows and her fantastic projects, Lived Religion in the Digital Age and Arch City Religion. You can find Dr. Lindsey’s projects at archcityreligion.org and religioninplace.org.

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Wake Smith, "Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention" (Cambridge UP, 2022) Jun 09, 2022

Reaching net zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, but only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures will remain elevated; climate damages will continue to accrue and sea levels will continue to rise. Even the urgent and utterly essential task of reaching net zero cannot be achieved rapidly by emissions reductions alone. To hasten net zero and minimize climate damages thereafter, we will also need massive carbon removal and storage. We may even need to reduce incoming solar radiation in order to lower unacceptably high temperatures. Such unproven and potentially risky climate interventions raise mind-blowing questions of governance and ethics.

Wake Smith's book Pandora's Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers readers an accessible and authoritative introduction to both the hopes and hazards of some of humanity's most controversial technologies, which may nevertheless provide the key to saving our world.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Nikita Braguinski, "Mathematical Music: From Antiquity to Music AI" (Focal Press, 2022) Jun 09, 2022

What is mathematical music? In Mathematical Music from Antiquity to AI(Routledge, 2022), musicologist Nikita Braguinski discusses how mathematics has historically been used to make music, how it continues to influence musical composition, and the ways in which it may influence music in the future, including through artificial intelligence (AI). From pre-historic sounds to Gregorian chant to jazz to rock and beyond, from Mozart to M.C. Hammer, from the definition of an interval to time signatures to what gives human music its “soul,” Braguinski, a 2019-2020 Harvard University Music Department fellow, takes us on a fascinating journey.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

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Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins, "Who Needs the ABC?: How Digital Disruption and Political Dysfunction Threaten the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Existence" (Scribe, 2022) Jun 08, 2022

Hello media fans - The ABC is Australia's public broadcaster, for TV, digital and radio. Think BBC and CBC and NPR.

Who Needs the ABC?: How Digital Disruption and Political Dysfunction Threaten the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Existence (Scribe, 2022) by Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins (Scribe 2022), charts how, in its 90th year, the best-trusted news organisation in Australia arrived at its current plight: doing the most it ever has, with less than it needs, under a barrage of constant criticism.

This book examines the profound changes that have swept through the Australian media, technology, and political landscapes in the past decade, and explores the tense relationship between the ABC and governments of both stripes over the last 40 years. It dispels any complacency about the ABC’s future by charting the very real threat now posed by the Liberal– National Party coalition, and the damage that it has done to the ABC while in office.

Who Needs the ABC? identifies the vital role that the ABC plays in Australia today: in its award-winning journalism, in its vast array of cultural programming on television, on radio, and online, and in the comprehensive service it provides to people across the country.

At a time when the truth has to vie with obfuscation and misinformation, this book offers a rejoinder to the ABC’s critics, points to solutions that will see the ABC thrive, and answers the question posed here: Who Needs the ABC? We all do.

Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com

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Marco Grasso, "From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022) Jun 08, 2022

In From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis(MIT Press, 2022), Marco Grasso examines the responsibility of the oil and gas industry for the climate crisis and develops a moral framework that lays out its duties of reparation and decarbonization to allay the harm it has done. By framing climate change as a moral issue and outlining the industry's obligation to tackle it, Grasso shows that Big Oil is a central, yet overlooked, agent of climate ethics and policy.

Grasso argues that by indiscriminately flooding the global economy with fossil fuels—while convincing the public that halting climate change is a matter of consumer choice, that fossil fuels are synonymous with energy, and that a decarbonized world would take civilization back to the Stone Age—Big Oil is morally responsible for the climate crisis. He explains that it has managed to avoid being held financially accountable for past harm and that its duty of reparation has never been theoretically developed or justified. With this book, he fills those gaps. After making the moral case for climate reparations and their implementation, Grasso develops Big Oil's duty of decarbonization, which entails its transformation into Big Green by phasing out carbon emissions from its processes and, especially, its products.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Joshua Citarella, "Politigram and the Post-Left" (Blurb, 2021) Jun 07, 2022

The internet’s potential to perform political miracles has been a source of both hope and disappointment for many grassroots movements. We remember that the Sanders campaign tried to master the meme to mobilise a young, eager audience. Equally, we ascribe Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 to seemingly leaderless internet misinformation.Many of such events have been the subject of academic study - but research is often slow to keep up with the rapidly changing scene. If a researcher tracing the role of the meme to the politicisation and radicalisation of online communities struggles to keep up what hope does an artist have?

Joshua Citarella’s practice starts with the understanding that it is impossible to predict what the next generation of meme posters will be interested in and whether their memes will reach beyond their tiny echo chambers. What is clear is that mainstream politics, particularly the politics of the left, remains afraid of these unruly communities that can just as easily turn to the dark corners of the demonised alt-right as they are to carry the flag for Bernie.

Joshua Citarella speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about researching internet subcultures, playing politics with the extremely online, the multiple meanings of radicalisation, strategies for subverting right-wing content, and the role of art in internet political aesthetics.

Joshua Citarella is an artist, content creator, and researcher. Politigram and the Post-left is one of many projects he has released through self-publishing channels and directly to his supporters.

Joshua on Instagram and Patreon
20 Interviews with meme-posters
Do Not Research, and online internet culture magazine
When Guys Turn 20, Joshua's video series at dis.art
Do Not Research exhibition at Lower Cavity
Interview with Mike Watson on The Memeing of Mark Fisher

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Gernot Wagner, "Geoengineering: The Gamble" (Polity, 2021) Jun 07, 2022

Stabilizing the world's climates means cutting carbon dioxide pollution. There's no way around it. But what if that's not enough? What if it's too difficult to accomplish in the time allotted or, worse, what if it's so late in the game that even cutting carbon emissions to zero, tomorrow, wouldn't do?

Enter solar geoengineering. The principle is simple: attempt to cool Earth by reflecting more sunlight back into space. The primary mechanism, shooting particles into the upper atmosphere, implies more pollution, not less. If that doesn't sound scary, it should. There are lots of risks, unknowns, and unknowables.

In Geoengineering: The Gamble(Polity, 2021), climate economist Gernot Wagner provides a balanced take on the possible benefits and all-too-real risks, especially the so-called "moral hazard" that researching or even just discussing (solar) geoengineering would undermine the push to cut carbon emissions in the first place. Despite those risks, he argues, solar geoengineering may only be a matter of time. Not if, but when.

As the founding executive director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program, Wagner explores scenarios of a geoengineered future, offering an inside-view of the research already under way and the actions the world must take to guide it in a productive direction.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Allison Hahn, "Media Culture in Nomadic Communities" (Amsterdam UP, 2021) Jun 07, 2022

In Media Culture in Nomadic Communities (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), author Allison Hahn examines the ways that new communications technologies have changed how nomadic and mobile communities engage in political advocacy, activism, and struggles for self-representation. Through a series of case studies focused on herding groups in different parts of the world, from Mongolia to Kenya to Scandinavia, Hahn examines how modern communications technologies and infrastructures are shaping nomadic communities and practices. Hahn argues that, contrary to popular belief, contemporary communications tools not only play an important role in how herding groups organize internally and for political ends, but also allow herding lifestyles to flourish and remain relevant into the 21st century.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Her work focuses on histories of nomad-state relationships and uses of architecture in nomadic contexts.

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David B. Goldstein, "The End of Genetics: Designing Humanity's DNA" (Yale UP, 2022) Jun 06, 2022

Since 2010 it has been possible to determine a person's genetic makeup in a matter of days at an accessible cost for many millions of people. Along with this technological breakthrough there has emerged a movement to use this information to help prospective parents "eliminate preventable genetic disease." As the prospect of systematically excluding the appearance of unwanted mutations in our children comes within reach, David B. Goldstein examines the possible consequences from these types of choices.

Engaging and accessible, The End of Genetics: Designing Humanity's DNA(Yale UP, 2022) is a clarion call for responsible and informed stewardship of the human genome provides an overview of what we do and do not know about human genetics and looks at some of the complex, yet largely unexplored, issues we must be most careful about as we move into an era of increasing numbers of parents exercising direct control over the genomes of their children.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Thomas J. Misa, "Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) Jun 06, 2022

“My underlying goal,” writes my guest Tom Misa, “has been to display the variety of technologies, to describe how they changed across time, and to understand how they interacted with diverse societies and cultures. There’s no simple definition of technology that adequately conveys the variety of its forms or sufficiently emphasizes the social and cultural interactions and consequences that I believe are essential to understand. The key point is that technologies are consequential for social and political futures. There is not “one path” forward.”

These words come from the conclusion of Misa’s Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present, now being published in a third edition by Johns Hopkins University Press, as one of the structural pillars of the Johns Hopkins Series in the History of Technology.

Thomas J. Misa recently retired as Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Minnesota, where he directed the Charles Babbage Center (dedicated to the history of computing); taught courses in the Program for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; and was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

For Further Investigation

Dutch fluit ships, the embodiment of the commercial/capitalist era
FIAT Lingotto factory on YouTube; key to the fantastic chase scene in original Italian Job movie (1969)
Reading Questions for every chapter of From Leonardo to the Internet
More interesting web sites!

Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.

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Andrew Shortland and Patrick Degryse, "When Art Isn’t Real: The World's Most Controversial Objects under Investigation" (Leuven UP, 2022) Jun 03, 2022

In When Art Isn’t Real: The World's Most Controversial Objects under Investigation (Leuven University Press, 2022), Dr. Andrew Shortland and Dr. Patrick Degryse examine how an initially valueless object becomes worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa.

The art world is a multi-billion-dollar industry which captures world headlines on a regular basis, for both good and bad reasons. This book deals with one of the most-discussed areas of controversy: high-profile objects that have experts arguing about their veracity. Some may have been looted, others may be fakes, some may be heavily restored or misattributed. Often, in these cases, analytical science is called on to settle a dispute.

The authors of this book have decades of experience in this field, working on a range of objects dating from prehistory to the twentieth century. They present seven of the most famous cases from the Getty Kouros to the Turin Shroud – some of which are still contested, and examine how a few words from a connoisseur or scientist can make a virtually valueless object worth hundreds of millions. And vice versa.

“We want to give readers some feel for the people involved. A feel for those period or material experts who give their opinion on an object’s validity from its looks, feel, even smell. A feel for the analysts, who employ their sicnetific equipment to the object and give their opinion from the numbers and pictures that are derived from them. A feel for the experts working with, in parallel with, and occasionally against each other.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Andrew Bickford, "Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military" (Duke UP, 2021) Jun 03, 2022

In Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military (Duke UP, 2021), Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military's attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological "supersoldiers" capable of withstanding extreme trauma. Bickford traces the deep history of efforts to biologically fortify and extend the health and lethal power of soldiers from the Cold War era into the twenty-first century, from early adoptions of mandatory immunizations to bio-protective gear, to the development and spread of new performance enhancing drugs during the global War on Terrorism. In his examination of government efforts to alter soldiers' bodies through new technologies, Bickford invites us to contemplate what constitutes heroism when armor becomes built in, wired in, and even edited into the molecular being of an American soldier. Lurking in the background and dark recesses of all US military enhancement research, Bickford demonstrates, is the desire to preserve US military and imperial power.

Dr. Bickford is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. You can learn more about his work here.

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Experimental Life Jun 03, 2022

Travis Chi Wing Lau talks about the notion that one can experiment on the fundamental conditions and nature of life in order to perfect them. He looks at this idea in diverse literary, scientific, and cultural contexts from the vitality debate and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the perils of the CRISPR technology and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and The New Engagement, as well as in two chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019) and Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020).

Music used in promotional material: “Future Life” by Ketsa

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Jahara Matisek and Buddhika Jayamaha, "Old and New Battlespaces: Society, Military Power, and War" (Lynne Rienner, 2022) Jun 03, 2022

War is ever changing. Just within the last decade or so, new domains have opened up as potential battlefields of the present and the future. These range from traditional land battles to space as well as social media, among other domains. Combined this with the recent resurgence of great power competition on the world stage, the challenges being faced are quite daunting. What are the implications for military strategy? Such issues are addressed in Old and New Battlespaces: Society, Military Power, and War (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022) co-authored by Jahara Matisek and Buddhika Jayamaha.

Jahara ‘Franky’ Matisek is a Lieutenant Colonel and Senior Pilot in the US Air Force and will be serving as a Military Professor at the US Naval War College this Fall. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University and was previously an Associate Professor in the Department of Military Strategic Studies and Senior Fellow at the Homeland Defense Institute at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He is also the Fellowship Director for the Irregular Warfare Initiative and has published over 70 articles on war and strategy in peer-reviewed journals, policy-relevant outlets, and edited volumes.

The views expressed by Lt Col Matisek are his own and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Naval War College, U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or U.S. Government.

Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history.

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Joshua Neves, "Underglobalization: Beijing's Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy" (Duke UP, 2020) Jun 03, 2022

Joshua Neves’ Underglobalization: Beijing's Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, 2020) examines the interplay of contemporary Chinese media practices with urban space, locating his analysis in political and postcolonial theory. His interdisciplinary approach, as noted in our interview, works to move past the traditional boundaries of Chinese studies and to understand the concatenation of Chinese piratical and official media practices in relation to modes of mediated citizenship as it exists across postcolonial urban spaces. Neves considers urban space in terms of planning and ruin, explores theatrical and televisual screen practices in situ in Chinese cities, and asks us to consider piracy not merely in terms of copied objects like DVDs, but rather in terms of technological intimacies and infrastructures. The book is richly illustrated, complementing Neves analytical argument with evidence of his urban methodology—an ambulatory, photographic mapping of the Beijing which allows us to accompany the scholar through his text. I hope you enjoy our conversation and excuse the faux pas with which I inadvertently opened the podcast!

Julia Keblinska is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

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Shara Rambarran, "Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Jun 03, 2022

Virtuality has entered our lives making anything we desire possible. We are, as Gorillaz once sang, in an exciting age where 'the digital won't let [us] go…' Technology has revolutionized music, especially in the 21st century where the traditional rules and conventions of music creation, consumption, distribution, promotion, and performance have been erased and substituted with unthinkable and exciting methods in which absolutely anyone can explore, enjoy, and participate in creating and listening to music.

Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era(Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the interactive relationship of sound, music, and image, and its users (creators/musicians/performers/audience/consumers). Areas involving the historical, technological, and creative practices of virtual music are surveyed including its connection with creators, musicians, performers, audience, and consumers. Shara Rambarran looks at the fascination and innovations surrounding virtual music, and illustrates key artists (such as Grace Jones, The Weeknd), creators (such as King Tubby, Kraftwerk, MadVillain, Danger Mouse), audiovisuals in video games and performances (such as Cuphead and Gorillaz), audiences, and consumers that contribute in making this musical experience a phenomenon. Whether it is interrogating the (un)realness of performers, modified identities of artists, technological manipulation of the Internet, music industry and music production, or accessible opportunities in creativity, the book offers a fresh understanding of virtual music and appeals to readers who have an interest in this digital revolution.

Shara Rambarran is Assistant Professor of Music at Bader International Study Centre, UK (Queen’s University, Canada). She co-runs the Art of Record Production conferences and is an editor on the Journal on the Art of Record Production and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2016). Shara Rambarran on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Rob Dunn, "A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species" (Basic Book, 2021) Jun 02, 2022

Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species(Basic Book, 2021), biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life's overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life's future flourishing is not in question. Ours is.

As ambitious as Edward Wilson's Sociobiology and as timely as Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, A Natural History of the Future sets a new standard for understanding the diversity and destiny of life itself.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Margie Meacham, "AI in Talent Development: Capitalize on the AI Revolution to Transform the Way You Work, Learn, and Live" (ASTD, 2020) Jun 02, 2022

In AI in Talent Development: Capitalize on the AI Revolution to Transform the Way You Work, Learn, and Live(ASTD, 2020), Margie Meacham describes the benefits, uses, and risks of AI technology and offers practical tools to strengthen and enhance learning and performance programs. In layman's terms, Meacham demonstrates how we can free time for ourselves by employing a useful robot "assistant," create a chatbot for specific tasks (such as a new manager bot, a sales coach bot, or new employee onboarding bot), and build personalized coaching tools from AI-processed big data. She concludes each of the six chapters with helpful tips and includes a resource guide with planning tools, templates, and worksheets.

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Jessamyn Abel, "Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train" (Stanford UP, 2022) Jun 02, 2022

Jessamyn Abel’s Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train (Stanford UP, 2022) is a history of Japan’s famous super-express (shinkansen) and “the bullet train imaginary.” In other words, it is both a history of infrastructure and mobility on the one hand, and a cultural and social history of the ways that the train was planned, interpreted, and built up as a symbol of a new Japan both at home and in the world on the other. The bullet train transformed the speed and volume of the flows of people and information across Japan, and became the embodiment of a dawning information society and a national brand. But it was also an agent of destruction for communities in its way; a source of anxiety for artists, activists, and others; and an object of nostalgia for those who connected it to Japan’s imperial past. While triumphalism eventually became hegemonic in public narratives about the shinkansen, Abel unearths the tensions, conflicts, and concerns often drowned out in the “monumentalization” of the bullet train as Japan’s Dream Super-Express.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Paul Huebener, "Nature's Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis" (U Regina Press, 2020) Jun 01, 2022

In Nature's Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis (University of Regina Press, 2020), Paul Huebener argues that "the environmental crisis is, in many ways, a crisis of time."

From the distress cries of birds that no longer know when to migrate, to the rapid dying of coral reefs, to the quickening pace of extreme weather events, the patterns and timekeeping of the natural world are falling apart. We have broken nature's clocks.

Lying hidden at the root of this problem are the cultural narratives that shape our actions and horizons of thought, but as Paul Huebener shows, we can bring about change by developing a critical literacy of time. Moving from circadian rhythms and the revival of ancient frozen bacteria to camping advertisements and the politics of oil pipelines, Nature's Broken Clocks turns to works of fiction and poetry, examining how cultural narratives of time are connected to the problems of ecological collapse and what we might do to fix them.

Nicholas Pritchard is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge interested in time and the sea.

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Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan, "Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities" (U California Press, 2021) Jun 01, 2022

What would it take to make urban places greener, more affordable, more equitable, and healthier for everyone? In recent years, cities have stepped up efforts to address climate and sustainability crises. But progress has not been fast enough or gone deep enough. If communities are to thrive in the future, we need to quickly imagine and implement an entirely new approach to urban development: one that is centered on equity and rethinks social, political, and economic systems as well as urban designs. With attention to this need for structural change, Reimagining Sustainable Cities advocates for a community-informed model of racially, economically, and socially just cities and regions. The book aims to rethink urban sustainability for a new era.

In Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities(U California Press, 2021), Stephen M. Wheeler and Christina D. Rosan ask big-picture questions of interest to readers worldwide: How do we get to carbon neutrality? How do we adapt to a climate-changed world? How can we create affordable, inclusive, and equitable cities? While many books dwell on the analysis of problems, Reimagining Sustainable Cities prioritizes solutions-oriented thinking--surveying historical trends, providing examples of constructive action worldwide, and outlining alternative problem-solving strategies. Wheeler and Rosan use a social ecology lens and draw perspectives from multiple disciplines. Positive, readable, and constructive in tone, Reimagining Sustainable Cities identifies actions ranging from urban design to institutional restructuring that can bring about fundamental change and prepare us for the challenges ahead.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Rajesh Veeraraghavan, "Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India" (Oxford UP, 2021) May 31, 2022

How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems.

Rajesh Veeraraghavan's book Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India (Oxford UP, 2021) is an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines in detail NREGA’s implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It finds that the local system of power is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia, but because of coercive counter-strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process of patching development. Patching development is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical process that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions, and technology is intricate, fluid, and highly situated. The book throws new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs. While focused on one Indian state, the implications for increasing citizen participation and government transparency have global relevance.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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Nathaniel Isaacson, "Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction" (Wesleyan UP, 2017) May 31, 2022

Chinese science fiction has been booming lately through the translation of books like Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, but where did the current surge come from? In Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), Nathaniel Isaacson introduces the genre’s origins in China and tracks its development from roughly 1904 to 1934. During that period, China’s final dynasty, the Qing, came to an end amid European nations’ increasing control of China, the Republic of China was established, and Japan conquered Manchuria while the Chinese Communist Party was established and grew into a major political-cultural force. Isaacson connects these political shifts to the establishment of science fiction in China through key works by authors like Lu Xun, Wu Jianren, and Lao She. In so doing, he shows how Chinese science fiction is connected to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, depicting authors’ struggles to subvert Orientalist attitudes toward China. Isaacson traces how Orientalism and its attendant colonialist projects were intertwined with Western scientific knowledge in such a way as to make science fiction a fruitful medium for cultural debates over China’s role in the world.

Nathaniel Isaacson is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at North Carolina State University. His research interests include the history of Chinese science and science fiction, Chinese cinema, cultural studies, and literary translation. Nathaniel has published articles and translations in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, Osiris, Science Fiction Studies, Renditions, Pathlight, and Chinese Literature Today. His book, Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (2017), examines the emergence of sf in late Qing China. His current book project, Moving the People: the Aesthetics of Mass Transit in Modern China, examines narratives of development as a theme in modern Chinese literary and visual culture primarily through the figure of the train.

Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. She writes about Japanese media and is currently completing Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, a book about contemporary media and Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels.

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Alexander Monea, "The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight" (MIT Press, 2022) May 31, 2022

In The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight(MIT Press, 2022), Alexander Monea argues provocatively that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQIA+ content into increasingly narrow channels--rendering it invisible through opaque algorithms, automated and human content moderation, warped keywords, and other strategies of digital overreach. Monea explains how the United States' thirty-year "war on porn" has brought about the over-regulation of sexual content, which, in turn, has resulted in the censorship of much nonpornographic content--including material on sex education and LGBTQIA+ activism. In this wide-ranging, enlightening account, Monea examines the cultural, technological, and political conditions that put LGBTQIA+ content into the closet.

Monea looks at the anti-porn activism of the alt-right, Christian conservatives, and anti-porn feminists, who became strange bedfellows in the politics of pornography; investigates the coders, code, and moderators whose work serves to reify heteronormativity; and explores the collateral damage in the ongoing war on porn--the censorship of LGBTQ+ community resources, sex education materials, art, literature, and other content that engages with sexuality but would rarely be categorized as pornography by today's community standards. Finally, he examines the internet architectures responsible for the heteronormalization of porn: Google Safe Search and the data structures of tube sites and other porn platforms.

Monea reveals the porn industry's deepest, darkest secret: porn is boring. Mainstream porn is stuck in a heteronormative filter bubble, limited to the same heteronormative tropes, tagged by the same heteronormative keywords. This heteronormativity is mirrored by the algorithms meant to filter pornographic content, increasingly filtering out all LGBTQIA+ content. Everyone suffers from this forced heteronormativity of the internet--suffering, Monea suggests, that could be alleviated by queering straightness and introducing feminism to dissipate the misogyny.

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Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim, "Song of the Earth: Understanding Geology and Why It Matters" (Oxford UP, 2021) May 31, 2022

In today’s podcast, Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim explains how understanding harmonics of the earth provides a forward-thinking methodology to confront the challenges presented by the massive changes in the climate. In her book Song of the Earth: Understanding Geology and Why it Matters (Oxford University Press, 2021), Ervin-Blankenheim documents the history of geology, a Western epistemological exploit, properly contextualizing how geologists know what they know. Song of the Earth is framed the around three primary tenants: geologic time, plate tectonics and evolution. Through her magnificent use of brevity and clarity, the narrative, supported by the three tenants, documents the “biography of the Earth” consisting of a multiplicity of interactions occurring between geosphere-human, hydrosphere-human, biosphere-human spanning millions of years. Ervin-Blankenheim impresses throughout her narrative that life today represents only .1% of life that has existed throughout the history of the planet, yet we cannot understand the changes such as extinction without recognizing how the earth impacts life and how life impacts the earth. Without mindful recognition about the interconnectivity of ecosystem, the mechanics of extinction and survival will continue to remain opaque.

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Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022) May 31, 2022

Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter(Duke UP, 2022), Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, disposable, and consumable. The invention and widespread use of plastic, Davis contends, reveals the dominance of the Western orientation to matter and its assumption that matter exists to be endlessly manipulated and controlled by humans. Plastic’s materiality and pliability reinforces these expectations of what matter should be and do. Davis charts these relations to matter by mapping the queer multispecies relationships between humans and plastic-eating bacteria and analyzing photography that documents the racialized environmental violence of plastic production. In so doing, Davis provokes readers to reexamine their relationships to matter and life in light of plastic’s saturation.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Adam M. Romero, "Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture" (U California Press, 2021) May 30, 2022

The toxicity of pesticides to the environment and humans is often framed as an unfortunate effect of their benefits to agricultural production. In Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture(U California Press, 2021), Adam M. Romero upends this narrative and provides a fascinating new history of pesticides in American industrial agriculture prior to World War II. Through impeccable archival research, Romero reveals the ways in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agriculture, especially in California, functioned less as a market for novel pest-killing chemical products and more as a sink for the accumulating toxic wastes of mining, oil production, and chemical manufacturing. Connecting farming ecosystems to technology and the economy, Romero provides an intriguing reconceptualization of pesticides that forces readers to rethink assumptions about food, industry, and the relationship between human and nonhuman environments.

Eyad Houssami makes theatre and has participated in the revitalization of an ancient organic farm in southern Lebanon. He is editor of the Arabic-English book Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre (Pluto/Dar Al Adab) and was editor-at-large of Portal 9, a bilingual literary and academic journal about urbanism. His doctoral research project on ecology and agriculture in post-independence Lebanon sat the University of Leeds and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.

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Greg Brennecka, "Impact: How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong" (William Morrow, 2022) May 30, 2022

The Solar System. Dinosaurs. Donkey Kong. What is the missing link? Surprisingly enough, it's meteorites. They explain our past, constructed our present, and could define our future.

Impact: How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong(William Morrow, 2022) argues that Earth would be a lifeless, inhospitable piece of rock without being fortuitously assaulted with meteorites throughout the history of the planet. These bombardments transformed Earth's early atmosphere and delivered the complex organic molecules that allowed life to develop on our planet. While meteorites have provided the raw materials for life to thrive, they have radically devastated life as well, most famously killing off the dinosaurs and paving the way for humans to evolve to where we are today.

As noted meteoriticist Greg Brennecka explains, meteorites did not just set us on the path to becoming human, they helped direct the development of human culture. Meteorites have influenced humanity since the start of civilization. Over the centuries, meteorite falls and other cosmic cinema have started (and stopped) wars, terrified millions, and inspired religions throughout the world.

With humor and an infectious enthusiasm, Brennecka reveals previously untold but important stories sure to delight and inform readers about the most important rocks on Earth.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Aniket Aga, "Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India" (Yale UP, 2022) May 30, 2022

How the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics Genetically modified or transgenic crops are controversial across the world. Advocates see such crops as crucial to feeding the world's growing population; critics oppose them for pushing farmers deeper into ecological and economic distress, and for shoring up the power of agribusinesses. India leads the world in terms of the intensity of democratic engagement with transgenic crops.

In Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India (Yale UP, 2022), anthropologist Aniket Aga excavates the genealogy of conflicts of interest and disputes over truth that animate the ongoing debate in India around the commercial release of transgenic food crops. The debate may well transform agriculture and food irreversibly in a country already witness to widespread agrarian distress, and over 300,000 suicides by farmers in the last two decades. Aga illustrates how state, science, and agrarian capitalism interact in novel ways to transform how democracy is lived and understood, and sheds light on the dynamics of technological change in populous, unequal polities.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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Should Scholars Trust Machine Translation of their Articles? May 30, 2022

Should academic scholars trust machine translation for the publication of their academic articles? In this episode, Avi Staiman and Ana Guerberof Arenas discuss how the evolution of machine translation and the most recent developments in machine translation technology. Ana shares her insight on the potential pitfalls of relying on machine translation for unpublished manuscripts as opposed to when getting the 'gist' suffices for understanding the research of others. She also shares the results of her recent study on the advantages of human translation for creative and literary texts.

Ana Guerberof Arenas is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at University of Groningen. Her project (CREAMT) looks at the impact of MT on translation creativity and the reader's experience in the context of literary texts. Ana is also a Senior Lecturer in Translation and Multimodal Technologies at University of Surrey (UK) where she is a member of the Centre for Translation Studies. She has worked more than twenty years in the translation/localization industry in roles that ranged from translator to operations manager. She has authored refereed articles and book chapters on MT post-editing productivity, quality and experience; pre-editing and post-editing; reading comprehension of MT output; translator training and creativity and reading experience with different translation modalities.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts.

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Andrew Doig, "This Mortal Coil: A History of Death" (Bloomsbury, 2022) May 27, 2022

Causes of death have changed irrevocably across time. In the course of a few centuries we have gone from a world where disease or violence were likely to strike anyone at any age, and where famine could be just one bad harvest away, to one where in many countries excess food is more of a problem than a lack of it. Why have the reasons we die changed so much? How is it that a century ago people died mainly from infectious disease, while today the leading causes of death in industrialised nations are heart disease and stroke? And what do changing causes of death reveal about how previous generations have lived?

University of Manchester Professor Andrew Doig provides an eye-opening portrait of death throughout history, looking at particular causes – from infectious disease to genetic disease, violence to diet – who they affected, and the people who made it possible to overcome them. Along the way we hear about the long and torturous story of the discovery of vitamin C and its role in preventing scurvy; the Irish immigrant who opened the first washhouse for the poor of Liverpool, and in so doing educated the public on the importance of cleanliness in combating disease; and the Church of England curate who, finding his new church equipped with a telephone, started the Samaritans to assist those in emotional distress.

This Mortal Coil: A History of Death(Bloomsbury, 2022) is a thrilling story of growing medical knowledge and social organisation, of achievement and, looking to the future, of promise.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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On Blogging Religion May 26, 2022

Dr. Giulia Evolvi is the author of Blogging My Religion: Secular, Muslim, and Catholic Media Spaces in Europe, out now from Routledge. Evolvi is a Research Associate at the Centrum für Religionswissenshaftliche Studien (CERES) in Germany and she manages the Religion and Materiality Focus Group for the Käte Hamburger Kolleg project.

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Paul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022) May 25, 2022

The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.

The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.

Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers(Picador, 2022) ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible.

Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.

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Pandemic Perspectives 12: Politicizing the COVID Pandemic May 25, 2022

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Berry, Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies on American scapegoating, Chinese censorship and the sad story of Fang Fang's brave and influential COVID-19 memoir, Wuhan Diary.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Nomi Claire Lazar, "Out of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time" (Yale UP, 2019) May 24, 2022

Today I talked to Nomi Claire Lazar aboutOut of Joint: Power, Crisis, and the Rhetoric of Time (Yale University Press, 2019).

Drawing on stories of leaders and thinkers across a range of cultures and political contexts, ancient and modern, Nomi Claire Lazar shows how constructions of time can help stabilize or destabilize political order and spark violent resistance or coax quiescence by shaping belief in what is possible--and what is inevitable.

Nomi Claire Lazar is Full Professor of Politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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John Markoff, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand" (Penguin, 2022) May 24, 2022

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live.

In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world.

John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Comstock Publishing, 2021) May 23, 2022

Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly(Comstock Publishing, 2021) explores the tangled history of weeds and their relationship to humans. Through eight interwoven stories, John Cardina offers a fresh perspective on how these tenacious plants came about, why they are both inevitable and essential, and how their ecological success is ensured by determined efforts to eradicate them. Linking botany, history, ecology, and evolutionary biology to the social dimensions of humanity's ancient struggle with feral flora, Cardina shows how weeds have shaped—and are shaped by—the way we live in the natural world.

Weeds and attempts to control them drove nomads toward settled communities, encouraged social stratification, caused environmental disruptions, and have motivated the development of GMO crops. They have snared us in social inequality and economic instability, infested social norms of suburbia, caused rage in the American heartland, and played a part in perpetuating pesticide use worldwide. Lives of Weeds reveals how the technologies directed against weeds underlie ethical questions about agriculture and the environment, and leaves readers with a deeper understanding of how the weeds around us are entangled in our daily choices.

Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally.

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Scott Reynolds Nelson, "Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World" (Basic Books, 2022) May 23, 2022

Grain traders wandering across the steppe; the Russian conquest of Ukraine (in the 18th century, that is); boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It’s all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson.

Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Georgia Athletics Association Professor of the Humanities at the University of Georgia. Author of numerous books, his latest is Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World(Basic Books, 2022) and it is the subject of our conversation today.

Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the excellent podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.

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Jim Downs, "Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine" (Harvard UP, 2021) May 23, 2022

Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge, especially when it comes to the science of infectious disease.

Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjects--conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. The field hospitals of the Crimean War and the US Civil War were carefully observed experiments in disease transmission.

The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine(Harvard UP, 2021) gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Emily Mendenhall, "Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji" (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) May 23, 2022

Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji(Vanderbilt UP, 2022) is the story of what happened in Okoboji, a small Iowan tourist town, when a collective turn from the coronavirus to the economy occurred in the COVID summer of 2020. State political failures, local negotiations among political and public health leaders, and community (dis)belief about the virus resulted in Okoboji being declared a hotspot just before the Independence Day weekend, when an influx of half a million people visit the town. The story is both personal and political. Author Emily Mendenhall, an anthropologist at Georgetown University, grew up in Okoboji, and her family still lives there. As the events unfolded, Mendenhall was in Okoboji, where she spoke formally with over 100 people and observed a community that rejected public health guidance, revealing deep-seated mistrust in outsiders and strong commitments to local thinking. Unmasked is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of where people put their trust, and how isolationist popular beliefs can be in America's small communities.

Professor Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist and Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2017. She is Editor-in-Chief of Social Science and Medicine-Mental Health and leads the office of Medical Anthropology and Critical Social Science. She has served as Honorary Faculty at the University of the Witwatersrand for the past decade. At Georgetown, she leads the global health concentration in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the School of Foreign Service.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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John Lardas Modern, "Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain" (U Chicago Press, 2021) May 23, 2022

In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain(U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion.

What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.

This interview was conduced by Alison Renna, a PhD candidate studying the history of ideas at Yale University.

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Alice Dailey, "How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol" (Cornell UP, 2022) May 20, 2022

Alice Dailey’s How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol(Cornell University Press, 2022) is an exploration of Shakespeare’s chronicle plays through the theoretical rubric of modern technology. Dailey is Professor of English at Villanova University and is the author of the monograph The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (from Notre Dame Press).

How to Do Things with Dead People is a study of the representational strategies of the porous boundary between past and present, and dead and undead, in Shakespeare’s history plays. Drawing on Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Lee Edelman, Peggy Phelan, and Derrida, Dailey creates new space for how we might think about the unruly interrelationships of the present, the past, and the future, including how twentieth-century technology can reanimate our engagement with early modern theories of kingship, ableism, and reproductive futurity.

John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Shannon L. Walsh, "Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) May 19, 2022

Today we are joined by Dr. Shannon Walsh, Associate Professor of Theatre History, and author of Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of women’s physical culture in the United States, the role that physical culture reformers played in producing femininity and whiteness, and the possibilities for anti-racist and anti-sexist sport to reconceptualize the white supremist roots of American athleticism.

In Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era, Walsh traces the beginnings of reform era physical culture, paying special attention to the way that physical culturists attempted to shape women’s bodies. She argues that their efforts hinged on using exercise to produce femininity and whiteness and that they prefigured the larger eugenic movements aimed at perpetuating the white race later in the 20th century. In each chapter she looks at different physical culturists or physical cultural movement. Her second chapter looks at Steele MacKaye and Americanised Delsarte, a physical cultural practice that combined acting, dance and exercise. Her third chapter focuses on Dudley Allen Sargent and mimetic workouts that introduced working class motions – for example wood chopping - to middle and upper-middle class men and women at Ivy League colleges.

The fourth and fifth chapter work together to unpack the complicated position of women’s physical culture, femininity and motherhood. In chapter four, Walsh shows how Abby Shaw Mayhew and the YWCA articulated a genre of motherhood, which Walsh calls “social motherhood,” that reframed women’s exercise as domestic and maternal rather than grotesque and masculine. In the fifth chapter, Walsh examines Bernarr MacFadden – the Barnum of physical culture – to showcases the places where advertising, motherhood, and women’s exercise came into explicit contact.

Relying on a close reading of physical culture through critical theory, these main chapters trace the intersections between exercise, femininity, motherhood, race and social class, to illustrate how debates over these issues helped to produce whiteness. Whether they were in elite educational institutions in the Northeast, Midwestern metropolises like Minneapolis, or travelling around the country these experts helped to code physical culture as specifically as womanly, middle class, white, and ultimately as unremarkable.

He final body chapter, chapter six, looks at physical culture for indigenous women in three sites: the Odanah Mission School, the Model Indian School at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Unlike their white counterparts, indigenous women were not offered significant opportunities for physical exercise and if they were it was only for the purpose of assimilation. Unsurprisingly, many indigenous girls and women challenged those expectations and were successful athletes.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter.

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Jim Al-Khalili, "The Joy of Science" (Princeton UP, 2022) May 19, 2022

Today’s world is unpredictable and full of contradictions, and navigating its complexities while trying to make the best decisions is far from easy. The Joy of Science (Princeton UP, 2022) presents 8 short lessons on how to unlock the clarity, empowerment, and joy of thinking and living a little more scientifically. In this brief guide to leading a more rational life, acclaimed physicist Jim Al-Khalili invites readers to engage with the world as scientists have been trained to do. The scientific method has served humankind well in its quest to see things as they really are, and underpinning the scientific method are core principles that can help us all navigate modern life more confidently. Discussing the nature of truth and uncertainty, the role of doubt, the pros and cons of simplification, the value of guarding against bias, the importance of evidence-based thinking, and more, Al-Khalili shows how the powerful ideas at the heart of the scientific method are deeply relevant to the complicated times we live in and the difficult choices we make. Read this book and discover the joy of science. It will empower you to think more objectively, see through the fog of your own preexisting beliefs, and lead a more fulfilling life.

Jim Al-Khalili is Distinguished Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Surrey and one of Britain’s best-known science communicators. He has written numerous books, including The World According to Physics (Princeton); Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed; and Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and lives in Southsea, England. Twitter @jimalkhalili

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Elena Esposito, "Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2022) May 18, 2022

Algorithms that work with deep learning and big data are getting so much better at doing so many things that it makes us uncomfortable. How can a device know what our favorite songs are, or what we should write in an email? Have machines become too smart? In Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence(MIT Press, 2022), Elena Esposito argues that drawing this sort of analogy between algorithms and human intelligence is misleading. If machines contribute to social intelligence, it will not be because they have learned how to think like us but because we have learned how to communicate with them. Esposito proposes that we think of "smart" machines not in terms of artificial intelligence but in terms of artificial communication.

To do this, we need a concept of communication that can take into account the possibility that a communication partner may be not a human being but an algorithm--which is not random and is completely controlled, although not by the processes of the human mind. Esposito investigates this by examining the use of algorithms in different areas of social life. She explores the proliferation of lists (and lists of lists) online, explaining that the web works on the basis of lists to produce further lists; the use of visualization; digital profiling and algorithmic individualization, which personalize a mass medium with playlists and recommendations; and the implications of the "right to be forgotten." Finally, she considers how photographs today seem to be used to escape the present rather than to preserve a memory.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Pandemic Perspectives 11: The Covid Pandemic and Learning about Learning May 18, 2022

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned cognitive psychologist Stephen Kosslyn about how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced, or didn't influence, our understanding of the learning process.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Alison Calder, "Synaptic" (U Regina Press, 2022) May 17, 2022

This intricate, yearning work from award-winning poet Alison Calder asks us to think about the way we perceive and the ways in which we seek to know ourselves and others.

In Synaptic(University of Regina Press, 2022) each section explores key themes in science, neurology, and perception. The first, Connectomics, riffs on scientific language to work with and against that language’s intentions. Attempting to map the brain’s neural connections, it raises fundamental questions about interiority and the self. The lyric considerations in these poems are juxtaposed against the scientific-like footnotes which, in turn, invoke questions undermining authority and power. The second section, Other Disasters, explores ways of seeing or and being seen, from considerations of folklore to modern art to daily life.

Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics.

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David M. Peña-Guzmán, "When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness" (Princeton UP, 2022) May 17, 2022

Are humans the only dreamers on Earth? What goes on in the minds of animals when they sleep? When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness(Princeton UP, 2022) brings together behavioral and neuroscientific research on animal sleep with philosophical theories of dreaming. It shows that dreams provide an invaluable window into the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals, giving us access to a seemingly inaccessible realm of animal experience.

David Peña-Guzmán uncovers evidence of animal dreaming throughout the scientific literature, suggesting that many animals run “reality simulations” while asleep, with a dream-ego moving through a dynamic and coherent dreamscape. He builds a convincing case for animals as conscious beings and examines the thorny scientific, philosophical, and ethical questions it raises. Once we accept that animals dream, we incur a host of moral obligations and have no choice but to rethink our views about who animals are and the interior lives they lead.

A mesmerizing journey into the otherworldly domain of nonhuman consciousness, When Animals Dream carries profound implications for contemporary debates about animal cognition, animal ethics, and animal rights, challenging us to regard animals as beings who matter, and for whom things matter.

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Gijs Mom, "Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980" (Berghahn Books, 2020) May 17, 2022

Why has "car society" proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900–1980(Berghahn Books, 2020), Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.

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Donald A. Barclay, "Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) May 17, 2022

Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces–historical, psychological, economic, and culture–to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies.

Disinformation explains:

How human psychology—the very way our brains work—can leave us vulnerable to disinformation.
How the early visions of what a global computer network would and should be unintentionally laid the groundwork for the current post-truth culture.
The ways in which truth is twisted and misrepresented via propaganda and conspiracy theories.
How new technology not only spreads disinformation but may also be changing the way we think.
The ways in which the economics of information and the powerful influence of popular culture have contributed to the creation of the post-truth culture.

Unlike the far-too-numerous one-sided, politically ideological treatments of the post-truth culture, Disinformation does not seek to point the finger of blame at any individuals or groups; instead, its focus is on how a number of disparate forces have influenced human behaviors during a time when all of humanity is struggling to better understand and more effectively control (for better or worse) challenging new technologies that are straining the limits of human intellectual and emotional capacity.

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Will Kinney, "An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe" (MIT Press, 2022) May 16, 2022

In the beginning was the Big Bang: an unimaginably hot fire almost fourteen billion years ago in which the first elements were forged. The physical theory of the hot nascent universe--the Big Bang--was one of the most consequential developments in twentieth-century science. And yet it leaves many questions unanswered: Why is the universe so big? Why is it so old? What is the origin of structure in the cosmos? In An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe(MIT Press, 2022), physicist Will Kinney explains a more recent theory that may hold the answers to these questions and even explain the ultimate origins of the universe: cosmic inflation, before the primordial fire of the Big Bang.

Kinney argues that cosmic inflation is a transformational idea in cosmology, changing our picture of the basic structure of the cosmos and raising unavoidable questions about what we mean by a scientific theory. He explains that inflation is a remarkable unification of inner space and outer space, in which the physics of the very large (the cosmos) meets the physics of the very small (elementary particles and fields), closing in a full circle at the first moment of time. With quantum uncertainty its fundamental feature, this new picture of cosmic origins introduces the possibility that the origin of the universe was of a quantum nature.

Kinney considers the consequences of eternal cosmic inflation. Can we come to terms with the possibility that our entire observable universe is one of infinitely many, forever hidden from our view?

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Simon Peter Rowberry, "Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform" (MIT Press, 2022) May 15, 2022

Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform(MIT Press, 2022) is the first book-length analysis of Amazon's Kindle explores the platform's technological, bibliographical, and social impact on publishing.

Dr. Simon Peter Rowberry recounts how Amazon built the infrastructure for a new generation of digital publications, then considers the consequences of having a single company control the direction of the publishing industry. Exploring the platform from the perspectives of technology, texts, and uses, he shows how the Kindle challenges traditional notions of platforms as discrete entities. Dr. Rowberry argues that Amazon's influence extends beyond “disruptive technology” to embed itself in all aspects of the publishing trade; yet despite industry pushback, he says, the Kindle has had a positive influence on publishing.

Dr. Rowberry documents the first decade of the Kindle with case studies of Kindle Popular Highlights, an account of the digitization of books published after 1922, and a discussion of how Amazon's patent filings reflect a shift in priorities. Rowberry argues that while it was initially convenient for the book trade to outsource ebook development to Amazon, doing so has had adverse consequences for publishers in the mid- and long term, limiting opportunities for developing an inclusive and forward-thinking digital platform. While it has forced publishers to embrace digital forms, the Kindle has also empowered some previously marginalized readerships. Although it is still too early to judge the long-term impact of ebooks compared with that of the older technologies of clay tablets, the printing press, and offset printing, the shockwaves of the Kindle continue to shape publishing.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Nigel Rothfels, "Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) May 13, 2022

When looking at historic records of all kinds—from prehistoric cave drawings and ancient rock art in Africa and India, from poetic narrations of travelers to hunter memoirs and press stories about zoos, from reports of mystical graveyards to museum warehouses collecting bones—notions about elephants in the West have come a long way. These ideas (their transformation; their persistence) tell perhaps more about how Western cultures have understood themselves than about the actual lives and potential histories of proboscideans. In Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures(Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Nigel Rothfels follows the paths of concrete elephant lives, their struggles and their deaths, in order to produce a history of one particular elephant, that which inhabits Western mentalities up to the present and which is composed as much of fantasy as thick skin.

In this conversation, Dr. Rothfels expands on some of the tenets of this book, as well as the trails that he himself followed in order to better understand how present notions about elephants in the West have been historically configured. This is a history of ideas about the magnificent animal we call the elephant, threaded with stories of flesh and blood.

Marcela Hernández, PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, is currently writing a dissertation on animals and gestures in films. She can be reached at m.hernandez@stud.uni-frankfurt.de

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Banu Subramaniam, "Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism" (U of Washington Press, 2019) May 12, 2022

In Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Banu Subramaniam examines how science and religion have come together to propel a vision of the modern Indian nation, and in particular, a Hindu nationalist vision of India. Subramaniam demonstrates that the politics of gender, race, class, caste, sexuality, and indigeneity are deeply implicated in the projects and narratives of the nation.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Facing Failure and the Museum Dedicated to It May 12, 2022

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

Why failure is part of the hidden curriculum
Why you can’t be creative or innovative without failing [sometimes a lot]
How to learn from it, instead of sweeping it under the rug
A failure our guest and our host each faced
A discussion of the Museum of Failure

Our guest is: Dr. Samuel West, a licensed psychologist (cognitive behavioral therapy) with a PhD in Organizational Psychology. His research focuses on creating climates for innovation by encouraging experimentation and exploration. In 2017 he founded the Museum of Failure showcasing over a 100 innovation failures from around the world. The aim of the museum is to stimulate productive discussions about the important role of failure for innovation and to increase organizational acceptance of failure.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life. She previously worked in Museum Education at a small museum in New York; and as a PhD student worked for a professor who was a Smithsonian curator.

Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:

The Museum of Failure
The Museum of Broken Relationships
The remote control referred to in this podcast
The marshmallow candy referred to in this podcast
TedTalk on Failing “Mindfully”
Podcast on fear and failure
Podcast on the role of failure in student success
Failosophy: A Handbook for When Things Go Wrong, by Elizabeth Day
Dr. Manu Kapur’s work on Productive Failure

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

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Mark Neocleous, "The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies" (Verso, 2022) May 12, 2022

Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance.

Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies(Verso, 2022) moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, this book lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.

In this interview, I spoke with Mark Neocleous about his fascinating and wide-ranging book The Politics of Immunity. We also spent time discussing his previous work on security and police power, the personal context informing this work, and connections with the ongoing UK undercover policing controversy (discussed in my previous interview with the authors of Deep Deception).

Content warning: between 43-45 minutes into the podcast, there is a brief discussion of suicide in the context of Mark's forthcoming work.

Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for his influential work on police power and security. His recent books include The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind' (2016); War Power, Police Power (2014); and the newly-reissued A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (2021).

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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Pandemic Perspectives 10: Covid and the Art of Science Communication May 11, 2022

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to John Tregoning, Imperial College respiratory infections researcher and author of the acclaimed book Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Sam Tatam, "Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow's Challenges" (Harriman House, 2022) May 11, 2022

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake?

In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions – often in the most unexpected ways.

Just as millions of years of evolution have helped craft the wing and dorsal fin, thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, and advertisers have toiled to solve many of the problems you face today. Over time, through intent, design, social learning and sheer luck, we have found what works.

Armed with an enhanced ability to see these patterns in human innovation, we can now systematically approach the creative process to develop more effective ideas more readily and rapidly.

Sam Tatam's book Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow's Challenges (Harriman House, 2022) explores five of the most critical challenges we face today, and we learn how to ‘breed’ more effective solutions from those that have survived. The result is a dynamic and exciting way of solving problems and supercharging creativity – for anyone in any endeavor.

John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma. john@ktdpod.com.

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Eve Ng, "Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) May 11, 2022

Eve Ng’s new book Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies perspective, as both cancel practices (what people and institutional actors do) and cancel discourses (commentary about cancelling). Ng traces multiple lines of origins for cancel practices and discourses, in the domains of Black communicative practices (e.g. cancelling relationship to "dissing"), celebrity and fan cultures, consumer culture (especially around consumer nationalist cancellings), and national politics (U.S. conservative criticisms of cancelling, and nationalist cancelling events in mainland China). Her analysis moves beyond popular press accounts about the latest targets of cancelling or familiar free speech debates, and underscores the different configurations of power associated with “cancel culture” in specific cultural and political contexts.

Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com.

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Samuel J. Redman, "Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology" (Harvard UP, 2021) May 11, 2022

Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology(Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect.

In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the “vanishing Indian” and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology.

The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions—a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors’ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public’s confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by “scientific” racism.

Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.

Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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Sangeet Kumar, "The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web" (Indiana UP, 2021) May 10, 2022

In The Digital Frontier: Infrastructures of Control on the Global Web (Indiana University Press, 2021), Sangeet Kumar interrogates the world wide web and the digital ecosystem has spawned to reveal how its conventions, protocols, standards, and algorithmic regulations represent a novel form of global power. Kumar shows the operation of this power through the web's "infrastructures of control" visible at sites where the universalizing imperatives of the web run up against local values, norms, and cultures. These include how the idea of the "global common good" is used as a ruse by digital oligopolies to expand their private enclosures, how seemingly collaborative spaces can simultaneously be exclusionary as they regulate legitimate knowledge, how selfhood is being redefined online along with Eurocentric ideals, and how the web's political challenge is felt differentially by sovereign nation-states.

In analysing this new modality of cultural power in the global digital ecosystem, The Digital Frontier is an important read for scholars, activists, academics and students inspired by the utopian dream of a truly representative global digital network.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and the public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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The Future of Opinion Polls: A Conversation with Mark Pack May 10, 2022

As the culture wars intensify, it seems that all sources of neutral authority get challenged and that includes opinion polls. Accusations about bias and unreliability fly around and yet everyone seriously engaged in the political process studies polls closely because they think they contain important truths. So are polls becoming more reliable because of improved techniques or less so because of the increasingly fractured and perhaps, increasingly difficult to measure nature of western democracies. British polling expert Mark Pak – author of Polls Unpacked- discusses the future of opinion polls.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Nicole Charles, "Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados" (Duke UP, 2022) May 10, 2022

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados(Duke University Press, 2022), Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora.

Nicole Charles is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies in Culture and Media, University of Toronto, Mississauga.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Emily West, "Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly" (MIT Press, 2022) May 09, 2022

How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly (MIT Press, 2022), Emily West examines Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy.

Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology

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Eugenics May 09, 2022

Kim talks with Mercedes Trigos about eugenics.

Mercedes references Francis Galton, who coined the term, preimplantation genetic profiling, and the failures of our ordinary progress narratives.

If you are interested in reading more about the subject check out:

-Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, University of California Press, 2015

-Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, Harvard UP, 1998

-Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics” Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America, Cornell UP, 1991

Kim and Mercedes organized an panel on “Eugenics and the Body” at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2021. If you attended the conference and held onto your registration ID, you can watch a video of the panel on the MLA website, and learn more about the history and legacy of eugenic thought.

Mercedes is a sixth-year PhD candidate at New York University’s English Department. Her work focuses on racialization, sex, and sexuality in Chicanx and Latinx studies.

This week’s image is the root system of the Dicotyledoneae Asteraceae herb. For the Deleuze scholars and botanists in the room, it is an example of root phenotypic plasticity: a primary root which becomes tap root and lateral roots. This image is in the public domain.

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Computational Creativity May 06, 2022

Saronik talks to Tuhin Chakrabarty about the creative processes of Artificial Intelligence, what we can expect from it, and how to keep the results fair.

(Saronik messes up the word GPT-3 twice!)

Reading List:

GPT3 Creativity

When AI Falls in Love, GPT-3 Creative Fiction, Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo?

Papers/Posts on Computational Creativity

Generating Similes Like a Pro, Content Planning for Neural Story Generation, Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation , The Comedian is in the Machine

Music and Art

Google Magenta

Creating Image from Text

Dall-E, Creative Text Generation

Bias in Language Models

Stereoset measures Racism, Sexism, and other Forms of Bias in AI Language Models, Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generation, The Woman worked as a Babysitter, Timnit Gebru’s thread about Google firing her, RealToxicityPrompts, Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models

Bias in Poetry

Investigating Societal Biases in a Poetry Composition System

AI Poetry

Google’s New AI Helps You Write Poetry like Poe, Generating Topical Poetry

Academic Venues

Computational Creativity, Machine Learning for Creativity and Design

Image: created using Dall-E

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Gary B. Fogel, "Sky Rider: Park Van Tassel and the Rise of Ballooning in the West" (U New Mexico Press, 2021) May 06, 2022

With a reputation as the hot-air balloon capital of the world and the home of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the southwestern desert city of Albuquerque frequently showcases the magic and adventure of ballooning. This legacy links back to the 1880s and a man by the name of Park Van Tassel. Through his pioneering flight, Van Tassel not only opened the skies to future generations across New Mexico, but he also opened minds to the possibility of manned flight throughout the American West.

A charismatic, P. T. Barnum–like showman, Van Tassel rose from obscurity to introduce the new science of ballooning and parachuting throughout the West. Van Tassel toured extensively—from California to Utah, Colorado, and Louisiana and later embarking on an international journey that took him to Hawaii, Australia, Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and beyond. Sky Rider: Park Van Tassel and the Rise of Ballooning in the West(U New Mexico Press, 2021) weaves together the many threads of Van Tassel’s extraordinary life journey, situating him at last in his rightful place among the prominent aerial exhibitionists of his time.

Gary B. Fogel is an adjunct professor of aerospace engineering at San Diego State University and the CEO of Natural Selection, Inc. He is also the author or coauthor of Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West and Wind and Wings: The History of Soaring in San Diego.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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Jason Steinhauer, "History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) May 06, 2022

The Internet has changed the past. Social media, Wikipedia, mobile networks, and the viral and visual nature of the Web have inundated the public sphere with historical information and misinformation, changing what we know about our history and History as a discipline. Jason Steinhauer's History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)is the first book to chronicle how and why it matters. Why does History matter at all? What role do history and the past play in our democracy? Our economy? Our understanding of ourselves? How do questions of history intersect with today’s most pressing debates about technology; the role of the media; journalism; tribalism; education; identity politics; the future of government, civilization, and the planet? At the start of a new decade, in the midst of growing political division around the world, this information is critical to an engaged citizenry. As we collectively grapple with the effects of technology and its capacity to destabilize our societies, scholars, educators and the general public should be aware of how the Web and social media shape what we know about ourselves - and crucially, about our past.

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Sarah Walsh, "The Religion of Life: Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) May 05, 2022

The Religion of Life: Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile(U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) examines the interconnections and relationship between Catholicism and eugenics in early twentieth-century Chile. Specifically, it demonstrates that the popularity of eugenic science was not diminished by the influence of Catholicism there. In fact, both eugenics and Catholicism worked together to construct the concept of a unique Chilean race, la raza chilena. A major factor that facilitated this conceptual overlap was a generalized belief among historical actors that male and female gender roles were biologically determined and therefore essential to a functioning society. As the first English-language study of eugenics in Chile, The Religion of Life surveys a wide variety of different materials (periodicals, newspapers, medical theses, and monographs) produced by Catholic and secular intellectuals from the first half of the twentieth century. What emerges from this examination is not only a more complex rendering of the relationship between religion and science but also the development of White supremacist logics in a Latin American context.

Sarah Walsh is the Hansen Lecturer in Global History at the University of Melbourne. She specializes in the history of the human sciences in Latin America with an emphasis on race and ethnicity.

Claudia Monterroza Rivera is a PhD candidate in Latin American History at Vanderbilt University.

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Christine Leuenberger and Izhak Schnell, "The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine" (Oxford UP, 2020) May 04, 2022

The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley has been one of the most disputed territories in history. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinians and Israelis have each sought to claim the national identity of the land through various martial, social, and scientific tactics, but no method has offered as much legitimacy and national controversy as that of the map.

In The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine(Oxford University Press, 2020), Dr. Christine Leuenberger and Dr. Izhak Schnell delve beneath the battlefield to unearth the cartographic strife behind the Israel/Palestine conflict. Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material, in-depth interviews and ethnographies, this book explores how the geographical sciences came to be entangled with the politics, territorial claim-making, and nation-state building of Israel/Palestine. Chapters chart the cartographic history of the region, from the introduction of Western scientific and legal paradigms that seemingly legitimized and depoliticized new land regimes to the rise of new mapping technologies and software that expanded access to cartography into the public sphere. Maps produced by various sectors like the "peace camps" or the Jewish community enhanced national belonging, while others, like that of the Green Line, served largely to divide.

The stories of Israel's many boundaries reveal that there is no absolute, technocratic solution to boundary-making. As boundaries continue to be controversial and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains intractable and unresolved,The Politics of Maps uses nationally-based cartographic discourses to provide insight into the complexity, fissures, and frictions within internal political debates, illuminating the persistent power of the nation-state as a framework for forging identities, citizens, and alliances.

Unfortunately, due to technical issues, Dr. Izhak Schnell was not able to join the audio interview about this book. His written answers to the questions are here.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Pandemic Perspectives 9: Covid, 'Scientism,' and the Betrayal of the Enlightenment May 04, 2022

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to bestselling author and University of Oxford law professor Charles Foster on how the coronavirus pandemic reveals how so many of us—including so many scientists—have replaced rigorous scientific skepticism with an alarming cult of "scientism."

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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John Zerilli, "A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2022) May 04, 2022

Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring homeowners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, and voters in liberal democracies? Authored by experts in fields ranging from computer science and law to philosophy and cognitive science, A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2022) offers a concise overview of moral, political, legal and economic implications of AI. It covers the basics of AI's latest permutation, machine learning, and considers issues such as transparency, bias, liability, privacy, and regulation.

Both business and government have integrated algorithmic decision support systems into their daily operations, and the book explores the implications for our lives as citizens. For example, do we take it on faith that a machine knows best in approving a patient's health insurance claim or a defendant's request for bail? What is the potential for manipulation by targeted political ads? How can the processes behind these technically sophisticated tools ever be transparent? The book discusses such issues as statistical definitions of fairness, legal and moral responsibility, the role of humans in machine learning decision systems, “nudging” algorithms and anonymized data, the effect of automation on the workplace, and AI as both regulatory tool and target.

Dr John Zerilli is a philosopher with particular interests in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the law. He is currently a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Research Associate in the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

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Daniel J. Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, "Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It" (Oxford UP, 2022) May 02, 2022

Digital connections permeate our lives-and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, finance, healthcare, and more, it is alarming how difficult it is to create rules for securing our personal information. Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasing at a record pace. In Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It(Oxford UP, 2022), Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, two of the world's leading experts on privacy and data security, argue that the law fails because, ironically, it focuses too much on the breach itself.

Drawing insights from many fascinating stories about data breaches, Solove and Hartzog show how major breaches could have been prevented or mitigated through a different approach to data security rules. Current law is counterproductive. It pummels organizations that have suffered a breach but doesn't address the many other actors that contribute to the problem: software companies that create vulnerable software, device companies that make insecure devices, government policymakers who write regulations that increase security risks, organizations that train people to engage in risky behaviors, and more.

Although humans are the weakest link for data security, policies and technologies are often designed with a poor understanding of human behavior. Breached! corrects this course by focusing on the human side of security. Drawing from public health theory and a nuanced understanding of risk, Solove and Hartzog set out a holistic vision for data security law-one that holds all actors accountable, understands security broadly and in relationship to privacy, looks to prevention and mitigation rather than reaction, and works by accepting human limitations rather than being in denial of them. The book closes with a roadmap for how we can reboot law and policy surrounding data security.

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William F. Eadie, "When Communication Became a Discipline" (Lexington, 2021) May 02, 2022

When Communication Became a Discipline (Lexington, 2021) argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the concept of communication between 1964 and 1982. They changed the names of their scholarly societies and journals and revised their academic curricula. Five “strands” of scholarship became and remain central to this transformation. Communication is not a traditional academic discipline, but its scholars convinced their colleagues to understand and embrace it. When Communication Became a Discipline presents an argument with historical evidence that illustrates scholarly creativity at its finest.

William F. Eadie is professor emeritus of journalism and media studies and director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University. William F. Eadie was former director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University, where he was responsible for leadership of a large program that encompassed all aspects of communication, media and journalism.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Maia Weinstock, "Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus" (MIT Press, 2022) Apr 29, 2022

Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus(MIT Press, 2022) follows Mildred Dresselhaus (or Millie, as everyone calls her) from her childhood in New York City to her final years in Cambridge. It focuses on her scientific achievements, but also rightfully presents her as a multi-hyphenate: being a resilient student, an adaptive researcher, a professor, an administrator, an advocate, a fundraiser, a patent owner, a book author. The accolades are plentiful and her involvement in science seemingly boundless.

Maia Weinstock masterfully blends anecdotes and scientific explanations into the life story of a truly phenomenal scientist.

In this episode of the podcast, we discuss Millie’s multifaceted career, as well as the process of putting the book together, and Maia’s history course on women in science.

Ana Georgescu studied astrophysics and physics at Harvard University and is now a science consultant and writer based in New York City.

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Anthony Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) Apr 28, 2022

It’s no secret that the United States has the most expansive prison system of any nation in the world. And the US carceral system overwhelmingly and unjustly impacts Black and Brown individuals and communities. With postwar efforts to dismantle Jim Crow policies, our era of mass incarceration reproduced the old logics of white supremacism that uphold racist capitalism in this new setting. These are the things we know.

But in his book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America(U Minnesota Press, 2019), Professor Anthony Hatch observes a feature of mass incarceration essential to its everyday function that many of us had never considered: the large-scale, persistent use of psychotropic drugs, including antipsychotics and antidepressants, not for medical care but rather to control the behavior of incarcerated people. Making a persuasive claim drawn from his training in STS and sociology, Hatch observes how the drugs are used at the level of individual brain chemistry to commit “soul murder” with enormous systemic implications and political stakes. What’s more, the carceral elites’ use of psychotropic drugs for the purposes of pacification, not care, of their wards extends to other (often state-backed) settings of “captive America,” including the military, foster care, elder care, and international detention centers. “Is it possible for the US carceral state to exist without psychotropics,” Hatch asks. “I think we can say the answer is no.”

Silent Cells accomplishes more than the (important) tasks of documentation and analysis. It is a work of liberatory social science. The book is of a piece with Hatch’s abolitionist agenda that he pursues through his generous and generative scholarly and activist engagements, including his work as director of the Black Box teaching laboratory and chair of the Program in Science in Society at Wesleyan University.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “Prison. Medicine” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu .

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Rana A. Hogarth, "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" (UNC Press, 2017) Apr 28, 2022

Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (UNC Press, 2017), Rana Hogarth shows that familiar histories, though excellent, fail to explain how and why medicine and slavery became fused in the first place.

No doubt, defenders of slavery used medicine to justify the corrupt practice once it was under threat. But Hogarth shows how science and medicine grafted during times and in places where slavery was secure—where white elites had no need to justify the violent practice with medical ideas because slavery was taken for granted. How and why did medicine and slavery fuse, Hogarth asks, in the Atlantic World of the newly invented United States and ascendant imperial Britain? Understanding the answer helps us grasp the valences and impacts of racialized national and social identities, then as well as today.

White physicians inflated their value—financial as well as reputational—by locating medical reasons for already existing racist tropes. Circa 1800, white physicians were a disreputable and loosely aligned lot. They had many rivals (Black healers), rich skeptics (plantation owners), and no professional organization until the mid-nineteenth century under which they could rally. Before then, a wide-spread, active white belief in an innate difference between Black and white bodies was the foregone conclusion that white physicians worked to explain in order to appear of use. White physicians in the English-speaking Caribbean developed medical theories of innate difference in the etiology, progress and experience of illness in Black and white bodies—evidence to the contrary be damned. As a consequence, they ignored immense Black suffering, exposed Black workers to deadly diseases, and policed Black people through the hospital system, all the while seeing Black people as appropriate for service in the military and as objects for teaching dissection, that is to say, in projects of imperial and professional expansion.

Medicalizing Blackness broadens the story of medicine in the Atlantic World with a lens that perceives more than the institution of slavery. It also demonstrates the emergence of the Caribbean as a locus—not an outpost—of trustworthy medical knowledge circulated through an array of genres, including journals articles, plantation guides, hospital advertisements, and other media of “textual subjugation” that Hogarth reads with great insight. In short, medicine needed the racist logics of slavery in order to gain power before slavery needed racist medicine to defend its own might.

July 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the exposure of the abusive and unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in the US media. Engaging the roots of white supremacist ideas and practices is essential for better understanding and for stronger political action against racism, as important fifty years ago as it is in our ongoing racialized pandemic.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Pandemic Perspectives 8: Covid and the Embrace of the Biological World Apr 27, 2022

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned UC San Diego neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland about the importance of communicating science, the wonders of the biological world and the dangers of wishful thinking.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Amanda D. Lotz, "Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars" (MIT Press, 2021) Apr 27, 2022

Has the internet really been the main culprit behind the upheaval of the contemporary media industries? In Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars(MIT Press, 2021), Professor Amanda Lotz provides a rebuttal to persistent myths about disruption across the mediascape of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Through a granular reading of four media industries – newspapers, recorded music, film and television – Lotz demonstrates that the internet has had diffuse and divergent effects in each, none of which are adequately explained through simplistic narratives of piracy or cannibalism. Lotz suggests that the speed and scale of reconfiguration in these industries has stemmed more from built up consumer demand and business (mal)practices, often with deep historical roots, which have only then been catalysed by the advent of the internet.

Alongside laying out what we often get wrong about the internet and the media industries, Lotz provides detailed analyses of those media businesses which managed to negotiate this tumultuous period successfully. Media Disruption helps us understand how the media industries got to where they are today and provides valuable lessons for those seeking to weather disruptions to come.

Professor Amanda Lotz works at the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology.

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Nancy L Segal, "Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) Apr 27, 2022

A lot can be learned from scientific twin studies about the relative contributions of nature versus nurture to human experience. However, when such studies do lasting harm to its participants, what does it teach us about the dangerous power of scientific zeal? This is the subject of Dr. Nancy Segal’s latest book,Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), in which she documents the controversial methods employed by the Louise Wise Services-Child Development Center Twin Study of the 1960s and 1970s. In our interview, she addresses the fallout of such methods for twins that were studied but kept unaware of each other for years and what it says about the unique bond shared by twins. This discussion of a tragic but fascinating and important moment in scientific history is relevant for anyone interested in questions about the roles of genes versus the environment or about the uniqueness of twin relationships.

Nancy L. Segal, Ph.D. is professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton and director of the Twin Studies Center. She has authored over 250 scientific articles and six books on twins and twin development. She lives in Southern California. She can be followed on Twitter at @nlsegal.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse.

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Delinda Collier, "Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa" (Duke UP, 2020) Apr 20, 2022

In Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa(Duke University Press, 2020) Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.

Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

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Gavin Mueller, "Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job" (Verso, 2021) Apr 20, 2022

In Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites are Right About Why You Hate Your Job(Verso, 2021), Gavin Mueller provides a bracing and wide-ranging study of the fractious relationship between workers and technology under capitalism. Mueller traces the thought and actions of ordinary people past and present – including hackers, dockers, musicians and the titular textile workers - who have recognised that technological ‘progress’ too often comes at the expense of their autonomy and dignity. The book pushes back against visions of machine-driven utopia that have continually re-emerged on both the right and the left, arguing instead that resistance to technology is a key site of struggle throughout modernity, and that a Marxist neo-Luddism is crucial to understanding, and changing, the world today.

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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Nicole Starosielski, "Media Hot and Cold" (Duke UP, 2021) Apr 20, 2022

Media Hot and Cold(Duke UP, 2021) attunes the reader to temperature as a crucial but often overlooked terrain of control, communication and contestation. The book skilfully unpacks the complex technical operations of a vast array of heat-based communication technologies in parallel with a close analysis of the cultural and political resonances of these media, taking in early experiments in heat ray technologies, the development of the thermostat, undersea fibre optic cables and torture sweatboxes from the US plantation. Today’s thermal media are framed as politically neutral and scientifically objective technologies of personalised comfort and climate mitigation. However, Starosielski pushes back against this reading, arguing that the manipulation of temperature as a means of coercion and domination has been integral to the construction, normalization and maintenance of unequal relations of power. The book is a timely and significant call for an unflinching analysis of the sociocultural function of temperature in a period of unprecedented thermal volatility.

Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds.

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David Nemer, "Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil" (MIT Press, 2022) Apr 19, 2022

In Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022), David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.

David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and Princeton University's Brazil Lab. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Technology, ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013).

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Deborah Gordon, "No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World" (Oxford UP, 2021) Apr 19, 2022

In No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2021), Deborah Gordon shows that no two oils or gases are environmentally alike. Each has a distinct, quantifiable climate impact. While all oils and gases pollute, some are much worse for the climate than others. In clear, accessible language, Gordon explains the results of the Oil Climate Index Plus Gas (OCI+), an innovative, open-source model that estimates global oil and gas emissions. Gordon identifies the oils and gases from every region of the globe–– along with the specific production, processing, and refining activities–– that are the most harmful to the planet, and proposes innovative solutions to reduce their climate footprints.

Global climate stabilization cannot afford to wait for oil and gas to run out. No Standard Oil shows how we can take immediate, practical steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the crucial oil and gas sector while making sustainable progress in transitioning to a carbon-free energy future.

Deborah Gordon is a senior principal in the Climate Intelligence Program at RMI where she leads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. Gordon also serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and the principal investigator for the Oil Climate Project.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Jeff Sebo, "Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes" (Oxford UP, 2022) Apr 18, 2022

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of our pandemic and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities.

Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes (Oxford UP, 2022) is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how.

Jeff Sebo is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, and Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program at New York University. He is also on the executive committee at the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection and the advisory board for the Animals in Context series at NYU Press.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Susanne A. Wengle, "Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food" (U Wisconsin Press, 2022) Apr 15, 2022

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.”

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements.

“A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.”

Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.”

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kris Ruijgrok, "Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and Other Authoritarian Regimes" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) Apr 15, 2022

Internet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes(Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media platforms like Twitter spontaneously spark protests around the world, the book takes a longer and wider view of how the internet challenges information scarcity in authoritarian regimes, which, consequently, creates conditions for citizens to carefully consider their sympathies for a protest movement and defy their fears about state control.

In this podcast, Kris discusses the reasons why the Malaysian government is unable to successfully control the digital public sphere in the same way it controlled the information environment of traditional media. He makes a case for going beyond what he considers to be technologically deterministic debate between cyber-pessimists and cyber-optimists. Instead, Kris foregrounds the importance of context – how different social conditions result to different outcomes.

Kris Ruijgrok is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam.

Like this interview? You may also be interested in:

Aim Sinpeng, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (U Michigan Press, 2021)

Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel.

This episode was produced in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University.

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Jonathan Beller, "The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2021) Apr 15, 2022

In The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021) Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression-language, image, music, communication-into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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Jennifer Petersen, "How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech" (Duke UP, 2022) Apr 14, 2022

In How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Duke University Press, 2022), Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens.

Jennifer Petersen is an Associate Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is the director of the graduate certificate program in Science and Technology Studies and is affiliated with the Center for Law, History, and Culture. Before arriving at USC, she worked at the University of Virginia, where she was an affiliate with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also a former Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program.

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Tim Hwang, "Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet" (FSG Originals, 2020) Apr 14, 2022

In Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet(FSG Originals, 2020), Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising--the beating heart of the internet--is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008.

From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers' attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself--much like subprime mortgages--is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet--and its free services--will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it.

Tim Hwang is a writer, researcher, and currently the general counsel for Substack. He is the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative and previously served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Robert A Jacobs, "Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha" (Yale UP, 2022) Apr 13, 2022

Robert Jacob’s book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha(Yale UP, 2022) re‑envisions the history of the Cold War as a slow nuclear war, fought on remote battlegrounds against populations powerless to prevent the contamination of their lands and bodies. Jacobs’s book put these “nuclear bodies” and the legacy of our eighty years history of nuclear weapon and power use at the center of his inquiry. The contaminated bodies of the hibakusha and the contaminated grounds on which they live (or in many cases lived. As many lost their homes), Jacobs argues, are largely invisible because of the colonial and post -colonial power relations that made these communities a target to begin with. Nuclear weapon tests and power stations usually were set at remote places, and the harm was done to people with no political power. Furthermore, it is not just contemporary communities that were harmed, but also future generations. “Plutonium will remain dangerous for over two hundred thousand years, and uranium particles for more than one million years”. Eighty years of tests and nuclear power have saddled our future descendants with radiative waste, most of which is still not safely stored, “a global legacy currently sitting in spent fuel pools and dry storage casks, waiting.” The invisibility of the problem and people affected by it, Jacobs argues, is manufactured in science and politics. Furthermore, the way we study the problem historically further obscured its scope. Different sites have been studied through different national historical “silos,” Jacobs, however, takes a global approach, and look at sites from Nevada to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kazakhstan to Xinjian, and the various Pacific sites that were sites of nuclear tests and accidents since 1945 to make the invisible global hibakusha visible.

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Laura J. Martin, "Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration" (Harvard UP, 2022) Apr 13, 2022

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology.

Restoration has been a touchstone of United States environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? In Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (Harvard University Press, 2022), Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be.

In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

Laura J. Martin is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. She is a past fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She has written for Scientific American, Slate, Environmental History, Environmental Humanities, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and other publications.

Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. She is also the creator and host of Drafting the Past, a podcast on the craft of writing history. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp.

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Dashun Wang and Albert-László Barabási, "The Science of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Apr 13, 2022

Listen to this interview of Dashun Wang, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and also with Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University. We talk about their new book The Science of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2021) and science, squared.

Albert-László Barabási : "There is, of course, the need that you grow professionally. If you're a mathematician, you need to perfect your math. If you're a physicist, you need to do your physics. If you're a biologist, you need to develop your lab techniques. But no matter the magnitude of any discovery you might make, it's not impactful unless you can actually communicate it. And I think that this is where science lacks significantly. I would even go so far as to say, there is a counter-selection: People who are not necessarily the best communicators tend to prefer science because there's the impression that that is not the skill that you need — you just need to be able to solve problems in a meaningful way. But if you're not able to write your ideas down, if you're not able to share your ideas with your community, then it's really as if you didn't have the ideas at all. And you know, I have experienced this in my own career. When I got interested in network science back in 1994/95, for the first few years my papers got rejected one after the other, and not because it wasn't good science (as I would later realize) — no, my papers were getting rejected because I could not communicate to the community at large and to my referees in particular why we should care about networks. And it took me about five years to find the way into people's minds, to learn how they write papers about networks. I needed to learn the hard way about how the community of scientists appreciated and did not appreciate research on networks. And it took me so long because I'd never been offered the opportunity to study the communication of science."

Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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James C. Ungureanu, "Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) Apr 12, 2022

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis.

In Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019), James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the “conflict thesis” was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation.

James C. Ungureanu is a Historian in Residence in the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland and in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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Marcus Kaiser, "Changing Connectomes: Evolution, Development, and Dynamics in Network Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2020) Apr 08, 2022

The human brain undergoes massive changes during its development, from early childhood and the teenage years to adulthood and old age. Across a wide range of species, from C. elegans and fruit flies to mice, monkeys, and humans, information about brain connectivity (connectomes) at different stages is now becoming available. New approaches in network neuroscience can be used to analyze the topological, spatial, and dynamical organization of such connectomes. In Changing Connectomes: Evolution, Development, and Dynamics in Network Neuroscience(MIT Press, 2020), Marcus Kaiser provides an up-to-date overview of the field of connectomics and introduces concepts and mechanisms underlying brain network changes during evolution and development.

Drawing on a range of results from experimental, clinical, and computational studies, Kaiser describes changes during healthy brain maturation and during brain network disorders (including such neurodevelopmental conditions as schizophrenia and depression), brain injury, and neurodegenerative disorders including dementia. He argues that brain stimulation is an area where understanding connectome development could help in assessing the long-term effects of interventions. Changing Connectomes is a suitable starting point for researchers who are new to the field of connectomics, and also for researchers who are interested in the link between brain network organization and brain and cognitive development in health and disease. Matlab/Octave code examples available at the MIT Press website will allow computational neuroscience researchers to understand and extend the shown mechanisms of connectome development.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Pandemic Perspectives 5: Necessarily Global--How the Pandemic Forces Us To Think Bigger Apr 06, 2022

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Andy Hoffman, the dynamic and innovative business professor at the University of Michigan, about what the pandemic has brought to light to effectively address our many pressing global problems.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022) Apr 06, 2022

Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, such as a free speech entropy: the perception of rulers or governments that if speech is not restricted then social or political decline or disorder is inevitable. Mchangama also notes how restrictions usually have the unintended effect of emboldening the speakers and making the forbidden speech even more attractive to potential listeners. This history also reveals advocates of free speech less familiar to Western readers, such as the ninth-century Persian scholar Ibn al-Rawandi, a theologian and later skeptic whose life illustrates the debates possible in medieval Islam. Mchangama reviews the modern debates regarding freedom of thought and the latest iterations of arguments about whether free speech will lead to social decline and chaos. Mchangama is a champion of free speech but his history provides a fair minded account of the concerns of speech restrictionists throughout history.

Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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Robert Buderi, "Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub" (MIT Press, 2022) Apr 05, 2022

Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Takeda, and others. It's a major tech center, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all occupying big chunks of pricey office space. Kendall Square also boasts a dense concentration of startups, with leading venture capital firms conveniently located nearby. And of course, MIT is just down the block. In Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub(MIT Press, 2022), Robert Buderi offers the first detailed account of the unique ecosystem that is Kendall Square, chronicling the endless cycles of change and reinvention that have driven its evolution.

Buderi, who himself has worked in Kendall Square for the past twenty years, tells fascinating stories of great innovators and their innovations that stretch back two centuries. Before biotech and artificial intelligence, there was railroad car innovation, the first long-distance telephone call, the Polaroid camera, MIT's once secret, now famous Radiation Laboratory, and much more. Buderi takes readers on a walking tour of the square and talks to dozens of innovators, entrepreneurs, urban planners, historians, and others. He considers Kendall Square's limitations—it's “gentrification gone rogue,” by one description, with little affordable housing, no pharmacy, and a scarce middle class—and its strengths: the “human collisions” that spur innovation.

What's next for Kendall Square? Buderi speculates about the next big innovative enterprises and outlines lessons for aspiring innovation districts. More important, he asks how Kendall Square can be both an innovation hub and a diversity, equity, and inclusion hub. There's a lot of work still to do.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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The Future of Delusions: A Discussion with Lisa Bortolotti Apr 05, 2022

The accusation “you’re deluded” is often used as something of a cheap shot intended to silence an opponent in debate. But what is the nature of a delusion and how can we assess rationality and irrationality? In this podcast, Owen Bennett-Jones talks to Professor Lisa Bortolotti who studies the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry at Birmingham University and is the author of among many other things, Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs(Oxford UP, 2010) and most recently edited Delusions in Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Zeynep Pamuk, "Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society" (Princeton UP, 2021) Apr 05, 2022

Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other.

Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society (Princeton University Press, 2021) offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists' judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial "science court" to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies.

Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.

Zeynep Pamuk is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Sherryl Vint, "Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2021) Apr 04, 2022

The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we don't understand. Depending the news of the day, we inhabit either a technological utopia or Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge surveys the uses of science fiction. Sherryl Vint's Science Fiction (MIT Press, 2021)focuses on what is at the core of all definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities might flow from such otherness.

Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. She is also a drummer who has studied Gamelan in Bali, Berber in Morocco, and most traditional Ga patterns with master drummers in Ghana.

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Natali Valdez, "Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era" (U California Press, 2022) Mar 30, 2022

In Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era (University of California Press, 2022), Natali Valdez examines research trials that enroll pregnant people in the United States and England. These research trials aim to lower the health risks to future generations by intervening in and studying the diet and exercise of pregnant people. As an ethnographer, Valdez enrolled pregnant participants into the studies, met with them to administer the intervention, and observed the processes of the trials. Valdez argues that these studies focus on the pregnant individual without accounting for the social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that present risk factors to their pregnancies. Structural factors such as racism, pollution, and poverty are not acknowledged, studied, or tracked. And this focus on the individual forecloses addressing issues, such as unstable housing, childcare, immigration, and racism. In the book, Valdez discusses how pregnancy trials have changed very little since the 1950s, the politics of recruiting participants to the trials, and how they handle racial diversity. Valdez asserts that these trials use race as an unstable and inconsistent marker of identifying participants, but they do not address racism, which is an underlying cause of health disparities. In the episode we discuss Valdez’s arguments, ethnographic work, and experience of writing the book. Weighing the Future would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, science and technology studies, as well as women and gender studies. Weighing the Future is the first book of its kind, and it contributes much to our understandings of the increasingly salient issues of maternal health, research, and race.

Natali Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Rachel E. Gross, "Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage" (W. W. Norton, 2022) Mar 30, 2022

Vagina Obscura: an anatomical voyage by Rachel E. Gross

A myth-busting voyage into the female body.

A camera obscura reflects the world back but dimmer and inverted. Similarly, science has long viewed woman through a warped lens, one focused narrowly on her capacity for reproduction. As a result, there exists a vast knowledge gap when it comes to what we know about half of the bodies on the planet.

That is finally changing. Today, a new generation of researchers is turning its gaze to the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making—the uterus, ovaries, and vagina—and illuminating them as part of a dynamic, resilient, and ever-changing whole. Welcome to Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage (W.W. Norton, 2022), an odyssey into a woman’s body from a fresh perspective, ushering in a whole new cast of characters.

In Boston, a pair of biologists are growing artificial ovaries to counter the cascading health effects of menopause. In Melbourne, a urologist remaps the clitoris to fill in crucial gaps in female sexual anatomy. Given unparalleled access to labs and the latest research, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes readers on a scientific journey to the center of a wonderous world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves.

This paradigm shift is made possible by the growing understanding that sex and gender are not binary; we all share the same universal body plan and origin in the womb. That’s why insights into the vaginal microbiome, ovarian stem cells, and the biology of menstruation don’t mean only a better understanding of female bodies, but a better understanding of male, non-binary, transgender, and intersex bodies—in other words, all bodies.

By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, and shocking, Vagina Obscura is a powerful testament to how the landscape of human knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.

Sine Yaganoglu: Having trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer, I switched to industry following my PhD at ETH Zurich and have been working in innovation management and diagnostics. Besides reading about science, innovation and entrepreneurship, I have become interested in the scientific and cultural aspects of parenting and motherhood since welcoming my first child.

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Hannah Star Rogers, "Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies" (Routledge, 2021)) Mar 30, 2022

I spoke with Hannah Star Rogers, one of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies(Routledge, 2021). Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science has played the role of muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) as the interdisciplinary exploration of art–science.

This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics, and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge-making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world.

This book provides scholars and practitioners already familiar with the themes and tensions of art–science with a means of connecting across disciplines. It proposes organizing principles for thinking about art–science across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Encounters with art and science become meaningful in relation to practices and materials manifest as perceptual habits, background knowledge, and cultural norms. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, a variety of STS tools can be brought to bear on art–science so that systematic research can be conducted on this unique set of knowledge-making practices.

Hannah Star Rogers is Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies (STIS) and lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies.

Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University, where she studied in the Science and Society Program. She is also a drummer who has studied Gamelan in Bali, Berber in Morocco, and most traditional Ga patterns with master drummers in Ghana.

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Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi, "A New History of Modern Computing" (MIT Press, 2021) Mar 30, 2022

In A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2021), Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace changes leading to the computer becoming a ubiquitous technology. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific super tool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music, and movies, communicate, and count their steps. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smartphones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.

Dr. Thomas Haigh is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Comenius Visiting Professor at Siegen University. He has been researching the history of computing for more than twenty years and is a past chair of SIGCIS, the group for historians of information technology. He is the lead author, with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope, of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, about the design, construction, and use of the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer, the ENIAC. His new book, with Paul Ceruzzi, is New History of Modern Computing: a comprehensive history of computing from ENIAC to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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The Future of Rational Decision Making: A Discussion with Olivier Sibony Mar 29, 2022

In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment(Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more important than ever. Yet the challenge to rationality comes not only from social media driven myths becoming accepted truths, but also bias and randomness in decision-making.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021) Mar 29, 2022

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest.

Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support.

Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Lucy Cooke, "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" (Basic Books, 2022) Mar 28, 2022

Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Basic Books, 2022) is a fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom. Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.

Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics.

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Scott Timcke, "Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life" (Bristol UP, 2021) Mar 28, 2022

As the US contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this timely study considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country’s politics and society.

In Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life (Bristol University Press, 2021), Dr. Scott Timcke provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. He looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world.

Offering bold new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the US and beyond.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Jing Tsu, "Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern" (Riverhead Books, 2022) Mar 24, 2022

Tens of thousands of characters. Countless homonyms. Mutually unintelligible dialects across an entire country. This is what faced the Chinese thinkers, inventors and technicians who had to figure out how to standardize, translate, and adapt the Chinese language for a new country, and for new technologies.

Professor Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern(Riverhead Books, 2022) tells the stories of those who worked to transform Chinese for the 20th century.

In this interview, Jing and I talk about thinkers and technicians: those who toiled to make the Chinese language work for typewriters, telegraphs, and other important technologies.

Jing Tsu is the John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale. She specializes in Chinese literature, history, and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, and received her doctorate in Chinese studies from Harvard. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has held fellowships and distinctions from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton institutes.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Kingdom of Characters. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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John Bellamy Foster, "The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology" (Monthly Review Press, 2021) Mar 23, 2022

It is slowly becoming clear that we are heading towards a deep ecological catastrophe. Our societies carbon footprint and its impact have been known for some time, and already we are starting to see the effects in terms of melting ice, warming oceans and more frequent extreme weather. This will contribute to food and water shortages, political unrest and migration crises that we are ill-prepared for.

In a context such as this, it has become urgent that we rethink the natural world and our relationship to it, but knowing where to start is difficult. Fortunately, John Bellamy Foster has stepped forward with just such a book. Picking up where his book Marx’s Ecology left off 20 years ago, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2021) starts with the funerals of both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, kicking off a story of the many people who worked in their combined shadow. Foster guides us through a century of scientific development in the relatively new field of ecology, showing how many of it’s founders were influenced by the socialist critique of capitalism, and vice-versa. What readers will find are a collection of texts and figures who understood that an economic model that prioritizes profit above all else will eventually have to start asking more of the earth than it can afford to give, incurring long and deep debts that we are now starting to pay. On the one hand, many ecologists have found Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism helpful for thinking dynamically about nature and scientific practice. On the other hand, ecologists have offered socialists a number of theoretical concepts and frameworks for their own thinking. In between are a number of other characters who make their own contributions to discussions on economics and nature, as well as literature, history, epidemiology, race, oppression and emancipation.

The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way, that a more sustainable world is possible.

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of a number of books, including Marx’s Ecology. With The Return of Nature he won the 2020 Isaac Deutscher Memorial prize. He is also the editor and a frequent contributor at the socialist periodical The Monthly Review.

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Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022) Mar 23, 2022

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.

"Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe, and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory.

In The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat (Pegasus Books, 2022), Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. This new book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat.

Rob Percival is Head of Policy at the Soil Association, Britain's leading food and farming charitable organization. He has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize as well as the Thompson Reuters Food Sustainability Media Award.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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N. J. Enfield, "Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" (MIT Press, 2022) Mar 23, 2022

Nick Enfield’s book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022), argues that language is primarily for social coordination, not precisely transferring thoughts from one person to another. Drawing on empirical research, Enfield shows that human lexicons the world over are far more coarse-grained than our perceptual faculties. Yet, at the same time, languages vary in the structure and sophistication of their representations. This means that, for instance, how different languages carve up the world influences not only how their speakers talk about the world, but also how they think about it. The book explores a range of linguistic phenomena, from lexical diversity to linguistic framing to the effects of narrative. As a result of understanding how language shapes our understanding of reality, Enfield argues that we can make more informed—and more ethical—decisions about our own language use, as individuals and communities.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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Howard Burton, "Pandemic Perspectives: A Filmmaker's Journey in 10 Essays" (Open Agenda, 2022) Mar 22, 2022

Howard Burton has been talking to very wise people for decades--scientists, historians, political thinkers, philosophers, etc. When Covid "hit" he was, like many of us, puzzled. Where did it come from? How should we respond to it? What does it say about us? So he did what he does: Had conversations with 32 very wise people about Covid. He filmed the discussions, and you can watch them here. Some of them will be released as podcasts on the Ideas Roadshow Podcast, which you can find here. He also wrote a book about his conversations: Pandemic Perspectives: A Filmmaker's Journey in 10 Essays (Open Agenda, 2022). You can buy it here.

Today I talked to Howard about the book, and what he learned in his discussions with these people. Enjoy.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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The Future of Disorder: A Discussion with Helen Thompson Mar 22, 2022

In her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century(Oxford UP, 2022), Cambridge academic Helen Thompson gets beyond the ephemeral and analyses instead the role of more fundamental drivers of events – including the energy markets and the international monetary system. That’s one way in which her book is distinctive. It’s also a very broad book. While much of academic output has a very narrow focus, this book is unusual in attempting a sweeping overview of what’s happening in the world. What role has energy played in disrupting politics especially since the 1970s? How has the US dominance of the international financial system impacted international relations? And how has the EU influenced democratic development in Europe?

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Kate Crawford, "The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" (Yale UP, 2021) Mar 21, 2022

What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence(Yale University Press, 2021), Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fuelling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased racial, gender, and economic inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research, award‑winning science, and technology, Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure, to the exploited workers behind “automated” services, to the data AI collects from us.

Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a political and a material perspective on what it takes to make artificial intelligence and where it goes wrong. While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity, they are always systems of power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.

Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.

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Stephen B. Heard, "The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed." (Princeton UP, 2022) Mar 21, 2022

Listen to this interview of Stephen Heard, Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick. We talk about his book The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 2022), we talk about writing when it's a verb, we talk about writing when it's a choice, and we talk about writing when it's the science.

Stephen Heard : "Especially for early-career scientists there's a risk of their writing entering into a positive feedback loop with the writing as it is in the literature. And really, we do this to them, we professors and instructors. We say, 'Next week, you're going to hand in a lab report. Write out this experiment you did,' and we say, quote, 'and write like the scientific literature,' unquote. Well, that's a horrible thing to tell anyone to do, because unfortunately, much of our literature isn't particularly well written. We love our acronyms, we love really long noun phrases, we love the passive voice, and so on. And so, people who don't make conscious choices and just sort of model what they're writing on what's already out there — I think they sort of get locked into some of those bad decisions, like the five-noun noun phrase. So being aware of what you're doing, thinking about the language you're using, and being willing to use the language to its fullest — that's not an invitation to write your own Finnegans Wake — but it is an invitation to think carefully about the way of constructing your point that will resonate best with the reader."

Readers may be interested in Heard's webpage for the book.

Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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Florian Jaton, "The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating" (MIT Press, 2021) Mar 16, 2022

The Constitution of Algorithms: Ground-Truthing, Programming, Formulating (MIT Press, 2021) is a laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence. Algorithms--often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence--underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly. In this book, Florian Jaton offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.

Florian Jaton is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the STS Lab, a research unit of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Florian studied Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature, and Political Sciences before receiving his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. He also worked at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California Irvine and at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at the École des Mines de Paris. His research interests are the sociology of algorithms, the philosophy of mathematics, and the history of computing.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Nanna Katrine Luders Kaalund, "Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) Mar 16, 2022

Harsh conditions, intense isolation, and acute danger inevitably impacted the making and communicating eighteenth-century scientific knowledge leading up to the first International Polar Year in 1882. In her new book, Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Country(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund demonstrates the instability of nineteenth-century scientific practices and the challenges of producing travel narratives about the harsh Arctic field by comparing an array of transnational arctic travel narratives, including British, Danish, Canadian, American, and indigenous perspectives. On their return to the metropole, explorers and their backers discovered that organizing and controlling perceptions of their venture became as tricky to navigate as the expeditions themselves. Noting the ambivalent relationship among religion, commerce, and scientific interests, Explorations in the Icy North examines tensions between the types of scientific results expected from exploratory missions based on differing focuses of trading companies and religious missions. Uncovering the transnational nature of Arctic exploration, Kaalund reveals how far beyond the metropole explorations and the narratives that followed ultimately influenced the understanding of field science, helping to establish Western perspectives about the arctic. While grappling with issues of institutionalization and professionalization of science, Explorations in the Icy North provides meaningful insight, explaining the need for research stations created by the end of the century while detailing the significance of public consumption of science through the lens of the travel narrative.

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Pandemic Perspectives 2: A Conversation with Stephen Scherer Mar 16, 2022

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Stephen Scherer, Chief of Research at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, about how lessons learned from the pandemic might be best harnessed to increase the likelihood of future breakthroughs in biomedical research.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Ori Schwarz, "Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes That Bind Us Together" (Polity Press, 2021) Mar 16, 2022

The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life – it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities in his book Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes that Bind Us Together, published by Polity Press in 2021.

What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations and is constantly documented as durable digital objects? How should we understand new digitally mediated forms of human association that bind our actions and lives together but have little in common with old-time 'collectives'; and why are they not simply ‘social networks’? How does social capital transform when it is materialized in a digital form, and how does it remold power structures? What happens to our conceptualization of power when faced with the emergence of new forms of algorithmic power? And what happens when labor departs from work? By posing and answering such fascinating questions, and offering critical tools for both students and scholars of social theory and digital society to engage with them, this thought-provoking book draws the outline of future sociological theory for our digital society.

Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Jackie Higgins, "Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses" (Atria Books, 2022) Mar 16, 2022

Packed with beautiful imagery, but also hard scientific facts, Jackie Higgins's book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses (Atria Books, 2022) explores how we process the world around us by analyzing the incredible sensory capabilities of thirteen animals and reveals that we are not limited to merely five senses. There is a scientific revolution stirring in the field of human perception. Research has shown that the extraordinary sensory powers of our animal friends can help us better understand the same powers that lie dormant within us. From the harlequin mantis shrimp with its ability to see a vast range of colors, to the bloodhound and its hundreds of millions of scent receptors; from the orb-weaving spider whose eyes recognize not only space but time, to the cheetah whose ears are responsible for its perfect agility, these astonishing animals hold the key to better understanding how we make sense of the world around us. Eye-opening and captivating, Sentient will change the way you think about what it is to be human.

Ana Georgescu is a Romanian transplant, astrophysics graduate, aspiring journalist.

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Lydia Pyne, "Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network" (Reaktion Books, 2021) Mar 15, 2022

For this episode, I met historian and writer Dr. Lydia Pyne. She is author of Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network (Reaktion, 2021).. Postcards is a global exploration of postcards as artifacts at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented, postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively.

Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections—links between people, places, and beliefs. Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct.

Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO.

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Silvia M. Lindtner, "Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation" (Princeton UP, 2020) Mar 10, 2022

Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Author Silvia Lindtner unpacks how this promise of entrepreneurial life has influenced governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexist and racist violence and various forms of labor exploitation.

Silvia Margot Lindtner (she/her) is a writer and ethnographer. She is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information and Director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). She is also a PIP (Public Intellectual Program) Fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations. Lindtner's research focuses on the cultures and politics of technology innovation, including the labor necessary to incubate entrepreneurial life, data-driven futures, and the promise of democratized agency. Drawing from more than ten years of multi-sited ethnographic research, she writes about China's shifting position in the global political economy of computing, supply chains, industrial and agricultural production, and science and technology policy.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focuses on China’s political economy and governance.

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Maryam Ziaee, "Big Data Analytics Adoption in Pharmaceutical Advanced Manufacturing" Mar 10, 2022

Dr. Maryam Ziaee is a University Lecturer at Victoria University in Australia teaching and researching Operations and Supply Chain Management. Dr. Ziaee has developed a cutting-edge model for big data analytics adoption in Australia’s pharmaceutical manufacturers that has garnered more attention in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic which has thrown the global supply chain into disarray. Manufacturing organisations around the globe are transitioning to big data analytics models to ramp up production and minimise manufacturing disruptions and uncertainties which can sometimes have adverse bearings on our social fabric. The shortage of critical goods and medicines in the last two years has shown how vital the role is the new oil in the current global market, but understanding and using data still remains a challenge. This is particularly more important when people’s lives and health are at stake. Dr. Ziaee’s research project provides a model that can be applied globally in manufacturing industries to improve their demand forecasting models and develop smart and data-driven decision-making.

Dr. Maryam Ziaee is a lecturer at Victoria University. Her research interests and interdisciplinary expertise are artificial intelligence adoption and implementation in the advanced manufacturing industry, optimisation of manufacturing performance, improving supply chain processes and resilience, implementation of quality management in manufacturing practices and products, sustainable engineering systems, and lean & agile manufacturing.

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Pratik Chakrabarti, "Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) Mar 10, 2022

In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future.

In Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity(Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality.

Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here.

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Carl R. Weinberg, "Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism In America" (Cornell UP, 2021) Mar 10, 2022

In Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism In America (Cornell UP, 2021), Carl R. Weinberg argues that creationism's tenacious hold on American public life depended on culture-war politics inextricably embedded in religion. Many Christian conservatives were convinced that evolutionary thought promoted immoral and even bestial social, sexual, and political behavior. The "fruits" of subscribing to Darwinism were, in their minds, a dangerous rearrangement of God-given standards and the unsettling of traditional hierarchies of power. Despite claiming to focus exclusively on science and religion, creationists were practicing politics. Their anticommunist campaign, often infused with conspiracy theory, gained power from the fact that the Marxist founders, the early Bolshevik leaders, and their American allies were staunch evolutionists.

Using the Scopes "Monkey" Trial as a starting point, Red Dynamite traces the politically explosive union of Darwinism and communism over the next century. Across those years, social evolution was the primary target of creationists, and their "ideas have consequences" strategy instilled fear that shaped the contours of America's culture wars. By taking the anticommunist arguments of creationists seriously, Weinberg reveals a neglected dimension of antievolutionism and illuminates a source of the creationist movement's continuing strength.

Carl R. Weinberg is Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Senior Lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion. His website is https://carlrweinberg.com/. You can also follow him on Twitter @Euclid585.

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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Joseph L. Graves and Alan H. Goodman, "Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions" (Columbia UP, 2021) Mar 10, 2022

The science on race is clear. Common categories like “Black,” “white,” and “Asian” do not represent genetic differences among groups. But if race is a pernicious fiction according to natural science, it is all too significant in the day-to-day lives of racialized people across the globe. Inequities in health, wealth, and an array of other life outcomes cannot be explained without referring to “race”—but their true source is racism. What do we need to know about the pseudoscience of race in order to fight racism and fulfill human potential?

In Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Columbia UP, 2021), two distinguished scientists tackle common misconceptions about race, human biology, and racism. Using an accessible question-and-answer format, Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman explain the differences between social and biological notions of race. Although there are many meaningful human genetic variations, they do not map onto socially constructed racial categories. Drawing on evidence from both natural and social science, Graves and Goodman dismantle the malignant myth of gene-based racial difference. They demonstrate that the ideology of racism created races and show why the inequalities ascribed to race are in fact caused by racism.

Graves and Goodman provide persuasive and timely answers to key questions about race and racism for a moment when people of all backgrounds are striving for social justice. Racism, Not Race shows readers why antiracist principles are both just and backed by sound science.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Pandemic Perspectives 1: A Conversation with Miguel Nicolelis Mar 09, 2022

In this first Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis who became trapped in his native Brazil when the pandemic exploded in early 2020 and found himself returning to his epidemiological roots, becoming co-leader of an impromptu scientific committee to advise 9 Brazilian Governors.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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The Future of Consciousness: A Discussion with Eva Jablonka Mar 08, 2022

What makes a living body conscious? What is consciousness and are there different types of it? These questions have been studied by Professor Eva Jablonka from the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Much of her early work was on epigenetic inheritance which poses questions such as whether learned behaviour can be passed on from one generation to the next and that has led her to think about whether it’s possible to take an evolutionary approach to consciousness.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Alan Rubel et al., "Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Mar 08, 2022

Many have experienced moments where algorithms have made us uncomfortable or suspicious. In Algorithms and Autonomy: The Ethics of Automated Decision Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Rubel, Phan, and Castro outline the stories of teachers and citizens subject to the criminal justice system who face serious consequences at the hands of algorithms. With a focus on locating the a philosophical touchstone to these harms, the authors look at how ideas of autonomy and freedom are affected by algorithms. When algorithms afford those subject to their decisions no transparency to endorse its use or worse hide responsibility for their decision in a network of actors laundering their own agency, citizens are harmed and democracy is harmed. This book mount a forceful lens of what exactly algorithms in criminal justice, education, housing, elections and beyond can do to autonomy, freedom, and democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Dr. Alan Rubel is Professor and Director of the Information School at University of Wisconsin Madison.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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Sarah Brayne, "Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing" (Oxford UP, 2020) Mar 04, 2022

Police use of advanced data collection and analysis technologies—or, "big data policing"—continues to receive both positive and negative attention through media, activism, and politics. While some high-profile cases illustrate its potential to hasten investigations or even solve previously unsolved crimes, and others showcase risks to individual liberties and vulnerable communities, we know surprisingly little about how and why police departments actually adopt and deploy these tools.

Sarah Brayne's new book, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing (Oxford UP, 2021) provides the first in-depth study of these questions. Dr. Brayne recorded observations and interviews over a 5-year period of ethnographic fieldwork and follow-up with the LAPD. In the book, she examines the roles of extra- and intra-departmental factors in the uptake of big data tools, their relationship to the practice and culture of policing, and the impacts and reactions they've precipitated among captains, sworn officers, civilian analysts, and policed communities.

A major theme of the book is the role of discretion: While data-driven decision-making tools may promise to replace biased human judgment, in practice they can instead displace human judgment—to earlier and less visible steps in the process, exacerbating the problem they are invoked to solve. Conversely, i was also interested in how Dr. Brayne suggests we shift our perspectives on these tools: She proposes to think of a "big data environment" that shapes our social behavior, and she flips the analogy of data as capital to describe a "cumulative disadvantage" that accrues to those with less access to and control over the data collected on them.

Dr. Brayne's study has legal and scholarly as well as policy implications, and it will be of interest to anyone interested in the societal role of data or in that of police. I hope that it becomes part of the foundation for urgently needed future work at their intersection.

Suggested companion work: Ballad of the Bullet by Forrest Stuart (listen to Stuart's interview with Sarah E. Patterson here)

Sarah Brayne is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. Dr. Brayne is the founder and director of the Texas Prison Education Initiative, a group of faculty and students who volunteer to teach college classes in prisons throughout Texas.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Firmin Debrabander, "Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Mar 03, 2022

Privacy is gravely endangered in the digital age, and we, the digital citizens, are its principal threat, willingly surrendering it to avail ourselves of new technology, and granting the government and corporations immense power over us. In Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society(Cambridge UP, 2020), Firmin DeBrabander begins with this premise and asks how we can ensure and protect our freedom in the absence of privacy. Can--and should--we rally anew to support this institution? Is privacy so important to political liberty after all? DeBrabander makes the case that privacy is a poor foundation for democracy, that it is a relatively new value that has been rarely enjoyed throughout history--but constantly persecuted--and politically and philosophically suspect. The vitality of the public realm, he argues, is far more significant to the health of our democracy, but is equally endangered--and often overlooked--in the digital age.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

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The Future of Sleep: A Discussion with Derk-Jan Dijk Mar 01, 2022

Many people, at some stage of their life, worry about sleep: are they getting enough of it? Or even, too much? Derk-Jan Dijk is Professor of Sleep and Physiology at University of Surrey. His current research interests include the contribution of sleep to brain function in healthy ageing and dementia; the role of circadian rhythms in sleep regulation; negative effects of sleep loss; understanding age and sex related differences in sleep physiology and developing tests to monitor sleep. In this podcast he discusses these issues and the future direction of the discipline with Owen Bennett-Jones.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Paul M. Dover, "The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Feb 25, 2022

In The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe(Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paul Dover argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. Dr. Dover argues that “paper, as never before, became the transactional medium; the repository of personal, communal, and institutional memory; the avenue of communication; the lifeblood of bureaucracies; and the foundation and residue of learning. Early modern Europeans, whether or not they sought to, and whether or not they were pleased with or trusted the new reality, put paper inscribed with text at the centre of their lives.” He argues that these developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life.

The book focuses on “two related and simultaneous developments in early modern Europe: the great increase in information created and circulating in European society, largely rendered on paper, and the accompanying efforts to manage and make sense of it, also chiefly via paper.” The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Gaye T. Lansdell et al., "Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses" (Edward Elgar, 2021) Feb 23, 2022

Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) delves into an under-researched and little understood but extremely pertinent issue in law; the prevalence of neurodisability within criminal justice systems. Considering the challenges faced by both juveniles and adults with neuorodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system, a host of interdisciplinary international scholars examine the issue from multiple perspectives; from that of lawyers, magistrates, and through the lens of therapeutic and legal analysis, this contribution offers suggestions for reform of both legislation and practice. The book makes the case that criminal justice systems lack the accommodations required both within the institution and the community to adequately support those with neurodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system.

In this conversation, with one of the co-editors of the book, Anna Eriksson, we cover a broad range of ground - from the ways in which resources could be reallocated to better address issues of community safety, to how better with neurodisabilities may be better supported in a practical basis to bring more just, equitable and humane outcomes. This is an important book for criminal lawyers, policy makers, criminologists and members of the public who wish to understand and challenge the barriers that people with neurodisabilities face, not just as a result of the criminal justice system but on a day-to-day basis.

Gaye T. Lansdell is an Associate Professor in The Faculty of Law at Monash University.

Bernadette J Saunders is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University.

Anna Eriksson is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Monash University.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Mauro José Caraccioli, "Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire" (U Florida Press, 2021) Feb 21, 2022

Is natural history a genre of political thought? What do we miss about the substance of political ideas when we ignore the study of nature?

Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire (University of Florida Press, 2021) demonstrates how the natural historical writings of chroniclers, explorers, and missionaries “helped to lay out a distinct set of empirical foundations for modern political thought.” Dr. Mauro José Caraccioli connects scientific, historical, religious, and political ideals to show how Spanish natural history of the so-called “New World” was deeply political.

Political theorists focus on empire, racial hierarchy, conquest, and colonization but Caraccioli cautions not to ignore the “interplay between empire, faith, and the experiences of New World environments” that shaped Imperial Spain’s early efforts to shape culture and politics. That natural history context is essential to fully understand the context of early modern political thought. Caraccioli uses natural history texts written by early Spanish missionaries to create the “first work of political theory that accounts for New World exploration and evangelization as a dual science of domination.” The intersecting analysis of the ecological, political, religious, and historical makes this book an important one for the 21st century.

Dr. Mauro José Caraccioli is an assistant professor of political science and core faculty in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech.

Amber Gonzalez assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Marissa Mika, "Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda" (Ohio UP, 2021) Feb 18, 2022

Thousands of stories are given voice by Marissa Mika in Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda(Ohio UP, 2021), a fearless, warm, and humane history of the Uganda Cancer Institute’s first half century. Mika treads carefully but surely through the fields of colonial and post-colonial medical research and politics while never losing sight of the individuals who worked, planned, improvised, suffered, survived and died at the UCI. The book is a fascinating contrast to the global north history of pediatric oncology as told, for example, by former National Cancer Institute director Vincent DeVita Jr. in The Death of Cancer. As Mika makes abundantly clear, there is no such wild optimism surrounding cancer in Uganda. There is, though, resourcefulness, commitment, and an ability to adapt to extraordinary circumstances on a daily basis. This richly researched book undoubtedly has significant academic merit in fields including, but not limited to, the history of medicine. It should appeal equally to global health activists who want to understand better the challenges and incremental accomplishments of work on the ground.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021.

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Kathryn Millard, "Double Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies" (Rutgers UP, 2022) Feb 17, 2022

Double Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies(Rutgers University Press, 2022)examines the role of film in shaping social psychology’s landmark postwar experiments. Dr. Kathryn Millard shares that we are told that most of us will inflict electric shocks on a fellow citizen when ordered to do so. Act as a brutal prison guard when we put on a uniform. Walk on by when we see a stranger in need. But there is more to the story. Documentaries that investigators claimed as evidence were central to capturing the public imagination.

Did they provide an alibi for twentieth century humanity? Millard examines dramaturgy, staging and filming of these experiments, including Milgram's Obedience Experiments, the Stanford Prison Experiment and many more to recover a new set of narratives.

Kathryn Millard is a writer, independent filmmaker and an honorary professor of screen and creative arts at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Screenwriting in a Digital Era.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Tug Villages: Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at a Tug of War Festival. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Keller Easterling, "Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World" (Verso, 2021) Feb 17, 2022

How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas, from climate change, to inequality, to concentrations of authoritarian power? Keller Easterling argues that the search for singular solutions is a mistake. Instead, she offers the perspective of medium design, one that considers not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them. This background matrix with all its latent potentials is profoundly underexploited in a culture that is good at naming things but not so good at seeing how they connect and interact.

In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World (Verso, 2021) looks not to new technologies for innovation but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but rather put them together in productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organisations of all kinds.

Keller Easterling speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about thinking in a world where 'nothing works', the paradoxical possibilities for solving concurrent problems, and the chances of winning games rigged by the Superbug.

Keller Easterling is a designer, writer, and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. She is the author of Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014) and numerous other books and articles. Easterling was a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Architecture and Design, and the recipient of the 2019 Blueprint Award for Critical Thinking.

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Tony Veale, "Your Wit Is My Command: Building AIs with a Sense of Humor" (MIT Press, 2021) Feb 16, 2022

For fans of computers and comedy alike, an accessible and entertaining look into how we can use artificial intelligence to make smart machines funny.

Most robots and smart devices are not known for their joke-telling abilities. And yet, as computer scientist Tony Veale explains in Your Wit Is My Command(MIT Press, 2021), machines are not inherently unfunny; they are just programmed that way. By examining the mechanisms of humor and jokes—how jokes actually works—Veale shows that computers can be built with a sense of humor, capable not only of producing a joke but also of appreciating one. Along the way, he explores the humor-generating capacities of fictional robots ranging from B-9 in Lost in Space to TARS in Interstellar, maps out possible scenarios for developing witty robots, and investigates such aspects of humor as puns, sarcasm, and offensiveness.

In order for robots to be funny, Veale explains, we need to analyze humor computationally. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Veale shows that joke generation is a knowledge-based process—a sense of humor is blend of wit and wisdom. He notes that existing technologies can detect sarcasm in conversation, and explains how some jokes can be pre-scripted while others are generated algorithmically—all while making the technical aspects of AI accessible for the general reader. Of course, there's no single algorithm or technology that we can plug in to make our virtual assistants or GPS voice navigation funny, but Veale provides a computational roadmap for how we might get there.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman, "The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World" (MIT Press, 2021) Feb 16, 2022

Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of different online experiences. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World (MIT Press, 2021), Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision-making in a data-driven world.

Luca and Bazerman describe the central role experiments play in the tech sector, drawing lessons and best practices from the experiences of such companies as StubHub, Alibaba, and Uber. Successful experiments can save companies money—eBay, for example, discovered how to cut $50 million from its yearly advertising budget—or bring to light something previously ignored, as when Airbnb was forced to confront rampant discrimination by its hosts. Moving beyond tech, Luca and Bazerman consider experimenting for the social good—different ways that governments are using experiments to influence or “nudge” behavior ranging from voter apathy to school absenteeism. Experiments, they argue, are part of any leader's toolkit.

In this show, Peter Lorentzen interviews economist Michael Luca about this new book on how organizations—including Google, StubHub, Airbnb, and Facebook—learn from experiments in a data-driven world.

Michael Luca, a professor of business administration at Harvard University, is an expert on the design of online platforms and the use of data to inform managerial and policy decision-making.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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Raghuveer Parthasarathy, "So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World" (Princeton UP, 2022) Feb 15, 2022

The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree. A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it. So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World(Princeton UP, 2022) shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering.

Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains how four basic principles—self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness, and scaling—shape the machinery of life on scales ranging from microscopic molecules to gigantic elephants. He describes how biophysics is helping to unlock the secrets of a host of natural phenomena, such as how your limbs know to form at the proper places, and why humans need lungs but ants do not. Parthasarathy explores how the cutting-edge biotechnologies of tomorrow could enable us to alter living things in ways both subtle and profound.

Featuring dozens of original watercolors and drawings by the author, this sweeping tour of biophysics offers astonishing new perspectives on how the wonders of life can arise from so simple a beginning.

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Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, "Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births" (MIT Press, 2021) Feb 15, 2022

In Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births(MIT Press, 2021), Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick along with more than fifty contributors consider over a hundred designs that have defined the arc of human reproduction. The designed objects that surround people during menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. This volume considers a breadth of designs that have defined the relationships between people and babies during the past century.

It is organized around four sections (Reproduction, Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum) and includes designs such as the menstrual cup, population policy posters, home pregnancy tests, tie-waist skirts, cesarean birth curtains, birth in film, the Kuddle Up blanket, breast pumps, and car seats.

Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

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In Science We Trust?: An insider Conversation with Health Policy Reporter, Fran Kritz Feb 15, 2022

Americans are deeply polarized on many issues, including science and medicine. Where once was widespread agreement, today the differences are sharp: on one hand, posters announce, “I believe in science!” and on the other hand, dramatic videos show ICU patients affirming their anti-vax beliefs with their final breaths.

What is going on?

Science is supposed to be based on reason, not faith. We get into a pile of metal – our cars – every day without fear because we trust the engineers, who built cars based on science. Science is characterized by observation, empirical findings, and replication. At least that’s the way it is supposed to be. Not long ago, Americans and most people around the world trusted the integrity of science. But that trust has been in decline for years, to our collective detriment.

Why did science lose so much of the public trust?

How does that loss relate to the decline of trust in other institutions?

What are the trust-related issues for minorities?

What can the scientific enterprise do to regain our trust?

Fran Kritz is a passionate journalist who has covered health and health policy for decades. Her reporting experience gives her a unique view of the changes in the relationship between the public and its medical and scientific experts. She has written for NPR, the Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Rachel Pagones, "Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love" (Brevis, 2021) Feb 14, 2022

Many in the global West have heard something about acupuncture as a treatment for pain relief; they may even have learned of its use in treating opioid addiction. But few know that, in the early 1970s, acupuncture was employed as a means of social and political revolution by Black, Latinx, and radical left-wing activists, inspired by the barefoot doctors of Mao Zedong's Communist revolution. Led by Mutulu Shakur, a charismatic member of the Republic of New Afrika, these young and idealistic people learned to apply acupuncture in the gritty confines of Lincoln Hospital, in the South Bronx of New York. The derelict public hospital, long known as "the Butcher Shop," became an unlikely source of energy and hope as the activists successfully helped people from the community recover from heroin addiction. The acupuncturists - some of them recovering from heroin addiction themselves - employed a combination of needling points in the ear with counseling and "political education"; for instance, taking clients to witness the trials of political prisoners (people imprisoned for their political beliefs or activities). By the late 1970s, the activists' radical approach led to their forced removal from Lincoln. But Shakur and others formed the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA) and founded a college to train a new generation of acupuncturists in the fine art of traditional Chinese medicine.

The fundamental principle was healthcare as a human right. The goal was the liberation of people oppressed by racism. The college had a short life; it was closed after an FBI raid in connection with the lethal armed robbery of a Brink's truck. Yet over three decades, the spirit of revolutionary acupuncture did not die, and neither did the issues that forced its rise, including drug addiction, racism, and social and health care inequities. Inspired by the radical acupuncturists of the 1970s, another group - the People's Organization of Community Acupuncture - founded the community acupuncture movement and took up the mantle of revolution. They, too, proclaim health care as a human right for people marginalized by society - and seek to give back that right through the art of inserting fine needles. Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press Limited, 2021) highlights a little-known intersection of acupuncture, leftist movements of the 1970s, and the global influence on the healthcare of Mao's Communist revolution - and shows how the legacy of that explosive meeting lives on today.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Retraction Watch: A Discussion with Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky Feb 11, 2022

Listen to this interview of Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, cofounders of Retraction Watch. We talk about lots of things, retracting very few.

Ivan Oransky : "Accountability in science certainly does not come down to only retracting papers, because there are just lots of issues. And by the way, just to remind everyone, science is very much a human endeavor. It doesn't exist outside of humans doing the science. I mean, facts exist, and there is truth out there, and we'd very much appear to be getting close and closer to it — that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the actual process, like, how do we learn these things. How — as this podcast more generally looks at — how does knowledge get known. Basically, epistemology. But that requires human beings. It requires human beings interpreting, talking and listening, collaborating, and so that's one part of science that is really critical. Therefore, of course, the issue of accountability is multifactorial."

The Retraction Watch database is here. You might also be interested in this article: "Repeat Offenders: When Scientific Fraudsters Slip Through the Cracks." You can learn more about retraction here.

Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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Eric Herschthal, "The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress" (Yale UP, 2021) Feb 11, 2022

In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders' scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders.

Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress(Yale UP, 2021) shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines--from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology--to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor-saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor.

While historians increasingly highlight slavery's centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of slavery's backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science, abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Jun Liu, "Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age: Mobile Communication and Politics in China" (Oxford UP, 2020) Feb 11, 2022

How has digital communication technologies impacted the dynamics of political contention in China? What is the role of mobile technology in the country with the world’s largest number of mobile and internet users? Why is there little domestic resistance about surveillance and technology-related privacy risks in China during the pandemic? Jun Liu, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, shares his book Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age: Mobile Communication and Politics in China (Oxford UP, 2020) with the Nordic Asia Podcast.

In his talk with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and affiliated PhD at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Jun Liu introduces his work on mobile communication and political activism based on first-hand in-depth interview and fieldwork data. He also draws on one of his latest papers to explain how China’s unprecedented measures to mobilise its diverse surveillance apparatus played a crucial part in the country’s containment of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Jun Liu’s research stands at the intersection of communication, technology, politics, and society, with particular attention to the social, cultural, and political implications of digital communication. Drawing upon theories from communication, sociology, and political science, his research focuses on how digital technology interacts with socio-cultural forms and settings and generates new power dynamics in politics in specific cultural and institutional contexts such as authoritarian regimes like China.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Kevin Coe and Joshua M. Scacco, "The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times" (Oxford UP, 2021) Feb 10, 2022

The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times (Oxford UP, 2021) is part of the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics book series, and it makes an important contribution to the literature on the American presidency and the understanding of presidential rhetoric. There are decades of literature on the concept of the rhetorical presidency, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. This area of study of executive politics focuses on public communication by the president, which is distinct from examining the powers and norms of the presidency itself. The media environment in which the president operates and in which the presidency exists has shifted and changed rather dramatically over the past century, moving the presidency to a position that is often or regularly the focus of news media, however consumed or delivered.

Josh Scacco and Kevin Coe’s new book examines this changed and continuing to change media landscape and to re-assess the capacity of presidential rhetoric, but they have also expanded and reconceptualized the idea of presidential communication, positioning it within important political contexts and goals that presidents often pursue. The Ubiquitous Presidency posits that accessibility, personalization, and pluralism (read as either exclusion or inclusion, depending on the president) are the dominant contexts in which to examine presidential communication. And that the goals that most presidents pursue within these contexts include visibility, adaptability, and control. Thus, Scacco and Coe have written about what has changed about the contemporary presidency, how it has adapted to changing circumstances, evolving digital spaces, and the need to seek audiences in these new spaces. They have also explained, within the research, how the president’s words may have more of an impact than is often considered to be the case. Given the changing environment in which presidential communication transpires, and the results that we have observed as individuals and group make choices and engage in activities based on communication from the president, there may, indeed, be significant effects connected to presidential rhetoric and communication.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Aubrey Clayton, "Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science" (Columbia UP, 2021) Feb 10, 2022

There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations.

Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the seventeenth-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it. He highlights how influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures developed a statistical methodology they claimed was purely objective in order to silence critics of their political agendas, including eugenics.

Clayton provides a clear account of the mathematics and logic of probability, conveying complex concepts accessibly for readers interested in the statistical methods that frame our understanding of the world. He contends that we need to take a Bayesian approach--that is, to incorporate prior knowledge when reasoning with incomplete information--in order to resolve the crisis. Ranging across math, philosophy, and culture, Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science(Columbia UP, 2021) explains why something has gone wrong with how we use data--and how to fix it.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Rashmi Sadana, "The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure" (U California Press, 2021) Feb 09, 2022

The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure (U California Press, 2021) is a rich and intimate account of urban transformation told through the story of Delhi's Metro, a massive infrastructure project that is reshaping the city's social and urban landscapes. Ethnographic vignettes introduce the feel and form of the Metro and let readers experience the city, scene by scene, stop by stop, as if they, too, have come along for the ride. Laying bare the radical possibilities and concretized inequalities of the Metro, and how people live with and through its built environment, this is a story of women and men on the move, the nature of Indian aspiration, and what it takes morally and materially to sustain urban life. Through exquisite prose, Rashmi Sadana transports the reader to a city shaped by both its Metro and those who depend on it, revealing a perspective on Delhi unlike any other.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com

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Sydney A. Halpern, "Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis" (Yale UP, 2021) Feb 09, 2022

From 1942 through 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting to discover the basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it, and develop interventions that would quell recurring outbreaks. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-person interviews, Sydney Halpern traces the hepatitis program from its origins in World War II through its expansion during the initial Cold War years, to its demise in the early 1970s amid outcry over research abuse. The subjects in hepatitis studies were members of stigmatized groups--conscientious objectors, prison inmates, and developmentally disabled adults and children. Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis (Yale UP, 2021) reveals how researchers invoked military and scientific imperatives and the rhetoric of common good to win support for the experiments and access to potential recruits. Halpern examines consequences of participation for subjects' long-term health, and raises troubling questions about hazardous human experiments aimed at controlling today's epidemic diseases.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Fritjof Capra, "Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades" (High Road Books, 2021) Feb 08, 2022

Welcome to the first Systems and Cybernetics episode of 2022! After a short break over the holidays to rest and spend time with family (and, of course, read!), it’s time to jump back into conversations with authors of exciting new works in systems thinking. We have a great lineup, and to kick things off I am thrilled to share my recent conversation with Fritjof Capra. Capra is a scientist, educator and activist. He has also been a best-selling author since his first book, The Tao of Physics, encouraged—rather captivated—the world to explore the parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophies nearly 50 years ago.

Many listeners will recall the one Capra book that challenged their worldview and got them asking new questions. For me, The Turning Point (1982) was that turning point. Capra’s new book Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades (High Road Books, 2021)presents the evolution of his thought over five decades, inviting the reader to go back to the beginning of the author’s inquiry and join him in his journey—to experience those milestone moments that represented a new development in his theory.

A systems thinker from his youth, Capra’s scientific training combined with a spiritual awakening in the late 1960s/early 1970s, led him to notice inherent connections between seemingly disparate disciplines. This led to a systemic questioning that compelled him to seek out and collaborate with—even build bridges between—thinkers across many realms. The result is a synthesis—or “systems view”—of life that serves as a “systemic framework for the understanding of biological and social phenomena” and informs “the design principles of our future social institutions… consistent with the principles of organization that nature has evolved to sustain the web of life”.

This conversation made me want to go back and (re)immerse myself in Capra’s previous works and I have a feeling it might make you want to do the same. If you’re new to Capra, Patterns of Connection is a great place to start.

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Diane Coyle, "Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be" (Princeton UP, 2021) Feb 08, 2022

In Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be(Princeton UP, 2021), Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems—but also opportunities—facing economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world’s crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency. Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are “cogs”—self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts. But the digital economy is much more characterized by “monsters”—untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns. Coyle argues that economic policy is fundamentally normative, as any policy decision will imply political trade-offs. She argues for a more diverse methodological and conceptually inform analysis while reflecting on broader issues of today such as ethics and the challenges of the digital economy.

This book has been recognized as the Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year 2021 and a CapX Book of the Year, 2021.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other mussings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019) Feb 07, 2022

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy expert, advising top government officials on the fentanyl crisis, and continuing to follow the story on his Substack account. The author of two previous nonfiction books and numerous articles in outlets like the Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal, Westhoff’s fourth book, Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search for the Truth comes out this spring.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Paul A. Offit, "You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation" (Basic Book, 2021) Feb 07, 2022

Every medical decision—whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery—is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation(Basic Book, 2021), physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions four hundred years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them.

Told in Offit’s vigorous and rigorous style, You Bet Your Life is an entertaining history of medicine. But it also lays bare the tortured relationships between intellectual breakthroughs, political realities, and human foibles. Our pandemic year has shown us, with its debates over lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, how easy it is to get everything wrong. You Bet Your Life is an essential read for getting the future a bit more right.

Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics.

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Where the Wild Things Are: Reimagining the More-Than-Human City Feb 04, 2022

Amidst accelerating environmental change and intense urbanisation, there is growing enthusiasm for building sustainable and ‘natural’ cities. Yet, when a flourishing eco-futuristic urban imaginary is enacted, it is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. In a Southeast Asian context, no city or country better encapsulates this than Singapore. But the pursuit of a singular narrative of progress has very specific consequences, particularly when that progress benefits some but not all beings. In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Jamie Wang to shed more light on the implications of Singapore’s growth fetish, and its implications for humans and non-humans.

About Jamie Wang:

Dr Jamie Wang is a Sydney Southeast Asia Centre Writing Fellow, a research affiliate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and an editor of the journal Feminist Review. She has a PhD in Environmental Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of environmental humanities, urban geography, more-than-human studies and sustainable development in the context of planetary urbanism, climate change and environmental injustice. Jamie’s recent project ‘Reimagining the More-than-Human cities, stories of Singapore’ has explored the multifaceted pressing urban environmental issues, from urban greenery to housing development projects, transportation, water infrastructure, and urban agriculture, with a geographic focus in Singapore. It asks how we might develop ways of re-thinking, re-seeing and re-storying cities through foregrounding their more-than-human worlds. Jamie is also a writer and poet.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Emily Levesque, "The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers" (Sourcebooks, 2021) Feb 04, 2022

Humans from the earliest civilizations through today have craned their necks each night, using the stars to orient themselves in the large, strange world around them. Stargazing is a pursuit that continues to fascinate us: from Copernicus to Carl Sagan, astronomers throughout history have spent their lives trying to answer the biggest questions in the universe. Now, award-winning astronomer Emily Levesque shares the stories of modern-day stargazers in this new nonfiction release, the people willing to adventure across high mountaintops and to some of the most remote corners of the planet, all in the name of science.

From the lonely quiet of midnight stargazing to tall tales of wild bears loose in the observatory, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers(Sourcebooks, 2021) is a love letter to astronomy and an affirmation of the crucial role that humans can and must play in the future of scientific discovery.

In this sweeping work of narrative science, Levesque shows how astronomers in this scrappy and evolving field are going beyond the machines to infuse creativity and passion into the stars and space and inspires us all to peer skyward in pursuit of the universe's secrets.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Renny Thomas, "Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment" (Routledge, 2021) Feb 04, 2022

Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists’ religious life and practices and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of ‘conflict’ and ‘complementarity.’ By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.

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Leonard Mlodinow, "Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking" (Pantheon, 2022) Feb 03, 2022

Today I talked to Leonard Mdlodinow about his new book Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking (Pantheon, 2022).

"On or around December 1910, human character changed,” Virginia Woolf memorably wrote, citing the rise of Modernism. Take things ahead a century, and Leonard Mdlodinow is making a similarly striking statement that advances in how neuroscientists can trace the connectivity of neurons has led to another striking advancement in intellectual life since approximately 2010. From the 1980s until that date, psychologists and neuroscientists were both appreciating and refining the concept of emotions as inherited from Charles Darwin. Since then, what emotions are and how they operate has undergone a conceptual revolution. This episode follows Mlodinow’s guidance as he outlines how scientists today focus on emotions as functional agents, thoroughly emmeshed in how we selectively perceive and adapt to the circumstances we find ourselves in. One tangible example of the revolution: now we know that childhood can literally change our DNA as we react and adjust to emotionally-laden experiences that leave their emotional fingerprint on us all.

Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and has been on the faculty at CalTech. His previous, award-winning books include two written with Stephen Hawking, and another written with Deepak Chopra.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Peter Cappelli, "The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face" (Wharton School Press, 2021) Feb 03, 2022

In this episode I spoke to Professor Peter Cappelli about his new book The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented experiment that reshaped white-collar work and turned remote work into a kind of "new normal." Now comes the hard part.

Many employees want to continue that normal and keep working remotely, and most at least want the ability to work occasionally from home. But for employers, the benefits of employees working from home or hybrid approaches are not so obvious. What should both groups do?

In a prescient new book, Cappelli lays out the facts in an effort to provide both employees and employers with a vision of their futures. Cappelli unveils the surprising tradeoffs both may have to accept to get what they want. Cappelli illustrates the challenges we face in drawing lessons from the pandemic and deciding what to do moving forward. Do we allow some workers to be permanently remote? Do we let others choose when to work from home? Do we get rid of their offices? What else has to change, depending on the approach we choose?

His research reveals there is no consensus among business leaders. Even the most high-profile and forward-thinking companies are taking divergent approaches:

Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies say many employees can work remotely on a permanent basis. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others say it is important for everyone to come back to the office.

Ford is redoing its office space so that most employees can work from home at least part of the time, and GM is planning to let local managers work out arrangements on an ad-hoc basis.

As Cappelli examines, earlier research on other types of remote work, including telecommuting offers some guidance as to what to expect when some people will be in the office and others work at home, and also what happened when employers tried to take back offices. Neither worked as expected.

In a call to action for both employers and employees, Cappelli explores how we should think about the choices going forward as well as who wins and who loses. As he implores, we have to choose soon.

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School of Business and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He teaches awesome sounding courses like How to be the boss and Managing and motivating. Some of his areas of research are human resource practices, public policy related to employment, talent, and performance management. He publishes in journals like theAcademy of Management Journal and Harvard Business Review and op-eds in many magazines like The New Yorker or the Atlantic magazine.

Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO.

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Lina Zeldovich, "The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Feb 03, 2022

The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap!

Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our waste, but the long line of engineering marvels we've created to do so--from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today--has also done considerable damage to the earth's ecology. Now scientists tell us: we've been wasting our waste. When recycled correctly, this resource, cheap and widely available, can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, provide effective medicinal therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, and much more.

In The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lina Zeldovich documents the massive redistribution of nutrients and sanitation inequities across the globe. She profiles the pioneers of poop upcycling, from startups in African villages to innovators in American cities that convert sewage into fertilizer, biogas, crude oil, and even life-saving medicine. She breaks taboos surrounding sewage disposal and shows how hygienic waste repurposing can help battle climate change, reduce acid rain, and eliminate toxic algal blooms. Ultimately, she implores us to use our innate organic power for the greater good. Don't just sit there and let it go to waste.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Kenneth Anderson, "Strychnine and Gold: The Untold History of Addiction Treatment in the United States" (2021) Feb 02, 2022

Kenneth Anderson is the author of Strychnine and Gold, a two-volume history of the “untold story of addiction treatment in the United States.” Anderson knows what he’s talking about when he discusses substance use and treatment–he holds multiple master’s degrees, including one in psychology and substance use disorders, and has worked in the field of addiction treatment for over twenty years as the founder and CEO of the HAMS Harm Reduction Network, the first worldwide harm reduction-based support group specifically for people who drink alcohol. The author of two previous books about alcohol harm reduction, Anderson is a regular presenter at the National Harm Reduction Conference, and has been a guest speaker at the Harlem Hospital Harm Reduction Program, the New School for Social Research, NYU, and the Drug Policy Conference, among other venues.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Wim Van Petegem et al., "Evolving as a Digital Scholar: Teaching and Researching in a Digital World" (Leuven UP, 2021) Feb 01, 2022

What does it take to become a digitally agile scholar? This manual explains how academics can comfortably navigate the digital world of today and tomorrow. It foregrounds three key domains of digital agility: getting involved in research, education and (community) service, mobilising (digital) skills on various levels, and acting in multiple roles, both individually and interlinked with others.

After an introduction that outlines the foundations of the three-dimensional framework, the chapters focus on different roles and skills associated with evolving as a digital scholar. There is the author, who writes highly specialised texts for expert peers; the storyteller, who crafts accessible narratives to a broader audience in the form of blogs or podcasts; the creator, who uses graphics, audio, and video to motivate audiences to delve deeper into the material; the integrator, who develops and curates multimedia artefacts, disseminating them through channels such as websites, webinars, and open source repositories; and finally the networker, who actively triggers interaction via social media applications and online learning communities. Additionally, the final chapters offer a blueprint for the future digital scholar as a professional learner and as a change agent who is open to and actively pursues innovation.

Informed by the authors' broad and diverse personal experience, Evolving as a Digital Scholar: Teaching and Researching in a Digital World (Leuven UP, 2021) offers insight, inspiration, and practical advice. It equips a broad readership with the skills and the mindset to harness new digital developments and navigate the ever-evolving digital age. It will inspire academic teachers and researchers with different backgrounds and levels of knowledge that wish to enhance their digital academic profile.

Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and Project Muse.

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Pankaj Jain, "Science and Socio-Religious Revolution in India" (Routledge, 2018) Jan 31, 2022

Scholars have long noticed a discrepancy in how non-Western and Western peoples conceptualize the scientific and religious worlds. Non-Western traditions and communities, such as India, are better positioned to provide an alternative to the Western dualistic thinking of separating science and religion. Dr. Anil Joshi founded the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization (HESCO) in the 1970s as a new movement looking at the economic and development needs of rural villages in the Indian Himalayas and encouraging them to use local resources in order to open up new avenues to self-reliance.

Pankaj Jain's book Science and Socio-Religious Revolution in India (Routledge, 2018) argues that the concept of dharma, the law that supports the regulatory order of the universe in Indian culture, can be applied as an overarching term for HESCO’s socio-economic work. This book presents the social-environmental work in contemporary India by Dr. Anil Joshi in the Himalayas and by Baba Seechewal in Punjab, combining the ideas of traditional and scientific ecological knowledge systems. Based on these two examples, the book presents the holistic model transcending the dichotomies of nature vs. culture and science vs. religion, especially as practiced and utilized in non-Western societies such as India.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India

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Carla Yanni, "The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States" (U Minnesota Press, 2007) Jan 28, 2022

Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these buildings were razed long ago, and those that remain stand as grim reminders of an often cruel system. For much of the nineteenth century, however, these asylums epitomized the widely held belief among doctors and social reformers that insanity was a curable disease and that environment—architecture in particular—was the most effective means of treatment.

In The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States(U Minnesota Press, 2007), Carla Yanni tells a compelling story of therapeutic design, from America’s earliest purpose—built institutions for the insane to the asylum construction frenzy in the second half of the century. At the center of Yanni’s inquiry is Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker, who in the 1840s devised a novel way to house the mentally diseased that emphasized segregation by severity of illness, ease of treatment and surveillance, and ventilation. After the Civil War, American architects designed Kirkbride-plan hospitals across the country.

Before the end of the century, interest in the Kirkbride plan had begun to decline. Many of the asylums had deteriorated into human warehouses, strengthening arguments against the monolithic structures advocated by Kirkbride. At the same time, the medical profession began embracing a more neurological approach to mental disease that considered architecture as largely irrelevant to its treatment.

Generously illustrated, The Architecture of Madness is a fresh and original look at the American medical establishment’s century-long preoccupation with therapeutic architecture as a way to cure social ills.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Grant Tavinor, "The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality" (Routledge, 2021) Jan 28, 2022

When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the “real” world.

Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved.

But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve.

The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality (Routledge, 2021) is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography.

Grant Tavinor speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about some of the fundamental features of virtual reality, the implications of working in a picturing medium, as well as the challenges that VR poses to the philosophy of the arts and ethics.

Grant Tavinor is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Lincoln University, New Zealand. He has published widely on the aesthetics of videogames, virtual worlds, digital media ethics, and the philosophy of technology.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Stephanie A. Martin, "Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump" (U Alabama Press, 2021) Jan 27, 2022

Dr. Stephanie (Sam) A. Martin’s new book, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (U Alabama Press, 2021), is a fascinating exploration of the way that sermons, particularly those delivered by white evangelical pastors with sizeable congregations, link together storytelling, patriotism, conservative and Republican politics, and American exceptionalism. Martin’s work is a rich and deep textual and rhetorical analysis of sermons that are delivered both in person and online. These sermons—delivered over the course of more than a decade—reach many listeners and believers since they are given by pastors who preside over churches with congregations of at least 2000 members. And Martin teases out the focus of so many of these sermons, which are not always directly discussing or addressing politics, but have and continue to create an understanding of the white evangelical individual within American society.

Decoding the Digital Church explains that part of the thrust of this understanding is to position white Evangelicals as both insiders and outsiders simultaneously. Part of this context, as explained via these sermons, is that the American Founders were the original evangelicals, thus contemporary evangelicals have an original claim to the benefits of being the first true Americans. This is also combined with the nostalgic rendering of America’s past—building on the concept of American exceptionalism as well. At the same time, the content of these sermons opens the pathway for Evangelicals to disavow the ill-effects of their political choices, absolving them of the responsibility for their votes or those they support for elected office. Martin provides a “digital rhetorical ethnography” to understand the narratives that are coming through the white evangelical megachurches. To unpack the threads of these narratives, Martin uses a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives for her research, including approaches from political science, rhetoric and communication, sociology and ethnography, and religious studies. This is an accessible and important study of the connection between evangelical storytelling and the evangelical community’s understanding of its place and role in American society.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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73 Teletherapy with Hannah Zeavin (High Theory Crossover, Saronik) Jan 27, 2022

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 High Theory. Refresh your sense of them with Recall this Book 52: they joined John to showcase their distinctive approach, taking as their topic "the pastoral." Or, just click Play without further ado to hear their thoughts on teletherapy, a concept that proves far more familiar, and omnipresent than we at RtB had realized. Take those omnipresent signs for the Suicide Hotline, for starters....

In this 18-minute gem of an episode, Hannah Zeavin talks with HT about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. This mediated practice is the topic of her new book The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021). You can learn more about Hannah’s research and teaching on her website: zeavin.org

Read the transcript here.

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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Paulette F. C. Steeves, "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere" (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Jan 27, 2022

The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere(U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years.

Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites.

In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas.

To learn more about Steeves’ research, please visit The Indigenous Paleolithic Database of the Americas at https://tipdba.com/.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here.

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Juan Manuel del Nido, "Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires" (Stanford UP, 2021) Jan 25, 2022

Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires(Stanford UP, 2021) examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away.

This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the arrival of a major platform economy to a metropolitan capital considers how the clash between Uber and the traditional taxi industry played out in courtrooms, in the press, and on the street. Looking to court cases, the politics of taxi licenses, social media campaigns, telecommunications infrastructure, public protests, and Uber's own promotional materials, del Nido examines the emergence of "post-political reasoning": an increasingly common way in which societies neutralize disagreement, shaping how we understand what we can even legitimately argue about and how.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com

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Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani, "Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors" (PublicAffairs, 2021) Jan 21, 2022

Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history's mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought.

The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more. But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. Our knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade, to the point where we can now reconstruct seasonal weather going back thousands of years and see just how people and nature interacted. The lesson is clear: the societies that survive are those that plan ahead.

Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani's Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors(PublicAffairs, 2021) is a book about saving ourselves. Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani show in remarkable detail what it was like to battle our climate over centuries and offer us a path to a safer and healthier future.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Helga Nowotny, "In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms" (Polity, 2021) Jan 20, 2022

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 most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us.

At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care.

As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Matthew C. Kruger, "What The Living Know: A Novel of Suicide and Philosophy" (Nfb Publishing, 2020) Jan 20, 2022

Now that science has granted eternal life and youth to all, the world is a place of endless opportunity to live out one's dreams and fulfill one's desires. With death unnecessary, it becomes optional and suicide is celebrated when chosen. However the main character, 10,000 year old Warren, has fought off the urge to die but begins to contemplate making this choice for himself. Matthew C. Kruger's book What The Living Know: A Novel of Suicide and Philosophy (Nfb Publishing, 2020) tackles questions such as: How many times can you send someone on their way and not start to feel as if it might be your time to go? How much life will you live before you come to say "that's enough for me"? Or, through it all, will your love for life always endure?

Our conversation discusses the importance of, not just having a philosophy, but having a lived and embodied philosophy: one that's procedural and takes into account the messiness and hardships of each and every day. While the book is a hard read mentally -- and perhaps spiritually -- it comes to the beautiful and paradoxical conclusion that there might not be a point to living but there's no point in dying either, that life is worth living, and that you should let yourself be moved and transformed through struggle. Not easy, certainly, but worthwhile.

Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely over-caffeinated.

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Matt Carlson et al., "News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture" (Oxford UP, 2021) Jan 19, 2022

Political scientists have argued that Donald Trump exacerbated long-simmering changes in polarization, populism, and other aspects of politics. In their book News After Trump: Journalism's Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021), Matt Carlson, Seth C. Lewis, and Sue Robinson, argue that Trump's candidacy and presidency did the same in journalism. The question now is, how do news organizations move forward and continue to deliver informational value to the public at a time when they're just one of many information sources people see?

Taking an expansive view of the contemporary media and political environment during the Trump years, News After Trump portrays a media culture in transition. As journalism's very relevance comes to be increasingly questioned, the authors focus on how different actors — from Trump to small-town newspaper editors — use their cultural power to define journalism, assess its value, and question what the news should look like. This conversation is especially important as news organizations continue to grapple with their role in standing up for democratic norms and values.

Matt Carlson is associate professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.

Seth C. Lewis is founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast.

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Colin Jerolmack, "Up to Heaven and Down to Hell: Fracking, Freedom, and Community in an American Town" (Princeton UP, 2021) Jan 19, 2022

Up to Heaven and Down to Hell(Princeton UP, 2021) is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet--whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet--is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent.

The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend up to heaven and down to hell, which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself.

Up to Heaven and Down to Hell casts America's ideas about freedom and property rights in a troubling new light, revealing how your personal choices can undermine your neighbors' liberty, and how the exercise of individual rights can bring unintended environmental consequences for us all.

Sebastián Rojas Cabal is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Princeton University.

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John Cardina, "Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly" (Cornell UP, 2021) Jan 19, 2022

Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly(Cornell UP, 2021) explores the tangled history of weeds and their relationship to humans. Through eight interwoven stories, John Cardina offers a fresh perspective on how these tenacious plants came about, why they are both inevitable and essential, and how their ecological success is ensured by determined efforts to eradicate them. Linking botany, history, ecology, and evolutionary biology to the social dimensions of humanity's ancient struggle with feral flora, Cardina shows how weeds have shaped—and are shaped by—the way we live in the natural world.

Weeds and attempts to control them drove nomads toward settled communities, encouraged social stratification, caused environmental disruptions, and have motivated the development of GMO crops. They have snared us in social inequality and economic instability, infested social norms of suburbia, caused rage in the American heartland, and played a part in perpetuating pesticide use worldwide. Lives of Weeds reveals how the technologies directed against weeds underlie ethical questions about agriculture and the environment, and leaves readers with a deeper understanding of how the weeds around us are entangled in our daily choices.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Ginger Nolan, "Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Jan 18, 2022

Attempting to derive aesthetic systems from natural structures of human cognition, designers looked toward the “savage mind”—a way of thinking they associated with a racialized subaltern. In Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design(U Minnesota Press, 2021), Ginger Nolan uncovers an enduring relationship between “the savage” and the development of technology and its wide-ranging impact on society, including in the fields of architecture and urbanism, the industrial arts, and digital design.

Nolan focuses on the relationship between the applied arts and the structuralist social sciences, proposing that the late-nineteenth-century rise of Freudian psychology, ethnology, and structuralist linguistics offered innovations and new opportunities in studying human cognition. She looks at institutions ranging from the Public Industrial Arts School of Philadelphia and the Weimar Bauhaus to the MIT Media Lab and the Centre Mondial Informatique, revealing a persistent theme of twentieth-century design: to supplant language with more subliminal, aesthetic modes of communication, thereby inculcating a deep intimacy between human habit and new technologies of production, communication, and consumption.

This book’s ultimate critique is of the development of the ergonomics of the spirit—the design of the human cognitive apparatus in relation to new aesthetic technologies. Nolan sees these ergonomics as a means of depoliticizing societies through aesthetic technologies intended to seamlessly integrate humans into the programs of capitalist modernity. Revising key modernist design narratives, Savage Mind to Savage Machine provides a deep historical foundation for understanding our contemporary world.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam.

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Rebekah Lee, "Health, Healing and Illness in African History" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Jan 17, 2022

In Health, Healing and Illness in African History (Bloomsbury, 2021), Rebekah Lee makes an overall assessment of the history and historiography and health, healing and illness in the African context. This unique text is divided in two parts. In the first half of the book, Lee presents a chronological survey and analysis of the ideas and literature that multiple disciplines have produced while studying the experience of health and illness, as well as medical and healing practices in Africa. This part of the book guides readers through seminal questions about African agency and sources that are central to our understanding of the historiography of Africa in general, and to the study of healing and illness in particular.

By starting her narrative in the precolonial past, Lee is not only trying to highlight the value of the research that has been done in this area, but also provide the reader with a wider intellectual and chronological context that can reframe our reading of the literature that exists for the colonial and postcolonial periods. In the second part of the book, Lee examines four case studies each focused on a particular health problem: HIV/Aids, mental illness, malaria and sleeping sickness, and occupational lung disease. In each of these individual studies, Lee offers both a historiographical review and a critical assessment of the ideas and questions that have shaped our views of these issues. She also offers examples of primary sources that illustrate the complex ways in which scholars, from many different disciplinary backgrounds, have used them to draw conclusions about how Africans have experienced health and illness, and engaged with a wide range of healing practices over time.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel, "Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Science" (SIAM, 2019) Jan 17, 2022

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 their consequences. No more thorough survey of these events may be available than Thomas Huckle and Tobias Neckel's Bits and Bugs: A Scientific and Historical Review of Software Failures in Computational Science (SIAM, 2019). Their book organizing an extensive collection of episodes into eight chapters that expand on an array of flavors of failures, increasing in intricacy from precision and rounding errors to the software–hardware interface and problems that emerge from complexity.

As I see it, this book serves three audiences: Instructors of computer engineering or numerical methods will find an educational text uniquely suited to a focus on software failures; software engineers will find an equally unique reference text; and students of the practice or the history of computational science will find a fully blazed trail through these complicated stories. Dr. Huckle joined me to discuss his and his coauthor's motivations for assembling the book, a sampler of the chapter headliners, and some of his thoughts on new and evolving computational tools with their own attendant opportunities for failure.

Technical readers will appreciate the mathematical excursions that rigorously introduce topics essential to understanding each chapter's headlining episodes, the exercises and MATLAB code provided at the book's website, and links to sources at Dr. Huckle's website. I found value in the recurring lesson that real-world failures arise from the coincidence of multiple, often multitudinous errors, as well as in the authors' consistent emphasis on the real human toll that the study of these errors is driven to prevent. That said, all readers may appreciate the fanciful taxonomy given in the introduction and the amusing (though sometimes apocryphal) idiosyncratic failures surveyed in the appendix.

Suggested companion works:

Thomas Huckle completed a degree program in mathematics and physics education and in pure mathematics, received a doctorate in 1985, and acquired his postdoctoral teaching qualification (habiliation) in 1991 at the University of Würzburg. A German research Foundation (DFG) grant enabled him to spend time performing research at Stanford University (1993–1994). In 1995 Professor Huckle joined TUM as professor of scientific computing. He has also been a member of the Mathematics Faculty since 1997. His primary research area is numerical linear algebra and its application in fields such as informatics and physics. His work focuses on solving linear problems on parallel computers, image processing and reconstruction, partial differential equations, and structured matrices.

Tobias Neckel has studied applied mathematics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and received a doctorate in Computer Science at TUM in 2009. He is currently senior researcher in scientific computing at TUM and has conducted research at the École Polytechnique, France (2003), the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2008), and the Australian National University (2017). His research interests include the numerical solution of differential equations, hierarchic and adaptive methods, uncertainty quantification, and various aspects of high-performance computing.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Harry Yi-Jui Wu, "Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization" (MIT Press, 2021) Jan 14, 2022

In 1948, the World Health Organization began to prepare its social psychiatry project, which aimed to discover the epidemiology and arrive at a classification of mental disorders. In Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization(MIT Press, 2021), Harry Y-Jui Wu examines the WHO's ambitious project, arguing that it was shaped by the postwar faith in technology and expertise and the universalizing vision of a “world psyche.” Wu shows that the WHO's idealized scientific internationalism laid the foundations for today's highly metricalized global mental health system.

Examining the interactions between the WHO and developing countries, Wu offers an analysis of the “transnationality” of mental health. He examines knowledge-sharing between the organization and African and Latin American collaborators, and looks in detail at the WHO's selection of a Taiwanese scientist, Tsung-yi Lin, to be its medical officer and head of the social psychiatry project. He discusses scientists' pursuit of standardization—not only to synchronize sectors in the organization but also to produce a common language of psychiatry—and how technological advances supported this. Wu considers why the optimism and idealism of the social psychiatry project turned to dissatisfaction, reappraising the WHO's early knowledge production modality through the concept of an “export processing zone.” Finally, he looks at the WHO's project in light of current debates over psychiatry and global mental health, as scientists shift their concerns from the creation of universal metrics to the importance of local matrixes.

Harry Yi-Jui Wu is Associate Professor in the Cross College Elite Program and Department of Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan.

Kelvin Chan is a PhD Candidate at McGill University. His PhD dissertation focuses on the history of psychiatry and mental health care in colonial Hong Kong.

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Charles Foster, "Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness" (Metropolitan Books, 2021) Jan 14, 2022

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 naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all—the human being.

To experience the Upper Paleolithic era—a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment—the age of reason and the end of the soul—Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness(Metropolitan Books, 2021) is one man’s audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth—and thrive.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Brendan Borrell, "The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine" (Mariner Books, 2021) Jan 13, 2022

Heroic science. Chaotic politics. Billionaire entrepreneurs. Award-winning journalist Brendan Borrell brings the defining story of our times alive through compulsively readable, first-time reporting on the players leading the fight against a vicious virus. The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine (Mariner Books, 2021), soon to be the subject of an HBO limited series with superstar director and producer Adam McKay (Succession, Vice, The Big Short), draws on exclusive, high-level access to weave together the intense vaccine-race conflicts among hard-driving, heroic scientists and the epic rivalries among Washington power players that shaped 18 months of fear, resolve, and triumph.

From infectious disease expert Michael Callahan, an American doctor secretly on the ground in Wuhan in January 2020 to gauge the terrifying ravages of Disease X; to Robert (Dr. Bob) Kadlec, one of Operation Warp Speed’s architects, whose audacious plans for the American people run straight into the buzz saw of the Trump White House factions; to Stéphane Bancel of upstart Moderna Therapeutics going toe-to-toe with pharma behemoth Pfizer, The First Shots lays bare, in a way we have not seen, the full stunning story behind the medical science “moon shot” of our lifetimes.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Jonathan B. Edelmann, "Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhagavata Purana and Contemporary Theory" (Oxford UP, 2020) Jan 11, 2022

In Hindu Theology and Biology: The Bhagavata Purana and Contemporary Theory(Oxford University Press, 2020), Professor Jonathan B. Edelmann develops a constructive and comparative theological dialogue between Hinduism and Western natural sciences. Describing the Bhagavata tradition and Darwinism as worldviews, the author asks the question in the book, whether a dialogue is even possible between the two traditions with entirely different goals of knowledge. The book elaborates upon the various topics in order to construct the dialogue, such as physicalism of Darwin, Ontology of The Bhagavata, theories of knowledge, and objectivity and testimony in natural sciences. Professor Edelmann ends up providing some overlapping aims of science and religion which makes it possible to undertake a science-religion dialogue.

Shruti Dixit is a PhD Divinity Candidate at CSRP, University of St Andrews, researching the Hindu-Christian Dialogue in Apocalyptic Prophecies.

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Paul Halpern, "Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate" (Basic Books, 2021) Jan 11, 2022

Today, the Big Bang is so entrenched in our understanding of the cosmos that to doubt it would seem crazy. But as Paul Halpern shows in Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate (Basic Books, 2021), just decades ago its mere mention caused sparks to fly. At the center of the debate were Russian American physicist George Gamow and British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. Gamow insisted that a fiery explosion explained how the elements of the universe were created. Attacking the idea as half-baked, Hoyle countered that the universe was engaged in a never-ending process of creation. The battle was fierce. In the end, Gamow turned out to be right -- mostly -- and Hoyle, despite his many achievements, is remembered for giving the theory the silliest possible name: "The Big Bang." Halpern captures the brilliance of both thinkers and reminds us that even those proved wrong have much to teach us about boldness, imagination, and the universe itself.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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COVID-19 and Vaccine Hesitancy in Japan Jan 07, 2022

Anti-vaccination movements pose an increasing threat to global public health, but what of vaccine hesitancy? Join us for a discussion on the effects of vaccine hesitancy in Japan during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. University of Turku's Centre for East Asian Studies University Teacher Dr. Yoko Demelius and University Lecturer Dr. Kamila Szczepanska discuss historical, cultural, and legal factors that have led to present trends ranging from general vaccine skepticism to online and real-life anti-vaccination activism. Learn about historical developments in Japanese public health policy as well as socio-demographic factors that contribute to current attitudes. Dr. Szczepanska and Dr. Demelius also speak of the state of domestic vaccine manufacturing and Research & Development, and the significant continuing influence of anti-vaccination propaganda and misinformation campaigns from the US and Europe.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Satoko Naito is a docent of Japanese studies at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku, Finland. Research interests include Japanese literature, cultural history, and gender studies.

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Karl Herrup, "How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer's" (MIT Press, 2021) Jan 03, 2022

For decades, some of our best and brightest medical scientists have dedicated themselves to finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease. What happened? Where is the cure? The biggest breakthroughs occurred twenty-five years ago, with little progress since. In How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer's(MIT Press, 2021), neurobiologist Karl Herrup explains why the Alzheimer's discoveries of the 1990s didn't bear fruit and maps a direction for future research. Herrup describes the research, explains what's taking so long, and offers an approach for resetting future research.

Herrup offers a unique insider's perspective, describing the red flags that science ignored in the rush to find a cure. He is unsparing in calling out the stubbornness, greed, and bad advice that has hamstrung the field, but his final message is a largely optimistic one. Herrup presents a new and sweeping vision of the field that includes a redefinition of the disease and a fresh conceptualization of aging and dementia that asks us to imagine the brain as a series of interconnected neighborhoods. He calls for changes in virtually every aspect of the Alzheimer's disease research effort, from the drug development process, to the mechanisms of support for basic research, to the often-overlooked role of the scientific media, and more. With How Not to Study a Disease, Herrup provides a roadmap that points us in a new direction in our journey to a cure for Alzheimer's.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Exploring Science Literacy and Public Engagement with Science Dec 31, 2021

Listen to this interview of Ayelet Baram-Tsabari. We talk about the accessibility of science using Google to scholars and students in languages beyond English and how scholars can de-jargonize their research to ensure increase their reach.

Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts

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David Sulzer, "Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music" (Columbia UP, 2021) Dec 30, 2021

Why does a clarinet play at lower pitches than a flute? What does it mean for sounds to be in or out of tune? How are emotions carried by music? Do other animals perceive sound like we do? How might a musician use math to come up with new ideas?

This book offers a lively exploration of the mathematics, physics, and neuroscience that underlie music in a way that readers without scientific background can follow. David Sulzer, also known in the musical world as Dave Soldier, explains why the perception of music encompasses the physics of sound, the functions of the ear and deep-brain auditory pathways, and the physiology of emotion. He delves into topics such as the math by which musical scales, rhythms, tuning, and harmonies are derived, from the days of Pythagoras to technological manipulation of sound waves. Sulzer ranges from styles from around the world to canonical composers to hip-hop, the history of experimental music, and animal sound by songbirds, cetaceans, bats, and insects. He makes accessible a vast range of material, helping readers discover the universal principles behind the music they find meaningful.

Written for musicians and music lovers with any level of science and math proficiency, including none, Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music(Columbia UP, 2021) demystifies how music works while testifying to its beauty and wonder.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Laurie Winkless, "Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces" (Bloomsbury, 2022) Dec 29, 2021

In Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces(Bloomsbury, 2022), physicist Laurie Winkless brings the amazing world of surface science to the popular science market for the first time. Atoms and molecules like to stick together--take friction, for example. This force keeps our cars on the road, trains on the tracks and our feet on the ground; similarly, anything moving through water or air encounters drag, a force caused by the viscous nature of fluids. In other words, there's a lot of stickiness going on, all the time. But what do we actually know about the physics of stickiness? What's really going on? How has nature evolved to make use of it, and what technological advances has it enabled the human race to create?

Using her characteristic fun and relaxed tone, Laurie Winkless introduces readers to the glues, adhesives and textures that rule and improve stickiness to give plants and animals an advantage, as well as uncovering the physics behind our sense of touch. Sticky also shows how our understanding of slipperiness opened the door to high-speed flight and space travel, and asks why friction and other surface interactions can cause machinery to literally grind to a halt.

This is fundamentally a materials science book, but it touches on topics as broad as medicine, robotics and geology. And, as we'll discover, there are still many great mysteries. By exploring the tiniest of interactions, Laurie Winkless shows how civilization owes a great deal to our knowledge of the science of stickiness.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Anna Bokov, "Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930" (Park Publishing, 2020) Dec 29, 2021

In Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930(Park Publishing, 2020), Anna Bokov examines the history of the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie) in Moscow, known most commonly by its acronym Vkhutemas. Operating between 1920 and 1930, Vkhutemas was a centre for developing new pedagogical methods to support mass education in art and technology. In this richly illustrated study, Bokov traces how radical experiments in art, architecture, and design were translated into systematic body of knowledge – and how this knowledge was then applied in various projects aimed at shaping modern Soviet society. From small utensils and furniture pieces to large-scale urban designs, the Vkhutemas influence was visible everywhere, and Bokov foregrounds the school’s impact both on the formation of modernism, along with its lasting creative legacy.

Anna Bokov is an architect, urban designer, and historian specialising in the history of the avant-garde movements and design pedagogy. She is a faculty member at the Cooper Union and the City College in New York and Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture at ETH Zürich.

Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.

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Paul Steinhardt, "Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale" (Open Agenda, 2021) Dec 28, 2021

We have developed two distinct books, Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals, and Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale, based on Howard Burton’s in-depth, filmed conversations with Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Director of the Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University. The first one is called Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals. This extensive conversation provides a comprehensive account of a marvellous scientific adventure story in the quest for a natural quasicrystal. You will be taken on a fascinating ride through the physics of materials, from theory, to the laboratory, to the discovery of a new state of matter, that culminated in Paul Steinhardt’s dramatic Siberian expedition. Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale is based on a second in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Paul Steinhardt. He is one of the originators of the theory of cosmic inflation and has become one of its fiercest critics. This fascinating conversation covers topics such as Paul Steinhardt’s scientific development, his formative experiences at Caltech including his encounters with Richard Feynman, his development and later scepticism of the theory of cosmic inflation, the response of the scientific community to the failure of this theory, his theory of cosmology, The Ekpyrotic Universe, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Omar W. Nasim, "The Astronomer's Chair: A Visual and Cultural History" (MIT Press, 2021) Dec 28, 2021

The astronomer's chair is a leitmotif in the history of astronomy, appearing in hundreds of drawings, prints, and photographs from a variety of sources. Nineteenth-century stargazers in particular seemed eager to display their observing chairs--task-specific, often mechanically adjustable observatory furniture designed for use in conjunction with telescopes. But what message did they mean to send with these images? In

The Astronomer's Chair: A Visual and Cultural History (MIT Press, 2021),Omar W. Nasim considers these specialized chairs as both image and object, offering an original framework for linking visual and material cultures. Observing chairs, Nasim ingeniously argues, showcased and embodied forms of scientific labor, personae, and bodily practice that appealed to bourgeois sensibilities.

Viewing image and object as connected parts of moral, epistemic, and visual economies of empire, Nasim shows that nineteenth-century science was represented in terms of comfort and energy, and that "manly" postures of Western astronomers at work in specialized chairs were contrasted pointedly with images of "effete" and cross-legged "Oriental" astronomers. Extending his historical analysis into the twentieth century, Nasim reexamines what he argues to be a famous descendant of the astronomer's chair: Freud's psychoanalytic couch, which directed observations not outward toward the stars but inward toward the stratified universe of the psyche. But whether in conjunction with the mind or the heavens, the observing chair was a point of entry designed for specialists that also portrayed widely held assumptions about who merited epistemic access to these realms in the first place.

Corinne Doria is a historian specializing in the social history of medicine. She holds the chair of history of medicine at the School of Advanced Studies of the University of Tyumen (Russian Federation) and teaches Disability Studies at Sciences-Po (Paris).

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Jennifer Fay, "Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene" (Oxford UP, 2018) Dec 27, 2021

Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford UP, 2018) explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene —the mise-en-scène— where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film.

While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945.

Jennifer Fay is Associate Professor of English and Director of Film Studies, Vanderbilt University

Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is MA in Anthropology, and BA in Social Communication. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez.

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Charles Sheppard, “Coral Reefs: Science and Survival” (Open Agenda, 2021) Dec 27, 2021

Coral Reefs: Science and Survival is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Charles Sheppard, Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. Charles Sheppard has worked extensively for a wide range of UN, governmental and aid agencies in tropical marine and coastal development issues. This conversation explores how Prof. Sheppard is trying to find a way through political shortsightedness, corporate greed and societal indifference to use his experience to make the planet a better place.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Gabriel Yoran, "The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology" (Open Humanities Press, 2021) Dec 24, 2021

Objects in object-oriented ontology (OOO) are mysterious and inexhaustible entities. But since OOO grants ontological priority to objects, it should have an easy time referring to objects. But this is not the case.

In The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology(Open Humanities Press, 2021), Yoran researches the question of how OOO refers to an object’s haecceity, its “thisness.” He starts with an investigation into OOO’s eponymous practice, object-oriented programming (OOP) and identifies not just a plethora of parallels, but finds OOP’s concept of interfaces (as structured ways of object confrontation in time) a promising tool to describe both the rift between all objects and their relative stability.

Yoran then extends Harman’s fourfold diagrams to reflect the linkages between fourfolds, revealing that objects necessarily are parts of other objects. This phenomenon, which he calls out-of-phase objects, reveals links to Simondon’s notion of compatibilisation.

Yoran argues that objects are necessarily integrated into a fabric of interconnected fourfolds as well as component-compound relations. This structure solves the problem of object identification, by recognizing the object-fourfolds as overlaps, a mutually stabilizing structure which allows for reproducible object confrontation in time, or facts.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Claudia de Rham, “The Pull of the Stars” (Open Agenda, 2021) Dec 24, 2021

The Pull of the Stars is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Claudia de Rham, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. After inspiring insights about Claudia de Rham’s upbringing in Madagascar and her academic journey, this wide-ranging conversation explores her research in cosmology, the public perception and communication of science to the general public, gender issues and stereotypes in physics, and recommendations for physics teachers to inspire the next generation.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Melinda Baldwin, "Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal" (U Chicago Press, 2015) Dec 24, 2021

Listen to this interview of Melinda Baldwin about her book Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal(U Chicago Press, 2015). Melinda is AIP Endowed Professor in History of Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland. We talk about Nature, naturally.

Melinda Baldwin : "Yes, I think it will be surprising to many scientists today that Nature has really been thoroughly shaped by the journal's contributors and readership, and certainly to the people who view Nature's editorial staff as these all-powerful gatekeepers of scientific success. But, I love the list you just gave of all the people who are involved in making a journal — the referees, the editors, the authors, the readers, the publishing executives — because that can really be one of the things that we lose sight of when discussing modern scholarly communication: The professional advancement of scientists is so heavily dependent on being published in these peer-reviewed journals, and according to where a scientist works, things like tenure, promotion, and even just getting hired can depend heavily on getting into a particular type of journal, a prestigious journal that rejects many submissions. And so it can seem like the power to shape scholarly communication is only in the hands of the editors and in the hands of the anonymous referees who review papers. But looking at the history of scientific publication, you really see a story where a lot more figures are influential in shaping the way that the scientific journal has developed. And you see that, of course, with Nature, where it was definitely contributors' needs and interests that drove some significant changes in the format and the audience of the journal."

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David Politzer, “The Physics of Banjos” (Open Agenda, 2021) Dec 23, 2021

The Physics of Banjos is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and David Politzer, 2004 Nobel Laureate and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. This extensive conversation examines many of the intriguing aspects associated with the physics of banjos, including the ocarina effect, string-stretching, the subtleties of how we hear pitch, transient growth, and the mysterious ringing sound of banjos; while also touching briefly on contemporary issues in black holes and particle physics.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Joseph Reagle on H. G. Wells's "World Brain" (1937) Dec 22, 2021

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 repository of scientifically established knowledge--that would spread enlightenment around the world and lead to world peace. Wells, known to readers today as the author of The War of the Worlds and other science fiction classics, was imagining something like a predigital Wikipedia. The World Encyclopedia would provide a summary of verified reality (in about forty volumes); it would be widely available, free of copyright, and utilize the latest technology.

Of course, as Bruce Sterling points out in the foreword to this new edition of Wells's work, the World Brain didn't happen; the internet did. And yet, Wells anticipated aspects of the internet, envisioning the World Brain as a technical system of networked knowledge (in Sterling's words, a hypothetical super-gadget). Wells's optimism about the power of information might strike readers today as naïvely utopian, but possibly also inspirational.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Sarah S. Richardson, "The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Dec 21, 2021

The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother--except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury--could alter her offspring's traits. Consensus asserted that a child's fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing.

Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman's experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development.

Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, Sarah S. Richardson's The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (U Chicago Press, 2021) offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues--in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy--provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today.

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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Alfred Mele, “Free Will: An Investigation” (Open Agenda, 2021) Dec 20, 2021

Free Will: An Investigation is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Alfred Mele, the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. This wide-ranging conversation examines free will and the different notions of free will that exist, the connections of free will with developments in neuroscience, social psychology and public opinion polls and Alfred Mele’s key concern about how current and future insights might be directly applied to improve our world.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jessica Hurley, "Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) Dec 20, 2021

Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex(U Minnesota Press, 2020), Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives.

Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement.

Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.

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Timothy M. Yang, "A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan" (Cornell UP, 2021) Dec 17, 2021

Timothy Yang’s A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan(Cornell 2021) is a case study of Hoshi Pharmaceutical, a Japanese drug company that exemplified the push for a modern “culture of self-medication.” The history of Hoshi is tightly intertwined with state promotion of Western biomedicine beginning in the late nineteenth century, but also reveals tensions between pharmaceutical manufacturers’ self-promotion “as a humanitarian endeavor for greater social good” and their profit motive. As the title suggests, A Medicated Empire also expands our understanding of the production and consumption of drugs―licit and illicit―in the Japanese empire, exploring topics including how companies like Hoshi exploited national-defense concerns to secure lucrative government support in times of crisis on the one hand, and the differential marketing and regulation of pharmaceuticals such as opium to Japanese and colonial subjects. In the latter sections of the book, these elements are central to the story of Hoshi’s fall and rise: the opium scandal which crippled and bankrupted the company in the early 1930s and its resurrection and profiteering as Japan geared up for war later in the decade. Throughout, Yang is sensitive to the tensions between state-led national strengthening, corporate profit motives, and the desires of individuals to optimize their health, and also to the imperial context in which the particular story of Hoshi played out. This book will of course be of interest to historians of Japan, STS, and business, among others, but as we discuss in the podcast, many of its core issues―trust in pharma, government interventions in public health, etc.—are more salient today than ever.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Rocky Kolb, “A Universe of Particles: Cosmological Reflections” (Open Agenda, 2021) Dec 16, 2021

A Universe of Particles: Cosmological Reflections is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Rocky Kolb, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. After an inspiring story of how Rocky Kolb became interested in science, this wide-ranging conversation covers topics such as the development of and his work on inflationary cosmology, the Standard Model of particle physics, dark matter, dark energy, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), the Large Hadron Collider, advice for high-school teachers to ignite a passion for learning in students, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jacob Johanssen, "Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibition" (Routledge, 2021) Dec 14, 2021

In his new book Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibition (Routledge, 2021), Jacob Johanssen takes us on a journey into the dark masculinist recesses of the internet. He analyses original data from online communities of Involuntary Celibate (Incel) men, women-denigrating “Men Going Their Own Way”, anti-porn crusading NoFap users and the manifestos of mass shooters. By making use of the work of Willhelm Reich, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Klaus Theweleit, he is able to construct a convincing and sinister portrait of this dis/inhibited online culture, in which intermingling fantasies of victimhood and destructive annihilation of the feminine Other create a seething mélange of hatred and misogyny. It is testament to the power of the psychoanalytically informed approach of gathering “identificatory knowledge” that Johanssen does not stop at painting a damning picture of these men, but tries to grasp the psychodynamics at play in their polarized and fragmented world views and identities. As unlikely as it seems, there is even a glimmer of hope at the end of the book. Johanssen applies Jessica Benjamin’s concept of recognition to the men discussed - a possible way out of the dead end of the obsessively intensified hate of the manosphere? We discuss this question and many more in the interview.

Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de.

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Andrew Piper, "Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Dec 14, 2021

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 respect to text-based evidence in the field of literary studies. When working with texts, how can we move, reliably and credibly, from individual observations to more general beliefs about the world? The onset of computational methods has highlighted major shortcomings of traditional approaches to texts when it comes to working with small samples of evidence. This Cambridge Element combines a machine learning-based approach to detect the prevalence and nature of generalization across tens of thousands of sentences from different disciplines alongside a robust discussion of potential solutions to the problem of the generalizability of textual evidence. It exemplifies the way mixed methods can be used in complementary fashion to develop nuanced, evidence-based arguments about complex disciplinary issues in a data-driven research environment.

Andrew Piper is Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He directs .txtlab, a laboratory for cultural analytics at McGill, and is editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics.

Katie McDonough is Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute.

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Greg Hickock, “Beyond Mirror Neurons” (Open Agenda, 2021) Dec 13, 2021

Beyond Mirror Neurons is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Greg Hickok, Professor of Cognitive science at UC Irvine, where he directs the Center for Language Science and the Auditory and Language Neuroscience Lab. This thought-provoking conversation examines Greg Hickok’s neuroscience research related to speech and language which led him to eventually reject many aspects of the mirror neuron hypothesis, while giving his views on the mechanisms behind imitation and what mirror neurons really do.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jade S. Sasser, "On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change" (NYU Press, 2018) Dec 13, 2021

Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is “back”—and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women’s universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back—and why now? In On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change(New York University Press, 2018), Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground—until now.

Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. Although well-intentioned—promoting positive action, women’s empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community—these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible.

On Infertile Ground presents a unique critique of international development that blends the study of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in a groundbreaking way. It will make any development professional take a second look at the ideals driving their work.

Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. witter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID

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Kalanit Grill-Spector, “Vision and Perception” (Open Agenda, 2021) Dec 10, 2021

Vision and Perception is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Kalanit Grill-Spector, Professor in Psychology and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. Kalanit Grill-Spector’s is a vision specialist with a background in computational neuroscience. Her research examines how the brain processes visual information and perceives it. This extensive conversation explores how functional imaging techniques are used to visualize the brain in action and how it functions to recognize people, objects and places. Kalanit also discusses how the anatomical and functional properties of the brain change from infancy to childhood through adulthood, and how this development is related to improved visual recognition abilities.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray, "Technology in World Civilization" (MIT Press, 2021) Dec 10, 2021

Technology in World Civilization represents a milestone history of technology. First published in 1990 and now revised and expanded in light of recent research, the book broke new ground by taking a global view, avoiding the conventional Eurocentric perspective and placing the development of technology squarely in the context of a “world civilization.” Case studies include “technological dialogues” between China and West Asia in the eleventh century, medieval African states and the Islamic world, and the United States and Japan post-1950. It examines railway empires through the examples of Russia and Japan and explores current synergies of innovation in energy supply and smartphone technology through African cases.

The book uses the term “technological dialogue” to challenge the top-down concept of “technology transfer,” showing instead that technologies are typically modified to fit local needs and conditions, often triggering further innovation. The authors trace these encounters and exchanges over a thousand years, examining changes in such technologies as agriculture, firearms, printing, electricity, and railroads. A new chapter brings the narrative into the twenty-first century, discussing technological developments including petrochemicals, aerospace, and digitalization from often unexpected global viewpoints and asking what new kind of industrial revolution is needed to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

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Ginny Smith, "Overloaded: How Every Aspect of Your Life is Influenced by Your Brain Chemicals" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Dec 10, 2021

From adrenaline to dopamine, most of us are familiar with the chemicals that control us. They are the hormones and neurotransmitters that our brains run on, and Overloaded: How Every Aspect of Your Life is Influenced by Your Brain Chemicals(Bloomsbury, 2021) looks at the role they play in every aspect of our lives, from what we remember, how we make decisions and who we love to basic survival drives such as hunger, fear and sleep.

Author Ginny Smith gets to the bottom of exactly what these tiny molecules do. What role do cortisol and adrenaline play in memory formation? Is it our brain chemicals that cause us to be 'hangry'? How do hormones and neurotransmitters affect the trajectory of our romantic relationships? These are just some of the questions that Ginny will answer as she meets the scientists at the cutting-edge of research into the world of brain chemistry who are uncovering the unexpected connections between these crucial chemicals that touch every aspect of our lives.

Listeners might be interested in Braintastic.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Britt Rusert, "Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture" (NYU Press, 2017) Dec 09, 2021

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture(NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It’s easy to see why.

At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right.

For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method.

In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway’s method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes’ technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021).

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process.

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Winka Dubbeldam, "Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms" (Actar, 2022) Dec 09, 2021

The object as solid, having three dimensions, is not just a different formal trend, but a paradigm shift; a reconceiving of how the architectural object is produced and experienced, changing the very concept of objectivity and meaning of architecture. This book celebrates the potential of the strange object, which finds its origin in the proto-space―the moment between the becoming of the idea and the ultimate shape it takes; the state of the still obscure and ‘uninhibited’ object outside the established framework of signification. As seen through an examination of 10 projects by Archi-Tectonics, this strange object is proof of the very capacity of the object to generate new habits and meanings.

For close to a century, modernism was the norm, presented to culturally aware citizens as the expression of modern life. It arrived hand in hand with medical advances, mass standardization, and a shared ideal of what the ease and speed of the modern lifestyle could offer. Only in the early years of the 21st century did our widespread allegiance begin to shift away from modernism and towards a new social realm. The digital revolution introduced online societies, niche cultures, and digital design. Digital manufacturing facilitated opportunities of surface patterning and the fabrication of one-off special building components, removing the constraints of standardization in the construction industry and celebrating the experimental. Testing designs through prototypes allows for a much more informed decision-making process. The focus is on precise, rigorous research and development, rather than representational models.

Now, after nearly two decades of implementing digital tools, we have reached a new platform where digital design and robotic production are the norm, and by extension, digital craft and integral design are as the future. This has been particularly important in the rethinking of advanced digital design processes. As showcased and examined in Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms (Actar, 2022), from the earliest projects and regardless of scale, Archi-Tectonics has valued performance over form, design intelligence over style. Through prototypes and mock-ups, process documentation and testimonials, the book presents 10 current and recent projects that celebrate the particular and singular over the ideal and universal.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Diana Kelly, "The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov" (Emerald, 2020) Dec 09, 2021

In this podcast Diana Kelly, author of The Red Taylorist: The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov (Emerald, 2020), tells us of the advantages of using a biography to explore a contested topic such as Taylorism. In this case by mapping the life and works of a Russian engineer, Walter Polakov, who was very active and helped shape the Taylor Society in the 1920s as well as the adoption of diffusion of Taylorism, given Polakov's friendship and interaction with key figures of the time, such as H. L Gantt.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other mussings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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James Shires, "The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East" (Hurst, 2021) Dec 09, 2021

How has “cybersecurity” become a catch-all for everything that touches our digital world? In his new book, The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East(Hurst, 2021), Dr. James Shires shows how myriad actors have exploited the prominent yet esoteric nature of the field, appropriating its symbolic power to serve their own interests. In the process, cybersecurity has grown to incorporate a series of seemingly distinct practices.

An Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at the University of Leiden, Dr. Shires explores four discursive spaces where the language of cybersecurity permeates: cybersecurity as interstate digital conflict, cybersecurity as the protection of human rights, cybersecurity as domestic information control, and cybersecurity as the prevention of foreign interference. Through a close examination of each of these spaces within the Middle East, Dr. Shires deconstructs how various actors disguised value-laden arguments as technological imperatives—and how they reacted when they met resistance from skeptics. He concludes that politics, as much as the essentials of technology, often determines the scope and nature of cybersecurity.

John Sakellariadis is a 2021-2022 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Jamie Mustard, "The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out" (BenBella Books, 2019) Dec 09, 2021

Today I talked to Jamie Mustard about his new book The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out (BenBella Books, 2019).

Ever feel like you’re “screaming” to be heard but in a world saturated by social media messages, et cetera, your “messages” are falling on deaf ears? If so, Jamie Mustard has a solution to propose. In short, you need to follow the Primal Laws of Attention. In essence, that means be bigger, brighter, and bolder than ever before in history to break through the clutter. In greater detail, those laws entail steps like the following: use repetition, deliver an emotional jolt by addressing the audience’s primary emotional concern, and practice transparency that establishes your authenticity. Most of all, engage in radical simplicity. If what you are saying can’t be readily understand, forget it. Then to back up that radical simplicity, the “shaft” behind that arrowhead of simplicity is sufficient information to make the messaging worthwhile. All of that—and more—delivered by Mustard in an impassioned episode.

Jamie Mustard is a London School of Economic graduate; he’s also an artist, filmmaker, consultant, and a leading authority on branding, art, design, and media perception.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Noémi Tousignant, "Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018) Dec 09, 2021

What is “capacity”? In science research and health interventions, it typically refers to the relative availability of equipment, infrastructure, personnel, and skills needed to get a job done. Noémi Tousignant’s book, Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal(Duke UP, 2018), feels its way into the experience of capacity to observe a crucial characteristic. Capacity has “temporal qualities.”

Waiting, interrupting, prolonging, repairing: these processes show that the elements of lab science and public health called “capacity” operate with different rhythms that often fail to synchronize or to be formally acknowledged. Yet the material world of capacity also implies a direction, which orients scientists to (im)possibilities for better futures, “to moral imaginations of responsibility and commitment.”

The book won the 2020 Ludwik Fleck prize for outstanding book from the Society for the Social Studies of Science. The award signals the book’s broad relevance for anyone interested in critical studies of science, technology, and health; intrigued by the phenomenology of time; keen to combine training in history with ethnographic methods; or interested in postcolonial studies, especially Africa.

The book is based on Tousignant’s field work in Senegal from in 2010 and 2011 studying professional toxicologists across three institutions as they “improvised and imagined a more capacious and protective toxicology.” In terms of empirical content, this work is important for anyone interested in environmental contamination and the politics of poisoning lands, waters, and bodies.

The interview also refers to the work of Gabrielle Hecht on exposure and imaginaries of Africa, Julie Livingstone on improvisation and slow risks, Joanna Crane on commodification of global health, and Monika Krause on how NGOs perform worthy projects. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.

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Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021) Dec 08, 2021

Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States.

In Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America (Oxford UP, 2021), Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. He vividly describes how activists and lawyers have resisted a wide variety of legal constraints on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA limitations on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. Grossman also considers the relationship between these campaigns for desired treatments and widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures such as vaccines and face masks. From the streets of San Francisco to the US Supreme Court, Choose Your Medicine examines an underexplored theme of American history, politics, and law that is more relevant today than ever.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Jennifer Ferng and Lauren R. Cannady, "Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks" (Voltaire Foundation, 2021) Dec 08, 2021

A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks(Voltaire Foundation, 2021) argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans – some anonymous, eminent, and outside the margins – translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illustration, and mining. In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired chapters are also followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both chapters. Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment.

Lauren R. Cannady, assistant clinical professor in University Honors at the University of Maryland, is a historian of early modern art and architecture with an interest in intellectual and cultural history.

Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from MIT.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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Benjamin Labatut, "When We Cease to Understand the World" (NYRB, 2021) Dec 07, 2021

An interview with Benjamín Labatut, author of When We Cease to Understand the World(2021), a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. Benjamin and I cover an enormous amount of ground in our wide-ranging interview: we touch on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal as a way of his writing; the failure of our societies to make room for overlapping, sometimes contradictory histories; his distaste for genre categories; the inevitable loss involved in translation; Chile’s frightening presidential election; and much much more. I know that you will be as enthralled and challenged and delighted by Benjamín’s capacious mind.

Benjamín Recommends:

Juan Forn, Los Viernes
Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Pascal Quignard, The Last Kingdom
Elliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing
J.A. Baker, The Peregrine
Georg Buchner, Lenz
Frantisek Vlacil, Marketa Lazarova (film)

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes, "Arguing with Numbers: The Intersections of Rhetoric and Mathematics" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) Dec 07, 2021

One pervasive stereotype about mathematics is that it is objective, unbiased, or otherwise exempt from the influence of human passions. James Wynn and G. Mitchell Reyes's edited collection will be a revelation even to mathematics professionals who don't take this strict view. The essays in Arguing with Numbers: The Intersections of Rhetoric and Mathematics (The Pennsylvania State UP, 2021) explore the interplays between rhetoric and mathematics that have shaped scholarly and popular culture through to the present day.

Opening the collection are both an historical sketch of scholarship at the intersection of these disciplines, from their division in ancient Greece to their hesitant reunion since the mid-twentieth century, and also a taxonomy of modern research into three distinct approaches, which we review in our discussion. The remaining essays use these approaches to probe the impact of mathematical rhetoric on the sciences (including Hantaro Nakaoka's analogical "Saturnian" model of atomic spectra), on cultural norms and institutions (including the influence of David X. Li's Gaussian copula on the behavior of financial markets), and on relations between mathematics professionals and the lay public. This last part contains a chapter on the legacy of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics that highlights the importance to mathematics professionals of understanding the rhetorical dimensions of our discipline.

Bookending our discussion, Drs. Wynn and Reyes related the story of their edited collection, which makes the point that a cross-disciplinary exchange is needed to help both disciplines better understand their connections to each other and more responsibly manage those connections. Their suggestions will resonate with mathematicians interested in challenging narratives of objectivity, in diversifying our ranks, and in developing responsible rules and principles for the use of social and personal data. The analytical tools demonstrated in this book abet this effort.

Suggested companion works:

Trust in Numbers, Theodore Porter
Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad

James Wynn is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement and Evolution by the Numbers: The Origins of Mathematical Argument in Biology.

G. Mitchell Reyes is Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis and Clark College. He is author of Stranger Relations: Mathematics, Rhetoric, and the Translative Force of Mathematical Discourse (in press with Penn State University Press) and coeditor of Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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David Herzberg, "White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Dec 06, 2021

The contemporary opioid crisis is widely seen as new and unprecedented. Not so. It is merely the latest in a long series of drug crises stretching back over a century. In White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America(U Chicago Press, 2020), David Herzberg explores these crises and the drugs that fueled them, from Bayer's Heroin to Purdue's OxyContin and all the drugs in between: barbiturate "goof balls," amphetamine "thrill pills," the "love drug" Quaalude, and more. As Herzberg argues, the vast majority of American experiences with drugs and addiction have taken place within what he calls "white markets," where legal drugs called medicines are sold to a largely white clientele.

These markets are widely acknowledged but no one has explained how they became so central to the medical system in a nation famous for its "drug wars"--until now. Drawing from federal, state, industry, and medical archives alongside a wealth of published sources, Herzberg re-connects America's divided drug history, telling the whole story for the first time. He reveals that the driving question for policymakers has never been how to prohibit the use of addictive drugs, but how to ensure their availability in medical contexts, where profitability often outweighs public safety. Access to white markets was thus a double-edged sword for socially privileged consumers, even as communities of color faced exclusion and punitive drug prohibition. To counter this no-win setup, Herzberg advocates for a consumer protection approach that robustly regulates all drug markets to minimize risks while maintaining safe, reliable access (and treatment) for people with addiction.

Accomplishing this requires rethinking a drug/medicine divide born a century ago that, unlike most policies of that racially segregated era, has somehow survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first century.

By showing how the twenty-first-century opioid crisis is only the most recent in a long history of similar crises of addiction to pharmaceuticals, Herzberg forces us to rethink our most basic ideas about drug policy and addiction itself--ideas that have been failing us catastrophically for over a century.

David Herzberg is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo is also the author of Happy Pills in America from Milltown to Prozac. David is also the co-editor of the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs.

Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, a stigma-destroying speaker, and the founder of Choose Your Struggle podcast. A guy in long-term recovery, Jay is dedicated to ending stigma and promoting fact-based education around Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. You can learn more about Jay at his links here.

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Shaoling Ma, "The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861–1906" (Duke UP, 2021) Dec 06, 2021

In this episode, I interview Shaoling Ma, professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS about her new book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906(Duke UP, 2021). In this fascinating book, Ma grapples with theoretical and historical questions of media and mediation in the late Qing. Calling on a diverse set of sources, including diplomatic records, science fiction novels, modern poetry, and telegraphic dispatches among many others, Ma’s examines “mediation in terms of the discursive interactions with physical devices and material processes of communication” (49). By reading the treatment of documents and labor in Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone against representations of the new, “stoney” lithographic practices of the Dianshizhai Pictorial, or showing how the Boxer crisis shaped understandings of telegraphy and transmission, The Stone and the Wireless enriches not only Chinese studies, but also speaks broadly to scholarship on media and technology. In her conclusion, Ma teases readers with an interpretation of a very recent Chinese sci-fi novel, convincingly making the case for the contemporary political relevance of her study.

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Matthew Walker, “Sleep Insights” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 29, 2021

Sleep Insights is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Matthew Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley. This extensive conversation gives a clear and compelling picture of our recent understanding of sleep’s essential role in our daily lives, from reinforcing learning and memory to regulating emotion.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Shaking the World: How Geology Can Help Us Address the Big Challenges of the 21st Century Nov 26, 2021

Southeast Asia is the most tectonically and geologically active region on Earth. These processes have enriched the mountains and basins with world-famous mineral and energy resources, fresh water, and highly productive soils. However, the same geological processes are responsible for incredible destruction – from the 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These natural hazards, coupled with the effects of human-induced climate change, are driving significant change. To talk us through these changes, Dr Sabin Zahirovic joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, exposing how climate change is amplifying existing vulnerabilities in Southeast Asia. He explains how understanding past and current geological process can help us reduce risks from natural hazards like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, but also address the huge challenges faced by growing populations and increased vulnerabilities resulting from climate change.

About Sabin Zahirovic:

Dr Sabin Zahirovic is a Robinson Fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sabin's research focuses on global plate tectonics and mantle evolution, and particularly for the Tethyan and Asian regions. He completed his PhD titled “Post-Pangea global plate kinematics and geodynamic implications for Southeast Asia” at the University of Sydney in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, he led the Papua New Guinea research stream of the ARC ITRH Basin GENESIS Hub at the University of Sydney. He now leads the Tectonics and Geodynamics stream of a collaborative industry project with BHP. In 2020, Sabin was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to explore the rise and demise of massive reefs and carbonate platforms on Australian continental margins. Sabin is a past recipient of the GSA Voisey Medal, the Deep Carbon Observatory Emerging Leader Award, and the AIPS NSW Tall Poppy award.

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Oliver Rollins, "Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain" (Stanford UP, 2021) Nov 26, 2021

Exposing ethical dilemmas of neuroscientific research on violence, this book warns against a dystopian future in which behavior is narrowly defined in relation to our biological makeup. Biological explanations for violence have existed for centuries, as has criticism of this kind of deterministic science, haunted by a long history of horrific abuse. Yet, this program has endured because of, and not despite, its notorious legacy. Today's scientists are well beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Instead, they contend that scientific progress has led to a natureandnurture, biological and social, stance that allows it to avoid the pitfalls of the past.

In Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain (Stanford UP, 2021), Oliver Rollins cautions against this optimism, arguing that the way these categories are imagined belies a dangerous continuity between past and present. The late 80s ushered in a wave of techno-scientific advancements in the genetic and brain sciences. Rollins focuses on an often-ignored strand of research, the neuroscience of violence, which he argues became a key player in the larger conversation about the biological origins of criminal, violent behavior. Using powerful technologies, neuroscientists have rationalized an idea of the violent brain--or a brain that bears the marks of predisposition towards "dangerousness." Drawing on extensive analysis of neurobiological research, interviews with neuroscientists, and participant observation, Rollins finds that this construct of the brain is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, much less the ethical implications of informing treatment based on such simplified definitions. Rollins warns of the potentially devastating effects of a science that promises to "predict" criminals before the crime is committed, in a world that already understands violence largely through a politic of inequality.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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Nolan Gasser, "Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste" (Flatiron Books, 2019) Nov 24, 2021

Why do we love the music we love? In Why You Like IT: The Science & Culture of Musical Taste (Flatiron Books, 2019) musicologist Nolan Gasser, architect of Pandora Radio’s Music Genome Project, discusses how psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, and culture combine to define our musical tastes—what he calls “inculturing.” From the Northern California Redwoods to Paris to Africa, from Nashville to New York City, and from medieval music to Phillip Glass to Led Zeppelin to Taylor Swift, Dr. Gasser takes us on a ride through our minds and how they process, understand and, yes, like music.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

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Robin Ince, "The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity" (Atlantic Books, 2021) Nov 23, 2021

Comedian Robin Ince quickly abandoned science at school, bored by a fog of dull lessons and intimidated by the barrage of equations. But, twenty years later, he fell in love and he now presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts. Every year he meets hundreds of the world's greatest thinkers.

In this erudite and witty book, Robin reveals why scientific wonder isn't just for the professionals. Filled with interviews featuring astronauts, comedians, teachers, quantum physicists, neuroscientists and more - as well as charting Robin's own journey with science - The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity (Atlantic Books, 2021) explores why many wrongly think of the discipline as distant and difficult. From the glorious appeal of the stars above to why scientific curiosity can encourage much needed intellectual humility, this optimistic and profound book will leave you filled with a thirst for intellectual adventure.

John Weston teaches academic communication at Tampere University, Finland. His work focuses on the sociolinguistics of knowledge, and creative writing and wellbeing. Twitter: @johnwphd. Email: john.weston.media@gmail.com

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Molly Thomasy Blasing, "Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture" (Cornell UP, 2021) Nov 23, 2021

Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture(Cornell UP, 2021) considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image.

Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to writing the photograph is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience.

Molly T. Blasing holds degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (AB, 2002) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA, 2006; PHD, 2014). After teaching at Florida State University, Wellesley College, and Oberlin College, she joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky as Assistant Professor of Russian Studies in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2021.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Kenneth O'Reilly, "Asphalt: A History" (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Nov 22, 2021

In Asphalt: A History(U Nebraska Press, 2021), Kenneth O’Reilly provides a history of this everyday substance. By tracing the history of asphalt—in both its natural and processed forms—from ancient times to the present, O’Reilly sets out to identify its importance within various contexts of human society and culture. Although O’Reilly argues that asphalt creates our environment, he believes it also eventually threatens it. Looking at its role in economics, politics, and global warming, O’Reilly explores asphalt’s contribution to the history, and future, of America and the world.

Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally.

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Beatrice Gruendler, "The Rise of the Arabic Book" (Harvard UP, 2020) Nov 22, 2021

How did it happen that, in the 13th century, Europe's largest library owned fewer than 2,000 volumes while Baghdad alone boasted of several libraries holding from 200,000 to 1,000,000 books each? In The Rise of the Arabic Book(Harvard UP, 2020), Beatrice Gruendler traces the story of the beginning of the revolution in book culture that happened in the first centuries of the Abbasid period in the Islamic lands of the Middle East. She does so by looking at the lives of people specializing and fulfilling different roles in a society that underwent a drastic technological revolution to accomodate them. Focusing on a range of social classes such as scholars and poets, craftsmen and traders, up to the large aristocratic book collectors, we read of the protagonists of this momentous revolution in knowledge, science, and book culture.

Miguel Monteiro is a PhD student in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. Twitter @anphph

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Herbert Lin, "Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons" (Stanford UP, 2021) Nov 22, 2021

What does America’s growing dependence on modern information technology systems mean for the management of its nuclear weapons? In his new book, Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons(Stanford University Press, 2021), Dr. Herb Lin explores the promise and peril of managing the bomb in the digital age.

A Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, Dr. Lin cautions that management of the future nuclear enterprise will require a series of difficult tradeoffs: between integrity and reliability, functionality and security, and usability and security. Moving beyond a historical focus on the command and control of nuclear forces, Lin argues that these compromises will affect each aspect of the US nuclear enterprise, from technology acquisition and maintenance to operations and employment.

On the podcast, I talk to Dr. Lin about what historical near-misses can tell us about future nuclear threats, how digitization could magnify the risks of deception and misperception, and the applicability of Silicon Valley-style software development practices for the Pentagon.

John Sakellariadis is a 2021-2022 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Gavin Van Horn et al., "Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, 5-Volume Set" (Center for Humans and Nature, 2021) Nov 22, 2021

From The Center for Humans and Nature, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a five-volume collection of essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity that highlight the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. Edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer, Kinship explores humanity’s deep interconnections with the living world. More than 70 contributors—including Joy Harjo, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, Bron Taylor, and Sharon Blackie—invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. These diverse voices render a wide range of possibilities for becoming better kin. From the recognition of nonhumans as persons to the care of our kinfolk through language and action, Kinship is a guide and companion into the ways we can deepen our care and respect for the family of plants, rivers, mountains, animals, and others who live with us in this exuberant, life-generating, planetary tangle of relations.

Brady McCartney is a Ph.D. student and scholar of religion, Indigenous studies, and environmental history at the University of Florida.Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu

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Chinese Digital Vigilantism: The Mediated and Mediatised Justice-Seeking Nov 19, 2021

What is digital vigilantism? How do Chinese citizens seek justice online? How does digital vigilantism reflect contemporary Chinese technological and socio-political development? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Qian Huang, lecturer and PhD Candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam, explains the growing phenomenon of online collective action against an individual to protect a shared value and the consequences of it.

Digital vigilantism refers to citizens’ practice of weaponising online visibility for retaliation when collectively offended. Qian Huang speaks to the Nordic Asia Podcast about her research on Chinese digital vigilantism, a part of the research project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) entitled Digital Vigilantism: Mapping the terrain and assessing societal impacts. Qian Huang is also the co-editor of the book Introducing Vigilant Audiences (Open Book Publishers, 2020)

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Scott Cunningham, "Causal Inference: The Mixtape" (Yale UP, 2021) Nov 19, 2021

Just about everyone knows correlation does not equal causation, and probably that a randomized controlled experiment is the best way to solve that problem, if you can do one. If you’ve been following the economics discipline you will have heard about the Nobel Prize given to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for their work applying the experimental method to test real-world policy interventions out in the field. But what if you can’t do this? Are you just stuck with untestable claims? This year’s Nobel Prize to Josh Angrist, David Card, and Guido Imbens for methods of causal inference with observational data confirms that you don't have to give up. Scott Cunningham’s Causal Inference: The Mixtape (Yale UP, 2021) provides an accessible practical introduction to techniques developed by these luminaries and others. Along with the statistical theory, it provides intuitive explanations of these techniques, and examples of the computer code needed to run them. In our conversation we discuss why economists needed these techniques and how they work.

Scott Cunningham is a professor of economics at Baylor University. He researches topics including mental healthcare, sex work, abortion and drug policy. He is active on Twitter, has a blog on Substack, and frequently conducts workshops on causal inference methods. A complete web version of his book is available here.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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James Garrison, "Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy" (SUNY Press, 2021) Nov 19, 2021

Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy by James Garrison (SUNY Press 2021), argues that the tradition of Confucian philosophy can provide resources for theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault in understanding what it is to be a subject in the social world. Garrison’s interlocutors are intercultural, from Confucius to Kant, Arendt to Butler, Hegel to Nietzsche. His book argues that Confucianism offers a relational, discursive, bodily, and ritualistic conception of the self. Through philosophers like Mencius, Xún Zǐ, and Lǐ Zéhòu, Confucianism’s emphasis on embodied aesthetic experiences presents new ways of thinking about how human beings can resist passivity in the face of society and instead learn how to consciously and bodily gain purposeful self-awareness.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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Frans de Waal, “On Atheists and Bonobos” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 19, 2021

On Atheists and Bonobos is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and primatologist Frans de Waal, Emory University, who is renowned for his work on the behaviour and social intelligence of primates. This thought-provoking conversation examines fascinating questions such as: Are we born with an innate sense of “the good”? Do we learn from others what is “wrong”? Does religion determine, or is it a result of, morality?

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Gabriella Lukács, "Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy" (Duke UP, 2020) Nov 18, 2021

In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan as new sites of work that were accessible to anyone. Enticed by the chance to build personally fulfilling careers, many young women entered Japan's digital economy by performing unpaid labor as photographers, net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists. While some women leveraged digital technology to create successful careers, most did not. In Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy(Duke UP, 2020), Gabriella Lukács traces how these women's unpaid labor became the engine of Japan's digital economy. Drawing on interviews with young women who strove to sculpt careers in the digital economy, Lukács shows how platform owners tapped unpaid labor to create innovative profit-generating practices without employing workers, thereby rendering women's labor invisible. By drawing out the ways in which labor precarity generates a demand for feminized affective labor, Lukács underscores the fallacy of the digital economy as a more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive mode of production.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Scott Tremaine, “Astrophysical Wonders” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 18, 2021

Astrophysical Wonders is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Scott Tremaine, Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study and an internationally renowned expert in both galactic-scale and planetary-scale astronomy. Topics that are part of this extensive conversation include the process of scientific discovery, in particular related to comets, Pluto, planetary rings, shepherding satellites, exoplanets, chaos theory and the formation, stability and uniqueness of our solar system. Further topics include galactic-scale astronomy, galaxy formation, dark matter, quasars, black holes, the large-scale structure of the universe and many outstanding open questions of contemporary astrophysics.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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David A. B. Murray, "Living with HIV in Post-crisis Times: Beyond the Endgame" (Lexington Books, 2021) Nov 18, 2021

Over the past decade, effective prevention and treatment policies have resulted in global health organizations claiming that the end of the HIV/AIDS crisis is near and that HIV/AIDS is now a chronic but manageable disease. These proclamations have been accompanied by stagnant or decreasing public interest in and financial support for people living with HIV and the organizations that support them, minimizing significant global disparities in the management and control of the HIV pandemic. The contributors to David A. B. Murray's Living with HIV in Post-crisis Times: Beyond the Endgame (Lexington Books, 2021) explore how diverse communities of people living with HIV (PLHIV) and organizations that support them are navigating physical, social, political, and economic challenges during these so-called “post-crisis” times.

Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018).

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68 Martin Puchner: Writing and Reading from Gilgamesh to Amazon Nov 18, 2021

Book Industry Month continues with a memory-lane voyage back to a beloved early RtB episode. This conversation with Martin Puchner about the very origins of writing struck us as perfect companion to Mark McGurl's wonderful insights (in RtB 67, published earlier this month) about the publishing industry's in 2021, or as Mark tells it, the era of "adult diaper baby love."

Aside from being a fabulous conversation about Martin's wonderful history of book production through the ages (The Written World) this episode brings back happy memories of Elizabeth and John piling their guests into a cozy sound booth at Brandeis, the kind of place that's utterly taboo in Pandemic America.So travel with us back to 2019 for a close encounter with the epic of Gilgamesh. The three friends discuss the different stages of world writing--from the time of the scribes to the time of great teachers like Confucius, Socrates and Jesus Christ, who had a very complicated relationship to writing.

In Recallable Books, Martin recommends the fan fiction website Wattpad; Elizabeth recommends "No Reservations: Narnia," in which Anthony Bourdain goes through the wardrobe. John feints at recommending Dennis Tenen's book on the writing within coding before recommending the Brautigan Library.

Come for the discussion of writing, stay for the impressions of Gollum!

Discussed in this episode:

The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History and Civilization, Martin Puchner
Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, David Ferry
Wattpad
"No Reservations: Narnia," Edonohana
Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation, David Tenen
The Brautigan Library

Episode transcript available here: Episode 6 Puchner 3.28.19

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu.

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John S. Tregoning, "Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them" (Oneworld, 2021) Nov 16, 2021

Nature wants you dead.Not just you, but your children and everyone you have ever met and everyone they have ever met; in fact, everyone. It wants you to cough and sneeze and poop yourself into an early grave. It wants your blood vessels to burst and pustules to explode all over your body. And - until recently - it was really good at doing this...

Covid-19 may be only the first of many modern pandemics. The subject of infection and how to fight it grows more urgent every day. How do pathogens cause disease? And what tools can we give our bodies to do battle?

Dr John S. Tregoning has dedicated his career to answering these questions. Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them (Oneworld, 2021) uncovers fascinating success stories in immunology and virology, making this book not only a vital overview of infection, but also a hopeful story of ongoing human ingenuity.

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Jill Tartar, “SETI: Astronomy as a Contact Sport” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 16, 2021

SETI: Astronomy as a Contact Sport is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jill Tarter, Chair Emeritus for SETI Research at SETI Institute and Former Director of the Center for SETI Research. Astronomer Jill Tarter has spent the majority of her professional life driving forward the science and technology of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, rigorously scanning the sky for the signs of some signal sent to us from outer space. This wide-ranging conversation explores the history of the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, what the present state is of our quest for signals from other planets, what those signals might look like and how we can interpret them, how SETI research has a surprisingly positive effect on other technologies, how citizens can get involved with astronomy and much more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, "Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth" (Zone Book, 2021) Nov 16, 2021

In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space, and it remains the only human-made object to have left the solar system. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth (Zone Books, 2021) ask big questions: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human culture into a time capsule that will barrel through space for tens of thousands of years? And last but not least: Do aliens have ears?

In this conversation, we chat with the authors Daniel Chua, the Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong, and Alex Rehding, a Professor of Music at Harvard University, and focus on the primacy of repetition and difference in music. Additionally, we discuss the underlying assumptions and exceptions humans have about music and the unknown alien listeners to the Golden Record. We also highlight the goal to establish and make accessible an Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything to turn everyone, no matter what their planet of origin is, into a music theorist.

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Robert Brooks, "Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers" (Columbia UP, 2021) Nov 15, 2021

What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution―yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves into human interactions. Digital lovers, virtual friends, and algorithmic matchmakers help us manage our feelings in a world of cognitive overload. Will these machines, fueled by masses of user data and powered by algorithms that learn all the time, transform the quality of human life?

Robert Brooks, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers(Columbia UP, 2021) offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider the interaction of new technologies and fundamental human behaviors. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs―and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Naomi Oreskes, "Why Trust Science?" (Princeton UP, 2021) Nov 15, 2021

Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don’t? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength—and the greatest reason we can trust it.

Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late nineteenth century to today, Oreskes explains that, contrary to popular belief, there is no single scientific method. Rather, the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted. This process is not perfect—nothing ever is when humans are involved—but she draws vital lessons from cases where scientists got it wrong. Oreskes shows how consensus is a crucial indicator of when a scientific matter has been settled, and when the knowledge produced is likely to be trustworthy.

Based on the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University, Why Trust Science? (Princeton UP, 2021) features critical responses by climate experts Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, political scientist Jon Krosnick, philosopher of science Marc Lange, and science historian Susan Lindee, as well as a foreword by political theorist Stephen Macedo.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Ian Stewart, “The Joy of Mathematics” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 12, 2021

The Joy of Mathematics is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Ian Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick and bestselling science and science fiction writer. For Ian Stewart, mathematics is far more than dreary arithmetic, while mathematical thinking is one of the most important—and overlooked—aspects of contemporary society. This wide-ranging conversation explores what mathematics is and why it’s worth doing, symmetry, networks and patterns, the relationship between logic and proof, the role of beauty in mathematical thinking, the future of mathematics, linking mathematical oscillations to animal gaits, how to deal with the peculiarities of the mathematical community, and much more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese, "Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work" (Routledge, 2020) Nov 12, 2021

Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese's Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work (Routledge, 2020) explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices.

The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work.

Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

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Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever, "Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations" (Oxford UP, 2021) Nov 11, 2021

In their open-access publication, Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2021), Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever argue that philosophers of language can contribute to a deeper understanding of artificial intelligence. AIs known as “neural nets” are becoming commonplace and we increasingly rely on their outputs for action-guidance, as when an AI like Siri hears your question and says, “There’s a pizza shop on the corner.” Our use of words like “says” suggests an important question: do AIs literally say anything? Should we understand their outputs as utterances with meaningful content? And if so, what makes that content meaningful, and how is it related to the processes which result in that output? Cappelen and Dever take up these questions and propose a framework for answering them, abstracting from existing externalist approaches to develop a “de-anthropocentrized” externalism for AI. The book introduces readers not only to issues in AI surrounding its content and interpretation, but also to concepts in philosophy of language which may be relevant to these issues, serving as an invitation for further investigation by philosophers and programmers alike.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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Paul Steinhardt, “Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 11, 2021

We have developed two distinct books, Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals, and Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale, based on Howard Burton’s in-depth, filmed conversations with Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Director of the Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University. The first one is called Indiana Steinhardt and the Quest for Quasicrystals. This extensive conversation provides a comprehensive account of a marvellous scientific adventure story in the quest for a natural quasicrystal. You will be taken on a fascinating ride through the physics of materials, from theory, to the laboratory, to the discovery of a new state of matter, that culminated in Paul Steinhardt’s dramatic Siberian expedition. Inflated Expectations: A Cosmological Tale is based on a second in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Paul Steinhardt. He is one of the originators of the theory of cosmic inflation and has become one of its fiercest critics. This fascinating conversation covers topics such as Paul Steinhardt’s scientific development, his formative experiences at Caltech including his encounters with Richard Feynman, his development and later scepticism of the theory of cosmic inflation, the response of the scientific community to the failure of this theory, his theory of cosmology, The Ekpyrotic Universe, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Kristin Hussey, "Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) Nov 11, 2021

With the opening of the Suez Canal, larger and faster steamships, plus dockside engineering to accommodate them – time shrunk in the British Empire. The movement of bodies between the U.K and colonial outposts quickened. In Kristen D. Hussey’s Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914(U Pittsburgh Press, 2021), readers are introduced to how such mobility transformed British conceptions of health and illness and the medical practices to heal. A scramble for “imperial bodies” occurred as medical professionals sought to cure the Empire’s “tropical” diseases.

Hussey’s intense archival work delivers several case studies in British medicine that brings together various historical narratives. Merging spatial theories to the history of medicine, for example, Hussey communicates well the reciprocal nature of Empire, movement, and diseased bodies. London loomed large as a place of recuperation, a place to get well, and the best that medicine had to offer. Imperial Bodies in London reads as if a microhistory, but never deviates from connecting to larger, much broader sweep of history. The story of how European men and women – administrators, soldiers, sailors, missionaries, doctors, servants, and families – returned home to recover or readjust from their imperial duties and thereby became specimens (in a sense) to advance medical knowledge is deftly handled by the author.

In this interview, discussed are ways in which British medical practitioners approached diseases affecting the liver, eyes, brain and blood of those that served the Empire. Many of their discoveries and practices were the foundations of modern medicine. The current Covid-19 pandemic makes this book not only timely, but a terrific read into the origins of modern medicine.

Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic.

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Jeffrey J. Hall, "Japan's Nationalist Right in the Internet Age: Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism" (Routledge, 2021) Nov 11, 2021

Japan's nationalist right have used the internet to organize offline activism in increasingly visible ways. Jeffrey J. Hall, investigates the role of internet-mediated activism in Japan's ongoing historical and territorial disputes. He explores the emergence of two right-wing activist organizations, Nihon Bunka Channel Sakura and Ganbare Nippon, which have played a significant role in pressure campaigns against Japanese media outlets, campaigns to influence historical memorials, and campaigns to assert Japan's territorial claim to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

In Japan's Nationalist Right in the Internet Age: Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism (Routledge, 2021), Hall analyses how activists maintained cohesion, raised funds, held protests that regularly drew hundreds to thousands of participants, and used fishing boats to land activists on disputed islands. Detailing events that took place between 2004 and 2020, he demonstrates how skilled social actors built cohesive grassroots protest organizations through the creation of shared meaning for their organization and its supporters. A valuable read both for scholars seeking insight into the dynamics surrounding Japan's history disputes and territorial issues, as well as those seeking to compare Japanese right-wing internet activism with its counterparts elsewhere.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (PublicAffairs: 2021) Nov 11, 2021

The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point.

But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion.

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East(PublicAffairs: 2021), written by Gershom Gorenberg, tells the story leading to the British Army holding off the Nazis at El Alamein: a battle not just of soldiers and tanks, but spies and codebreakers.

In this interview, Gershom and I talk about the years preceding the Battle for Egypt: those who broke Enigma, the spies who unlocked their enemies secrets, and the troubled relations between nominal allies.

Gershom Gorenberg’s previous books are The Unmaking of Israel (HarperCollins: 2011), The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (Macmillan: 2007), and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford University Press: 2002). He also co-authored The Jerusalem Report’s 1996 biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom Friend, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Gershom is a columnist for The Washington Post, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He can be followed on Twitter at @GershomG

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of War of Shadows. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Andrew Leigh, "What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics" (MIT Press, 2021) Nov 10, 2021

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 event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That's fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What's the Worst That Could Happen?: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics(MIT Press, 2021), Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely.

Leigh explains that pervasive short-term thinking leaves us unprepared for long-term risks. Politicians sweat the small stuff—granular policy details of legislation and regulation—but rarely devote much attention to reducing long-term risks. Populist movements thrive on short-termism because they focus on their followers' immediate grievances. Leigh argues that we should be long-termers: broaden our thinking and give big threats the attention and resources they need.

Leigh outlines the biggest existential risks facing humanity and suggests remedies for them. He discusses pandemics, considering the possibility that the next virus will be more deadly than COVID-19; warns that unchecked climate change could render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable; describes the metamorphosis of the arms race from a fight into a chaotic brawl; and examines the dangers of runaway superintelligence. Moreover, Leigh points out, populism (and its crony, totalitarianism) not only exacerbates other dangers but is also a risk factor in itself, undermining the institutions of democracy as we watch.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Sima Shakhsari, "Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan" (Duke UP, 2020) Nov 10, 2021

In the early 2000s, mainstream international news outlets celebrated the growth of Weblogistan—the online and real-life transnational network of Iranian bloggers—and depicted it as a liberatory site that gave voice to Iranians. As Sima Shakhsari argues in Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan(Duke UP, 2020), the common assumptions of Weblogistan as a site of civil society consensus and resistance to state oppression belie its deep internal conflicts. While Weblogistan was an effective venue for some Iranians to “practice democracy,” it served as a valuable site for the United States to surveil bloggers and express anti-Iranian sentiment and policies. At the same time, bloggers used the network to self-police and enforce gender and sexuality norms based on Western liberal values in ways that unwittingly undermined Weblogistan's claims of democratic participation. In this way, Weblogistan became a site of cybergovernmentality, where biopolitical security regimes disciplined and regulated populations. Analyzing online and off-line ethnography, Shakhsari provides an account of digital citizenship that raises questions about the internet's relationship to political engagement, militarism, and democracy.

Sima Shakhsari is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexualities Studies at the University of Minnesota. They are interested in transnational feminist theory, transnational sexuality studies, non-Eurocentric queer and transgender studies, Middle East studies, empire, militarism, neoliberal governmentality, biopolitics, digital media, refugees, diasporas, and political anthropology. They earned their PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University and have held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston. Before joining UMN, they were Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Wellesley College.

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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How to Be Wrong: An Introduction to the Podcast Nov 10, 2021

"How To Be Wrong" is a podcast series hosted by John J. Kaag, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and John W. Traphagan, Professor of Religious Studies and in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin. The series explores mistakes, errors, and the importance of embracing intellectual humility in a world that seems increasingly dominated by dualistic an uncritically oppositional thinking, argument, and debate. We talk with scholars, artists, authors, and others about their ideas and stories related to things that have gone wrong and ask them to discuss the ways this has influenced their lives and work and influenced their ideas about certainty and humility.

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Maria Jose de Abreu, "The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil" (Duke UP, 2021) Nov 09, 2021

In The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil(Duke University Press, 2021), Maria José de Abreu examines how Charismatic Catholicism in contemporary Brazil produces a new form of total power through a concatenation of the breathing body, theology, and electronic mass media. De Abreu documents a vast religious respiratory program of revival popularly branded as “the aerobics of Jesus.” Pneuma—the Greek term for air, breath, and spirit—is central to this aerobic program, whose goal is to labor on the athletic elasticity of spirit. Tracing the rhetoric, gestures, and spaces that together constitute this new theological community, de Abreu exposes the articulating forces among evangelical Christianity, neoliberal logics, and the rise of right-wing politics. By calling attention to how an ethics of pauperism vitally intersects with the neoliberal ethos of flexibility, de Abreu shows how paradoxes do not hinder but expand the Charismatic gymnasium. The result, de Abreu demonstrates, is the production of a fluid form of totalitarianism and Christianity in Brazil and beyond.

Irene Promodh is a PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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Scott Soames, “Appreciating Analytic Philosophy” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 09, 2021

Appreciating Analytic Philosophy is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Scott Soames, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern California. Scott Soames is specialized in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. This detailed conversation provides a thoughtful introduction to analytic philosophy, including some examples of contemporary relevance to a wide range of other fields.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Lee Smolin, “Examining Time” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 08, 2021

Examining Time is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Lee Smolin who is a faculty member of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. The basis of this wide-ranging conversation are Lee Smolin’s books Life of the Cosmos and Time Reborn. This detailed discussion offers an investigation of time, both what it is and how the true nature of it impacts our world and future and provides behind-the scenes insights into the development of Lee Smolin’s groundbreaking theory on the nature of time.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Bradley Alger, "Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data" (Oxford UP, 2019) Nov 08, 2021

Listen to this interview of Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus of Physiology at University of Maryland School of Medicine and author of Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data (Oxford UP, 2019). We talk about definitions of words and about explanations of the world.

Bradley Alger : "I don't care how brilliant your data are, but if you don't succeed in explaining them clearly and laying them out and making them accessible to other people, you're really going to be penalizing yourself, at least as a scientist. And the idea of the hypothesis as a story structure, as helping to organize a narrative, as helping to lead a reader (even your competitors) through your reasoning is, I think, unparalleled. It's funny, I've talked to some scientists who say they don't use hypotheses because they want to tell a story — my view is, that's getting it backwards. The hypothesis has got almost a built-in narrative. We start from a problem, there is a proposed solution, we extract predictions from it, and that can lead us through the entire paper."

Watch the scientific hypothesis at here. Meet the scientific hypothesis at here.

Watch Daniel edit your science here. Write Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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Diego Armus and Pablo Gómez, "The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) Nov 08, 2021

Edited by Diego Armus and Pablo Gómez, The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press 2021) tell the stories of health practitioners that thrived in a gray space between legality and criminality, the trajectories they followed, and the interstitial spaces they inhabited between official and unofficial medicines. Spanning from the seventeenth century up to the twentieth century, this book wonderfully brings together the little-known stories and biographies of African, Chinese, and indigenous healers, midwives, homeopaths, amongst others. In the end, The Gray Zones of Medicine question traditional narratives in the history of medicine that center around the professional doctor, as well as concepts and dichotomies that have narrowly defined different healing cultures (e.g. Western vs. non-Western medicine, popular vs. learned medicine, European vs. indigenous or African medical systems). By doing so, the contributors of this volume propose a new narrative in which healers are at the center of the social and cultural histories of the region bridging the divide between the early modern and modern periods, one in which the seeming social and cultural dominance of official medicine, and later biomedicine, was never preordained nor complete, ultimately, a world in which these health practitioners were and are incredibly resilient in the midst of change.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron.

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Vicky Neale, "Why Study Mathematics?" (London Publishing Partnership, 2020) Nov 05, 2021

Students and their families face a consequential choice in whether to pursue a degree, and in what area. For those considering mathematics programs, the choice may be particularly fraught: A gulf separates the exploratory and experimental mathematics done by professionals from the computational training of most secondary schools, and this can obscure the meanings of program options. Meanwhile, cultural anxieties and stereotypes can dissuade students who would flourish in mathematical careers. This despite mathematical professionals being among the most satisfied and well-compensated in their careers.

In Why Study Mathematics? (2020), Vicky Neale provides a compact guide to this juncture, which i expect students and their families and teachers will find hugely valuable. As part of the London Publishing Partnership's "Why Study" series, her book in Part I explores in detail the substance and varieties of math degrees, how students can shape them to their needs and interests, and what those who complete them go on to do after. For Part II, Neale gives the reader a deeper view into a selection of subfields and the work their practitioners do, including the technologically vital study of data compression and the (for now) more humanistic study of abstract networks known as Ramsey theory.

Dr. Neale has exceptional experience and skill as a mentor that comes through as she addresses questions that, in my experience, often aren't: Are mathematics degrees mostly for mathematically adept students? Once in a program, whom should i get to know? Where are all the job postings for "mathematician"? It was a treat to hear her expound further on the book, and i would suggest that anyone at the beginning of their professional life, with interest, aptitude, or just curiosity about mathematics, seek out this resource (or recommend it to their mentors and guidance offices!) as they weigh their options.

Suggested companion works:

Vicky Neale is the Whitehead Lecturer at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, and a Supernumerary Fellow at Balliol College. She teaches pure mathematics to undergraduates, and combines this with work on public engagement with mathematics: she gives public lectures, leads workshops with school students, and has appeared on numerous BBC radio and television programmes. One of her current interests is in using knitting and crochet to explore mathematical ideas. She is the author of Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2017)—listen to her interview with Jim Stein about that book here.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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67 Everything and Less: Mark McGurl on Books in the Age of Amazon Nov 04, 2021

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 tablet) just a click away? John and Elizabeth speak with Stanford English prof Mark McGurl, whose previous books include the pathbreaking The Program Era.

Mark faces that question squarely in his terrific new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: if you want to know even more about it, check out the NY Times review by RTB's own book-history maven, star of RTB 46, Leah Price. Mark ponders when service became an idiom for the relationship between writer and reader and how strong a claim he is willing to make about Amazon's impact on the modern novel (pretty strong!). Finally, he tackles the key question: is the genre of "Adult Diaper Baby Love" (a breakout hit in Kindle sales; google it at your peril!) the perfect metaphor for Amazon's effort to soothe, pacify and succor its infantilized consumer-base?

Mentioned in the episode:

Laura Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Public libraries going trashy or classy: John wrote an article about this topic, praising a compelling database, "What Middletown Read"

Recallable Books:

Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1853)

Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855)

Transcript available here

RTB 67 Transcript

(or Visit the Recall this Book Transcript page)

Upcoming: Mark's discussion of the history of books and book publishing inspired next week's blog post: tune in next Thursday to find out more! It also sent us back to the archives for a golden RTB oldie starring Martin Puchner. That will appear, freshly rewrapped for the occasion, just before Thanksgiving.

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Alcino Silva, “Learning and Memory” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 04, 2021

Learning and Memory is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Alcino Silva, Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology, Psychiatry and Psychology at the David Geffen School of Medicine and Director of the Integrated Center for Learning and Memory at UCLA. Alcino Silva runs a learning and memory lab at UCLA that is focused on a vast number of topics, from schizophrenia and autism to learning and memory. This fascinating conversation explores how he and his colleagues focus on understanding the specific molecular mechanisms of neurobiology with the goal of being able to intervene and repair these mechanisms when they go awry. Further topics include plasticity of the brain, implanting memories, how cognitive deficits associated with developmental disorders can be reversed, the importance of “research maps” for the field and inspired optimism for the future.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro, "When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves" (Princeton UP, 2021) Nov 01, 2021

There is an epidemic of bad thinking in the world today. An alarming number of people are embracing crazy, even dangerous ideas. They believe that vaccinations cause autism. They reject the scientific consensus on climate change as a “hoax.” And they blame the spread of COVID-19 on the 5G network or a Chinese cabal. Worse, bad thinking drives bad acting—it even inspired a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol. In this book, Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro argue that the best antidote for bad thinking is the wisdom, insights, and practical skills of philosophy. When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves(Princeton UP, 2021) provides an engaging tour through the basic principles of logic, argument, evidence, and probability that can make all of us more reasonable and responsible citizens.

When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People shows how we can more readily spot and avoid flawed arguments and unreliable information; determine whether evidence supports or contradicts an idea; distinguish between merely believing something and knowing it; and much more. In doing so, the book reveals how epistemology, which addresses the nature of belief and knowledge, and ethics, the study of moral principles that should govern our behavior, can reduce bad thinking. Moreover, the book shows why philosophy’s millennia-old advice about how to lead a good, rational, and examined life is essential for escaping our current predicament.

In a world in which irrationality has exploded to deadly effect, When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People is a timely and essential guide for a return to reason.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Jonathan Schooler, “Mind-Wandering and Meta-Awareness” (Open Agenda, 2021) Nov 01, 2021

Mind-Wandering & Meta-Awareness is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jonathan Schooler, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This wide-ranging conversation examines how mind-wandering can serve as a window into the psychological world of meta-awareness. further topics include the nature of consciousness, mindfulness, creativity, free will, verbal overshadowing and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Caitlin Ring Carlson, "Hate Speech" (MIT Press, 2021) Oct 29, 2021

Hate speech can happen anywhere - in Charlottesville, Virginia, where young men in khakis shouted, "Jews will not replace us"; in Myanmar, where the military used Facebook to target the Muslim Rohingya; in Cape Town, South Africa, where a pastor called on ISIS to rid South Africa of the "homosexual curse." In person or online, people wield language to attack others for their race, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or other aspects of identity. Caitlin Ring Carlson's Hate Speech (MIT Press, 2021) examines hate speech: what it is, and is not; its history; and efforts to address it.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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Stephen Scherer, “Our Human Variability” (Open Agenda, 2021) Oct 29, 2021

Our Human Variability is a comprehensive book based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Stephen Scherer, the GlaxoSmithKline Research Chair in Genome Sciences at the Hospital for Sick Children and University of Toronto. Stephen Scherer discusses his lifelong passion for science that culminated in his groundbreaking discovery of copy-number variation. This conversation also covers his exciting work in autism research and how copy number variation brings us a deeper understanding of both human variability and disease.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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George Styles, "Contemplation" (2021) Oct 29, 2021

Although many of us move through life at a fast pace, do you ever stop to wonder why things are the way they are? More so, do you even know why you showed up for work this morning? Whatever reasons you might have, could you say you thought them all the way through? And when you thought them all the way through, did you do this past the parts you might not like to think about as well? And what about what the world is doing? Even if you might not care, do you know why it is doing what it is doing? And what about the people that live far beyond your side of the planet? Do you know why they are doing what they are doing? More so than all of this, why is it that all of us are on this particular planet, in this particular galaxy, and this particular universe?

Perhaps we may not be able to find all the answers to such a series of questions. But there has never been a better time in history than now to try and discover all the answers. With so many resources available online, perhaps now is a better time than ever to start to ask questions about why things are the way they are. From online dictionaries to databases that have open access to the public, finding information has never been easier. However, the question then becomes, “How do we start?” And even more so, “Where do we start?” To answer those questions and more, we need to begin with a single question. And from that question, we can then begin our search. But what question should we start with?

George Styles' Contemplation (2021) is a convention-defying exploration of 400 questions the author has posted on Twitter, ranging from the mundane, such as “in general, what is the thing you would say people talk about the most?” to politically current, “does cancel culture really exist?” to intriguing thoughts such as “what is an intellectual?” The questions are initially presented sequentially with numbers and then again with short commentaries for each question. In many cases the commentaries have further questions, rather than answers to the questions raised.

The book is a product of our social media age and an innovative way to engage social media in a more intellectually stimulating manner than is common. It's a fascinating read.

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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A Conversation with Aliyah Kovner, Science Writer and Science Podcaster Oct 27, 2021

Listen to this interview of Aliyah Kovner, science writer and also host of the podcast A Day in the Half-Life. We talk about who science communication reaches: peers, other experts, non-experts, you, me, everyone.

Aliyah Kovner : "That's definitely a thing not talked about enough, that is: often the audience for science communication is the scientists themselves, who want to learn about other fields. And even brilliant people with PhDs don't know the lingo for a different field. So, any scientist really actually has to appreciate the fact that most people are going to be outsiders to their research, but that doesn't mean that these people aren't terribly interested in the research and really willing to dive in and learn. But for whoever's not inside your close area of research, you're going to have to step back and think about how to communicate your work to people who might not know, but who definitely care."

Listen to A Day in the Half-Life.

Watch Daniel Shea edit your science here. Write Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com

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Nicolette Hahn Niman, "Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat" (Chelsea Green, 2021) Oct 26, 2021

In Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat (Chelsea Green, 2021), Nicolette Hahn Niman makes the expanded case for large ruminants as part of the solution to the climate crisis. In our discussion, Hahn Niman does some myth-busting and presents a system for managing beef cattle that can enhance ecosystems rather than degrade them. Hahn Niman recognizes not all beef enterprises are equal in their impact and argues components of the industry are tone-deaf. To move the industry forward Hahn Niman offers several places to improve. Some of these are to stop routinely killing primary predators, stop feeding drugs and other junk, stop using hormones, and stop long-distance transport. Join us and challenge some of your perceptions of beef cattle production.

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Roberto J. González, "Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network" (U California Press, 2020) Oct 26, 2021

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 Mexican pueblo built its own autonomous cell phone network—without help from telecom companies or the government. Anthropologist Roberto J. González paints a vivid and nuanced picture of life in a Oaxaca mountain village and the collective tribulation, triumph, and tragedy the community experienced in pursuit of getting connected. In doing so, this book captures the challenges and contradictions facing Mexico's indigenous peoples today, as they struggle to wire themselves into the 21st century using mobile technologies, ingenuity, and sheer determination. It also holds a broader lesson about the great paradox of the digital age, by exploring how constant connection through virtual worlds can hinder our ability to communicate with those around us.

Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

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Alex Pentland and Alexander Lipton, "Building the New Economy: Data As Capital" (MIT Press, 2021) Oct 25, 2021

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 people? Alex Pentland and Alexander Lipton's Building the New Economy: Data As Capital (MIT Press, 2021) calls for us to reinvent the ways that data and artificial intelligence are used in civic and government systems. Arguing that we need to think about data as a new type of capital, the authors show that the use of data trusts and distributed ledgers can empower people and communities with user-centric data ownership, transparent and accountable algorithms, machine learning fairness principles and methodologies, and secure digital transaction systems.

It's well known that social media generate disinformation and that mobile phone tracking apps threaten privacy. But these same technologies may also enable the creation of more agile systems in which power and decision-making are distributed among stakeholders rather than concentrated in a few hands. Offering both big ideas and detailed blueprints, the authors describe such key building blocks as data cooperatives, tokenized funding mechanisms, and tradecoin architecture. They also discuss technical issues, including how to build an ecosystem of trusted data, the implementation of digital currencies, and interoperability, and consider the evolution of computational law systems.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Ashley Hinck, "Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World" (LSU Press, 2019) Oct 22, 2021

Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World(Louisiana State Press, 2019) examines what Ashley Hinck calls “fan-based citizenship”: civic action that blends with and arises from participation in fandom and commitment to a fan-object. Examining cases like Harry Potter fans fighting for fair trade, YouTube fans donating money to charity, and football fans volunteering to mentor local youth, Hinck argues that fan-based citizenship has created new civic practices wherein popular culture may play as large a role in generating social action as traditional political institutions such as the Democratic Party or the Catholic Church.

Hinck considers the ways in which fan-based social engagement arises organically, from fan communities seeking to change their world as a group, as well as the methods creators use to leverage their fans to take social action. The modern shift to networked, fluid communities, Hinck argues, opens up opportunities for public participation that occurs outside of political parties, houses of worship, and organizations for social action.

Politics for the Love of Fandom shows how fan-based citizenship performances help us understand the future possibilities of public engagement, as fans and creators alike tie the ethical frameworks of fan-objects to desired social goal, such as volunteering for political candidates, mentoring at-risk youth, and promoting environmentally friendly policy.

Dr. Ashley Hinck (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Communication at Xavier University specializing in digital media, fandom, citizenship, social activism, rhetoric.

Dr. Lee M. Pierce (they/them) is a rhetoric scholar and speech critic at SUNY Geneseo and host/ess of for New Books Network channels in Language and Media & Communications.

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Eunice Blavascunas, "Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe's Last Primeval Forest" (Indiana UP, 2020) Oct 20, 2021

In Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest (Indiana University Press, 2020),Eunice Blavascunas provides an intimate ethnographic accountof Białowieża, Europe's last primeval forest.At Poland’s easternmost border with Belarus, the deep past of ancient oaks, woodland bison, and thousands of species of insects and fungi collides with authoritarian and communist histories. Foresters, biologists, environmentalists, and locals project the ancient Białowieża Forest as a series of competing icons in struggles over memory, land, and economy, which are also struggles about whether to log or preserve the woodland; whether and how to celebrate the mixed ethnic Polish/Belarusian peasant past; and whether to align this eastern outpost with ultra-right Polish politics, neighboring Belarus, or the European Union. Drawing on more than twenty years of research, Blavascunas untangles complex conflicts between protection and use by examining which forest pasts are celebrated, which fester, and which have been altered in the tumultuous decades following the collapse of communism.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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Rebecca L. Stein, "Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2021) Oct 20, 2021

In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bystanders and police. Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine(Stanford UP, 2021) studies this phenomenon from the vantage point of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Here, cameras have proliferated as political tools in the hands of a broad range of actors and institutions, including Palestinian activists, Israeli soldiers, Jewish settlers, and human rights workers. All trained their lens on Israeli state violence, propelled by a shared dream: that advances in digital photography-closer, sharper, faster-would advance their respective political agendas. Most would be let down.

Drawing on ethnographic work, Rebecca L. Stein chronicles Palestinian video-activists seeking justice, Israeli soldiers laboring to perfect the military's image, and Zionist conspiracy theorists accusing Palestinians of "playing dead." Writing against techno-optimism, Stein investigates what camera dreams and disillusionment across these political divides reveal about the Israeli and Palestinian colonial present, and the shifting terms of power and struggle in the smartphone age.

Mathew Gagné in an independent writer, scholar, and educator, currently teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

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Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, "Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath" (NewSouth, 2021) Oct 19, 2021

Matthew Ricketson joins to discuss how newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic changes in the media and this book shares their stories as essays and narrative interviews. Names include from more than 50 Australian journalists – including Amanda Meade, David Marr and Flip Prior – Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath (NewSouth, 2021) reveals the highs and the lows of those who were there to see it all.

Matthew takes us inside frenetic and vibrant newsrooms at the peak of their influence, and the difficulties of adapting to ever-accelerating news cycles with fewer resources. Some left journalism altogether while others stayed in the media — or sought to reinvent it. Normally the ones telling other people’s stories, in Upheaval journalists share the rawness of losing their own job or watching others lose theirs. They reveal their anxieties and hopes for the industry’s future and their commitment to reporting news that matters.

Matthew Ricketson is presently the professor of communication at Deakin University, previously inaugural journalism professor at the University of Canberra between 2009 and 2017. He ran the journalism program at RMIT for 11 years, and worked on staff at The Australian and Time Australia magazine. His last news media role was Media and Communications Editor at The Age.

Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com

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Katherine Chandler, "Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare" (Rutgers UP, 2020) Oct 19, 2021

Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone--including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness--are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to "man" and the paradoxes at their basis.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Roger Penrose, “The Cyclic Universe” (Open Agenda, 2021) Oct 19, 2021

In the last twenty years, cosmology has unexpectedly emerged as one of the most exciting and dynamic fields of modern science. From astoundingly precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background to the ongoing mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, modern cosmology is unquestionably in the midst of its Golden Age. And yet, one of the most eminent mathematical physicists of our age, Roger Penrose is convinced that there is one fundamental problem that is consistently being overlooked: why did our universe begin in such a particular state of extremely low entropy? His Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) is an attempt to directly address that question. The Cyclic Universe is based on an extensive conversation between Howard Burton and Roger Penrose, co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, and explores his motivation to come up with this theory in the first place and provides detailed insights into his groundbreaking research and Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Cyrus R. K. Patell, "Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Oct 18, 2021

From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe.

Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe(Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell also looks at how this ever-expanding universe of cultural products and enterprises became a global brand and asks: can a corporate entity be considered a "filmmaker and philosopher"?

More than any other film franchise, Lucasfilm's Star Wars has become part of the global cultural imagination. The new generation of Lucasfilm artists is full of passionate fans of the Star Wars universe, who have now been given the chance to build on George Lucas's oeuvre. Within these pages, Patell explores what it means for films and their creators to become part of cultural history in this unprecedented way.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Catherine Knight Steele, "Digital Black Feminism" (NYU Press, 2021) Oct 18, 2021

How have Black women lead a digital revolution? In Digital Black Feminism(NYU Press, 2021), Catherine Knight Steele, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Maryland, places digital Black feminism within the longer-term context of Black feminism and Black women’s experiences in America. The book considers examples from the Black feminist blogosphere and offers a comparative analysis of early Black feminist pioneers and key contemporary voices. Posing questions as to the dangers of commodification and the limits of the digital sphere, as well as celebrating Black feminist success, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences and for anyone interested in digital life today.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Vincent Ialenti, "Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now" (MIT Press, 2020) Oct 15, 2021

Based on twelve years of anthropological exploration, Vincent Ialenti's Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now(MIT Press, 2020) is an engaging guide on deep time learning to reorient our understanding of time and space. As each chapter begins with creative vignettes to capture the reader's imagination and empathy and concludes with five to six reflective "reckonings," the book focuses on Finland's nuclear waste experts whose daily lives revolve around considerations of the far-flung futures and deep pasts. The main goal of chapters one and two is to pursue independent, expert-inspired, long-termist learning. The book's second goal, captured in chapters three and four, is to encourage support for highly trained, too often ignored, long-termist experts. By combating the deflation of expertise by weaving together chains of generational knowledge, Deep Time Reckoning advocates for one route of spirited and adventurous learning to rescue hopes of a safe tomorrow from the Earth's current ecological death spiral.

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Hannah Zeavin, "The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy" (MIT Press, 2021) Oct 14, 2021

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews author Hannah Zeavin about her new book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy(MIT Press, 2021). Among Zeavin’s central interventions in the book is to reframe what is normally understood as the “therapeutic dyad” as always already a triad: therapist, patient, and mediating communication technology. Across the book’s chapters, she traces teletherapy’s history from Freud’s epistolary treatments to contemporary algorithmic therapies. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” characteristic of all therapeutic encounters complicates narratives of technologically mediated treatments as somehow inherently “less than.”

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and fellow in the Program for Psychotherapy at Cambridge Health Alliance. Originally from the west coast, he currently lives and bikes in Somerville, MA. He can be reached at: jay.c.mull@gmail.com.

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Luci Marzola, "Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System" (Oxford UP, 2021) Oct 13, 2021

Luci Marzola's book Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building Studio System(Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before.

Using extensive archival research, Marzola's book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here, the studio system is seen as a technology-dependent business with connections to the larger American industrial world. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians' societies. Rather than focusing on the technical improvements in any particular motion picture tool, this book centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with technology in this creative industry. Engineering Hollywood argues that the American industry was stabilized and able to dominate the motion picture field for decades through collaboration over technologies of everyday use. Hollywood's relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation-with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. As such, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of cooperation that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades.

Luci Marzola is a film and media historian who writes about the technology, labor, and infrastructure of the American film industry in the silent and classical eras. She teaches in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California Irvine and at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Rebecca Earle, "Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Oct 11, 2021

Potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop, yet they were unknown to most of humanity before 1500. Rebecca Earle, Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato's global history reveals the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. It also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives. Feeding the People tells the story of how eating became part of statecraft, and provides a new account of the global spread of one of the world's most successful foods.

Daniela Gutierrez Flores is a PhD candidate in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago Romance Languages and Literatures department. Follow her on Twitter @danielagtz.

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Jenny Nelson, “Harnessing the Sun” (Open Agenda, 2021) Oct 11, 2021

Harnessing the Sun is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jenny Nelson, Professor of Physics and Head of the Climate Change mitigation team at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. After inspiring insights about Jenny Nelson’s academic journey, the conversation examines different solar energy processes, solar energy conversion technology, novel varieties of material for use in solar cells, and the materials used to build and improve photovoltaic, and other renewable, technologies, which convert energy from the sun into electricity.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Martin Monti, “The Limits of Consciousness” (Open Agenda, 2021) Oct 08, 2021

The Limits of Consciousness is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Martin Monti, Associate Professor in Psychology and Neurosurgery, Brain Injury Research Centre, UCLA. This extensive conversation examines Martin Monti’s innovative work with patients who are in a vegetative state or minimally conscious state which has led to some surprising results that might well prove to be integral to our development of a deeper understanding of consciousness.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Cait McKinney, "Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies" (Duke UP, 2020) Oct 08, 2021

For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies(Duke UP, 2020), Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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Michael Yudell, "Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century" (Columbia UP, 2018) Oct 08, 2021

Race, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, an identifiable present, and an uncertain future. The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had a profound effect on the human experience. Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2018)revisits the origins of commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences, examines the roots of the modern idea of race, and explains why race continues to generate controversy as a tool of classification even in our genomic age. Surveying the work of some of the twentieth century's most notable scientists, Race Unmasked reveals how genetics and related biological disciplines formed and preserved ideas of race and, at times, racism. A gripping history of science and scientists, Race Unmasked elucidates the limitations of a racial worldview and throws the contours of our current and evolving understanding of human diversity into sharp relief.

About the author: Michael Yudell is a public health ethicist, award-winning historian, and professor and Vice Dean at the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. He is the co-editor of the Columbia University Press Series Race, Inequality, and Health and the author of several books, including Race Unmasked, for which he won the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association.

About the interviewer: Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

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Caitlin Donohue Wylie, "Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes" (MIT Press, 2021) Oct 08, 2021

Those awe-inspiring dinosaur skeletons on display in museums do not spring fully assembled from the earth. Technicians known as preparators have painstakingly removed the fossils from rock, repaired broken bones, and reconstructed missing pieces to create them. These specimens are foundational evidence for paleontologists, and yet the work and workers in fossil preparation labs go largely unacknowledged in publications and specimen records. In Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes (MIT Press, 2021), Caitlin Wylie investigates the skilled labor of fossil preparators and argues for a new model of science that includes all research work and workers.

Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, Wylie shows that the everyday work of fossil preparation requires creativity, problem-solving, and craft. She finds that preparators privilege their own skills over technology and that scientists prefer to rely on these trusted technicians rather than new technologies. Wylie examines how fossil preparators decide what fossils, and therefore dinosaurs, look like; how labor relations between interdependent yet hierarchically unequal collaborators influence scientific practice; how some museums display preparators at work behind glass, as if they were another exhibit; and how these workers learn their skills without formal training or scientific credentials. The work of preparing specimens is a crucial component of scientific research, although it leaves few written traces. Wylie argues that the paleontology research community's social structure demonstrates how other sciences might incorporate non-scientists into research work, empowering and educating both scientists and nonscientists.

The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld, "Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization" (Princeton UP, 2021) Oct 07, 2021

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 responsibilities of libraries, the rights of authors and publishers, and whether a powerful corporation should be the conveyor of such a fundamental public good. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization (Princeton University Press, 2021) traces the history of Google's book digitization project and its implications for us today.

In this conversation, we hear from Roger Schonfeld about, not just the history of book digitization, but the dynamic and intricate relationships amongst libraries, publishers, and technology corporations. In addition, we talk about the ongoing conversations and community-lead projects that hint at what the future of book and scholarship digitization could look like.

Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely over-caffeinated.

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Paul Milgrom, "Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints" (Columbia UP, 2017) Oct 06, 2021

Neoclassical economic theory shows that under the right conditions, prices alone can guide markets to efficient outcomes. But what if it it’s hard to find the right price? In many important markets, a buyer’s willingness to pay for one good (say, the right to use a certain part of the radio spectrum range in San Francisco) will depend on the price of another complementary good (the right to use that same spectrum in Los Angeles). The number of possible combinations can rapidly become incalculably complex. Such complex markets require new collaborations between economists and computer scientists to create designs that are both incentive compatible and computationally tractable.

In Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints (Columbia UP, 2017), 2020 Economics Nobel Memorial Prize winner Paul Milgrom discusses some of the new economics theory he has developed to help address these challenging contexts, in which neither unfettered market forces nor top-down planning will work well. In our interview we explore these ideas in the context of the most complex auction ever created, the FCC’s broadcast incentive auction. This auction, designed and planned by a team led by Professor Milgrom with his company Auctionomics, purchased underutilized broadcast spectrum from television stations and sold it onward to telecoms providers. This reallocation helped improve wireless network performance and pave the way for 5G wireless services, while also generating over $7 billion for the US treasury.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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Paul Thagard, "Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?" (MIT Press, 2021) Oct 06, 2021

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 favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?(MIT Press, 2021), Paul Thagard looks at how computers (“bots”) and animals measure up to the minds of people, offering the first systematic comparison of intelligence across machines, animals, and humans.

Thagard explains that human intelligence is more than IQ and encompasses such features as problem solving, decision making, and creativity. He uses a checklist of twenty characteristics of human intelligence to evaluate the smartest machines—including Watson, AlphaZero, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars—and the most intelligent animals—including octopuses, dogs, dolphins, bees, and chimpanzees. Neither a romantic enthusiast for nonhuman intelligence nor a skeptical killjoy, Thagard offers a clear assessment. He discusses hotly debated issues about animal intelligence concerning bacterial consciousness, fish pain, and dog jealousy. He evaluates the plausibility of achieving human-level artificial intelligence and considers ethical and policy issues. A full appreciation of human minds reveals that current bots and beasts fall far short of human capabilities.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Jaap-Henk Hoepman, "Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths: Achieving Privacy Through Careful Design" (MIT Press, 2021) Oct 05, 2021

We are tethered to our devices all day, every day, leaving data trails of our searches, posts, clicks, and communications. Meanwhile, governments and businesses collect our data and use it to monitor us without our knowledge. So we have resigned ourselves to the belief that privacy is hard--choosing to believe that websites do not share our information, for example, and declaring that we have nothing to hide anyway. In Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths: Achieving Privacy Through Careful Design (MIT Press, 2021), a computer privacy and security expert argues that privacy is not that hard if we build it into the design of systems from the start.

Along the way, Jaap-Henk Hoepman debunks eight persistent myths surrounding computer privacy. The website that claims it doesn't collect personal data, for example; Hoepman explains that most data is personal, capturing location, preferences, and other information. You don't have anything to hide? There's nothing wrong with wanting to keep personal information--even if it's not incriminating or embarrassing--private. Hoepman shows that just as technology can be used to invade our privacy, it can be used to protect it, when we apply privacy by design. Hoepman suggests technical fixes, discussing pseudonyms, leaky design, encryption, metadata, and the benefits of keeping your data local (on your own device only), and outlines privacy design strategies that system designers can apply now.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Gideon Fujiwara, "From Country to Nation: Ethnographic Studies, Kokugaku, and Spirits in Nineteenth-Century Japan" (Cornell UP, 2021) Oct 05, 2021

From Country to Nation: Ethnographic Studies, Kokugaku, and Spirits in Nineteenth-Century Japan(Cornell UP, 2021) tracks the emergence of the modern Japanese nation in the nineteenth century through the history of some of its local aspirants. It explores how kokugaku (Japan studies) scholars envisioned their place within Japan and the globe, while living in a castle town and domain far north of the political capital.

Gideon Fujiwara follows the story of Hirao Rosen and fellow scholars in the northeastern domain of Tsugaru. On discovering a newly "opened" Japan facing the dominant Western powers and a defeated Qing China, Rosen and other Tsugaru intellectuals embraced kokugaku to secure a place for their local "country" within the broader nation and to reorient their native Tsugaru within the spiritual landscape of an Imperial Japan protected by the gods.

Although Rosen and his fellows celebrated the rise of Imperial Japan, their resistance to the Western influence and modernity embraced by the Meiji state ultimately resulted in their own disorientation and estrangement. By analyzing their writings—treatises, travelogues, letters, poetry, liturgies, and diaries—alongside their artwork, Fujiwara reveals how this socially diverse group of scholars experienced the Meiji Restoration from the peripheries.

Using compelling firsthand accounts, Fujiwara tells the story of the rise of modern Japan, from the perspective of local intellectuals who envisioned their local "country" within a nation that emerged as an empire of the modern world.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Denis McQuail, “Perspectives on Mass Communication” (Open Agenda, 2021) Oct 05, 2021

Perspectives on Mass Communication is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Denis McQuail (1935-2017), who was Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential scholars in the history of mass communication studies. This wide-ranging conversation provides detailed insights into how examining the media, and in particular mass media, necessarily involves a careful, probing look at our societal values; the concepts, metrics and ideas that McQuail developed to measure the sociological influence of the media; the critical role of journalism in society and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Alvin E. Roth, "Who Gets What--and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design" (HMH, 2015) Oct 05, 2021

In Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design (Mariner Books, 2015), Nobel Memorial Prize Winner Alvin Roth explains his pioneering work in the study of matching markets such as kidney exchange, marriage, job placements for new doctors and new professors, and enrollments in schools or colleges. In these markets, “buyers” and “sellers” must each chose the other, and getting the prices right is only a small part of what makes for a successful transaction, if cash is even involved at all. Roth’s work has led the way in taking microeconomics outside the halls of academic theory to become a practical “engineering” tool for policymakers and businesses.

In our interview, we range far beyond the examples from the book to discuss the implications of his work for the design of tech’s market-making “platform” businesses like Airbnb, Amazon, Lyft, or Uber, the challenges he faces when countries or people view some kinds of transactions as “repugnant” or morally unacceptable, and the reasons why San Francisco’s school district (unlike Boston’s or New York’s) chose not to implement the un-gameable school choice plan his team devised for them.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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Darrin McMahon, “Deconstructing Genius” (Open Agenda, 2021) Oct 04, 2021

Deconstructing Genius is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and intellectual historian Darrin McMahon, Dartmouth College. The word “genius” evokes great figures like Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Mozart but what quintessential quality unites these individuals? Can we measure it? Can we create it? This thoughtful conversation explores Darrin’s research on the evolution of genius from Plato to Einstein (which led him to write the book Divine Fury: A History of Genius) in an effort to illuminate what our evolving genius mythology reveals about the rest of us.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Elaine Yuan, "The Web of Meaning: The Internet in a Changing Chinese Society" (U Toronto Press, 2021) Oct 01, 2021

What is the impact of Internet technology communication in China? How do Chinese people view "privacy" differently from the western perspective? How is the newly passed China's Personal Information Protection Law going to impact people's lives? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Elaine Yuan, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago, talks about her recent book, The Web of Meaning: the Internet in a Changing Chinese Society (University of Toronto Press, 2021).

Elaine Yuan's research focuses on how new and emerging forms of communication mediate various social institutions and relations. She has extensively researched the subjects of network and mobile communication, social media, digital infrastructure, and cultural change processes. Her latest book examines the role of the Internet as symbolic fields for reproducing the cultural practices of privacy, nationalism, and the network market in China.

Through three empirical cases – online privacy, cyber-nationalism, and the network market – the book traces how different social actors negotiate the practices, social relations, and power structures that define these evolving institutions in Chinese society. Examining rich user-generated social media data with innovative methods such as semantic network analysis and topic modelling, The Web of Meaning provides a solid empirical base to critique for critiquing the power relationships embedded in Chinese society's very fibre.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

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Kyle Harper, "Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" (Princeton UP, 2021) Oct 01, 2021

Kyle Harper's book Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History(Princeton UP, 2021) is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality. He also tells the story of humanity’s escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible, yet destabilizes the environment and fosters new diseases.

Panoramic in scope, Plagues upon the Earth traces the role of disease in the transition to farming, the spread of cities, the advance of transportation, and the stupendous increase in human population. Harper offers a new interpretation of humanity’s path to control over infectious disease—one where rising evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence between societies. The book reminds us that human health is globally interdependent—and inseparable from the well-being of the planet itself.

Putting the COVID-19 pandemic in perspective, Plagues upon the Earth tells the story of how we got here as a species, and it may help us decide where we want to go.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Mark Maslin, “Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 30, 2021

Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Mark Maslin, Professor of Geography at University College London. This wide-ranging conversation explores Prof. Maslin’s research on the Anthropocene which according to his definition began when human impacts on the planet irrevocably started to change the course of the Earth’s biological and geographical trajectory, leading to climate change, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Sandro Galea, "The Contagion Next Time" (Oxford UP, 2021) Sep 30, 2021

How can we create a healthier world and prevent the crisis next time? In a few short months, COVID-19 devastated the world and, in particular, the United States. It infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, and effectively made the earth stand still. Yet America was already in poor health before COVID-19 appeared. Racism, marginalization, socioeconomic inequality--our failure to address these forces left us vulnerable to COVID-19 and the ensuing global health crisis it became. Had we tackled these challenges twenty years ago, after the outbreak of SARS, perhaps COVID-19 could have been quickly contained. Instead, we allowed our systems to deteriorate.

Following on the themes of his award-winning publication Well, Sandro Galea's The Contagion Next Time (Oxford UP, 2021) articulates the foundational forces shaping health in our society and how we can strengthen them to prevent the next outbreak from becoming a pandemic. Because while no one could have predicted that a pandemic would strike when it did, we did know that a pandemic would strike, sooner or later. We're still not ready for the next pandemic. But we can be--we must be. In lyrical prose, The Contagion Next Time challenges all of us to tackle the deep-rooted obstacles preventing us from becoming a truly vibrant and equitable nation, reminding us of what we've seemed to have forgotten: that our health is a public good worth protecting.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller, "The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company’s Future" (HBR Press, 2021) Sep 30, 2021

Today I talked to Martin Reeves and Jack Fuller about their new book The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company’s Future(Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).

Since the 1990s, the fade rate (i.e., the inability of companies to stay out ahead of their closest rivals) has gone from sustaining a lead on average for 10 years to now merely a single year. So focusing on offer innovation alone won’t suffice. A company that will survive and thrive must re-imagine really every aspect of the company’s culture and operations to succeed. That move requires an open mind and an inquisitive spirit not averse to surprise but, instead, welcoming of them. Who better than these two authors to take on that task? Reeves is in his own words a “failed” musician and biologist turned businessperson, and Fuller likewise prefers to go “inside” people and organizations to understand how their minds and even their very “souls” perform. This is an episode devoted, in short, to how can a company re-humanize itself in an age when converging forces requires a wholesale change.

Martin Reeves is a Senior Partner and Managing Director at BCG, i.e., the Boston Consulting Group. He’s also the Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG’s internal think tank. Jack Fuller is a former special project manager at the BCG Henderson Institute, and the founder of Casati Health, a company that reimagines mental and physical health. He’s a Rhodes Scholar with a background that combines neuroscience and philosophical theology.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Elizabeth Loftus, “The Malleability of Memory” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 28, 2021

The Malleability of Memory is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Elizabeth Loftus, a world-renowned expert on human memory and Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science; Criminology, Law, and Society; Cognitive Science and Law at UC Irvine. This extensive conversation covers her ground-breaking work on the misinformation effect, false memories and her battles with “repressed memory” advocates, the introduction of expert memory testimony into legal proceedings and the effect of DNA evidence on convincing judges of the problematic nature of eyewitness testimony.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jonathan Rees, "The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley's Fight for Pure Food" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) Sep 28, 2021

Though trained as a medical doctor, chemist Harvey Wiley spent most of his professional life advocating for "pure food"—food free of both adulterants and preservatives. A strong proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, still the basis of food safety legislation in the United States, Wiley gained fame for what became known as the Poison Squad experiments—a series of tests in which, to learn more about the effects of various chemicals on the human body, Wiley's own employees at the Department of Agriculture agreed to consume food mixed with significant amounts of various additives, including borax, saltpeter, copper sulfate, sulfuric acid, and formaldehyde. One hundred years later, Wiley's influence lives on in many of our current popular ideas about food: that the wrong food can kill you; that the right food can extend your life; that additives are unnatural; and that unnatural food is unhealthy food. Eating—the process of taking something external in the world and putting it inside of you—has always been an intimate act, but it was Harvey Wiley who first turned it into a matter of life or death.

In The Chemistry of Fear: Harvey Wiley's Fight for Pure Food(Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Jonathan Rees examines Wiley's many—and varied—conflicts and clashes over food safety, including the adulteration of honey and the addition of caffeine to Coca-Cola, formaldehyde to milk, and alum to baking powder. Although Wiley is often depicted as an unwavering champion of the consumer's interest, Rees argues that his critics rightfully questioned some of his motivations, as well as the conclusions that he drew from his most important scientific work. And although Wiley's fame and popularity gave him enormous influence, Rees reveals that his impact on what Americans eat depends more upon fear than it does upon the quality of his research.

Exploring in detail the battles Wiley picked over the way various foods and drinks were made and marketed, The Chemistry of Fear touches upon every stage of his career as a pure food advocate. From his initial work in Washington researching food adulteration, through the long interval at the end of his life when he worked for Good Housekeeping, Wiley often wrote about the people who prevented him from making the pure food law as effective as he thought it should have been. This engaging book will interest anyone who's curious about the pitfalls that eaters faced at the turn of the twentieth century.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Lisa T. Sarasohn, "Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) Sep 28, 2021

For most of our time on this planet, vermin were considered humanity's common inheritance. Fleas, lice, bedbugs, and rats were universal scourges, as pervasive as hunger or cold, at home in both palaces and hovels. But with the spread of microscopic close-ups of these creatures, the beginnings of sanitary standards, and the rising belief that cleanliness equaled class, vermin began to provide a way to scratch a different itch: the need to feel superior, and to justify the exploitation of those pronounced ethnically—and entomologically—inferior.

In Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin(Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Lisa T. Sarasohn tells the fascinating story of how vermin came to signify the individuals and classes that society impugns and ostracizes. How did these creatures go from annoyance to social stigma? And how did people thought verminous become considered almost a species of vermin themselves? Focusing on Great Britain and North America, Sarasohn explains how the label "vermin" makes dehumanization and violence possible. She describes how Cromwellians in Ireland and US cavalry on the American frontier both justified slaughter by warning "Nits grow into lice." Nazis not only labeled Jews as vermin, they used insecticides in the gas chambers to kill them during the Holocaust.

Concentrating on the insects living in our bodies, clothes, and beds, Sarasohn also looks at rats and their social impact. Besides their powerful symbolic status in all cultures, rats' endurance challenges all human pretentions. From eighteenth-century London merchants anointing their carved bedsteads with roasted cat to repel bedbugs to modern-day hedge fund managers hoping neighbors won't notice exterminators in their penthouses, the studies in this book reveal that vermin continue to fuel our prejudices and threaten our status. Getting Under Our Skin will appeal to cultural historians, naturalists, and to anyone who has ever scratched—and then gazed in horror.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021) Sep 28, 2021

Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and consequence. In Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe (MIT Press, 2021), Brian Clegg explores the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationships between space and time to the quantum behaviors that rule the way that matter and light interact, Clegg shows how these patterns provide a unique view of the physical world and its fundamental workings.

Guiding readers on a tour of our world and the universe beyond, Clegg describes the cosmic microwave background, sometimes called the "echo of the big bang," and how it offers clues to the universe's beginnings; the diagrams that illustrate Einstein's revelation of the intertwined nature of space and time; the particle trail patterns revealed by the Large Hadron Collider and other accelerators; and the simple-looking patterns that predict quantum behavior (and decorated Richard Feynman's van). Clegg explains how the periodic table reflects the underlying pattern of the configuration of atoms, discusses the power of the number line, demonstrates the explanatory uses of tree diagrams, and more.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Eric. S. Hintz, "American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D" (MIT Press, 2021) Sep 28, 2021

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

American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D (MIT Press, 2021) by Eric S. Hintz presents a candid look into the history behind the phenomenon.

During the nineteenth century, heroic individual inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell created entirely new industries while achieving widespread fame. However, by 1927, a New York Times editorial suggested that teams of corporate scientists at General Electric, AT&T, and DuPont had replaced the solitary "garret inventor" as the wellspring of invention. But these inventors never disappeared. In this book, Eric Hintz argues that lesser-known inventors such as Chester Carlson (Xerox photocopier), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Earl Tupper (Tupperware) continued to develop important technologies throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, Hintz explains how independent inventors gradually fell from public view as corporate brands increasingly became associated with high-tech innovation.

Focusing on the years from 1890 to 1950, Hintz documents how American independent inventors competed (and sometimes partnered) with their corporate rivals, adopted a variety of flexible commercialization strategies, established a series of short-lived professional groups, lobbied for fairer patent laws, and mobilized for two world wars. After 1950, the experiences of independent inventors generally mirrored the patterns of their predecessors, and they continued to be overshadowed during corporate R&D's postwar golden age. The independents enjoyed a resurgence, however, at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Apple's Steve Jobs and Shark Tank's Lori Greiner heralded a new generation of heroic inventor-entrepreneurs. By recovering the stories of a group once considered extinct, Hintz shows that independent inventors have long been—and remain—an important source of new technologies.

Nathan Moore is a history Ph.D. candidate and graduate assistant at Auburn University.

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Chris Bleakley, "Poems That Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms" (Oxford UP, 2020) Sep 27, 2021

As algorithms become ever more significant to and embedded in our everyday lives, ever more accessible introductions to them are needed. While several excellent technical and critical treatments have emerged in recent years, i had not come across a book for the general public that would provide a deep sense for the intuitions and motivations behind their development. Chris Bleakley's new book offers this and more: conceptual rigor woven into historical vignettes in a style that i believe general readers will find truly enjoyable to read.

Poems that Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms (Oxford UP, 2020) is itself a quite poetic book, in which echoes of ideas and variations on themes can be heard throughout. Its stories encompass the early hypothetical and mechanical computers, the charactered rise of weather forecasting, the origins (and lulls) of machine learning, and the sensational competitions between master game players and artificial intelligence. The book traverses a long historical arc, but each episode is a quick read, remarkable in their ability to convey depth and rigor in crisp, plain language. It was a delight to talk with Chris about these and other aspects of his book.

Suggested companion works:

--Simon Singh, The Code Book

--George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

--Greg Kohs (director), "AlphaGo"

Chris Bleakley is Head of the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin. He graduated with a BSc (Hons) degree in Computer Science from Queen's University, Belfast, and a PhD degree in Electronic Engineering from Dublin City University. After college, he was employed as a software consultant by Accenture and, later, as a senior telecommunications researcher at Broadcom Eireann Research.

Cory Brunson is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data.

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Vanilla Beer and Allenna Leonard, "Stafford Beer the Father of Management Cybernetics" (2019) Sep 27, 2021

In this episode I am in conversation with artist and author Vanilla Beer about her 2019 book Stafford Beer: The Father of Management Cybernetics. While he got is start in the academic world, it was in industry where Stafford Beer made is most recognized contributions. Beer is best known for being the first systems thinker to apply cybernetics to management; it is from this work that he developed his Viable System Model (VSM). There is nothing theoretical about Beer's solutions - they are all grounded in practice. Their successful application caused him to be invited to work for Salvador Allende in Chile and for many other companies and governments. His insistence that hierarchical models will fail the people whom they are supposed to serve is axiomatic to his thinking.

Stafford Beer: The Father of Management Cybernetics is presented in a fun comic book style that tells the story of Stafford Beer - man, father, thinker, practitioner. In it we get a glimpse into Beer's early influences and the role his spirituality played in life and work. Allenna Leonard, Beer's partner later in life - until his death in Toronto in 2002, contributes a fantastic cybernetics glossary readers will want to refer to time and again.I am pleased to share my conversation with Vanilla Beer as a way to mark Stafford Beer's 95th birthday. Vanilla shares tremendous insights about her father, a man who contributed greatly to systems sciences, and whose name will forever be associated with cybernetics.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

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Tony Leggett, “The Problems of Physics, Reconsidered” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 27, 2021

The Problems of Physics, Reconsidered is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Physics Nobel Laureate Tony Leggett. The basis of this conversation is Tony Leggett’s book The Problems of Physics and further explores the insightful plain-speaking itemization that he developed of the physics landscape according to four basic categories—the very small (particle physics), the very large (cosmology), the very complex (condensed matter physics) and the very unclear (foundations of quantum theory)—while providing a thoughtful follow-up analysis from a contemporary perspective to assess how much progress we’ve made and which mysteries remain or have come on the scene since the book was published.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Nick Lane, “A Matter of Energy: Biology From First Principles” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 24, 2021

A Matter of Energy: Biology From First Principles is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nick Lane, Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London and bestselling author. After an inspiring exploration of Nick Lane’s career path, this wide-ranging conversation covers his bioenergetic view of early, evolutionary history, the origin of life and how all complex life is composed of a very particular cell type that we all share, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Allan V. Horwitz, "DSM: A History of Psychiatry's Bible" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) Sep 24, 2021

Over the past seventy years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has evolved from a virtually unknown and little-used pamphlet to an imposing and comprehensive compendium of mental disorder. Its nearly 300 conditions have become the touchstones for the diagnoses that patients receive, students are taught, researchers study, insurers reimburse, and drug companies promote. Although the manual is portrayed as an authoritative corpus of psychiatric knowledge, it is a product of intense political conflicts, dissension, and factionalism. The manual results from struggles among psychiatric researchers and clinicians, different mental health professions, and a variety of patient, familial, feminist, gay, and veterans' interest groups. The DSM is fundamentally a social document that both reflects and shapes the professional, economic, and cultural forces associated with its use.

In DSM: A History of Psychiatry's Bible (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Allan V. Horwitz examines how the manual, known colloquially as "psychiatry's bible," has been at the center of thinking about mental health in the United States since its original publication in 1952. The first book to examine its entire history, this volume draws on both archival sources and the literature on modern psychiatry to show how the history of the DSM is more a story of the growing social importance of psychiatric diagnoses than of increasing knowledge about the nature of mental disorder. Despite attempts to replace it, Horwitz argues that the DSM persists because its diagnostic entities are closely intertwined with too many interests that benefit from them.

This comprehensive treatment should appeal to not only specialists but also anyone who is interested in how diagnoses of mental illness have evolved over the past seven decades—from unwanted and often imposed labels to resources that lead to valued mental health treatments and social services.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Shannon Mattern, "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences" (Princeton UP, 2021) Sep 24, 2021

Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models.

Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city’s many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs.

Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

Shannon Mattern is professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her books include Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media and The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities. She lives in New York City. Website wordsinspace.net Instagram @atlas.sounds Twitter @shannonmattern

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez, "Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human" (Princeton UP, 2021) Sep 23, 2021

Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? Delicious is a supremely entertaining foray into the heart of such questions.

With generous helpings of warmth and wit, Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez offer bold new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of delicious flavors has guided the course of human history. They consider the role that flavor may have played in the invention of the first tools, the extinction of giant mammals, the evolution of the world’s most delicious and fatty fruits, the creation of beer, and our own sociality. Along the way, you will learn about the taste receptors you didn’t even know you had, the best way to ferment a mastodon, the relationship between Paleolithic art and cheese, and much more.

Blending irresistible storytelling with the latest science, Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human(Princeton UP, 2021) is a deep history of flavor that will transform the way you think about human evolution and the gustatory pleasures of the foods we eat.

Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

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Laura Paskus, "At the Precipice: New Mexico's Changing Climate" (U New Mexico Press, 2020) Sep 23, 2021

At the Precipice: New Mexico's Changing Climate(U New Mexico Press, 2020) explores the question many of us have asked ourselves: What kind of world are we leaving to our children? The realities of climate change consume the media and keep us up at night worrying about the future. But in New Mexico and the larger Southwest, climate change has been silently wreaking havoc: average temperatures in the Upper Rio Grande Basin are increasing at double the global average, super fires like Las Conchas have devastated mountains, and sections of the Rio Grande are drying up.

Laura Paskus has tracked the issues of climate change at both the state and federal levels. She shares the frightening truth, both in terms of what is happening in nature and what is not happening to counteract the mounting crisis. She writes, “I wonder about the coming world. Which trees will grow, which birds will have survived. . . . The door to that new world has opened. And there’s no going back.” And yet our future is not yet determined—or is it?

Laura Paskus is an environmental journalist and a correspondent whose work has been widely published. She is the producer of New Mexico In Focus’s series “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present, and Future.”

Brady McCartney is a Ph.D. student and scholar of religion, Indigenous studies, and environmental history at the University of Florida.Email: Brady.McCartney@UFL.edu

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Stephen Kosslyn, “Applied Psychology: Thinking Critically” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 23, 2021

Applied Psychology: Thinking Critically is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Stephen Kosslyn, a renowned psychologist and Founder, President and Chief Academic Officer of Foundry College.This wide-ranging conversation explores Kosslyn and his colleagues’ extensive analysis of research results on the differences between what the top parts of the brain and the bottom parts of the brain do and what the implications of those results are for everyday life which led to a new theory of personality called the Theory of Cognitive Modes. In addition the discussion covers how pedagogical principles were applied in the real world of learning and teaching by establishing Minerva Schools at KGI.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer" (Princeton UP, 2020) Sep 22, 2021

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer(Princeton UP, 2020) delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer’s evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments.

Athena Aktipis goes back billions of years to explore when unicellular forms became multicellular organisms. Within these bodies of cooperating cells, cheating ones arose, overusing resources and replicating out of control, giving rise to cancer. Aktipis illustrates how evolution has paved the way for cancer’s ubiquity, and why it will exist as long as multicellular life does. Even so, she argues, this doesn’t mean we should give up on treating cancer—in fact, evolutionary approaches offer new and promising options for the disease’s prevention and treatments that aim at long-term management rather than simple eradication. Looking across species—from sponges and cacti to dogs and elephants—we are discovering new mechanisms of tumor suppression and the many ways that multicellular life-forms have evolved to keep cancer under control. By accepting that cancer is a part of our biological past, present, and future—and that we cannot win a war against evolution—treatments can become smarter, more strategic, and more humane.

Unifying the latest research from biology, ecology, medicine, and social science, The Cheating Cell challenges us to rethink cancer’s fundamental nature and our relationship to it.

Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

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Joshua Schimel, "Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded" (Oxford UP, 2011) Sep 22, 2021

Listen to this interview of Joshua Schimel, Professor of soil ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded (Oxford UP, 2011). We talk about how writing is research, and about how the Vietnam War was really just one big fat rejected manuscript.

Joshua Schimel : "One of the challenges, I think, we have in science is that all the way up through university, we're being taught scientific knowledge. But that isn't really science. That's the product of science. Science is the process of learning new things. And there's this wonderful book, Ignorance: How it drives science, by Stuart Firestein, and the book is elegant in that idea of reminding people that science is about ignorance. Science is about what we don't know and how to figure it out. And so, for example, in a good Introduction to an article, you're not just trying to tell people everything we know about a field, you're trying either to identify the gap in what we know or, as the most important papers do, to locate the error in what we do know: 'We've been thinking about things this one way, but we've been wrong in some part of that thinking.' That's going to really engage the experts."

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Justin Khoury, “Cosmological Conundrums” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 21, 2021

Cosmological Conundrums is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Justin Khoury, Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. This thoughtful, extensive conversation gives a window into the world of a practicing cosmologist, the often-considerable gap between formal scientific positions and personal scientific interests and examines a wide range of fascinating topics that his research covers such as the early universe, the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, Cosmic Microwave Background, the MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) theory, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Caley Horan, "Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Sep 21, 2021

Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. In Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America(The University of Chicago Press, 2021), Caley Horan charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life.

Through a careful analysis of insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them.

Caley Horan is Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ashton Merck is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Interdisciplinary Risk Sciences at NC State University. She can be found on Twitter @awmerck.

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Mike Jones, "Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum" (Routledge, 2021) Sep 21, 2021

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum (Routledge, 2021) provides the first interdisciplinary study of the digital documentation of artefacts and archives in contemporary museums, while also exploring the implications of polyphonic, relational thinking on collections documentation.

Drawing on case studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the book provides a critical examination of the history of collections management and documentation since the introduction of computers to museums in the 1960s, demonstrating how technology has contributed to the disconnection of distributed collections knowledge. Jones also highlights how separate documentation systems have developed, managed by distinct, increasingly professionalised staff, impacting our ability to understand and use what we find in museums and their ever-expanding online collections. Exploring this legacy allows us to rethink current practice, focusing less on individual objects and more on the rich stories and interconnected resources that lie at the heart of the contemporary, plural, participatory ‘relational museum.’

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum is essential reading for those who wish to better understand the institutional silos found in museums, and the changes required to make museum knowledge more accessible. The book is a particularly important addition to the fields of museum studies, archival science, information management, and the history of cultural heritage technologies.

Mike Jones is an archivist, historian, and collections consultant with more than 12 years of experience working with the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) on digital, archival, and public history projects. His interdisciplinary research explores the history of collections-based knowledge, and the ways in which contemporary technologies can help us to develop and maintain relationships within and between archives, collections, disciplines, and communities.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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Ruth Aylett and Patricia A. Vargas, "Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know" (MIT Press, 2021) Sep 21, 2021

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 what robots can and can't do, how they work, and what we can reasonably expect their future capabilities to be. It will not only make you think differently about the capabilities of robots; it will make you think differently about the capabilities of humans.

Ruth Aylett and Patricia Vargas discuss the history of our fascination with robots—from chatbots and prosthetics to autonomous cars and robot swarms. They show us the ways in which robots outperform humans and the ways they fall woefully short of our superior talents. They explain how robots see, feel, hear, think, and learn; describe how robots can cooperate; and consider robots as pets, butlers, and companions. Finally, they look at robots that raise ethical and social issues: killer robots, sexbots, and robots that might be gunning for your job. Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know(MIT Press, 2021) equips readers to look at robots concretely—as human-made artifacts rather than placeholders for our anxieties.

Find out: •Why robots can swim and fly but find it difficult to walk •Which robot features are inspired by animals and insects•Why we develop feelings for robots •Which human abilities are hard for robots to emulate.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Firmin DeBrabander, "Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Sep 20, 2021

As governments and corporations mine our “entrenched culture of sharing” to invade privacy (down to Target creating an algorithm to figure out which shoppers are in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy) what happens to democracy? Can democracy survive with no (or very little privacy)? What if the citizenry cares little about privacy and or is unwilling to protect it? If surveillance is here to stay what are the prospects for individual autonomy? citizenship? democratic discussion and deliberation? Life after Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society (Cambridge UP, 2020) argues that we should not focus on protecting individual privacy; privacy is NOT “our best hope” for ensuring a “democratic future.” Instead, we should channel Hannah Arendt and focus on the public realm and how it supports political freedom.

Dr. Firmin DeBrabander is a Professor of Philosophy at Maryland Institute College of Art and the author of two previous books: Do Guns Make Us Free?: Democracy and the Armed Society (Yale University Press, 2015), and Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics and the Passions (Bloomsbury Press, 2007). He writes social and political commentary for the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Salon, The Atlantic and The New Republic.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Richard Janko, “The Derveni Papyrus” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 17, 2021

The Derveni Papyrus is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Richard Janko, Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. This wide-ranging conversation covers Prof. Janko’s research on the Derveni Papyrus, Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript from the 4th century BCE and the most important text relating to early Greek literature, science, religion and philosophy to have come to light since the Renaissance.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Princeton UP's "Pedia" Series: Beautiful, Short Books About Big, Important Subjects Sep 17, 2021

Today I talked to Robert Kirk, the publisher of Princeton University Press's "Pedia" book series. Encyclopedic in nature and miniature in form, these books explore the wonders of the natural world, from A to Z. These brief compendiums cover wide ground in thoughtful, witty, and endlessly fascinating entries on the science, natural history, and culture of their subjects. Books in the series include: Insectpedia, Dinopedia, Geopedia, Treepedia, Birdpedia, Florapedia and Fungipedia. More titles are forthcoming!

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Patrick T. Reardon, "The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago" (Southern Illinois UP, 2020) Sep 14, 2021

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 they know about the single most important structure in the history of the Windy City? In engagingly brisk prose, Patrick T. Reardon unfolds the fascinating story about how Chicago’s elevated Loop was built, gave its name to the downtown, helped unify the city, saved the city’s economy, and was itself saved from destruction in the 1970s.

Patrick T. Reardon's book The Loop: The 'L' Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago (Southern Illinois UP, 2020) combines urban history, biography, engineering, architecture, transportation, culture, and politics to explore the elevated Loop’s impact on the city’s development and economy and on the way Chicagoans see themselves. The Loop rooted Chicago’s downtown in a way unknown in other cities, and it protected that area—and the city itself—from the full effects of suburbanization during the second half of the twentieth century. Masses of data underlie new insights into what has made Chicago’s downtown, and the city as a whole, tick.

The Loop features a cast of colorful Chicagoans, such as legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, poet Edgar Lee Masters, mayor Richard J. Daley, and the notorious Gray Wolves of the Chicago City Council. Charles T. Yerkes, an often-demonized figure, is shown as a visionary urban planner, and engineer John Alexander Low Waddell, a world-renowned bridge creator, is introduced to Chicagoans as the designer of their urban railway.

This fascinating exploration of how one human-built structure reshaped the social and economic landscape of Chicago is the definitive book on Chicago’s elevated Loop.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email tobtoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Katy Borner, "Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures" (MIT Press, 2021) Sep 10, 2021

To envision and create the futures we want, society needs an appropriate understanding of the likely impact of alternative actions. Data models and visualizations offer a way to understand and intelligently manage complex, interlinked systems in science and technology, education, and policymaking. Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures(MIT Press, 2021), from the creator of Atlas of Science and Atlas of Knowledge, shows how we can use data to predict, communicate, and ultimately attain desirable futures.

Using advanced data visualizations to introduce different types of computational models, Atlas of Forecasts demonstrates how models can inform effective decision-making in education, science, technology, and policymaking. The models and maps presented aim to help anyone understand key processes and outcomes of complex systems dynamics, including which human skills are needed in an artificial intelligence–empowered economy; what progress in science and technology is likely to be made; and how policymakers can future-proof regions or nations. This Atlas offers a driver's seat-perspective for a test-drive of the future.

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Caitlin Petre, "All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists" (Princeton UP, 2021) Sep 10, 2021

Over the past 15 years, journalism has experienced a rapid proliferation of data about online reader behavior in the form of web metrics. These newsroom metrics influence which stories are written, how news is promoted, and which journalists get hired and fired. Some argue that metrics help journalists better serve their audiences. Others worry that metrics are the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch-wielding factory manager. In All the News That's Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists (Princeton UP 2021), Caitlin Petre offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how metrics are reshaping the work of journalism.

The book is based on Petre's interviews and ethnographic observations at Chartbeat, Gawker, and the New York Times. Across the organizations, she finds that newsroom metrics are a powerful form of managerial surveillance and discipline. However, unlike the manager's stopwatch that preceded them, digital metrics are designed to gain the trust of wary journalists by providing a habit-forming user experience that mimics key features of addictive games. She details how metrics intersect with newsroom hierarchies and norms, as well as how their ambiguity leads to seemingly arbitrary interpretations of success. As performance analytics spread to virtually every professional field, Petre's findings speak to the future of expertise and labor relations in contexts far beyond journalism.

Caitlin Petre is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast.

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Stephen Hinshaw, “Understanding ADHD” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 09, 2021

Understanding ADHD is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Stephen Hinshaw, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley. Stephen Hinshaw is an expert in the fields of clinical child and adolescent psychology and developmental psychopathology, as well as stigma, preventive interventions and dehumanization related to mental illness.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Angelica Malin, "She Made It: The Toolkit for Female Founders in the Digital Age" (Kogan Page, 2021) Sep 09, 2021

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 entrepreneurs don’t tend to receive the same funding assistance as do their male counterparts, but in turn they have the advantage of often connecting more effectively with their target markets. It’s their soft skills, in effect, that can see them through observes Angelica Malin. Plus one should never forget the power of having a greater purpose, a sense of mission by, for instance, by addressing a need that other, often male entrepreneurs may overlook. This guest has no fear of public speaking, whatsoever – and it shows. This is a very engaging episode as Angelica gives crisp, lively answers to questions like: why it helps to be personal and quirky in addressing journalists, how Instagram has changed in recent years, and how Taylor Swift helped make She Made It possible.

Angelica Malin is the Editor-in-Chief of About Time Magazine and the U.K.’s rising voice for championing women founders and entrepreneurs. She’s appeared on the BBC News and LBC Business Hour and has been featured in The Telegraph, Forbes, and Real Business.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Silvia Casini, "Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology" (MIT Press, 2021) Sep 09, 2021

Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology (MIT Press, 2021), Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image–and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization.

Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists’ body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen’s biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art-science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Emma Marris, "Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Sep 08, 2021

In Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), Emma Marris wrestles with big ethical questions facing the conservation field. Emma takes us through several experiences that informed the book, exposing us to relevant on-the-ground decisions impacting the life or death of animals. When the interests of individual animals conflict with the goals of biodiversity preservation, is it okay to kill? Are any animals truly wild now that humans have directly altered so much of their habitat? How do we balance the rights of introduced species with those already established within an ecosystem? To start engaging these, and other questions, Emma takes us through a needed crash course in ethics, specifically environmental ethics. Much like her previous work, we are exposed to new ways of thinking about old problems. Listening in will not disappoint.

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Stephen J. Pyne, "The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next" (U California Press, 2021) Sep 08, 2021

Stephen J. Pyne's new bookThe Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (U California Press, 2021) tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet.

Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity’s firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene.

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Audrey Watters, "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" (MIT Press, 2021) Sep 07, 2021

Contrary to the claims of many of today’s advocates of computerized instruction and online learning, efforts to use technology to improve the education process are hardly new. In Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning (MIT Press, 2021), Audrey Watters recounts the attempts over the past century to use technology to improve educational procedures. These began over a century ago with psychologist Sidney Pressy’s effort to invent an “automatic teacher” that would eliminate drudgery by automating test scoring. While such efforts gained momentum in the 1930s, the attempts by manufacturers to profit from such technology often complicated their introduction and adoption. In the 1950s B. F. Skinner gave new life to these endeavors by developing devices and processes that applied his theories of behavioral psychology to the learning process. Though the idea of “push-button education” seized the public’s imagination and stimulated efforts to introduce his teaching machines to the classroom, by the end of the 1960s the growing backlash against Skinner’s ideas and regimentation in education ensured the demise of his vision of the automated classroom.

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Nayanika Mathur, "Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Sep 07, 2021

Big cats—tigers, leopards, and lions—that make prey of humans are commonly known as “man-eaters.” Anthropologist Nayanika Mathur reconceptualizes them as cats that have gone off the straight path to become “crooked.” Building upon fifteen years of research in India, this groundbreaking work moves beyond both colonial and conservationist accounts to place crooked cats at the center of the question of how we are to comprehend a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists.

Nayanika Mathur's book Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores in vivid detail the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer startling new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. Through creative ethnographic storytelling, Crooked Cats illuminates the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement. Weaving together “beastly tales” spun from encounters with big cats, Mathur deepens our understanding of the causes, consequences, and conceptualization of the climate crisis.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com

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H. Glenn Penny, "In Humboldt's Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology" (Princeton UP, 2021) Sep 06, 2021

The Berlin Ethnological Museum is one of the world's largest and most important anthropological museums, housing more than a half million objects collected from around the globe. In Humboldt's Shadow tells the story of the German scientists and adventurers who, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's inclusive vision of the world, traveled the earth in pursuit of a total history of humanity. It also details the fate of their museum, which they hoped would be a scientists' workshop, a place where a unitary history of humanity might emerge.

H. Glenn Penny shows how these early German ethnologists assembled vast ethnographic collections to facilitate their study of the multiplicity of humanity, not to confirm emerging racist theories of human difference. He traces how Adolf Bastian filled the Berlin museum in an effort to preserve the records of human diversity, yet how he and his supporters were swept up by the imperialist currents of the day and struck a series of Faustian bargains to ensure the growth of their collections. Penny describes how influential administrators such as Wilhelm von Bode demanded that the museum be transformed into a hall for public displays, and how Humboldt's inspiring ideals were ultimately betrayed by politics and personal ambition.

In Humboldt's Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology(Princeton UP, 2021) calls on museums to embrace anew Bastian's vision while deepening their engagement with indigenous peoples concerning the provenance and stewardship of these collections.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Joanna Haigh, “Solar Impact: Climate and the Sun” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 06, 2021

Solar Impact: Climate and the Sun is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Joanna Haigh, Professor Emerita of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London and Co-Director of the Grantham Institute until her retirement in 2019. After inspiring details about how she got into her field of study and how we can encourage more girls to get more interested in science, the conversation examines her research of the influence of the sun and solar variability on our climate, how energy emitted by the sun in the form of heat, light and ultraviolet radiation warms the earth and drives our climate, how data from satellites and modelling the processes helps us distinguish the warming effects of greenhouse gases from those of natural variations in solar energy, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jennifer Groh, “Knowing One’s Place: Space and the Brain” (Open Agenda, 2021) Sep 02, 2021

Knowing One’s Place: Space and the Brain is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jennifer Groh, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. After an inspiring story about how she became interested in neuroscience, this thoughtful conversation examines Jennifer Groh’s extensive research on how the brain combines various streams of sensory input to determine where things are, together with the corresponding implications for a wide range of issues, from neuroplasticity to evolutionary mechanisms, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Anil Seth, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness" (Dutton, 2020) Sep 02, 2021

Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science.

An unprecedented tour of consciousness thanks to new experimental evidence, much of which comes from Anil Seth's own lab. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness.

Seth's work has yielded new ways to communicate with patients previously deemed unconscious, as well as promising methods of coping with brain damage and disease. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Dutton, 2020) sheds light on the future of AI and virtual/augmented reality, adds empirical evidence to cutting-edge ideas of how the brain works, and ushers in a new age in the study of the mystery of human consciousness. Being You is a life-changing existential insight into being you.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Alessandra Tanesini, "The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology" (Oxford UP, 2021) Sep 01, 2021

Epistemology traditionally focuses on the analysis of central epistemological concepts, such as knowledge, justification, evidence, truth, and belief. But having knowledge is also a matter of acquiring knowledge. And this means that epistemology must also address questions of our conduct – how we should go about finding things out, what it means to be a good inquirer, and so on. This suggests that people can behave badly as epistemic agents. It falls to epistemologists to examine bad epistemic conduct as well.

In her new book, The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology (Oxford UP, 2021), Alessandra Tanesini begins from the observation that good epistemic conduct involves proper appraisal of one’s epistemic condition, including one’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Her book focuses on the ways epistemic self-assessment can go wrong. Along the way, she provides a general theory of epistemic virtue and vice.

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Jemma Wadham, "Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity" (Princeton UP, 2021) Sep 01, 2021

The ice sheets and glaciers that cover one-tenth of Earth’s land surface are in grave peril. High in the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya, once-indomitable glaciers are retreating, even dying. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, thinning glaciers may be unlocking vast quantities of methane stored for millions of years beneath the ice. In Ice Rivers: A Story of Glaciers, Wilderness, and Humanity (Princeton UP, 2021), renowned glaciologist Jemma Wadham offers a searing personal account of glaciers and the rapidly unfolding crisis that they—and we—face.

Taking readers on a personal journey from Europe and Asia to Antarctica and South America, Wadham introduces majestic glaciers around the globe as individuals—even friends—each with their own unique character and place in their community. She challenges their first appearance as silent, passive, and lifeless, and reveals that glaciers are, in fact, as alive as a forest or soil, teeming with microbial life and deeply connected to almost everything we know. They influence crucial systems on which people depend, from lucrative fisheries to fertile croplands, and represent some of the most sensitive and dynamic parts of our world. Their fate is inescapably entwined with our own, and unless we act to abate the greenhouse warming of our planet the potential consequences are almost unfathomable.

A riveting blend of cutting-edge research and tales of encounters with polar bears and survival under the midnight sun, Ice Rivers is an unforgettable portrait of—and love letter to—our vanishing icy wildernesses.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Magnus Ramage and Karen Shipp, "Systems Thinkers" (Springer, 2020) Sep 01, 2021

In this episode I spoke with Magnus Ramage, co-author of Systems Thinkers (Springer, 2020). This second edition provides an update to Ramage’s and co-author Karen Shipp’s earlier exploration, and presents an enlightening—often inspiring—biographical history of the field of systems thinking. Systems thinking is necessarily interdisciplinary; as such, the people highlighted in the book come from a wide range of areas such as biology, management, physiology, anthropology, chemistry, public policy, sociology and environmental studies among others.

Systems Thinkers examines the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers—some, like Gregory Bateson, only today becoming well-known outside systems circles, others less-known and in Ramage’s view, underappreciated. The book explores each thinker’s key contributions, and the way their contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker’s own writing, to give a flavor of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests. The thinkers are usefully categorized into six groupings ranging from ‘Early Cybernetics’ to ‘Learning Systems’.

A significant aim of the book is to broaden and deepen the reader’s interest in systems writers, providing an appetizing ‘taster’ for each of the 30 thinkers, so that the reader is encouraged to go on to study the published works of the thinkers themselves. Ramage describes Systems Thinkers as a “collective love letter to some of most remarkable people in academia and professional practice over the past century”. His passion for these thinkers comes through in his writing and in our conversation. It is a passion shared by others who stand on the shoulders of these thinkers.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

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Roy Richard Grinker, "Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness" (Norton, 2021) Sep 01, 2021

Stigma about mental illness makes life doubly hard for people suffering from mental or emotional distress. In addition to dealing with their conditions, they must also contend with social shame and secrecy. But by examining how mental illness is conceived of and treated in other cultures, we can improve our own perspectives in the Western world. In his new book, Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (Norton, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker offers a critique of our current mental health system based on cross-cultural observations as well as suggestions for improving upon it. In our interview, we talk about the impact of stigma on mental health treatment and his ideas about where it comes from. He also explains why he feels optimistic about recent trends in the way individuals speak about their mental health challenges.

Roy Richard Grinker is professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. His specialties include ethnicity, nationalism, and psychological anthropology, with topical expertise in autism, Korea, and sub-Saharan Africa. He is also the director of George Washington University’s Institute for Ethnographic Research and editor-in-chief of the journal Anthropological Quarterly. He is author of several books, including Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism. He lives in Washington, DC.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse.

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Jennifer L. Lambe, "Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History" (UNC Press, 2017) Aug 31, 2021

"On the outskirts of Havana lies Mazorra, an asylum known to--and at times feared by--ordinary Cubans for over a century. Since its founding in 1857, the island's first psychiatric hospital has been an object of persistent political attention. Drawing on hospital documents and government records, as well as the popular press, photographs, and oral histories, Jennifer L. Lambe charts the connections between the inner workings of this notorious institution and the highest echelons of Cuban politics. Across the sweep of modern Cuban history, she finds, Mazorra has served as both laboratory and microcosm of the Cuban state: the asylum is an icon of its ignominious colonial and neocolonial past and a crucible of its republican and revolutionary futures. From its birth, Cuban psychiatry was politically inflected, drawing partisan contention while sparking debates over race, religion, gender, and sexuality. Psychiatric notions were even invested with revolutionary significance after 1959, as the new government undertook ambitious schemes for social reeducation. But Mazorra was not the exclusive province of government officials and professionalizing psychiatrists. U.S. occupiers, Soviet visitors, and, above all, ordinary Cubans infused the institution, both literal and metaphorical, with their own fears, dreams, and alternative meanings. Together, their voices comprise the madhouse that, as Lambe argues, haunts the revolutionary trajectory of Cuban history."

I talked with Dr. Lambe about her first book, Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History,which was published in 2017 by University of North Carolina Press as part of the Envisioning Cuba Series. Dr. Lambe is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at Brown University and is also the co-editor of The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959-1980 (2019). Dr. Lambe and I talked corruption, politics, and madness. Don't miss this wonderful conversation!

Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual politics surrounding black motherhood in twentieth-century Cuba. Twitter: @RozzmeryPV

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Thomas O. Haakenson, "Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Aug 31, 2021

Thomas O. Haakenson's book Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada (Bloomsbury, 2021) focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedländer (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how Friedländer/Mynona, Brugman, Höch, and other Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity.

Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora.

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Michael Gordin, “Science and Pseudoscience” (Open Agenda, 2021) Aug 30, 2021

Science and Pseudoscience is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Michael Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. This thought-provoking, extensive conversation examines the strange case of Immanuel Velikovsky, author of the bestselling book “Worlds in Collision” that managed to provocatively combine unbridled scientific speculation with ancient myth, as a way of probing the often-problematic boundary between science and pseudoscience. By all accounts, Velikovsky was a decidedly curious character. The notorious Russian-born doctor-turned psychoanalyst-turned astronomer-historian-autodidact not only had a flair for writing and boatloads of charisma and energy, he also was on record for making a couple of concrete predictions of his radical new theory of the solar system that turned out, much to the dismay of the authorities of the day, to actually be correct.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jay Gargus, “Autism: A Genetic Perspective” (Open Agenda, 2021) Aug 24, 2021

Autism: A Genetic Perspective is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jay Gargus, Professor of Physiology, Biophysics and Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Autism Research and Translation at UC Irvine. This wide-ranging conversation examines the recent explosion in our genetic understanding and its implications for the future of medicine, together with the importance of understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms in order to successfully treat a wide range of genetic disorders. Prof. Gargus focuses on autism, dispelling myths associated with the condition, advocating why a treatment should be actively pursued, and illustrating what we can learn from the recent breakthrough in cystic fibrosis research.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Rohit Khanna, "Misunderstanding Health: Making Sense of America's Broken Health Care System" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) Aug 24, 2021

With technological advances and information sharing so prevalent, health care should be more transparent and easier to access than ever before. So why does it seem like everything about it―from pricing, drug development, and the emergence of new diseases to the intricacies of biologic and precision medicine therapies―is becoming more complex, not less?

Rohit Khanna's Misunderstanding Health: Making Sense of America's Broken Health Care System(Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) examines some of today's most revealing health care trends while imploring us to look at these issues with alacrity, humor, and vigilance. Over the course of eighteen short, engaging chapters, Khanna explains

• how unexamined beliefs can endanger patients, drive cost, and increase bureaucracy

• the "Dr. Google" effect on the ways that we seek (or eschew) care

• why our health care costs more than in any other country

• the unintended consequences of using rating sites like Yelp

• what we can learn about health care from hurricanes

• how social media influencers impact health care

• how artificial intelligence can improve health care

• why health screening programs are so complicated

• what the industry is doing to combat health care fraud

• what the big deal about legalizing medical cannabis is

• how to think about behavioral "nudges" designed to improve health

• why understanding how data are collected is critical to understanding what they can tell us

• and much more

Each provocative and easy-to-read chapter covers a familiar aspect of health care in a clear and succinct way. Offering inquisitive readers a warts-and-all view of American health care, Misunderstanding Health is the book that you'll want to read if you know enough to be frustrated by the system but want a deeper dive into its challenges and opportunities.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Uta Frith, “Exploring Autism” (Open Agenda, 2021) Aug 23, 2021

Exploring Autism is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and one of the world’s leading experts on autism Uta Frith, Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London. Topics that are examined in this extensive conversation are what autism actually is, the reasons behind the increased number of diagnoses over the last few years, autism spectrum disorders, Asperger’s syndrome, mentalizing, brain imaging to research the cognitive and neurobiological bases of autism and much more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer, "A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication" (Harvard UP, 2021) Aug 23, 2021

Statistical graphing was born in the seventeenth century as a scientific tool, but it quickly escaped all disciplinary bounds. Today graphics are ubiquitous in daily life. In their just-published A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication (Harvard UP, 2021), Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer detail the history of graphs and tables, how they help solve problems, and even changed the way we think. You'll never look at an excel chart the same way again....

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...

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Chris Frith, “In Search of a Mechanism: From the Brain to the Mind” (Open Agenda, 2020) Aug 20, 2021

In Search of a Mechanism: From the Brain to the Mind is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London and Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London. After an interesting exploration of how Chris Frith became interested in the study of schizophrenia, this detailed conversation examines topics such how our understanding of schizophrenia has evolved, the role of dopamine, how the brain works, the brain’s predicting role, the phantom limb phenomenon, how the brain and mind link up, how culture affects the brain and much more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Matthew Flisfeder, "Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media" (Northwestern UP, 2021) Aug 20, 2021

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 stories, and even find new careers and lovers on various sites and apps. But is all this good for us? Our always-online way of living has been called into question for quite some time now, with many people, young and old, finding themselves burned out and disconnected in a world with no shortage of connections. So what does this prevalence of social media mean for our society at large?

This question is one of the starting points for my guest today, Matthew Flisfeder, in his new book Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media(Northwestern UP, 2021). While he is curious about the affects of social media on society, he also spends much of the book trying to flip the question around and ask: what does the structure of our society mean for social media? Flisfeder is interested in thinking of social media in it’s social, political and economic context, seeing the form our current social media takes as a gateway into broader social and economic structures. This broad Marxist vision is brought together with the theories of subjectivity developed in recent critical theory, particularly of Slavoj Žižek, to better understand both the ways social media hooks us into exploitative mechanisms, but it also gives us some offramps for possible resistance. Flisfeder is no luddite; not only is he himself an enthusiastic user of social media, but his critique here is meant as a course-correction rather than an all-out condemnation. If social media today produces alienation rather than true connection, then what does that tell us about society more broadly? And, more provocatively, what does it mean for broader social critique to take the social in social media seriously?

Matthew Flisfeder is an associate professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is also the author of Postmodern Theory and Bladerunner and The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Craig Robertson, "The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Aug 20, 2021

The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work.

In The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information(U Minnesota Press, 2021), Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson's unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an "automatic memory" machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women's nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today's digital world.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Carol Anderson, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Aug 20, 2021

Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second Amendment has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second.

In The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America(Bloomsbury, 2021) historian Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.

Dr. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Connect on Twitter @ProfCAnderson

Dr. Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at State University of New York at Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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Jonathan Brill, "Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change" (McGraw-Hill Education, 2021) Aug 19, 2021

Today I talked to Jonathan Brill about his new book Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change(McGraw-Hill Education, 2021)

There are ten big trends that Brill identifies as disrupting business now and into the future. Each is a wave of change onto self, but the intersection of many of them contributes to forming monster waves that threaten to drown companies not open to rapid, successive adaptations. What are the avoidable causes of failure? What kind of executive will do best? (Hint: it’s not those too full of pride.) From automation and artificial intelligence to Sherlock Holmes and abductive reasoning, this episode has a little of everything, as befits a world in turmoil. Hard to resist a book with this wonderful quote from Anais Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” It’s human fallacies, especially the confirmation bias, that so often limits our ability to adapt.

Jonathan Brill is the former Global Futurist and Research Director for HP, a board member and advisor to the Chairman at Frost & Sullivan, and the Futurist-in-Residence at Territory Studio. He’s been a consultant to numerous companies and the managing partner at innovation firms that generated over $27 billion in new revenue for customers.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Barbara Fredrickson, “The Science of Emotions” (Open Agenda, 2020) Aug 19, 2021

The Science of Emotions is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Barbara Fredrickson, Director Positive Emotions & Psychology Laboratory at UNC Chapel Hill. Why do we smile, laugh and actively seek out personal connections with the people around us? Why does it feel good and what evolutionary purposes do our so-called “positive emotions” serve? Topics covered by this extensive conversation include Barbara’s work on the science of positive emotions, including her broaden-and-build theory, the undoing effect and upward spirals, while highlighting relevant evolutionary-driven hypotheses together with measurement details of empirical studies.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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James W. Cortada, "IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon" (MIT Press, 2019) Aug 18, 2021

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 story of his long-term employer. In particular the challenges and tribulations of a unique organizational culture, how it was created, how it led to success, how it resisted a process of reconfiguration. IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon (MIT Press, 2019) covers a significant time span. The 20 chapters in the book are organised into four sections: origins (1880s-1945), market dominance (1945-1985), crisis (1985-1994), and renewal (1995-2012). Reading this title cover to cover is no small feat and not recommended (or intended) for everyone. In this podcast, Cortada tells us about his trajectory as a writter and how the book was put together.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other mussings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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Benjamin R. Cohen et al., "Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food" (MIT Press, 2021) Aug 17, 2021

The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers trace our eating habits to World War II, but this book shows that our current food system began to coalesce much earlier. Modern food came from and helped to create a society based on racial hierarchies, colonization, and global integration. Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food(MIT Press, 2021) explores these themes through a series of moments in food history—stories of bread, beer, sugar, canned food, cereal, bananas, and more—that shaped how we think about food today. Contributors consider the displacement of native peoples for agricultural development; the invention of Pilsner, the first international beer style; the “long con” of gilded sugar and corn syrup; Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and the rise of celebrity tastemakers; and faith in institutions and experts who produced, among other things, food rankings and fake meat.

Benjamin R. Cohen is Associate Professor at Lafayette College and the author of Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food. Michael S. Kideckel teaches history at Princeton Day School and is the author of the forthcoming Fresh from the Factory: Breakfast Cereal, Natural Food, and the Marketing of Reform, 1890-1920. Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History and Director of Food Studies at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, winner of the 2019 James Beard Award in Reference, History and Scholarship.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website

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Raghav Rajagopalan, "Immersive Systemic Knowing: Advancing Systems Thinking Beyond Rational Analysis" (Springer Nature, 2020) Aug 17, 2021

On this episode, we speak with Ragav Rajagopalan about his book, Immersive Systemic Knowing: Advancing Systems Thinking Beyond Rational Analysis, out from Springer in 2020. This fascinating book advances systems thinking by introducing a new philosophy of systemic knowing. It argues that there are inescapable limits to rational understanding. Humankind has always depended on extended ways of knowing to complement the rational-analytic approach. The book establishes that the application of such methods is fundamental to systemic practice.

The author advocates embracing two modes of consciousness: intentionality, which Western philosophy has long recognized, and non-intentional awareness, which Eastern philosophy additionally highlights. The simultaneity of these two modes of consciousness, and the variety of knowings they spawn are harnessed for a more holistic, systemic knowing.

Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people.

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Leslie Anne Hadfield, "A Bold Profession: African Nurses in Rural Apartheid South Africa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2021) Aug 17, 2021

The first African nurse was certified in the Ciskei region of South Africa during the early decades of the twentieth century. Since then, African nurses have played a key role in the expansion and development of healthcare services in South Africa, particularly in rural areas. Using the stories of retired African nurses who worked in the Ciskei between 1950 and 1980, Leslie Anne Hatfield documents and contextualizes the achievements of these remarkable women. Their stories were prefaced by the last decades of British colonialism and shaped by the rise of apartheid and the creation of African homelands. In spite of the racial and economic injustices that Africans experienced under apartheid, nursing allowed many African women to pursue careers that gave them a sense of purpose and some measure of agency, while providing them with a stepping stone into the middle class. The stories collected by Hatfield speak of the rigorous training, long hours and minimal resources that African nurses endured while working in rural clinics; the role they played as brokers between biomedical and Xhosa medical approaches; and as pioneers in the expansion of gender roles, both as nurses and professional women who had to care for families of their own. A Bold Profession. African Nurses in Rural Apartheid South Africa(University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) deftly illustrates how the everyday challenges and triumphs of African nurses amounted not only to a substantial expansion of healthcare services in the Ciskei, but were also important in the continuous move towards increasing the opportunities available to African women.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Lee McIntyre, "How to Talk to a Science Denier" (MIT Press, 2021) Aug 17, 2021

Climate change is a hoax--and so is coronavirus. Vaccines are bad for you. These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. They are not merely uninformed--they are misinformed. They cite cherry-picked evidence, rely on fake experts, and believe conspiracy theories. How can we convince such people otherwise? How can we get them to change their minds and accept the facts when they don't believe in facts? In How to Talk to a Science Denier (MIT Press, 2021), Lee McIntyre shows that anyone can fight back against science deniers, and argues that it's important to do so. Science denial can kill.

Drawing on his own experience--including a visit to a Flat Earth convention--as well as academic research, McIntyre outlines the common themes of science denialism, present in misinformation campaigns ranging from tobacco companies' denial in the 1950s that smoking causes lung cancer to today's anti-vaxxers. He describes attempts to use his persuasive powers as a philosopher to convert Flat Earthers; surprising discussions with coal miners; and conversations with a scientist friend about genetically modified organisms in food. McIntyre offers tools and techniques for communicating the truth and values of science, emphasizing that the most important way to reach science deniers is to talk to them calmly and respectfully--to put ourselves out there, and meet them face to face.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Mark L. Johnson and Don M. Tucker, "Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing" (MIT Press, 2021) Aug 17, 2021

Plato's Allegory of the Cave trapped us in the illusion that mind is separate from body and from the natural and physical world. Knowledge had to be eternal and absolute. Recent scientific advances, however, show that our bodies shape mind, thought, and language in a deep and pervasive way. In Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing(MIT Press, 2021), Mark Johnson and Don Tucker—a philosopher and a neuropsychologist—propose a radical rethinking of certain traditional views about human cognition and behavior. They argue for a theory of knowing as embodied, embedded, enactive, and emotionally based. Knowing is an ongoing process—shaped by our deepest biological and cultural values.

Johnson and Tucker describe a natural philosophy of mind that is emerging through the convergence of biology, psychology, computer science, and philosophy, and they explain recent research showing that all of our higher-level cognitive activities are rooted in our bodies through processes of perception, motive control of action, and feeling. This developing natural philosophy of mind offers a psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific account that is at once scientifically valid and subjectively meaningful—allowing us to know both ourselves and the world.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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P. J. Boczkowski and E. Mitchelstein, "The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now" (MIT Press, 2021) Aug 17, 2021

Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the digitization of everyday life made possible by innovations in media, information, and communication technology. In The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now(MIT Press, 2021), Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein offer a new way to understand the role of the digital in our daily lives, calling on us to turn our attention from our discrete devices and apps to the array of artifacts and practices that make up the digital environment that envelops every aspect of our social experience.

Boczkowski and Mitchelstein explore a series of issues raised by the digital takeover of everyday life, drawing on interviews with a variety of experts. They show how existing inequities of gender, race, ethnicity, education, and class are baked into the design and deployment of technology, and describe emancipatory practices that counter this--including the use of Twitter as a platform for activism through such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. They discuss the digitization of parenting, schooling, and dating--noting, among other things, that today we can both begin and end relationships online. They describe how digital media shape our consumption of sports, entertainment, and news, and consider the dynamics of political campaigns, disinformation, and social activism. Finally, they report on developments in three areas that will be key to our digital future: data science, virtual reality, and space exploration.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Charles Foster, “Defined By Relationship” (Open Agenda, 2021) Aug 17, 2021

Defined By Relationship is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Charles Foster, who is a writer, traveller, veterinarian, barrister, philosopher and Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. This wide-ranging conversation provides a detailed exploration of several of his books in many different fields with a particular focus on Human Dignity in Bioethics and Law and the New York Times Bestseller Being a Beast.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Jonathan E. Robins, "Oil Palm: A Global History" (UNC Press, 2021) Aug 17, 2021

Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows in Oil Palm: A Global History (UNC Press, 2021), sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across multiple centuries and continents, Robins demonstrates how the fruits of an African palm tree became a key commodity in the story of global capitalism, beginning in the eras of slavery and imperialism, persisting through decolonization, and stretching to the present day.

Jonathan E. Robins is Associate Professor of Global History at Michigan Technology University. He earned his PhD in history at the University of Rochester in 2010 and taught at Morgan State University before joining the faculty at Michigan Tech in 2012. He studies the histories of commodities and how they've reshaped societies, industries, and our planet. His first book, Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2016.

Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral student in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp.

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Mikkael A. Sekeres, "When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia" (MIT Press, 2020) Aug 16, 2021

When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia (MIT Press, 2020), Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes readers on the journey that patient and doctor travel together.

Sekeres, who writes regularly for the Well section of the New York Times, tells the compelling stories of three people who receive diagnoses of adult leukemia within hours of each other: Joan, a 48-year-old surgical nurse, a caregiver who becomes a patient; David, a 68-year-old former factory worker who bows to his family's wishes and pursues the most aggressive treatment; and Sarah, a 36-year-old pregnant woman who must decide whether to undergo chemotherapy and put her fetus at risk. We join the intimacy of the conversations Sekeres has with his patients, and watch as he teaches trainees. Along the way, Sekeres also explores leukemia in its different forms and the development of drugs to treat it--describing, among many other fascinating details, the invention of the bone marrow transplant (first performed experimentally on beagles) and a treatment that targets the genetics of leukemia.

The lessons to be learned from leukemia, Sekeres shows, are not merely medical; they teach us about courage and grace and defying the odds.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Victor Ferreira, “Speaking and Thinking” (Open Agenda, 2021) Aug 16, 2021

Speaking and Thinking is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Victor Ferreira, Professor of Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Language Production Lab at the University of California at San Diego. This extensive conversation explores Victor Ferreira’s research which is focused on language production, especially with regard to grammar, lexical structure and speaker-hearer interaction, and his interests to incorporate computational and quantitative modelling of cognitive processing. Topics under discussion include key experimental results that change our view of what is actually going on when two people talk to each other, giving us new insight into the structure of language and also how many aspects of linguistics are related to our current understanding of how the brain and mind function.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Nita Farahany, “Neurolaw” (Open Agenda, 2021) Aug 12, 2021

Neurolaw is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nita Farahany, Robert O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Nita Farahany is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies. This wide-ranging conversation examines the growing impact of modern neuroscience on the law, deepening our understanding of a wide range of issues, from legal responsibility to the American Constitution’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Beronda L. Montgomery, "Lessons from Plants" (Harvard UP, 2021) Aug 10, 2021

In Lessons from Plants (Harvard University Press, 2021), Dr. Beronda Montgomery connects the science of plants to the behavior of people. She unpacks how their ability to who they are, where they are, and what they are supposed to do translates into good leadership. In the interview, Dr. Montgomery leads us on a quest for societal change through an understanding of plant physiology and ecology. We unexpectantly venture into applying her expertise to the transformation we hope to see in academia. Plants are fascinating. Society has a lot to learn. Dr. Montgomery ends the conversation with wisdom about how our a priori that plants should successfully grow needs to transfer to how we see every individual human.

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Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, "When Maps Become the World" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Aug 10, 2021

There are maps of the Earth’s landmasses, the universe, the ocean floors, human migration, the human brain: maps are so integral to how we interact with the world that we sometimes forget that they are not the world. In When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press), Rasmus Grunfeldt Winther considers how maps get made, used, and abused, and how processes and problems from cartography can be found in the ways we create and use scientific theories. Winther, who is professor of humanities at the University of California – Santa Cruz, shows how “pernicious reification” – taking the map or model for what it represents -- can arise in science, and he argues for a form of pluralism about our understanding of the world, called contextual objectivity, that lies between realism and constructivism. The maps and drawings filling the book highlight Winther’s discussion and illustrate the power that maps and theories have to shape the way we think about the world.

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Artur Ekert, “Cryptoreality” (Open Agenda, 2021) Aug 09, 2021

Cryptoreality is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Artur Ekert, Professor of Quantum Physics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and Director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies and Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore. Artur Ekert is one of the pioneers of quantum cryptography. This wide-ranging conversation provides detailed insights into his research and covers many fascinating topics such as mathematical and physical intuition, a detailed history of cryptography from antiquity to the present day and how it works in practice, the development of quantum information science, the nature of reality, and more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Chiara Marletto, "The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals" (Viking, 2021) Aug 09, 2021

There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, yet have traditionally been assumed to be impossible to incorporate into fundamental scientific explanations. They are facts not about what is (the actual) but about what could be (counterfactuals).

According to physicist Chiara Marletto, laws about things being possible or impossible may generate an alternative way of providing explanations. This fascinating, far-reaching approach holds promise for revolutionizing the way fundamental physics is formulated and for providing essential tools to face existing technological challenges–from delivering the next generation of information-processing devices beyond the universal quantum computer to designing AIs. Each chapter in The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals (Viking, 2021) delineates how an existing vexed open problem in science can be solved by this radically different approach and it is augmented by short fictional stories that explicate the main point of the chapter. As Marletto demonstrates, contemplating what is possible can give us a more complete and hopeful picture of the physical world.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, "The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World" (U Chicago Press, 2017) Aug 06, 2021

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted an ambitious yet clandestine programme to map the world - from big cities like New York and Tokyo, to seemingly-obscure towns like Gainsborough (Lincolnshire) and Pontiac (Missouri). The programme was unlike any other of its time, encompassing a wide variety of topographic maps and city plans in incredible detail. The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World(University of Chicago Press, 2017) is not only a compilation of some 350 extracts of this collection, but also a deep dive into the provenance, nature and applications of these Cold War era Soviet maps.

Join us as we talk to co-authors John Davies and Alex Kent about the joys of working with maps, the difficulties they encountered researching the Soviet mapping programme, and their visions for the future.

Listeners interested in contributing to John and Alex's research may contact them at author@redatlasbook.com. Prints of Soviet City Plans are also available on their website.

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Peter B. Kaufman, "The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge" (Seven Stories Press, 2021) Aug 05, 2021

Listen to this interview of Peter Kaufman, Program Manager in Strategic Initiatives and Resource Development at MIT Open Learning and author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021). We talk about us. All of us.

Peter Kaufman : "Well, I'd say this about how to bring about the change my book calls for. Take a broad look at our knowledge institutions. Define them as broadly as we can, so obviously the universities, but there are museums, there are libraries, there are archives, there are public broadcasting institutions, there are historical societies–––and just figure out ways for all of these institutions, which have so many stakeholders, so many members, so many funders, so many visitors and readers and people who absorb things emanating from these institutions–––figure out ways for all these institutions to publish more, to publish more on to the Web, because (as someone put it) 'The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.' And you know, if these knowledge institutions can band together, can commit in principle and practice to publishing more, to linking to each others' content, to citing and sourcing each others' work, then we'll be a much stronger world, we'll be a much stronger society, and we'll be a little bit better equipped the next time that the gladiators from the Monsterverse manage to gain access to the most powerful offices in the land."

Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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Alex Csiszar, "The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Aug 04, 2021

Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke.

Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is ridiculous. Most everything that everybody believes in the sciences is stuff that they've been given to believe through reading papers, through education, through being told by their colleagues, through textbooks–––almost everything anybody in the sciences believes has come to them through trust. And the formats and genres through which a lot of that stuff comes to one's eyes matter a lot for generating that trust. Though, maybe one of the lessons of the book is that the formats and genres might matter a little less than you might at first think because there are other means, perhaps more important means, through which individuals come to trust a particular claim––and personal contacts matter a lot here. But clearly what is being discussed in a lot of the debates that I follow in this book are the means through which such trust can be established, guaranteed."

Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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Hoyt Long, "The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age" (Columbia UP, 2021) Aug 03, 2021

Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age(Columbia UP, 2021) tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly.

Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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John Duncan, “Investigating Intelligence” (Open Agenda, 2021) Aug 03, 2021

Investigating Intelligence is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and neuroscientist John Duncan, University of Cambridge, and examines fascinating questions in neuroscience such as: What is intelligence and what does IQ testing tell us? Can intelligence be measured and improved? What role does our frontal lobe play in executive control? John Duncan has rigorously investigated these types of issues for years and this conversation covers all those questions plus topics such as impairments following brain damage, functional brain imaging, and the brain basis for attention, intelligence and cognitive control, and much more.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Iris Berent, "The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature" (Oxford UP, 2020) Aug 02, 2021

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself.

An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature(Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity.

You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris.

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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Chinmay Tumbe, "Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020) Aug 02, 2021

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management. He was Alfred D Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholar in Business History, Harvard Business School in 2018. Dr, Tumbe has published academic articles in Management and Organizational History and in the Journal of Management History. He has written two books, one in 2018 India Moving: A History of Migration, which talks about how people have moved in India historically, and his 2020 book the Age of Pandemics 1817-1920: How They Shaped India and the World (HarperCollins, 2020). The book argues that the period between the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century - an age otherwise known for the worldwide spread of the industrial revolution, imperialism, and globalization - was also the 'age of pandemics'. It documents the scale of devastation caused by different pandemics, cholera, the plague, influenza, and finally Covid. The book has great resources for the classroom and for the general public such as a timeline of pandemics, striking tables such as the death toll in millions for each epidemic, and a set of photographs at the end that is definitely worth viewing.

Paula De La Cruz-Fernández is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO.

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Joseph Curtin, “The Science of Siren Songs: Stradivari Unveiled” (Open Agenda, 2021) Jul 30, 2021

The Science of Siren Songs: Stradivari Unveiled is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and master violinmaker and acoustician Joseph Curtin, recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. This in-depth conversation explores Curtin’s long quest to characterize the sound of a Stradivari violin and the rigorous series of double-blind tests he and his colleagues developed to probe whether or not professional musicians can really tell the difference between a Stradivari and a modern violin. The conversation also covers violin acoustics and how Joseph Curtin marries acoustic science to the art of violin making and merges time-honoured techniques with new materials and design.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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James Ladyman and K. Wiesner, "What Is a Complex System?" (Yale UP, 2020) Jul 30, 2021

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 related concepts. I'm not alone! Researchers' own attempts to define complex systems incorporate a mix of folk wisdom and fraught assumptions anchored to a menagerie of contested examples. The field was ripe for a 2013 article proposing a unified account of complexity, and it's no less ripe today for this book-length expansion.

In What Is a Complex System? (Yale UP, 2020), philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist and mathematician Karoline Wiesner systematically interrogate popular definitions. They break the most commonly cited features into three bins: truisms on which there is universal agreement, the conditions necessary for complexity to arise, and various emergent products of complexity. A key insight of their account, for me, was to understand emergence as a relation between features rather than one feature among many.

The book is compact, accessible, and at times profound. Indeed, James and Karoline bring the lessons of their account to some of the most consequential complex systems of our time, including Earth's climate and biosphere as well as our global social media ecosystem. I was honored to host them in conversation on this episode, and i encourage listeners to pick up the book itself for deeper dives into the topics we discussed.

James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol and works mainly in the philosophy of science. Karoline Wiesner is professor of physics at the University of Potsdam and uses information theory to understand complex systems.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains.

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Stefan Collini, “The Two Cultures, Revisited” (Open Agenda, 2021) Jul 28, 2021

The ‘Two Cultures’ debate of the 1960s between C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis is one of the most misunderstood intellectual disputes of the 20th century. Most people think that the debate only revolved around the notion that our society is characterized by a divide between two cultures – the arts or humanities on one hand, and the sciences on the other. The Two Cultures, Revisited is based on an extensive, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and University of Cambridge intellectual historian Stefan Collini— and author of the book, What Are Universities For?— which provides a careful examination and illuminating insights of what the issues really were in this debate.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Simon Ferdinand, "Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) Jul 27, 2021

In Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity(U Nebraska Press, 2019), Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing, made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the world as a measurable and malleable geometrical space.

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Gayle Rogers, "Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI" (Columbia UP, 2021) Jul 26, 2021

In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy?

Gayle Rogers, author of Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia UP, 2021), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the intellectual history of speculation: from the mirror and the watch tower, the Calvinist reformation, the scientific revolution, through Jane Austen, to the founding of the United States, and the shape of contemporary capitalism – with booms, manias, busts, and bubbles along the way. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future.

Gayle Rogers is professor and chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Patricia Churchland, “Philosophy of Brain” (Open Agenda, 2021) Jul 26, 2021

Philosophy of Brain is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland, UC San Diego. Patricia Churchland has done extensive research in the fields of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of the mind and neuroethics. During this mind-stretching conversation Patricia explores how the brain works, how we are able to represent the external world of objects and our inner world of thoughts, self and consciousness.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Eszter Varsa, "Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the 'Gypsy Question' in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956" (Central European UP, 2020) Jul 26, 2021

Historian Eszter Varsa’s new book Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the 'Gypsy Question' in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956(Central European UP, 2020) examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European history. Across the communist bloc, the prewar foster care system was increasingly replaced after 1945 by institutionalization in residential homes. This shift was often interpreted as a further attempt to establish totalitarian control. However, this study—based on hundreds of children's case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care—provides a new perspective.

Rather than being merely a tool of political repression, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad of problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. This response built on, rather than broke with, earlier models of reform and reformatory education. Yet child protection went beyond safeguarding and educating children; it also focused on parents, particularly lone mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. In so doing, children's homes both reinforced and changed existing cultural and social patterns, whether about gendered division of work or the assimilation of minorities. Indeed, a major finding of the book is that state socialist child protection continued a centuries-long national project of seeking a “solution to the Gypsy question,” rooted in efforts to eliminate the perceived “workshyness” of Roma.

Eszter Varsa is a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC project ZARAH: Women's Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century at Central European University, Vienna.

Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at lwaters@utep.edu or tweet to @leslieh2Os.

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Joseph P. Laycock, "Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds" (U California Press, 2015) Jul 26, 2021

The 1980s saw the peak of a moral panic over fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. A coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included representatives from the Christian Right, the field of psychology, and law enforcement claimed that these games were not only psychologically dangerous but an occult religion masquerading as a game. Dangerous Games:What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds(University of California Press, 2015) by Joseph Laycock, explores both the history and the sociological significance of this panic.

Fantasy role-playing games do share several functions in common with religion. However, religion—as a socially constructed world of shared meaning—can also be compared to a fantasy role-playing game. In fact, the claims of the moral entrepreneurs, in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and how they construct and maintain meaningful worlds together.

Joseph Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He has written several books on new religious movements and American religious history, including one on The Satanic Temple. He is also a co-editor for the journal Nova Religio.

Carrie Lynn Evans is currently a PhD student of English Literature with Université Laval in Quebec.

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The Renewable Energy Revolution in East Asia and the Nordics Jul 26, 2021

The world is in a midst of a renewable energy revolution, with the price of utility scale photo-voltaic solar power falling by nearly 90% between 2009 and 2019, and the price of wind power falling by 70% during the same period. Annual global investment in renewable electricity generation assets is now more than double that for fossil fuel and nuclear-powered generation facilities combined, and yet the pace of adoption varies greatly across countries.

In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Assistant Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and coordinator of Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, moderates a discussion on the various barriers and opportunities countries in Asia and the Nordics face in trying to take advantage of this renewable energy revolution. He is joined by Paul Midford a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, in Yokohama, Japan, Espen Moe, a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and Eric Zusman, senior policy researcher and area leader at the Institute for Global Environmental Studies in Hayama, Japan.

The talk focuses on two new books: New Challenges and Solutions for Renewable Energy: Japan, East Asia and Northern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), edited by Midford and Moe, and Aligning Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies in Asia (Springer, 2021), edited by Zusman with Hooman Farzaneh and Yeora Chae.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

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Rahul Mukherjee, "Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty" (Duke UP, 2020) Jul 23, 2021

In Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty(Duke UP, 2020), Rahul Mukherjee explores how the media coverage of nuclear power plants and cellular phone antennas in India—what he calls radiant infrastructures—creates environmental publics: groups of activists, scientists, and policy makers who use media to influence public opinion. In documentaries, lifestyle television shows, newspapers, and Bollywood films, and through other forms of media (including radiation-sensing technologies), these publics articulate contesting views about the relationships between modernity, wireless signals, and nuclear power. From testimonies of cancer patients who live close to cell towers to power plant operators working to contain information about radiation leaks and health risks, discussions in the media show how radiant infrastructures are at once harbingers of optimism about India's development and emitters of potentially carcinogenic radiation. In tracing these dynamics, Mukherjee expands understandings of the relationship between media and infrastructure and how people make sense of their everyday encounters with technology and the environment.

Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology.

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Popular Protests in the Age of #MilkTeaAlliance Jul 23, 2021

What influence can online and visual activism have on protest movements? With a wave of anti-establishment protests sweeping over East and Southeast Asia over the past couple of years, the online phenomenon of the #MilkTeaAlliance has gained increasing international recognition. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is joined by Wasana Wongsurawat and Mai Corlin Fredriksen to discuss the Milk Tea Alliance. Departing from the Thai and Hong Kong contexts, they explore what role this alliance plays in the broader political context, and what future it may have.

Wasana Wongsurawat is an associate professor at the Department of History at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her research has focused on the Chinese diaspora and Thai nationalism.

Mai Corlin Fredriksen is a Carlsberg Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Her current work focuses on the role of protest walls and the use of visual material in the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is a student of social anthropology at the University of Bergen in Norway.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

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John Horgan, "Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science" (MIT Press, 2020) Jul 23, 2021

What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science(MIT Press, 2020), a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole--a blogger, college professor, and divorced father.

This work of fact-based fiction, or "faction," follows Toole as he wakes up in his rented apartment in upstate New York, meditates with the mantra "Duh," commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a William James essay on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch, takes a ferry to Manhattan and spends the evening with his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, Emily, on whom he plans to spring a big question. Throughout the day, Toole struggles to be rational while buffeted by fears and yearnings. Thoughts of sex and death keep intruding on his ruminations over quantum spookiness, the neural code, the Singularity and free will. Pay Attention is a profane, profound meditation on the entanglements of our inner and outer worlds and the elusiveness of truth.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Michael Moore, "We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jul 23, 2021

The image most of us have of whalers includes harpoons and intentional trauma. Yet eating commercially caught seafood leads to whales' entanglement and slow death in rope and nets, and the global shipping routes that bring us readily available goods often lead to death by collision. We--all of us--are whalers, marine scientist and veterinarian Michael J. Moore contends. But we do not have to be.

Drawing on over forty years of fieldwork with humpback, pilot, fin, and in particular, North Atlantic right whales--a species whose population has declined more than twenty percent since 2017--Moore takes us with him as he performs whale necropsies on animals stranded on beaches, in his independent research alongside whalers using explosive harpoons, and as he tracks injured whales to deliver sedatives. The whales' plight is a complex, confounding, and disturbing one. We learn of existing but poorly enforced conservation laws and of perennial (and often failed) efforts to balance the push for fisheries profit versus the protection of endangered species caught by accident.

But despite these challenges, Moore's We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an optimistic one. He shows us how technologies for rope-less fishing and the acoustic tracking of whale migrations make a dramatic difference. And he looks ahead with hope as our growing understanding of these extraordinary creatures fuels an ever-stronger drive for change.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati, "Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice" (Routledge, 2020) Jul 22, 2021

Drawing together 18 contributions from leading international scholars, Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice (Routledge, 2021) conceptualizes the history and theory of cinema’s century-long relationship to modes of exploration in its many forms, from colonialist expeditions to decolonial radical cinemas to the perceptual voyage of the senses made possible by the cinematic apparatus. In my conversation with them, James and Leo review the theory behind cinema of exploration and discuss how they recruited the hours of the various essays.

The essays in this collection are ideal for a broad range of scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in cinema and media studies, cultural studies, and cognate fields.

James Leo Cahill is Director of the Cinema Studies Institute and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and French at the University of Toronto. He is author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (2019) and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

Luca Caminati is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Orientalismo eretico. Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del Terzo Mondo (2007), Il cinema come happening: Pasolini's Primitivism and the Sixties Italian Art Scene (2010), and Roberto Rossellini documentarista. Una cultura della realtà (2012), along with many articles and book chapters on Italian cinema and media. He is currently serving as associate editor for the journal Italica.

Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne.

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Eugene T. Richardson, "Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health" (MIT Press, 2020) Jul 22, 2021

In Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health(MIT Press, 2020), physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardsonexplores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities.

This book questions the Global North's "monopoly on truth" in global public health science, making a provocative claim: that public health science manages and maintains global health inequity. Richardson, a physician and anthropologist, examines the conventional public health approach to epidemiology through the lens of a participant-observer, identifying a dogmatic commitment to the quantitative paradigm. This paradigm, he argues, plays a role in causing and perpetrating public health crises. The mechanisms of public health science--and epidemiology in particular--that set public health agendas and claim a monopoly on truth stem from a colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.

Deploying a range of rhetorical tools, including ironism, “redescriptions” of public health crises, Platonic dialogue, flash fiction, allegory, and koan, Richardson describes how epidemiology uses models of disease causation that serve protected affluence (the possessing classes) by setting epistemic limits to the understanding of why some groups live sicker lives than others—limits that sustain predatory accumulation rather than challenge it. Drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, he concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.

Eugene T. Richardson, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Faculty at the University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, Rwanda, and Chair of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. Her current work concerns the politics of travel in Cold War US; she has previously published on US intervention in the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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Andrew Jenks, "Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth" (Anthem Press, 2021) Jul 21, 2021

Andrew Jenks' book Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth (Anthem Press, 2021) explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations.

The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics.

The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian.

Paul Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Stacia Ryder et al., "Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures" (Routledge, 2021) Jul 20, 2021

Through various international case studies presented by both practitioners and scholars, Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene: From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures (Routledge, 2021) explores how an environmental justice approach is necessary for reflections on inequality in the Anthropocene and for forging societal transitions toward a more just and sustainable future. Environmental justice is a central component of sustainability politics during the Anthropocene - the current geological age in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Every aspect of sustainability politics requires a close analysis of equity implications, including problematizing the notion that humans as a collective are equally responsible for ushering in this new epoch. Environmental justice provides us with the tools to critically investigate the drivers and characteristics of this era and the debates over the inequitable outcomes of the Anthropocene for historically marginalized peoples.

The contributors to Environmental Justice in the Anthropocenefocus on a critical approach to power and issues of environmental injustice across time, space, and context--drawing from twelve national contexts: Austria, Bangladesh, Chile, China, India, Nicaragua, Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Tanzania, and the United States. Beyond highlighting injustices, the volume highlights forward-facing efforts at building just transitions, with a goal of identifying practical steps to connect theory and movement and envision an environmentally and ecologically just future. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners focused on conservation, environmental politics and governance, environmental and earth sciences, environmental sociology, environment and planning, environmental justice and global sustainability and governance. It will also be of interest to social and environmental justice advocates and activists.

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Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, "Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jul 20, 2021

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.

With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (U Chicago Press, 2021) makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.

Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.

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John Troyer, "Technologies of the Human Corpse" (MIT Press, 2020) Jul 19, 2021

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 is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In Technologies of the Human Corpse (MIT Press, 2020), John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways.

Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the "Happy Death Movement" of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into "death prevention technologies." The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Terry McGlynn, "The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Jul 19, 2021

Listen to this interview of Terry McGlynn, author of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching (U Chicago Press, 2020). McGlynn is also a professor of biology at California State University Dominguez Hills and research associate in the Department of Entomology in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We talk about learning, actually.

Terry McGlynn : “If you’re giving students a writing assignment, like an experimental protocol, and they’re supposed to write about what they did in the lab or in the field, and it’s a cookbook project, you know, where the students don’t design the methods themselves and they're just doing what they were told to do and they're writing that down–––well, then the students are just jumping through a hoop and there's no ownership. That just gets you following through the prescribed steps, and in each of those steps, you just need to know, 'Oh, I just need to write a sentence where I've said This is where I did this,' and you write that sentence. And so, I think you can get through the whole assignment without thinking about the grand reason why you're doing it, right? Because the grand reason why you're doing it is because you need to turn it in and get your grade. And so all the little decisions you're making when you're doing the writing assignment–––all those decisions are all based on a micro level of, 'Okay, this next sentence, and that next sentence,' rather than if you had more control over what you're writing or if you had a bigger set of questions–––basically, if you knew why you're doing this assignment, you know like, what is the purpose of the assignment other than to turn it in and to get a grade–––because then that would be the purpose which is behind all those other small decisions, the purpose that guides you toward some destination."

McGlynn's blog is here.

Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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Anna Reser and Leila McNeill, "Forces of Nature: The Women who Changed Science" (Frances Lincoln, 2021) Jul 16, 2021

From the ancient world to the present women have been critical to the progress of science, yet their importance is overlooked, their stories lost, distorted, or actively suppressed. Forces of Nature sets the record straight and charts the fascinating history of women's discoveries in science.

In the ancient and medieval world, women served as royal physicians and nurses, taught mathematics, studied the stars, and practiced midwifery. As natural philosophers, physicists, anatomists, and botanists, they were central to the great intellectual flourishing of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. More recently women have been crucially involved in the Manhattan Project, pioneering space missions and much more. Despite their record of illustrious achievements, even today very few women win Nobel Prizes in science.

In Anna Reser and Leila McNeill's book Forces of Nature: The Women who Changed Science (Frances Lincoln, 2021), you will discover how women have navigated a male-dominated scientific culture - showing themselves to be pioneers and trailblazers, often without any recognition at all.

Listeners might be interested in Lady Science Magazine and the Lady Science Podcast.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Adam Crymble, "Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age" (U Illinois Press, 2021) Jul 15, 2021

The digital age has touched and changed pretty much everything, even altering how historical research is practiced. In his new book Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2021), Adam Crymble makes a meta-historical account of how digital and technological advances have impacted historical research, collection management, education, and communication. Our discussion highlights the balance required when creating digital standards and research practices in a dynamic and ever-changing scholarly ecosystem, and how technology has and can be used to disrupt the scholarly status-quo (for better or for worse). Additionally, we talk about the challenges of keeping archives online and relevant along with the exciting emergence of community-lead digital history projects.

Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread.

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Yurou Zhong, "Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958" (Columbia UP, 2019) Jul 15, 2021

In 1928 linguist Yuen Ren Chao had reason to celebrate. The Nationalist government had just recognized his system for writing Chinese, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, so he gleefully wrote (using the system) in his diary: "G.R. yii yu jeou yueh 26 ry gong buh le. Hooray!!!" (G.R. was officially announced on September 26. Hooray!!!). He was not the only one excited about the prospect of scraping Chinese characters either. In the global context of phonocentric dominance both the Nationalists and the Communists waged war on Chinese characters, seeking new, scientific, modern, and entirely phonetic writing system.

Ultimately, however, Chao's three exclamation marks were somewhat in vain. China's "script revolution" ended, and the Chinese Communist Party opted to simplify Chinese characters instead — a process and history deftly traced by Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958(Columbia University Press, 2019). In Chinese Grammatology Yurou Zhong explores the history of the script revolution, tracing where it came from, how it changed over time, and how it was finally contained. Sharply written, beautifully constructed and filled with fascinated case studies, this is a real treat for those interested in modern Chinese history and literature, as well as anyone curious about global script reforms in the twentieth century.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu

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Angus Fletcher, "Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature" (Simon & Schuster, 2021) Jul 14, 2021

Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere--from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others--each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature's great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.

Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature(Simon & Schuster, 2021) reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most powerful developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui--all while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found all throughout literature--from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare's plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.

An easy-to-understand exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class. Based on author Angus Fletcher's own research, it is an eye-opening and thought-provoking work that offers us a new understanding of the power of literature.

Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon.

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Lindy McDougall, "The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century" (Indiana UP, 2021) Jul 14, 2021

Today on New Books in Gender Studies Jana Byars talks with Lindy McDougall, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia about her new book, The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century, out this year, 2021, with Indiana University Press.

In The Perfect Vagina, Lindy McDougall provides an ethnographic account of women who choose FGCS in Australia and the physicians who perform these procedures, both in Australia and globally, while also examining the environment in which surgeons and women come together. Physicians have a vested interest in establishing this surgery as valid medical intervention, despite majority medical opinion explicitly acknowledging that a wide range of genital variation is normal. McDougall offers a nuanced picture of why and how these procedures are performed and draws parallels between FGCS and anthropological discussions of female genital circumcision (cutting). Using the neologism biomagical, she argues that cosmetic surgery functions as both ritual and sacrifice due to its promise of transformation while simultaneously submitting the body to the risks and pain of surgery, thus exposing biomedicine as an increasingly cultural and commercial pursuit.

The Perfect Vagina highlights the complexities involved with FGCS, its role in Western beauty culture, and the creation and control of body image in countries where self-care is valorized and medicine is increasingly harnessed for enhancement as well as health.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Nima Arkani-Hamed, “The Power of Principles: Physics Revealed” (Open Agenda, 2021) Jul 13, 2021

The Power of Principles: Physics Revealed is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nima Arkani-Hamed, faculty member at the renowned Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Prof. Arkani-Hamed is one of today’s leading particle physicists. This extensive Ideas Roadshow conversation explores how we discover the laws of nature, the “scientific method”, the relation between theory and experiment and how we can push our understanding well beyond where experiments can currently reach.

Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

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Nicoletta Batini, "The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet" (Island Press, 2021) Jul 13, 2021

In The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Nicoletta Batini, and co-authors, unpack the true cost of food production. While the Green Revolution served a purpose, Dr. Batini makes the case that the industrial food complex continues to cause tremendous global economic losses in terms of malnutrition, diseases, and environmental degradation. To ensure we do not exceed the 1.5oC target, the book offers the Great Food Transformation (GFT) as a solution. The GFT entails, (1) halving animal-based food production and increasing plant-based production, (2) shifting to organic, regenerative farming, and (3) rewilding, reforesting, and afforesting land. In this interview, Dr. Batini discusses the economics and policy mechanisms to make the GFT possible. Some of the mechanisms discussed include taxes, labor market reform, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. We discuss the important differences in the GFT between “advanced economies” and “less-advanced economies,” with case studies that highlight successes in both.

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Thomas D. Mullaney et al., "Your Computer Is on Fire" (MIT Press, 2021) Jul 09, 2021

This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society.

The essays in Your Computer Is on Fire (MIT Press, 2021) interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy. These practices are often kept out of sight until it is too late to question the costs of how they shape society. From energy-hungry server farms to racist and sexist algorithms, the digital is always IRL, with everything that happens algorithmically or online influencing our offline lives as well. Each essay proposes paths for action to understand and solve technological problems that are often ignored or misunderstood.

Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.

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Alyssa Ney, "The World in the Wave Function: A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics" (Oxford UP, 2021) Jul 09, 2021

Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings – for example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated, and that a system may be in two different possible states at the same time. Entanglement and superposition, among other phenomena, have prompted debate since the inception of QM about how, exactly, we should understand what it tells us about reality. In The World in the Wave Function (Oxford UP, 2021), Alyssa Ney defends wave function realism, the claim that the basic representation in QM, the wavefunction, corresponds to a field in a high-dimensional space, and that this field and its space is the fundamental reality. Ney, a leading philosopher of physics and metaphysics at the University of California at Davis, defends this controversial view by explaining how the particles of classical mechanics and the ordinary objects of familiar 3D space can plausibly arise from it. Ney makes the complications of QM accessible to non-physicists, and clearly explains the motivations for her view, the opposing positions, and the challenges that face any interpretation of the ontological implications of quantum mechanics.

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Warren Mansell, "The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory" (Academic Press, 2020) Jul 08, 2021

Regular listeners to this podcast will be well aware of my strong conviction that the Perceptual Control Theory initially formulated by William T. Powers entails many significant contributions to the domains of systems and cybernetics despite the fact that, for the last several decades, its applications have been further developed in a largely “adjacent” academic community.

It is in the ongoing spirit of a much-needed rapprochement between these fields, that previous guest, Warren Mansell, returns to this podcast; this time, as editor of The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory – Vol. 1, out from Elsevier in 2020. Astonishing in its sweeping, panoramic view of the contemporary sciences, both “natural” and “social,” this magnificent volume brings together the latest research, theory, and applications of Powers’ powerful and parsimonious theory proposing that the behavior of a living organism lies in the control of perceived aspects of both itself and its environment. Illustrating both the fundamental theory and the application of PCT to a broad range of disciplines, various chapters illuminate why perceptual control is fundamental to understanding human nature, describe a new way to do research on brain processes and behavior, reveal how the role of natural selection in behavior can be demystified, explain how engineers can emulate human purposeful behavior in robots with significantly lower computational expense, and so much more. If ever there was a book that could consolidate some of the world’s most rigorous applications of PCT in a manner rendering its remarkable explanatory power and paradigm exploding practical value in vivid detail and inspiring insight, this is it.

Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people.

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Kristin Poling, "Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020) Jul 08, 2021

In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany's many growing cities. Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared. Through a series of local case studies including Leipzig, Oldenburg, and Berlin, Kristin Poling reveals how Germans on the edge of the city confronted not only questions of planning and control, but also their own histories and futures as a community.

Kristin Poling is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan—Dearborn, where she teaches modern European and global history and received the 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Stefan Vogler, "Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jul 07, 2021

In Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification(University of Chicago Press, 2021), Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement--two situations where state actors must determine individuals' sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed--one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one--they present the same question: how do we know someone's sexuality?

In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

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Catalina M. de Onís, "Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico" (U California Press, 2021) Jul 07, 2021

Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico(University of California Press, 2021) provides an urgent and nuanced portrait of collective action that resists racial capitalism, colonialism, and climate disruption. Weaving together historical and ethnographic research, this story challenges the master narratives of Puerto Rico as a tourist destination and site of "natural" disasters to demonstrate how fossil fuel economies are inextricably entwined with colonial practices and how local community groups in Puerto Rico have struggled against energy coloniality to mobilize and transform power from the ground up. Catalina M. de Onís documents how these groups work to decenter continental contexts and deconstruct damaging hierarchies that devalue and exploit rural coastal communities. She highlights and collaborates with individuals who refuse the cruel logics of empire by imagining and implementing energy justice and other interconnected radical power transformations. Diving deeply into energy, islands, and power, this book engages various metaphors for alternative world-making.

In our conversation, Dr. de Onís mentions her recent article in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, which can be read here.

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Arunabh Ghosh, "Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jul 07, 2021

The first historical study of the development of statistics in Mao-era China, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton University Press, 2020) explores how Chinese statisticians attempted to know their new nation through numbers. Exploring the different kinds of statistics available and adopted by the PRC, Arunabh Ghosh details how Chinese statisticians moved away from Soviet-inspired exhaustive enumeration, learned about the then-new technology of random sampling through exchanges with Indian statisticians, and how, in the tumult of the Great Leap Forward, they rejected other methods in favor of the ethnographic approach.

Not only does this meticulous book take seriously Maoist-era science and technology and revisit the question of whether the shift to Communist rule after 1949 was a rupture — for as far as statistics are concerned there was a good deal of continuity — but, by acknowledging Soviet and Indian influence, Making It Count also revises existing models of Cold War science. Lucidly written and organized, this book offers a fresh perspective on the nature of the early PRC state and a more global history of statistics to readers interested in modern Chinese history, statistics, the 1950s, and global science.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu.

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Martin Summers, "Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jul 07, 2021

From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation's capital, the institution became one of the country's preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so.

Martin Summers' book Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions (Oxford UP, 2019) is a history of the hospital and its relationship to Washington, DC's African American community. It charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late-1980s, when the hospital's mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization, and its transfer from the federal government to the District of Columbia. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including patient case files, the book demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital's existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experienced their institutionalization. The book argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a "rights consciousness" in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Nathan R. Johnson, "Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age" (U Alabama Press, 2020) Jul 06, 2021

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 past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge.

In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age(University of Alabama Press, 2020), Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices.

This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century.

Nathan R. Johnson is assistant professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Florida. His work has appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Poroi, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.

Connect with your host, Lee Pierce (they & she) on social and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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Jenny Price, "Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto" (W. W. Norton, 2021) Jul 05, 2021

We’ve been “saving the planet” for decades…and environmental crises just get worse. All this Tesla driving and LEED building and carbon trading seems to accomplish little to nothing — all while low-income communities continue to suffer the worst consequences.

Why aren’t we cleaning up the toxic messes and rolling back climate change? And why do so many Americans hate environmentalists?

Jenny Price says, enough already! — with this short, fun, fierce manifesto for an environmentalism that is hugely more effective, a whole lot fairer, and infinitely less righteous. In Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto (W. W. Norton, 2021), she challenges you, Exxon, and the EPA alike to think and act completely anew — and to start right now — to ensure a truly habitable future.

Jenny Price is a public writer and artist, and a Research Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University-St. Louis. Author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, she is co-founder of the public art collective LA Urban Rangers and a co-creator of the Our Malibu Beaches mobile-phone app. She has been a resident artist at MOCA and the Orange County Museum of Art, and has held visiting professorships at Princeton University. She is currently working on “St. Louis Division,” a hometown collection of projects about environmental justice.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Twitter. Website

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Sandeep Mertia, "Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India" (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020) Jul 05, 2021

Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020) maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts.

This episode features a discussion between Sandeep Mertia (book editor and contributing author), Aakash Solanki (contributing author) and Noopur (host and contributing author). The discussion begins with the contents of the book but moves on to a broader conversation about STS as an interdisciplinary formation in India and the global South.

Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology

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Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jul 02, 2021

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government’s largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans’ use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Cambridge UP, 2018), written after he retired, shows where the survey came from, details how it gathers information, and tracks the impact that the shifting cultural and political climate surrounding drug use played on how these statistics were understood. Gfroerer provides necessary insight on what drug use statistics have meant, how they’ve been used (and misused), and what this means for our understanding of drug use in America today.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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Luiz Valerio de Paula Trindade, "No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media" (Vernon Press, 2020) Jul 02, 2021

No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media (Vernon Press, 2020) examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Valério P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society. The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women's upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to attract a considerable number of like-minded people, creating a long-lasting echo chamber effect in the cyberspace. This way, they manage to amplify the reach and reverberation of their racist discourses in the online environment in ways not commonly seen in Brazilian offline social contexts.

Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University.

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Open Access Publishing Explained: A Discussion with Ros Pyne Jul 01, 2021

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.

In this episode you’ll hear about: Ros Pyne’s path through higher education, how she found her way to her current job, her role at Bloomsbury Publishers, what Open Access [OA] is and is not, how OA can democratize knowledge, and what she’s hopeful about.

Our guest is: Ros Pyne, who is the Global Director of Research and Open Access at Bloomsbury Publishers. She has worked in academic publishing since 2007, initially as an editor, and for the last eight years in roles focusing on open access. She has a particular interest in bringing open access to long-form scholarship and to the humanities, and is the co-author of several reports on open access books. She holds a degree in English from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in early modern English literature from King’s College London.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode might be interested in:

Open access at Bloomsbury
Directory of Open Access Books
OAPEN OA Books Toolkit (for anyone interested in learning more about what open access books are and how they work)
Open Access Books Network (a free online network for people working on open access books or interested in getting involved)
Open Access and the Humanities (a 2014 book by an open access expert Martin Paul Eve that’s still an excellent primer on this topic)

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stef m. shuster, "Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender" (NYU Press, 2021) Jun 30, 2021

A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender (NYU Press, 2021), stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to “treat” gender identity today. Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, shuster shows how medical providers’ lack of clinical experience and scientific research undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Leah DeVun, "The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance" (Columbia UP, 2021) Jun 29, 2021

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing.

Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people’s politics and resistance.

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Rowena Lennox, "Dingo Bold: The Life and Death of K'gari Dingoes" (Sydney UP, 2021) Jun 29, 2021

Australia and dingos - we have a past and future, and not without controversy.

Dingo Bold: The Life and Death of K'gari Dingoes (Sydney UP, 2021) examines this relationship, with Rowena Lennox's encounter with a dingo, 'Bold', on K'gari (Fraser Island). There are intense, polarised opinions over dingo conservation and control. How should we live with dingos? Native wildlife or feral dogs? Wild or domesticated? A tourist attraction or a threat?

Rowena Lennox has worked as a book editor for many years and now teaches creative writing. She has published essays, fiction, memoir and poems in Hecate, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, New Statesman, Seizure, Social Alternatives and Southerly, among others. Her first book, Fighting Spirit of East Timor, won a New South Wales Premier’s History Award.

Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com

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Faith Kearns, "Getting to the Heart of Science Communication: A Guide to Effective Engagement" (Island Press, 2021) Jun 28, 2021

In Getting to the Heart of Science Communication (Island Press, 2021), Dr. Faith Kearns unpacks science communication as so much more than the “sage from the stage” perspective. Dr. Kearns, through decades of experience and countless interviews, writes to further a conversation for best practices and necessary training for science communication practitioners. In this interview, we discuss the past, present, and future of science communication. We dig into Part II of the book, The Tools of Science Communication, which for those newer to the field or practice, might be shocked to hear has little to do with speaking. Instead, we talk about relating, listening, conflict, and trauma. While Dr. Kearns is clear this book is not intended to be a final word on the topic, it does force readers to think about how the sciences might adopt training from other fields. We finish our talk with an unanswered question – how do trained generalists fit into the expertise-focused world of science?

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Margaret MacMillan, "War: How Conflict Shaped Us" (Random House, 2020) Jun 28, 2021

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

-Isaiah 2:4

The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject, not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity.

Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us(Random House, 2020) explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control?

Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Jun 28, 2021

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France(University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu.

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Canay Özden-Schilling, "The Current Economy: Making Energy and Markets in the United States" (Stanford UP, 2021) Jun 25, 2021

Electricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy: Making Energy and Markets in the United States(Stanford UP, 2021) is an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogeneous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life.

Canay Özden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work: cultures of science, technology, and engineering that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise, this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Canay Özden-Schilling is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore.

Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an urban anthropologist focusing on futurity, care, and migration in Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Sarah K. Mock, "Farm (and Other F Words): The Rise and Fall of the Small Family Farm" (New Degree Press, 2021) Jun 23, 2021

In Farm (and Other F Words): The Rise and Fall of the Small Family Farm (New Degree Press, 2021), Sarah K. Mock seeks to answer “what exactly do we mean by a Good Farm?” She looks at size, income, and age, among other factors that might be metrics of a Good Farm. Using USDA NASS data, farmer interviews, and experience Sarah shares some not so easy to hear perspectives. In this interview, Sarah discusses the systems at play, most working exactly as intended, that are preventing agribusiness from operating as businesses at all. We discuss the lack of mechanisms to remove ineffective or harmful farmers, why more farms don’t grow food (e.g., fruits and vegetables), and whether rich farmers grow food for poor people while poor farmers grow food for rich people. In the last moments of the book, and our interview, Sarah reveals a potential solution – Big Team Farms. What are they? Come find out.

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Howard Burton, "First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute" (Open Agenda Publishing, 2021) Jun 21, 2021

In this second edition of First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute, Howard Burton tells the remarkable and unconventional story—with a bold and biting humour and surprising candour—of the founding of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Howard was the Founding Director of Perimeter Institute and his experiences at developing the research and outreach mandates of PI are described in this thought-provoking book featuring a foreword by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose.

Howard Burton was a freshly-minted physics PhD from the University of Waterloo when a random job query resulted in a strange - albeit fateful - meeting with Research In Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. Mike had a crazy idea: he wanted to spend $100 million of his own recently-found wealth (Research In Motion had just gone public a year earlier and he suddenly found himself fabulously wealthy on paper) to do something new and transformative in the world of science. From these curious beginnings began the story of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Howard's role as its founding director from 1999-2007.

Howard Burton is also the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations. Ideas Roadshow is an award-winning initiative producing a wide range of innovative, multimedia resources, including several pedagogical databases and a wide range of books in both electronic and print format developed from in-depth conversations with more than 100 world-leading researchers, including 3 Nobel Laureates. Ideas Roadshow conversations reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research while providing behind-the-scenes insights into the world of frontline researchers. You can check it out on ideasroadshow.com. Howard also spoke to me about the books Conversations about Astrophysics and Cosmology, Biology and Neuroscience on the NBN, so make sure to look those episodes on our website or any podcast app you use.

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Jessica Helfand, "Face: A Visual Odyssey" (MIT Press, 2019) Jun 17, 2021

Today I talked to Jessica Helfand about her new book Face: A Visual Odyssey (MIT Press, 2019)

Helfand is a designer, artist, and author. She’s taught at Yale University for more than 20 years, cofounded Design Observer, and has had additional roles at a variety of institutions ranging from the American Academy in Rome to the California Institute of Technology.

We’ve always visited churches and museums to gaze at faces. So what’s now changed? Today, about two billion images get uploaded daily to social media – of which nearly 100 million are estimated to be selfies. As Daniel Boorstin presaged in his seminal 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, we’ve become consumed as a culture by our own self-reflections. In this episode, Helfand guides listeners through everything from caricatures (i.e., loaded portraits), to Facebook and selfie-sticks hitting the mainstream in 2006, to how now every third photograph taken by people from 18 to 24 years of age is of themselves. From the question of who’s behind the camera to othering as part of biased behavior, this episode has it all as, indeed, do faces as an enduring centerpiece to how we judge ourselves and others.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer, "Wildness: Relations of People and Place" (U Chicago Press, 2017) Jun 16, 2021

Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild.

Wildness: Relations of People and Place (University of Chicago Press, 2017) charts a different path. Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness.

With this book, we gain insight into what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human.

Gavin Van Horn is the Director of Cultures of Conservation at the Center for Humans and Nature.

John Hausdoerffer is Professor of Environment, Sustainability, and Philosophy at Western State Colorado University.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Aim Sinpeng, "Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand" (U Michigan Press, 2021) Jun 15, 2021

Why did hundreds of thousands of Thai people rise up in opposition to elected governments in 2006, 2008 and 2013-14? What were the ideological underpinnings of the yellow shirt movement? How did the original People’s Alliance for Democracy differ from the later People’s Democratic Reform Committee? Were the yellow shirts simply trying to provoke military coups against administrations linked to the controversial former premier Thaksin Shinawatra? And why did the rise of satellite TV and digital media apparently undermine rather than enrich Thai democracy?

In this lively conversation, Aim Sinpeng – senior lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Sydney – discusses these topics with Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. She explains how many of her family, friends and neighbours took part in the yellow shirt protests, and argues for a more nuanced understanding of these movements, one that goes beyond the caricature of conservative royalists blinded by their overweening faith in monarchy.

Aim Sinpeng is a prolific scholar of Thailand’s politics, who has been at the forefront of recent work on the growing salience on online political participation in Southeast Asia. She is the author of Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand(U Michigan Press, 2021). Sinpeng tweets at @aimsinpeng.

For Aim’s latest (Open Access) Critical Asian Studies article on Thailand’s 2020 student protests, see here.

Like this interview? If so, you might be interested in an earlier Nordic Asia podcast with Aim on the Future Forward Party here. Or some recent Southeast Asian Studies channel podcasts on Thai politics here and here.

Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here.

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Javier Guerrero C., "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave, 2020) Jun 15, 2021

Javier Guerrero's "Narcosubmarines: Outlaw Innovation and Maritime Interdiction in the War on Drugs" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) is about the encounters of Colombian drug smugglers and the Colombian Navy, both in the open seas and along coastlines. Guerrero specifically examines the technologies involved in the War on Drugs, such as the narcosubmarines and patrol boats, the knowledge required to transport drugs and the knowledge required to stop the illicit flows.

The author presents compelling new evidence for advancing an understanding of technological innovation in antagonist contexts, as well as the symbiotic and co-evolutionary character of the process of technological innovation in the War on Drugs. This book will appeal both to practitioners and scholars interested in the War on Drugs and the production of technologies in outlaw contexts.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

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Howard Burton, "Conversations About Neuroscience" (Open Agenda, 2020) Jun 14, 2021

This Ideas Roadshow Collection includes five Ideas Roadshow books that have been developed from filmed wide-ranging conversations with the following leading neuroscientists: Lisa Feldman Barrett (Northeastern University), Jennifer Groh (Duke University), Kalanit Grill-Spector (Stanford University), John Duncan (Cambridge University) and Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University). Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy.

This collection includes a detailed preface highlighting the connections between the different books which offer a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship while each individual book also includes a detailed introduction plus questions for discussion. These mind-stretching books provide readers through an engaging dialogue format with a wide range of fascinating findings in today's neuroscience research, such as: how the brain combines various streams of sensory input to determine where things are, together with the corresponding implications for a wide range of issues, from neuroplasticity to evolutionary mechanisms; how our brain is anticipating and making sense of sensory inputs from its environment; how functional imaging techniques are used to visualize the brain in action and how it functions to recognize people, objects and places; whether intelligence can be measured and improved; what role our frontal lobe plays in executive control; sophisticated ways of harnessing the thoughts of rats, monkeys and humans to drive mechanical devices in the rapidly emerging field of brain-machine interfaces, and much more.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Martin Halliwell, "American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics" (U California Press, 2021) Jun 11, 2021

Despite enormous advances in medical science and public health education over the last century, access to health care remains a dominant issue in American life. U.S. health care is often hailed as the best in the world, yet the public health emergencies of today often echo the public health emergencies of yesterday: consider the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 and COVID-19, the displacement of the Dust Bowl and the havoc of Hurricane Maria, the Reagan administration’s antipathy toward the AIDS epidemic and the lack of accountability during the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Spanning the period from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson to that of Donald Trump, American Health Crisis: One Hundred Years of Panic, Planning, and Politics (University of California Press, 2021) illuminates how—despite the elevation of health care as a human right throughout the world—vulnerable communities in the United States continue to be victimized by structural inequalities across disparate geographies, income levels, and ethnic groups. Martin Halliwell views contemporary public health crises through the lens of historical and cultural revisionings, suturing individual events together into a narrative of calamity that has brought us to our current crisis in health politics. American Health Crisis considers the future of public health in the United States and, presenting a reinvigorated concept of health citizenship, argues that now is the moment to act for lasting change.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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W. Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture" (MIT Press, 2020) Jun 09, 2021

Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural realms separated by impervious walls. But some fifty years ago, the borders between technology and art began to be breached. In Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020), W. Patrick McCray shows how in this era, artists eagerly collaborated with engineers and scientists to explore new technologies and create visually and sonically compelling multimedia works. This art emerged from corporate laboratories, artists' studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses. Many of the biggest stars of the art world—Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneemann, and John Cage—participated, but the technologists who contributed essential expertise and aesthetic input often went unrecognized.

Coming from diverse personal backgrounds, this roster of engineers and scientists includes Frank J. Malina, the American rocket-pioneer turned kinetic artist who launched the art-science journal Leonardo, and Swedish-born engineer Billy Klüver, who established the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T). At schools ranging from MIT to Caltech, engineers engaged with such figures as artist Gyorgy Kepes and celebrity curator Maurice Tuchman.

Today, we are in the midst of a new surge of corporate and academic promotion of projects and programs combining art, technology, and science. Making Art Work reveals how artists and technologists have continually constructed new communities in which they exercise imagination, display creative expertise, and pursue commercial innovation.

Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. I study science and its history, in the hope that understanding the past can help us make sense of the present and build a better future.

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George Szmukler, "Men in White Coats: Treatment Under Coercion" (Oxford UP, 2017) Jun 09, 2021

The laws that govern psychiatric treatment under coercion have remain largely unchanged since the eighteenth century. But this is not because of their effectiveness, rather, these laws cling to outdated notions of disability, mental illness and mental disorder why deny the fundamental rights of this category of people on an equal basis with all others. In Men in White Coats: Treatment Under Coercion(Oxford University Press, 2017) Professor George Szmukler examines the violation of these rights, such as the right to autonomy, self-determination, liberty, and security and integrity of the person in the context of the domestic laws which themselves perpetuate ongoing discrimination against people with mental impairments.

Tracing first the history of the medical coercion and involuntary treatment of people with mental illnesses and mental disorders, Professor Szmukler offers a potential path which he argues would end discrimination against this category of people. He puts forward a legal framework which is non-discriminatory and is based on a person's decision-making abilities and best interests, as opposed to a diagnosis. Crucially, he argues that this law is generic, and would not apply by reason of a person's mental disorder. His solution - Fusion Law - would better support people's autonomy, better engage with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and have significant social value by recognising the dignity and equality of people with mental health impairments. It would also have implications for the forensics system, in particular, with regards to defendants who have mental disorders.

Professor George Szmukler is a psychiatrist who started practising in the field as a trainee in 1972. He retired from clinical work in 2012, and is now an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Society at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's college London. His major research now concerns methods of reducing compulsion and ’coercion’ in psychiatric care, for example, through the use of ’advance statements’. A related interest is mental health law, particularly the possibility of generic legislation centred on impaired decision-making capacity which would apply to all persons, regardless of the cause of the underlying disturbance of mental functioning.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "Objectivity" (Zone Books, 2010) Jun 07, 2021

Turns out "objectivity" has a not-so clear-cut definition across time. In this podcast, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison to discuss their work, Objectivity(Zone Books, 2010). This work traces the historical and cultural developments of the word “objective” as it acquired different meanings and associated practices. Similarly, they consider the changing relationship of objectivity as it relates to the subjectivity of the researcher, as the “scientific self.” This deep philosophical work, diving into the cultural and historical shifts of epistemology within the past few centuries, is told through atlas making and image generation.

In this conversation, we discuss the evolving processes of research and atlas making and how they co-evolved with the fears, virtues, and ideals of the time of their emergence. Additionally, we talk about the role of the self and aesthetics in categorizing and publishing the collections of working objects in atlases. We end looking at the current trajectories of image production as they try to pragmatically predict what's to come.

Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread.

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A. Burton and R. Mawani, "Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times" (Duke UP, 2020) Jun 07, 2021

From yaks and vultures to whales and platypuses, animals have played central roles in the history of British imperial control. The contributors to Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times(Duke UP, 2020) analyze twenty-six animals—domestic, feral, predatory, and mythical—whose relationship to imperial authorities and settler colonists reveals how the presumed racial supremacy of Europeans underwrote the history of Western imperialism. Victorian imperial authorities, adventurers, and colonists used animals as companions, military transportation, agricultural laborers, food sources, and status symbols. They also overhunted and destroyed ecosystems, laying the groundwork for what has come to be known as climate change.

At the same time, animals such as lions, tigers, and mosquitoes interfered in the empire's racial, gendered, and political aspirations by challenging the imperial project’s sense of inevitability. Unconventional and innovative in form and approach, Animalia invites new ways to consider the consequences of imperial power by demonstrating how the politics of empire—in its racial, gendered, and sexualized forms—played out in multispecies relations across jurisdictions under British imperial control.

Akash is a historical researcher focusing on the interconnected lives of humans and animals. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 (https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/27991). Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca

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Jonathan Rauch, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth" (Brookings, 2021) Jun 07, 2021

In recent years Americans have experienced a range of assaults upon the truth. In The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), Jonathan Rauch describes the various ways in which our understanding of truth has come under attack, and the mechanisms that exist to fight back. As Rauch explains, the challenge of determining truth is as old as civilization itself, with the system we use today a product of concepts formulated in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today this system faces an unprecedented challenge created by the digital revolution, which has inverted the social incentives on which the reality-based community depends and fractured reality for millions of people. The consequences of this today can be seen today in both the numerous agenda-driven disinformation campaigns and the coercive conformity of “cancel culture” that challenges diversity of thought. Yet for all of the threats posed to the Constitution of Knowledge, Rauch argues that within it are contained the tools with which people can fight back successfully in order to maintain our social system for turning disagreement into truth.

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Suzanne L. Marchand, "Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jun 04, 2021

Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020)balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a history of chemistry at the dawn of modern industry, and a history of aristocratic consumption of porcelain as these stories open into an economic history of globalized markets, as well as a social history of sorts of Central Europe’s fledgling bourgeois and lower-class consumer public. Marchand traces these interlocking stories across three centuries, from the first European firing of porcelain in 1708 under the supervision of Johann Friedrich Böttger to the present day, where contemporary tastes threaten to consign the white tableware of Europe’s past to the flea markets of today. Porcelain in Marchand’s hands acts as something like an objet de memoire, to think of Pierre Nora and other scholars’ work on national histories. One of the book’s many virtues is the sense of Professor Marchand reassembling a continental pattern out of several shards.

Porcelain, as Professor Marchand writes, “is a rich and complicated adventure, in which we not only visit lavishly decorated palaces but also linger in blisteringly hot craft workshops and spartan working-class homes. Though actual porcelain objects in all their splendor and strangeness play a central role, the focus is really on the people who made, marketed, and purchased them, whether they were princes, or peddlers, or middle-class housewives.” It is also an attempt to write Central European history in a new way, one that the author hopes will be taken up by other scholars of history and material culture.

John Raimo is a PhD. Candidate in History at NYU finishing up my dissertation (on postwar publishing houses) this summer in European history.

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Maneesha Deckha, "Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders" (U Toronto Press, 2021) Jun 04, 2021

In Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (University of Toronto Press, 2021), Maneesha Deckha critically examines how Canadian law and, by extension, other legal orders around the world, participate in the social construction of the human-animal divide and the abject rendering of animals as property. Through a rigorous but cogent analysis, Deckha calls for replacing the exploitative property classification for animals with a new transformative legal status or subjectivity called "beingness."

In developing a new legal subjectivity for animals, one oriented toward respecting animals for who they are rather than their proximity to idealized versions of humanness, Animals as Legal Beings seeks to bring critical animal theorizations and animal law closer together. Throughout, Deckha draws upon the feminist animal care tradition, as well as feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies. Her argument is critical of the liberal legal view of animals and directed at a legal subjectivity for animals attentive to their embodied vulnerability, and desirous of an animal-friendly cultural shift in the core foundations of anthropocentric legal systems.

Theoretically informed yet accessibly presented, Animals as Legal Beings makes a significant contribution to an array of interdisciplinary debates and is an innovative and astute argument for a meaningful more-than-human turn in law and policy.

Akash Ondaatje is a historical researcher focusing on the interconnected lives of humans and animals. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 (https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/handle/1974/27991). Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca

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Carla Diana, "My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human" (Harvard Business, 2021) Jun 03, 2021

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, 2021).

Carla Diana is a robot designer responsible for the creative aspects of Diligent Robotics’ new hospital service robot named Moxi. She created and leads the 4D Design masters program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, wrote the world’s first children’s book on 3D printing, LEO the Maker Prince, and she cohosts the Robopsych Podcast.

The author is intrigued by where technology is headed—the “electronic guts” of high-tech offerings--at the same time that she never loses focus on what kind of gut reaction a user will have in interacting with a product. This episode therefore ranges from discussing modalities central to Diana’s work (sound, movement, and lighting) to addressing how important it is for designers and engineers alike to engage in “bodystorming” exercises that align everyone around what the user’s experience will be like. Delight and ease of use are both key criteria in achieving success. If there’s a Frankenstein aspect to helping bring robots “alive,” fortunately Diana is somebody concerned with all the ethical challenges that arise.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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S. Livingstone and A. Blum-Ross, "Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children's Lives" (Oxford UP, 2020) Jun 03, 2021

In this interview, I talked with Professor Sonia Livingstone about her book Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives (Oxford UP, 2020). The book is co-authored with Alicia Blum-Ross who is the Public Policy Lead for Kids & Families at Google. Professor Livingstone is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research examines how the changing conditions of mediation are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action. She has published 20 books on media audiences, specifically focusing on children and young people’s risks and opportunities, media literacy and rights in the digital environment. Professor Livingstone currently directs the Digital Futures Commission with the 5Rights Foundation and the Global Kids Online project with UNICEF along with various other prestigious affiliations.

Najarian R. Peters is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kansas and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her research interests and teaching areas focus on privacy and emerging technology. Email her at: npeters@law.harvard.edu or Najarian.peters@ku.edu

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Rob Boddice, "Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Jun 02, 2021

In this compelling history of the co-ordinated, transnational defence of medical experimentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rob Boddice explores the experience of vivisection as humanitarian practice. He captures the rise of the professional and specialist medical scientist, whose métier was animal experimentation, and whose guiding principle was 'humanity' or the reduction of the aggregate of suffering in the world. He also highlights the rhetorical rehearsal of scientific practices as humane and humanitarian, and connects these often defensive professions to meaningful changes in the experience of doing science. Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge UP, 2021) examines the strategies employed by the medical establishment to try to cement an idea in the public consciousness: that the blood spilt in medical laboratories served a far-reaching human good.

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Amy D. Finstein, "Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-interstate America" (Temple UP, 2020) Jun 02, 2021

In the first half of the twentieth century, urban elevated highways were much more than utilitarian infrastructure, lifting traffic above the streets; they were statements of civic pride, asserting boldly modern visions for a city’s architecture, economy, and transportation network. Yet three of the most ambitious projects, launched in Chicago, New York, and Boston in the spirit of utopian models by architects such as Le Corbusier and Hugh Ferriss, ultimately fell short of their ideals.

Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-interstate America(Temple UP, 2020) is the first study to focus on pre-Interstate urban elevated highways within American architectural and urban history. Amy Finstein traces the idealistic roots of these superstructures, their contrasting realities once built, their impacts on successive development patterns, and the recent challenges they have posed to contemporary urban designers.

Filled with more than 100 historic photographs and illustrations of beaux arts and art deco architecture, Modern Mobility Aloft provides a critical understanding of urban landscapes, transportation, and technological change as cities moved into the modern era.

Amy Finstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches modern architectural and urban history.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Cara A. Finnegan, "Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital" (U Illinois Press, 2021) Jun 02, 2021

Defining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks. In this episode, Dr. Lee M. Pierce (they & she) interviews Dr. Cara A. Finnegan about Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital(University of Illinois Press, 2021).

Lincoln's somber portraits. Lyndon Johnson's swearing in. George W. Bush's reaction to learning about the 9/11 attacks. Photography plays an indelible role in how we remember and define American presidents. Throughout history, presidents have actively participated in all aspects of photography, not only by sitting for photos but by taking and consuming them. Cara A. Finnegan ventures from a newly-discovered daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams to Barack Obama's selfies to tell the stories of how presidents have participated in the medium's transformative moments. As she shows, technological developments not only changed photography, but introduced new visual values that influence how we judge an image. At the same time, presidential photographs--as representations of leaders who symbolized the nation--sparked public debate on these values and their implications. An original journey through political history, Photographic Presidents reveals the intertwined evolution of an American institution and a medium that continues to define it.

Have questions or comments? Connect with your host, Dr. Lee M. Pierce, on social media and Gmail @rhetoriclee or with guest author, Dr. Cara Finnegan on Twitter.

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Mikiya Koyagi, "Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway" (Stanford UP, 2021) Jun 01, 2021

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 in the south. Iran's first national railway, it produced and disrupted various kinds of movement—voluntary and forced, intended and unintended, on different scales and in different directions—among Iranian diplomats, tribesmen, migrant laborers, technocrats, railway workers, tourists and pilgrims, as well as European imperial officials alike. Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway(Stanford UP, 2021) tells the hitherto unexplored stories of these individuals as they experienced new levels of mobility.

Drawing on newspapers, industry publications, travelogues, and memoirs, as well as American, British, Danish, and Iranian archival materials, Mikiya Koyagi traces contested imaginations and practices of mobility from the conception of a trans-Iranian railway project during the nineteenth-century global transport revolution to its early years of operation on the eve of Iran's oil nationalization movement in the 1950s. Weaving together various individual experiences, this book considers how the infrastructural megaproject reoriented the flows of people and goods. In so doing, the railway project simultaneously brought the provinces closer to Tehran and pulled them away from it, thereby constantly reshaping local, national, and transnational experiences of space among mobile individuals.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on Mobilities and Methods.

Mikiya Koyagi is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Alize Arıcan is an urban anthropologist and incoming Postdoctoral Scholar at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Studies. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Patrick Maille, "The Cards: The Evolution and Power of Tarot" (UP of Mississippi, 2021) Jun 01, 2021

In The Cards: The History and Power of Tarot (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Patrick Maille examines the history of Tarot cards and their place in popular culture. The Cards starts with an extensive review of the history of Tarot from its roots as a game to its supposed connection to ancient Egyptian magic, through its place in secret societies, and to its current use in meditation and psychology. Part Two delves into specific areas of popular culture—art, television, movies, and comics—and how Tarot is used in works such as The Andy Griffith Show, Dark Shadows, Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic, and Live and Let Die. While Tarot means many different things to many different people, the cards somehow strike universal chords that can resonate through popular culture. The symbolism within the cards, and the cards as symbols themselves, make Tarot an excellent device for the media of popular culture in numerous ways.The cards are evocative images in their own right, but the mystical fascination they inspire makes them a fantastic tool to be used in our favorite shows and stories.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Skylar Tibbits, "Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2021) Jun 01, 2021

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution (Princeton UP, 2021) is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world.

Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself—and along the way help us build a more sustainable future.

Compelling and beautifully designed, Things Fall Together provides an insider’s perspective on the materials revolution that lies ahead, revealing the spectacular possibilities for designing active materials that can self-assemble, collaborate, and one day even evolve and design on their own.

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Howard Burton, "Conversations About Astrophysics & Cosmology" (Open Agenda, 2020) May 31, 2021

This Ideas Roadshow Collection includes five Ideas Roadshow books that have been developed from filmed wide-ranging conversations with the following leading physicists: Roger Penrose (University of Oxford), Scott Tremaine (IAS), Paul Steinhardt (Princeton University), Justin Khoury (University of Pennsylvania) and Rocky Kolb (University of Chicago). Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy.

This collection includes a detailed preface highlighting the connections between the different books which offer a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship while each individual book also includes a detailed introduction plus questions for discussion. The books explore a wide range of fascinating topics related to astrophysics and cosmology through an engaging dialogue format and will give a non-specialist a genuine sense of what questions the world's leading cosmologists are grappling with and what the world of scientific discovery is really like. Topics examined include black holes, dark matter, the process of discovery, dark energy, cosmic inflation, the multiverse, conformal cyclic cosmology, and much more.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Jurgen Martschukat, "The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement" (Polity, 2021) May 31, 2021

Today on New Books in History, Juergen Martschukat, professor of North American History at Universitat Erfurt, talks about his new book, The Age of Fitness: How the Body Became a Sign of Success and Performance (Polity Press, 2021), to celebrate its translation into and publication in English with Polity Press, this year, 2021. The book was originally published in 2019, by S. Fischer, in German.

We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms, cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In this new book, Jurgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity's emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues, that the age of fitness truly emerged, as part and parcel of our contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism enjoins individuals to work on themselves, to cultivate themselves in body and mind. Fitness becomes a guiding principle of social life, an era-defining network of discourses and practices that shape individuals' actions and self-conceptions. The pursuit of fitness becomes a cultural repertoire that is deeply ingrained in our institutions and way of life. This wide-ranging book shows how deeply fitness is inscribed in modern societies, and how important fitness has become to success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition. It will be of great value not only to those interested in sport and fitness, but also to anyone concerned with the conditions of success and failure in our societies today.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, "Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access" (MIT Press, 2020) May 31, 2021

Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, editors of Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (published open access by MIT in 2020). We talk about a lot, and all of it, really, falls under the head "Ethics of Scholarly Communication."

interviewer : "How did you conceive of a project of this diversity on the subject of open access and publishing?"

Martin Paul Eve : "What's really interesting to me is that most academics think they know about scholarly publishing because they have all published. This is a bit like me saying that I'm an expert in how car engines work because I can drive. It doesn't equate to the same thing. And so what we really wanted to do was to put together a volume that did not really attempt forcibly to synthesize all of the propositions made under its roof, but rather to give a space for a debate to develop, a space for argument and conversation to flourish about the difficulties surrounding open access."

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interviewer : "The book just tells all it has to tell from every perspective, and these disagreements, and agreements, make for the feel of a real discussion. I wonder what your basic view of scholarly communication was throughout the, surely, long editing process."

Jonathan Gray : "Well, we thought of it like this: so if you look at work on the sociology of art––rather than looking at the artwork, you look at everything around that artwork which is required for it to be seen and appreciated as an artwork. You look at the supply chains involved in producing print and canvas, you look at the gallery workers, you look at ticket sales and so on. And I guess we were keen to kind of do a similar thing with this book, to perform a kind of inversion around scholarly communication and open access, and really situate it and re-world it in relation to all sorts of issues, communities, forms of labor, and infrastructures."

Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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Zahi Zalloua, "Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future" (Bloomsbury, 2020) May 31, 2021

The figure of the human looms large of the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks speculating about featherless bipeds to contemporary programmers wondering if they can recreate human intelligence with a series of algorithms. Much philosophical thought in the last few decades has involved much speculation about the human subject, even if it was often hostile to the idea that there is such a thing, rather than an odd effect of linguistic and cultural practices. Other critics have pointed out that the idea of a universal human subject has often been used to legitimate and cover up nefarious political ideas and practices.

Still, many thinkers today continue to argue for an ontology that includes a unique place for the human subject. One of these thinkers is my guest today, Zahi Zalloua, here to discuss his new book Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2020). Written both as an introduction and intervention, it kicks off with a long history of humanism and its critics, which helps set the stage for the four chapters that make up the main book. The first explores cyborgs, and the ways technology is slowly becoming a part of our lives and what that might mean. The second explores animals and our treatment of them, and what our willingness to send them to slaughterhouses and consume them in enormous quantities says about us. The third explores new theoretical frameworks such as Object Oriented Ontology and New Materialism, and the place of the subject in these frameworks. The final chapter looks at race in Afropessimism, and what a true emancipation might look like. In all this, Zalloua combines theoretical frameworks with cultural analysis, giving the book a sense of accessibility and relevance to our current moment (as well as a couple plot-spoilers for Black Mirror and Sorry to Bother You). Those interested in philosophy and critical theory, and particularly the work of Slavoj Žižek will find this to be both an accessible and provocative text.

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Ellen Peters, "Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers" (Oxford UP, 2020) May 31, 2021

To many mathematicians and math enthusiasts, the word "innumeracy" brings to mind popular writing like that of John Allen Paulos. But inequities in our quantitative reasoning skills have received considerable interest and attention from researchers lately, including in psychology, development, education, and public health. Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a unified treatment of these broad-ranging studies, from the ways more and less numerate people differ in our perceptions of risk and our number-based decisions to the roots of our numeric faculties and how we can make the best of them. Dr. Ellen Peters has made significant contributions to the subject and brings her expertise and an exceptional clarity to its presentation.

Precious little of the research surveyed in her book could fit into this interview! We discussed the three components of numeric ability—objective numeracy, subjective numeracy, and the innate number sense—and how they vary within and across populations. We talked through some key lessons from this literature, such as the importance of calibrating our self-efficacy to our real ability and an awareness of how our cultural allegiances can drive even our mathematical reasoning. And we identified some of the essential personal habits and policy levers (early childhood education!!) available to us in our efforts to improve our individual numeracy and our collective numeric decision-making. For a firm grounding in the state of knowledge and urgent open questions, there may be no better resource for many years to come.

Suggested companion works: Contributions from the labs of Isaac Lipkus, Angela Fagerlin, John Opfer, Edward Cokely, Rocio Garcia-Retamero, Jakub Traczyk, Agata Sobków, Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Keith Stanovich, and Valerie Reyna.

Ellen Peters, Ph.D., is the Philip H. Knight Chair, and Director of the Center for Science Communication Research, in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. As a decision psychologist, she studies the basic building blocks of human judgment and decision making and their links with effective communication techniques and has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers on these topics. She is former President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She also works with federal agencies to advance decision and communication sciences in health and health policy, including having been Chair of FDA’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee and member of the NAS’s Science of Science Communication committee. She has been awarded the Jane Beattie Scientific Recognition Award and an NIH Group Merit Award. Finally, she has received extensive funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains.

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Randolph M. Nesse, "Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry" (Dutton, 2019) May 28, 2021

Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. With his classic Why We Get Sick, Dr. Randolph Nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry (Dutton, 2019), a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds.

Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations yet can become overwhelming. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Taken together, these and many more insights help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering and show us new paths for relieving it by understanding individuals as individuals.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Tim Lockley, "Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments, 1795–1874" (Cambridge UP, 2020) May 26, 2021

Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments(Cambridge University Press, 2020) by Tim Lockley demonstrates how Britain's black soldiers helped shape attitudes towards race throughout the nineteenth century. The West India Regiments were part of the British military establishment for 132 years, generating vast records with details about every one of their 100,000+ recruits which made them the best-documented group of black men in the Atlantic World. Tim Lockley shows how, in the late eighteenth century, surgeons established in medical literature that white and black bodies were radically different, forging a notion of the 'superhuman' black soldier able to undertake physical challenges far beyond white soldiers. By the late 1830s, however, military statisticians would contest these ideas and highlight the vulnerabilities of black soldiers instead. The popularity and pervasiveness of these publications spread far beyond British military or medical circles and had a significant international impact, particularly in the US, both reflecting and reinforcing changing notions about blackness.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world.

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Jenny Bangham, "Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics" (U Chicago Press, 2020) May 26, 2021

Blood is messy, dangerous, and charged with meaning. By following it as it circulates through people and institutions, Jenny Bangham explores the intimate connections between the early infrastructures of blood transfusion and the development of human genetics. Focusing on mid-twentieth-century Britain, Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics (U Chicago Press, 2020) connects histories of eugenics to the local politics of giving blood, showing how the exchange of blood carved out networks that made human populations into objects of medical surveillance and scientific research. Bangham reveals how biology was transformed by two world wars, how scientists have worked to define racial categories, and how the practices and rhetoric of public health made genetics into a human science. Today, genetics is a powerful authority on human health and identity, and Blood Relations helps us understand how this authority was achieved.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Linda Colley, "The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World" (Liveright, 2021) May 26, 2021

Linda Colley is a luminary in the fields of British and imperial history, and the Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Her captivating new book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright, 2021) narrates a sweeping global history of written constitutions from the 18th to the 21st century. Bold, imaginative, and strikingly original, it challenges established accounts and uncovers the close connection between constitution-making and warfare. Colley brings to the fore historiographically neglected sites and actors, from Catherine the Great to Sierra Leone's James Africanus Beale Horton and Tunisia's soldier-constitutionalist Khayr-al-Din. The monograph focuses on the myriad ways in which constitutions crossed boundaries and intersected with wider political, cultural, and socioeconomic forces in all corners of the globe. By displaying both the emancipatory and the repressive effects of modern constitutions, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen retells the serpentine story of successful and failed attempts to redefine the functions and limits of state governments.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

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Heba Y. Amin, "The General's Stork" (Sternberg Press, 2020) May 25, 2021

In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin’s The General’s Stork, an ongoing project that investigates the politics of aerial surveillance. It is also the subject of the most recent book in the Research/Practice edited by Anthony Downey.

Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems. Drawing on preliminary material such as diaries, notebooks, audiovisual content, digital and social media, informal communications, and abandoned drafts, the series examines the interdisciplinary research methods that artists employ in their practices. In their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to generating research, what forms of knowledge do artists produce?

Anthony Downey, editor of The General's Stork(Sternberg Press, 2020) speaks with Pierre d'Alancaisez about the work of Heba Y. Amin and her exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms, London, which he curated and the epistemic implications of cartographic imaging and computer vision for our understanding and command of territories. Downey also discusses I'm Good at Love, I'm Good at Hate, It's in Between I Freeze, a volume in the series that follows the artist Michael Rakowitz as he attempts to restage a concert by the singer Leonard Cohen that never took place in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Alex Wellerstein, "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2021) May 24, 2021

The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy--and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive?

Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author's efforts, Alex Wellerstein's book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power.

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Deborah R. Coen, "The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter" (U Chicago Press, 2013) May 21, 2021

Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs but also on the observations of eyewitnesses to destruction. During the nineteenth century, a scientific description of an earthquake was built of stories--stories from as many people in as many situations as possible. Sometimes their stories told of fear and devastation, sometimes of wonder and excitement.

In The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (U Chicago Press, 2013), Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century's most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1930s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties.The Earthquake Observers tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.

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Ellen Helsper, "The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities" (Sage, 2021) May 21, 2021

What are digital inequalities? In The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities (Sage, 2021), Ellen Helsper, a Professor of Digital Inequalities in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, explores the unequal nature of our now digital world. The book introduces the corresponding fields theoretical framework, as a way of blending a huge range of empirical and theoretical material that provides the basis for a global analysis of digital’s relationship to economic, social, and cultural inequalities. Clear, engaging, and easy to follow, the book poses important questions as to who is valued in the digital world, as well as offering lessons for how we might address the causes and consequences of digital inequalities. The book will be essential reading across social science and humanities, and for anyone interested in understanding and changing the digital world.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Makis Solomos, "From Music to Sound: The Emergence of Sound in 20th and 21st-century Music" (Routledge, 2019) May 21, 2021

In From Music to Sound: The Emergence of Sound in 20th and 21st-century Music (Routledge, 2019), Makis Solomos (Professor of Musicology, University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis “Paris 8”) argues that the 20th century bears witness to a kind of paradigm shift relating to the subject matter of music, a shift “from a musical culture centered on the note to a culture of sound” (5). Crucially, Solomos sets out to track this transformation as a change that is music-internal: that is, one that may be understood with reference to the new aesthetic and cultural forms of particular compositions that put sound at stake. Solomos draws on analysis, listening, and the aesthetic writings of composers themselves to argue for the “emergence” of sound-as-such as a topic of 20th- and 21st-century music, one consequence of the increasing complexity of music since 1900.

His first sole-author monograph in English, From Music to Sound is an accessible and engaging entry point into Solomos’s work for an Anglophone audience that draws not only on his long career as a musicologist with extensive experience of contemporary music but also as a specialist in the musical thought of Theodor Adorno and the music of Iannis Xenakis. The book's attention to the contingency of the six themes around which Solomos organises this history—timbre, noise, listening, immersion, the composition of sound as material, and “sound-space”—marks it out not only as a contribution to the history of contemporary music but also to its historiography. Composers and works likely familiar to listeners are marshaled to develop these themes: Russolo, Webern, Schaeffer, Xenakis, Tristan Murail. Its rich selection of music examples provides ample points of departure into the work of composers perhaps less well known to listeners: François-Bernard Mâche, Fausto Romitelli, and Dmitri Kourliandski, among others. Though the principal focus of the book rests squarely on the tradition of Western art music composition, Solomos is careful to acknowledge that this titular transition from “music to sound” is not the exclusive preserve of institutional music culture: examples from recorded rock, jazz, and post-rock help round out the picture by pointing to the role that sound-studio cultures—and, we might say, technique and technics in general—play in the objectification of sound across genre lines.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Joseph Rouse, "Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image" (U Chicago Press, 2015) May 21, 2021

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself.

In Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image(U Chicago Press, 2015), Joseph Rouse argues that the most pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it.

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Rob Kitchin, "Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World" (Policy Press, 2021) May 20, 2021

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 new data-rich world, and can we truly comprehend what is at stake. In Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World (Policy Press, 2021), renowned social scientist Rob Kitchin explores the intricacies of data creation and charts how data-driven technologies have become essential to how society, government and the economy work. Creatively blending scholarly analysis, biography and fiction, he demonstrates how data are shaped by social and political forces, and the extent to which they influence our daily lives. He reveals our data world to be one of potential danger, but also of hope.

Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology.

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L. Ayu Saraswati, "Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie" (NYU Press, 2021) May 19, 2021

Social media has become the front-and-center arena for feminist activism. Responding to and enacting the political potential of pain inflicted in acts of sexual harassment, violence, and abuse, Asian American and Asian Canadian feminist icons such as rupi kaur, Margaret Cho, and Mia Matsumiya have turned to social media to share their stories with the world. But how does such activism reconcile with the platforms on which it is being cultivated, when its radical messaging is at total odds with the neoliberal logic governing social media?

Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie(NYU Press, 2021) troubles this phenomenon by articulating a "neoliberal self(ie) gaze" through which these feminist activists see and storify the self on social media as "good" neoliberal subjects who are appealing, inspiring, and entertaining. This book offers a fresh perspective on feminist activism by demonstrating how the problematic neoliberal logic governing digital spaces like Instagram and Twitter limits the possibilities of how one might use social media for feminist activism.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

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Aaron Shapiro, "Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) May 19, 2021

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 behind the scenes tour of the smart city and shows the revolution in urban technology that is currently taking place in large metropolitan areas around the United States. Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. Throughout Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (U Minnesota Press, 2020), Shapiro develops a new lens called logistical governance in his effort to interpret and understand urban technologies. This lens was used to critique urban future based on extraction and rationalization.

Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps readers peer through cracks of the façade that smart cities are bearing. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it is ultimately serving the ends of commercial media. Shapiro also builds on his experience as a bike courier delivering food for a startup company and examines how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy paves the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his discussion toward the current debates about police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are the answer to reforming the ongoing crises of criminal justice in large urban cities.

Through these gripping accounts of new technology in urban areas, Shapiro and Design, Control, Predict make vital contributions to conversations about data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro provides a ground level account of a timely and important piece of research in Design, Control, Predict. This piece can be used when comprehending urbanism today and when identifying strategies to advance the critique and resistance to a dystopian future that is often viewed as inevitable.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the social interactions that people engage in at two annual festivals that take place during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Zoetanya Sujon, "The Social Media Age" (Sage, 2021) May 18, 2021

How has social media shaped contemporary society? In The Social Media Age(Sage, 2021), Zoetanya Sujon, a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director in Communications and Media at London College of Communication, analyses social media, from pre-history through to our more contemporary critical turn. The book considers a wide range of issues and perspectives, from platforms and power, through data and dating, to selfies and surveillance. Packed with a vast range of case study material, including reflections on #BlackLivesMatter, social credit systems in China, and influencer culture on YouTube, the book is essential reading across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in our current, social media, world.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Climate Denialism and Propaganda with Catriona McKinnon May 18, 2021

Catriona McKinnon is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on climate ethics and environmental justice. Much of her recent work aims at addressing denialism about climate change.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project.

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Michael D. Gordin, "On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience" (Oxford UP, 2021) May 17, 2021

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience", typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella-- astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements--both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides-- there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.

On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience(Oxford UP, 2021) explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?

Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. On the Fringe provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Adam Rogers, "Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern" (Houghton Mifflin, 2021) May 17, 2021

From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world.

In Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern (Houghton Mifflin, 2021), Rogers takes us on that globe-trotting journey, tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Bijal P. Trivedi, "Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever" (Benbella, 2020) May 13, 2021

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type—from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. In 1974, Joey O'Donnell was born with strange symptoms. His insatiable appetite, incessant vomiting, and a relentless cough—which shook his tiny, fragile body and made it difficult to draw breath—confounded doctors and caused his parents agonizing, sleepless nights. After six sickly months, his salty skin provided the critical clue: he was one of thousands of Americans with cystic fibrosis, an inherited lung disorder that would most likely kill him before his first birthday.

The gene and mutation responsible for CF were found in 1989—discoveries that promised to lead to a cure for kids like Joey. But treatments unexpectedly failed and CF was deemed incurable. It was only after the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a grassroots organization founded by parents, formed an unprecedented partnership with a fledgling biotech company that transformative leaps in drug development were harnessed to produce groundbreaking new treatments: pills that could fix the crippled protein at the root of this deadly disease.

From science writer Bijal P. Trivedi, Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever (Benbella, 2020) chronicles the riveting saga of cystic fibrosis, from its ancient origins to its identification in the dank autopsy room of a hospital basement, and from the CF gene's celebrated status as one of the first human disease genes ever discovered to the groundbreaking targeted genetic therapies that now promise to cure it. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope—and a fascinating peek into the future of genetics and medicine.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Michelle Nijhuis, "Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction" (Norton, 2021) May 12, 2021

In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction(Norton, 2021), acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale.

She describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as lesser-known figures in conservation history; she reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund; she explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros; and she confronts the darker side of conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism.

As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change escalate, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species—including our own

Jenny Splitter is an independent journalist covering food, farming, science, and climate.

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Lucy van de Wiel, "Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging" (NYU Press, 2020) May 12, 2021

How does egg freezing reshape our conception of time, aging and fertility? In her new monograph, Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging (NYU Press, 2020) Dr. Lucy van de Wiel explores the significance of egg freezing in re-orienting the temporality of the gender politics of aging. Dr. van de Wiel argues that it is critical to examine the politicized dimensions of egg freezing because it transforms the broader discourses around aging and normative timeline of women's reproduction even though the technology is only accessible for an elite few.

Through a cultural analysis of popular media and documentaries to highlight the role of rhetoric in creating conditions that motivate women in making decisions about their reproductive futures, Dr. van de Wiel criticizes the moralistic boundaries between social and medical utilized by some state actors to condemn women who decide to freeze their eggs for their careers. Dr. van de Wiel also highlights the role of financialized capitalism in refiguring fertility under the investment logic of optimization to speculate on the potential risks posed by anticipated infertility. Egg freezing technology shows us how the biopolitical control of population shifted to managing fertility, which transcends national borders as frozen eggs circulate transnationally for assisted reproduction as well as stem cell research. An incredibly rich and nuanced book, Freezing Fertility would be an invaluable read for anyone who is interested in the politics of reproduction, ART, gendered politics of aging, mortality, life, and regeneration.

Dr. Lucy van de Wiel is a Research Associate at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the social and cultural analysis of assisted reproductive technologies like egg freezing, time-lapse embryo selection and cross-border reproductive care.

Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu.

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Jason Karlawish, "The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It" (St. Martin's Press, 2021) May 11, 2021

In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complications. 16 million caregivers are responsible for paying as much as half of the $226 billion annual costs of their care. As more people live beyond their seventies and eighties, the number of patients will rise to an estimated 13.8 million by 2025.

Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It (St. Martin's Press, 2021) traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis. While it is an unambiguous account of decades of missed opportunities and our health care systems’ failures to take action, it tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow Alzheimer’s to finally be prevented and treated by medicine and also presents an argument for how we can live with dementia: the ways patients can reclaim their autonomy and redefine their sense of self, how families can support their loved ones, and the innovative reforms we can make as a society that would give caregivers and patients better quality of life.

Rich in science, history, and characters, The Problem of Alzheimer's takes us inside laboratories, patients' homes, caregivers’ support groups, progressive care communities, and Jason Karlawish's own practice at the Penn Memory Center.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Scott Berkun, "How Design Makes the World" (2020) May 11, 2021

Everything you use, from your home to your smartphone, from highways to supermarkets, was designed by someone. What did they get right? Where did they go wrong? And what can we learn from how these experts think that can help us improve our own lives?

In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have succeeded and failed us. From the airplane armrest to the Facebook “like” button, and everything in between, Berkun shows how design helps or hinders everyone, and offers a new way to think about the world around you.

Whether you spend time in a studio or a boardroom, an office or the outdoors, How Design Makes the World empowers you to ask better questions—and to understand the designs in everything that matters.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Can we Disagree Online Respectfully?: A Discussion with Ian Leslie May 11, 2021

In this episode, we are talking to a British writer Ian Leslie, a journalist and author of acclaimed books on human behavior. His latest book, Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes (Harper Business, 2021), is about how to disagree better. Ian regularly publishes in The Guardian, The New Statesman and The Economist. He co-hosted the podcast series Polarized and created a BBC radio comedy series.

The piece we talked about today is "How to have Better Arguments Online" (The Guardian, February 21, 2021).

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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Tetyana Lokot, "Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) May 10, 2021

Tetyana Lokot's new book Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) examines how citizens use digital social media to engage in public discontent and offers a critical examination of the hybrid reality of protest where bodies, spaces and technologies resonate. It argues that the augmented reality of protest goes beyond the bodies, the tents, and the cobblestones in the protest square, incorporating live streams, different time zones, encrypted conversations, and simultaneous translation of protest updates into different languages. Based on more than 60 interviews with protest participants and ethnographic analysis of online content in Ukraine and Russia, it examines how citizens in countries with limited media freedom and corrupt authorities perceive the affordances of digital media for protest and how these enable or limit protest action. The book provides a nuanced contribution to debates about the role of digital media in contentious politics and protest events, both in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications, Dublin City University.

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T. Sanders et al., "Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020) May 10, 2021

Providing one of the first comprehensive, cross-cultural examinations of the dynamic market for sexual services, this book presents an evidence-based look at the multiple factors related to purchasing patterns and demand among clients who have used the internet.

The data is drawn from two large surveys of sex workers' clients in the US and UK. The book presents descriptive baseline data on client engagement with online platforms, demographics and patterns of frequency in different markets, information on smaller niche markets and client reactions to exploitation, safety and changes in the law.

Teela Sanders, Barbara G. Brents and Chris Wakefield's book Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives (Routledge, 2020) makes clear that a variety of situational as well as individual factors affect the willingness and ability to purchase sexual services. The view that emerges shatters the stereotypes and generalistions on which much policy is based and demonstrates the complexities surrounding who pays for sex and the contours of sexual consumption in consumer culture.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

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Pallavi Guha, "Hear #metoo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism" (Rutgers UP, 2021) May 07, 2021

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 today with Pallavi Guha, assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Towson, MD, to talk to her about her new book, Hear #MeToo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism, out this year, 2021 with Rutgers University Press.

This book examines the role media platforms play in anti-rape and sexual harassment activism in India. Including 75 interviews with feminist activists and journalists working across India, it proposes a framework of agenda-building and establishes a theoretical framework to examine media coverage of issues in the digitally emerging Global South.

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Jillian C. York, "Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism" (Verso Book, 2021) May 06, 2021

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 the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian York charts the war over our digital rights. She looks at both how the big corporations have become unaccountable censors, and the devastating impact it has had on those who have been censored.

In Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism(Verso Book, 2021), leading campaigner Jillian York, looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, "Twitter: A Biography" (NYU Press, 2020) May 06, 2021

As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly could not have been imagined at its inception. In their engaging book Twitter: A Biography (NYU Press, 2020), Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym (@nancybaym) tell the fascinating and surprising story of how this platform developed from a quirky SMS tool for publicly sharing intimate details of personal life to a major source of late-breaking news, political activism, and even governmental communication. This story explores how many of Twitter's most ubiquitous and iconic conventions were not systematically rolled out from a centralized corporate strategy, but so often driven by users who continued to innovate within the limitations of the platform they had to democratically create the platform they desired. Yet this story highlights the tensions along the way as Twitter has adapted to new and unforeseen challenges, business models, and social consequences as the experiments of social media have become increasingly powerful, influential, and contested. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the wild and changing landscape of internet communication and communities.

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Susan M. Reverby, "Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy" (UNC Press, 2013) May 05, 2021

Some books are new, others are newly relevant – and so worth looking at from a new, contemporary perspective. Such is the case with Susan Reverby’s book Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (UNC Press, 2013). When the book was published in 2009, our world was reeling from a global financial crisis that exposed how subprime mortgages disproportionately affected Black homeowners; today we reel from a global pandemic that has starkly exposed how Black Americans and other people of color are disproportionately affected by the virus SARS-CoV-2 and its effects. Another inequity connected to the pandemic relates to vaccine distribution and uptake: they are much lower among Black (and Latinx) than white Americans.

Examining Tuskegee is a deeply researched work that ranges from the trial’s origins within a public health partnership between the Tuskegee Institute and the Public Health Service, to portraits of its protagonists – the researchers, the men who were its subjects, the complex Nurse Rivers, and the persistent Peter Buxton, whose efforts eventually exposed the full truth of the study after it ran for 40 years – to the ways it was portrayed in popular culture and the media, to matters of bioethics and presidential apologies. In our conversation, Susan Reverby explains what actually happened in the study – no, the men were not injected by the researchers with syphilis – what it meant 50 years ago, and how it pertains, or not, to issues such as vaccine hesitancy among African Americans today.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her third book, an examination of the history of acupuncture as a means of social and political revolution, is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.

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Patrick Vitale, "Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) May 05, 2021

From submarines to the suburbs--the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh's eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world's leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth.

In Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance(University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers. Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh's suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh's elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city. Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the "renewal" of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice.

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David Rainbow, "Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2019) May 05, 2021

Conflicting notions about the dynamics of race in Russia and the Soviet Union have made it difficult for both scholars and other observers of the region to understand rising racial tension in Russian and Eurasian societies. Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a Global Context(McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019) is an interdisciplinary anthology that brings together historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists of Russia, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America to examine the intersection between ideas about race and racializing practices. In this interview, editor David Rainbow (University of Houston) discusses Russian and Soviet ideologies in a global history of race, defining the evolving understanding of race vis-à-vis nationality and ethnicity in Russia, accounting for state sanctioned racist practice in the ostensibly antiracist Soviet state, the legacy of Alexander Pushkin, the consequences of a prevailing attachment to Russian exceptionalism in the study of race, challenges for North American scholars studying the subject, and key takeaways for the undergraduate classroom.

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Daniel Greene, "The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope" (MIT Press, 2021) May 03, 2021

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: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope(MIT Press, 2021), Daniel Greene argues that the problem of poverty became a problem of technology in order to manage the contradictions of a changing economy. Greene shows how the digital divide emerged as a policy problem and why simple technological solutions to complex social issues continue to appeal to politicians and professionals who should (and often do) know better.

Patrick Sheehan is a PhD student in Sociology at UT Austin studying work and careers in the digital economy.

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Carol Dyhouse, "Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen" (Oxford UP, 2021) May 03, 2021

Cinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life's problems. But over the next fifty years women's lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control--and feminism. However, while widening opportunities for women were seen as progress, feminists were regularly caricatured as man-haters, cast in the role of ugly sisters, witches or wicked fairies in the fairy-tale.

Carol Dyhouse's new book Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the reshaping of women's lives, loves and dreams since 1950, the year in which Walt Disney's film Cinderella gave expression to popular ideas of romance, and at a time when marriage was a major determinant of female life chances and teenage girls dreamed of Mr Right and happy endings. It ends with the runaway success of Disney's Frozen, in 2013--a film with relevance to very different times. Along the way, it illuminates how women's expectations and emotional landscapes have shifted, asking bold questions about how women's lives have been transformed since 1950. How have women's changing life experiences been mirrored in new expectations about marriage, intimacy, and family life? How have new forms of independence through education and work, and greater control over childbearing, altered women's life ambitions? And were feminists right to believe that sexual equality would improve relationships between men and women?

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Mary A. Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019) Apr 30, 2021

Mary Brazelton’s new book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell UP, 2019)could hardly be more timely. During the Covid-19 pandemic, China was in the headlines of Euro-American media as the site of the first cases of the disease. China is also centerstage in Brazelton’s insightful, antiracist book—not as a source of disease but as the source of an effective and pervasive global public health strategy that other nations during the Covid-19 pandemic have strained to implement: mass vaccination.

As a historian of modern China and a historian of medicine, Brazelton offers a trustworthy and well-documented account of the National Epidemic Prevention Board and its successor agencies during the republic’s war-torn twentieth century. The location—and relocation—of the Board and its refugee scientists was decisive, Brazelton argues. During World War II and Japanese occupation (1937-45), the Board’s labs and scientists decamped from China’s coastal cities to the mountainous southwest borderland of Yunnan—exactly because the area was rugged, sparsely populated, and far from China’s urban hubs. In Yunnan, scientists were not isolated, but rather set within an idiosyncratic health infrastructure and network of longstanding political rivals vying for sway in the region—including France to the south, UK to the east, the League of Nations in the capital, and everywhere indigenous rulers, who retained local authority as the Nationalist Party struggled to consolidate power in the early years of the republic. The distinctive geography, epidemiology, and communities of health knowledge in Yunnan channeled the Board’s research and strategies. This regional system, developed under the banner of the national Board, became the blueprint for public health interventions for the People’s Republic of China after the Communist Revolution (1949). In the 1970s because of its repressive practices, China was officially excluded from the global health community, which was dominated by Europe and the US under the World Health Organization. Yet, China’s program of mass vaccination and strategy of universal primary care directly informed practices of new and nonaligned countries.

Brazelton’s important new book addresses a classic puzzle of biopolitics in the history of science and medicine: when and why did governing regimes build public health programs that prioritized changing people’s behaviors and values (sanitation, hygiene; mask wearing, social distancing) rather than changing people’s health with quick technical fixes—such as vaccination.

The interview refers to the image on the book’s cover (also p130) and to the important, related work of Alicia Altorfer-Ong, Ruth Rogawski, and the Connecting Three Worlds project. The conversation was a collective interview by Vanderbilt students in Laura Stark’s course, American Medicine & the World.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.

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Elise K. Burton, "Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity" (Stanford UP, 2021) Apr 29, 2021

Elise K. Burton’s important book, Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (Stanford University Press, 2021), documents how race and nation became fused in concept and in political practice. Over the past century, nation-building and race-making became interdependent through the sciences of heredity and their uses during wartimes and their aftermaths. The book provincializes Euro-American histories of science by centering the intrepid and non-innocent scientists from land along the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea (often called by the imperial name of “Middle East”)—and their transnational networks.

The book tracks how scientists’ reputations, access to resources, and interpretations of data shifted from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the repackaged race science around World War II, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the lingering state-backed violence of the present day. The sciences of heredity—including physical anthropology and medical genetics—have continued to be used to justify violence and territorial occupation, as much as humanitarian “resettlement” programs, storage of biospecimen, and building of research infrastructures for a cosmopolitan science. Today, “the anti-racist, progressive discourses surrounding contemporary human genome projects have so far been unable to overcome the territorial regimes and ethnic concepts produced by a century of conflict,” Burton writes, because “nationalism is sustained by particular practices of human genetics research—specifically, the need to describe human populations according to geography and ancestral history, coinciding with the two major constituent elements of the nation-state paradigm.”

The interview refers to the important, related work of Jenny Bangham, Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, Gayle Rubin, and Kim TallBear. The conversation was a collective interview by Vanderbilt Master’s students in Laura Stark’s seminar, Critical Bioethics: Jazmyn Ayers, Kell Coney, Anyssa Francis, Caroline Goodman, Lily Jaremski, Natalie Jones, Ashley Mullen, Enna Pehadzic, Olivia Post, Karrie Raymond, Christina Rosca, Cecile Sahel, Chad Smith, and McKenzie Yates.

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John Ferris, "Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency" (Bloomsbury, 2020) Apr 28, 2021

For more than a hundred years, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, has played a central role in the conduct of British statecraft. But the organization has traditionally operated from the shadows, leaving many questions about its internal operations and its impact on policy.

Now, the story of GCHQ can be told with greater clarity: A few years ago, GCHQ opened parts of its archive to John Ferris, a Professor of History at the University of Calgary, and asked him to write an authoritative history of the intelligence agency. The result is Ferris’s monumental new book, Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).

On this episode, I talk with Professor Ferris about the origins of British signals intelligence, its impact on British policy in World War I and World War II, the type of people who have filled the organization’s ranks over time, and how GCHQ is adapting to the “second age” of computerized signals intelligence.

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Dave Auckly, et al., "Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles" (AMS, 2019) Apr 27, 2021

Math circles defy simple narratives. The model was introduced a century ago, and is taking off in the present day thanks in part to its congruence with cutting-edge research in mathematics education. It is a modern approach to teaching—or facilitation—that resonates and finds mutual reinforcement with traditional practices and cultural preservation efforts. A wide range of math circle resources have become available for interested instructors, including the MSRI Math Circles Library, now in its 14th year of publication by the AMS.

I was excited to talk with three editors and contributors to a recent volume in the series, Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles (American Mathematical, 2019). Drs. Dave Auckly, Amanda Serenevy, and Henry Fowler have been instrumental to the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project, along with co-editors Tatiana Shubin and Bob Klein and a broader contact and support network. Their book showcases scripts developed and facilitated in Navajo Nation, including an introduction to modular arithmetic through bean bag tossing, prefix sorting in the guise of pancake flipping, and a tactile use of limiting behavior to folding a necktie. We discussed the origin and expansion of math circles, their potential to indigenous mathematics educators and students, and the content of and stories behind a selection of the scripts.

Dr. Fowler's foreword and the editors' introduction situate the math circles movement and the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project in history, geography, and culture. Each script begins with a (minimal!) list of the necessary materials and a student handout that invites explorations with them. A short survey of connections to deeper mathematics precedes each handout, and each is followed by an extensive teacher's guide with (illustrative) solutions and presentation suggestions. The scripts vary in complexity and are suitable for student- and teacher-focused math circles. I hope the text becomes widely adopted for science-based and culturally conscious mathematics education and helps introduce others like myself to the greater math circles project.

Suggested companion works:

-James Tanton

-The Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival

-Gordon Hamilton and Lora Saarnio, MathPickle

-Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free

-Rachel and Rodi Steinig, Math Renaissance

Dave Auckly is a research mathematician at Kansas State University and Co-founder and Director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project. Amanda Serenevy is Co-founder and Director of the Riverbend Community Math Center. Henry Fowler is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Navajo Technical University and Co-director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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Brent D. Ziarnick, "To Rule the Skies: General Thomas S. Power and the Rise of Strategic Air Command in the Cold War" (US Naval Institute Press, 2021) Apr 27, 2021

A sadist. A madman. A sociopath seduced by the terrible allure of nuclear weapons. These are but a few of the pejoratives commonly used to describe United States Air Force General Thomas S. Power, Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Air Command (SAC) from 1957 to 1964. Power’s remit as CinCSAC was twofold: deter the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear first strike on the United States and plan to unleash Armageddon if they did. Neither was easily achieved. Effective deterrence hinged upon the actual possession of qualitatively superior weapons systems combined with the perception that the United States was willing to use them. Loosing the nuclear dogs of war, in turn, depended on the exacting coordination of those weapons systems under combat conditions. Further complicating matters was the incredible compression of time and space brought on by the advent of new delivery systems like the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). SAC's mission was truly a Gordian Knot—one Power was determined to cut. Power approached the problem with an alacrity that transformed SAC into a formidable nuclear instrument, but which simultaneously earned him a less than flattering reputation. Within the Kennedy administration and among many members of the media, Power was seen as fatally unhinged, obsessed with nuclear weapons, violently anti-communist, and liable to start a nuclear war with the Soviets of his own volition. Whether accurate or not, this view dominated popular and historiographical appraisals of Power for the better part of seven decades.

In To Rule the Skies: General Thomas S. Power and the Rise of Strategic Air Command in the Cold War (US Naval Institute Press, 2021), historian Brent Ziarnick takes aim at this mainstream historiographic narrative. Telling in detail for the first time the story of Power’s personal and professional life, Ziarnick refocuses our attention away from the hyperbole and onto Power’s substantive contributions to the development of America’s strategic air and aerospace capability.

Brent D. Ziarnick is an assistant professor at the Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He has been published in Wired, Politico, and The Hill. He is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.

Scott Lipkowitz holds a MA in History, with a concentration in military history, and a MLIS, with a concentration in information technology, from Queens College, City University of New York

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Melvin Konner, "Believers: Faith in Human Nature" (Norton, 2019) Apr 26, 2021

Believers: Faith in Human Nature(Norton, 2019) is a scientist's answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers. It is a firm rebuke of the "Four Horsemen"--Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens--known for writing about religion as something irrational and ultimately harmful. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but has lived his adult life without such faith, explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution, and even genetics of the varied religious impulses we experience as a species.

Conceding that faith is not for everyone, he views religious people with a sympathetic eye; his own upbringing, his apprenticeship in the trance-dance religion of the African Bushmen, and his friends and explorations in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other faiths have all shaped his perspective. Faith has always manifested itself in different ways--some revelatory and comforting; some kind and good; some ecumenical and cosmopolitan; some bigoted, coercive, and violent. But the future, Konner argues, will both produce more nonbelievers, and incline the religious among us--holding their own by having larger families--to increasingly reject prejudice and aggression.

A colorful weave of personal stories of religious--and irreligious--encounters, as well as new scientific research, Believers shows us that religion does much good as well as undoubted harm, and that for at least a large minority of humanity, the belief in things unseen neither can nor should go away.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Leigh Calvez, "The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature's Most Elusive Birds" (Sasquatch Books, 2016) Apr 23, 2021

Join naturalist and science writer Leigh Calvez on her adventures into science and spirit of animals, as we discuss her two recent books: The Hidden Lives of Owls, and The Breath of the Whale(Sasquatch Books, 2016 and 2019, respectively). Calvez makes the science and research entertaining and accessible, describing the social behavior of owls and whales while exploring the questions about the human-animal connection. Our conversation highlights the impressive resilience and intelligence of the animals we have the pleasure to share the world with, the role of research and intuition in field work studies, in addition to the complexity of ethical decisions we humans must make to ensure and perpetuate a diverse and healthy ecosystem for every creature.

Leigh Calvez has worked with whales and dolphins as a scientist, naturalist and nature writer, her work featured in Smithsonian Magazine, High Country News, The Ecologist, Ocean Realm, The Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Bainbridge Island Magazine. She also teaches private writing classes and lives near Seattle, Washington, with her daughter Ellie and their two cats.

Sarah (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread.

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Douglas M. O'Reagan, "Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) Apr 23, 2021

In his new book Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Douglas O’Reagandescribes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators invaded Germany's factories and research institutions, seizing or copying all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land—including that of other Allied nations.

Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed—and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did it, and when still matters today. He also argues that these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself.

Douglas M. O'Reagan is a historian of technology, industry, and national security. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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James Doucet-Battle, "Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Apr 23, 2021

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes(University of Minnesota Press, 2021) provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes.

Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her book about acupuncture as a tool of medical, social, and political revolution in the United States is under contract with University of Michigan Press.

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Daniel Heifetz, "The Science of Satyug: Class, Charisma, and Vedic Revivalism in the All World Gayatri Pariwar" (SUNY Press, 2021) Apr 22, 2021

The first in-depth study of the All World Gayatri Pariwar, a modern Indian religious movement. The All World Gayatri Pariwar is a modern religious movement that enjoys wide popularity in North India, particularly among the many STEM workers who joined after becoming disillusioned with their lucrative but unfulfilling private-sector careers. Founded in the mid-twentieth century, the Gayatri Pariwar works to popularize practices inspired by ancient religious texts and breaks with convention by framing these practices as the foundation of a universal spirituality. The movement appeals to science in its advocacy of these practices, claiming that they have medical benefits that constitute proof that rational people around the world should find persuasive. Should these practices become sufficiently widespread, the belief is that humanity will enter a new satyug, or “golden age.”

In The Science of Satyug: Class, Charisma, and Vedic Revivalism in the All World Gayatri Pariwar (SUNY Press, 2021), Daniel Heifetz focuses on how religion and science are objects of intense emotion that help to constitute identities. Weaving engaging ethnographic anecdotes together with readings of Gayatri Pariwar literature, Heifetz interprets this material in light of classic and contemporary theory. The result is a significant contribution to current conversations about the globalized middle classes and the entanglement of religion and science that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding these aspects of life in modern India. Daniel Heifetz teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Mathew Sweezey, "The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media" (Harvard Business Press, 2020) Apr 22, 2021

Today I talked to Mathew Sweezy about his new book The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media(Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

Mathew Sweezey is Principal of Marketing Insights for Salesforce. His work has appeared in leading publications such as AdAge, Forbes, Brand Quarterly, The Economist, and The Observer. He’s also the author of Marketing Automation for Dummies.

On June 24, 2009, we entered the era when private individuals became the largest producers of media in the world, eclipsing businesses and traditional media outlets. A perfect case-in-point is Tesla, which follows a market-sell-build-market (some more) model that engages customers with a greater purpose (weaning us off fossil fuels) and invites customers to co-create the cars they want. Tesla spends about $6 on advertising per car it sells, versus the nearly $1,000 that Mercedes-Benz spends per car sold. This episode explores the Tesla example, how Gen I members want to be “influencers” as their dream job, and what it means to have conversations with consumers rather than interrupt them with ads.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Robert T. Tierney, "Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame" (U California Press, 2010) Apr 22, 2021

Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame(U California Press, 2010) is an incisive and provocative study of the figures and tropes of “savagery” in Japanese colonial culture. Through a rigorous analysis of literary works, ethnographic studies, and a variety of other discourses, Robert Thomas Tierney demonstrates how imperial Japan constructed its own identity in relation both to the West and to the people it colonized. By examining the representations of Taiwanese aborigines and indigenous Micronesians in the works of prominent writers, he shows that the trope of the savage underwent several metamorphoses over the course of Japan's colonial period--violent headhunter to be subjugated, ethnographic other to be studied, happy primitive to be exoticized, and hybrid colonial subject to be assimilated.

Dr. Robert Tierney is professor of Japanese literature in the Departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative and World Literatures in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83

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Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia, "Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan" (Stanford UP, 2019) Apr 21, 2021

How did Japanese academics study their "fields" in places like Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the transwar decades? How did they transform in the postwar, under the US Occupation, and after? Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan (Stanford UP, 2019) is the first monograph on the collective biography of this cohort of professional Japanese intellectuals, or in Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia's words, "the men of one age."

Kadia observes that during the transwar decades (1930s-1060s), these "men of one age" jointly embraced a set of unchanging assumptions regarding epistemology that was anchored in the ideal of "objectivity." The scholarship, or gakujutsu, that they aimed to produce were concerned with the quest of universal laws governing human society and the natural world, the use of a comprehensively delineated method to assure rigor in pursuit of "truth," and impartiality. Those who studied the human sciences applied the ideal of "objectivity" to the study of Self and Others in Japanese colonized and occupied lands.

Following the lives of these transwar human scientists into the fields, Kadia reveals that these "men of one age," such as Izumi Seiichi, were both creators and creations of imperial epistemology. Kadia points out that although the duration of Japanese imperial control was too short to apply their academic findings to policy in much of the empire, Izumi and his colleagues "enjoyed outsized influence in justifying the empire as a hierarchy of confraternal races ruled for their own benefit by the putatively superior Japanese."

The US Occupation in the postwar allowed the continuation of the pursuit of "objective" knowledge for the Japanese human scientists, as well as opening new avenues for them. Kadia argues that "what changed after 1945 were the values understood to constitute objectivity," namely ideals vaunted as characteristically American: democracy, capitalism, and peace.

During the Cold War, Kadia reminds us, the US saw strategic potential in Japan's studies of East Asia and Oceania, and the Japanese academics largely "upheld the convenient fiction of their reluctant cooperation with and quiet opposition to the former government." To rehabilitate Japan's scholarly reputation, the Japanese academics were integrated into a new transnational intellectual community that both reflected and supported US hegemony, although some Japanese academics resisted the subordination of domestic progress to grand strategy.

Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Joel Waldfogel, "Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture" (Princeton UP, 2020) Apr 21, 2021

Digitization is reshaping creative industries. Old gatekeepers in music, publishing, television, movies, and other industries no longer play such an important role, and digital piracy makes it easy for consumers to avoid paying companies, artists, and writers for what they produce. On the other hand, independents can now cheaply produce and distribute creative works both to niche and mass market audiences.

In Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture (Princeton UP, 2020), Economist Joel Waldfogel uses data about the quantity, quality, and mass appeal of these works to make the case that this has on balance made us all better off, resulting in a digital renaissance.

In this interview, we discuss the findings in his book and how he arrives at them. I also get his perspective on some developments since his book came out, like the rise of Spotify, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the impact of the pandemic on digitization. He also unwittingly gives me the opportunity to tell everyone with an Amazon device in the house to say “Alexa, Beethoven’s pathetic!” and enjoy the result.

If you want to buy the NFT for Waldfogel’s famously Scroogey paper “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” he is open to bids and promises to donate the proceeds to charity, unlike Scrooge. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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Kas Saghafi, "The World after the End of the World: A Spectro-Poetics" (SUNY Press, 2020) Apr 20, 2021

In this episode, I interview Kas Saghafi, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, about his book The World After the End of the World, published through SUNY Press in 2020. In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of “the end the world” in Derrida’s late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida’s work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida’s thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy’s. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a “spectro-poetics” devoted to and assigned to the other’s singularity.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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Carolyn J. Heinrich, et al., "Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education" (Harvard Education Press, 2020) Apr 20, 2021

The COVID19 pandemic has profoundly changed the landscape of K-12 education in our society. Last March, many states closed their brick-and-mortar schools and shifted to remote education. The massive shift is historic and unprecedented. Until now, while we see the light at the end of the tunnel in our battle against the coronavirus, millions and millions of students are still learning at home via online platforms. It is also because of this shift that digital learning all of a sudden has drawn attention from not only educators but also the general public from families to policy makers. Over the past months we have seen concerted efforts to invest in digital learning and improve the required infrastructure. In spite of this unexpected yet much welcomed attention from the society at large, digital teaching and learning a field has existed for a long time. Experts in the field have been documenting and exploring the best practice of digital teaching and learning. Today I am going to talk with three researchers who have been working in this field for a long time, Carolyn Heinrich from Vanderbilt University, Jennifer Darling-Aduana from Georgia State University and Annalee G. Good from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Last year, they published their new book with Harvard Education Press, titled Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education(2020). It systematically studies the implementation and best practice of using digital tools to reduce inequities in educational opportunities and improve student outcomes. Although the book was out right before the start of the pandemic, the lessons, best practice and insights they highlighted in their book have so much to offer for educators, policy makers and families to navigate a teaching-and-learning landscape during and after this pandemic.

Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, and an affiliated Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University.

Jennifer Darling-Aduana is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies in the Department of Learning Sciences, College of Education and Human Development, at Georgia State University.

Annalee G. Good is co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and Director of the Clinical Program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida.

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Allison Cobb, "Plastic: An Autobiography" (Nightboat Books, 2021) Apr 20, 2021

Plastic: An Autobiography (Nightboat Books, 2021) explores how technology, sprung from desire, draws all beings into its net, and asks how to live justly within its grasp.

In Plastic: An Autobiography, Allison Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives ― from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama ― the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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R. Armstrong and R. Hughes "The Art of Experiment: Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design" (Routledge, 2020) Apr 19, 2021

The Art of Experiment: Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design(Routledge, 2020) is a handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times. In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. Hughes and Armstrong search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself, examining how we have manipulated these historically through an anthropocentric focus.

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes speak with Pierre d'Alancaisez about their approach to knowledge-making and organa paradoxa as an apparatus for incorporating the unexpected into research and practices. They also talk about sending cockroaches into space, living Shakespearean bricks, and about the value of experimentation in establishing productive cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Some of the works discussed in the interview are described and illustrated in a Nature article.
Caustic Ophelia from Brick Dialogues is on Bandcamp.
The Hanging Gardens of Medusa can be seen here.
They were also a subject of a study by the British Interplanetary Society.
Hughes' and Armstrong's earlier collaboration with Espen Gangvik The Handbook of the Unknowable is available in full here.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are" (HarperCollins, 2017) Apr 15, 2021

Economist, data journalist, and best-selling author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz uses data from the internet to gain new insights into the human psyche. In his new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (HarperCollins, 2017), Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics. In this interview he explains how web searches are a kind of digital truth serum that reveals our hidden desires, insecurities and biases. He also explores other ways economists have used the explosion of new data created by the digitization of the economy to shed new light on old questions.

Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he created and leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

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David Wills, "Prosthesis" (U Minnesota Press, 2021) Apr 15, 2021

In this episode, I interview David Wills, professor of French Studies at Brown University, about his book, Prosthesis, recently republished for its 25th anniversary by University of Minnesota Press. A landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, the book promotes the idea that the human body is open to supplementation by artificial addenda that operate both internally or externally and engage it in an unceasing arbitration with the environment. Questioning the opposition between animate and inanimate along with the logic of the automatic prioritization of living flesh, Prosthesis undertakes these assumptions by studying thematics of artificiality through the writings of Freud, Derrida, William Gibson, Peter Greenaway, and others.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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Can We Fix Social Media?: A Discussion with Christopher A. Bail Apr 15, 2021

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 use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Christopher A. Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing(Princeton University Press, 2021) challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.

Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit “reset” and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research.

Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com

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Jon Birger, "Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge" (Benbella, 2021) Apr 15, 2021

Apps have transformed dating from a mysterious adventure into a daily chore. Young, single, college-educated women are sick and tired of competing for a shrinking supply of guys. And marriage-material men, long expected to take the lead when it comes to asking women out, are suddenly balking at making the first move, fearing they'll come across as creepy or inappropriate.

Society is changing, which means it's time for dating to evolve. Millennial and Gen Z women are more than capable of seeking out what—and who—they want. They're standouts in the classroom and champions on the playing fields. They're leaders in the workplace and trailblazers in city halls, state houses, and Congress. So why would we tell a generation of badass women that they're not allowed to be bold when it comes to finding love? Why should they have to sit back and wait (and wait and wait) for men to find them?

In Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (Benbella, 2021), Jon Birger, author of Date-onomics, offers women bold new strategies for finding the one. Backed by research showing that women can win at romance by making the first move with the men of their choice, Birger explains why:

It's better to choose than to be chosen
The "play hard to get" method is not only outdated but grounded in bad science
The first move does not have to be a big move
It's time to log off of dating apps and date men you actually know
The workplace can be a terrific place to meet a long-term romantic partner
. . . and more!

Make Your Move is an honest, solution-based guide to finding love that lasts. If you're tired of playing by old rules, look no further: Make your move and win

Jon Birger is an award-winning writer, a contributor to Fortune, and the author of Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. A former senior writer at both Fortune and Money, Jon's work has also appeared in Barron's, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, New York Magazine, Time, and Washington Post. He was included on AlwaysOn Network's list of "Power Players in Technology Business Media." A familiar face and voice on television and radio, Jon has been a guest on ABC's Good Morning America, BBC World Service, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News-discussing a wide range of topics from the dating market to the stock market to oil market.

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website.

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Jürgen P. Melzer, "Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation" (Harvard UP, 2020) Apr 15, 2021

Jürgen Melzer’s Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation(Harvard UP, 2020) traces the history of Japanese aviation from its origins with hot-air balloons in the 1870s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Melzer’s narrative centers around three themes: transnational technology transfer and Japan’s efforts to attain technological independence, domestic efforts to mobilize public enthusiasm for aviation development (what Melzer calls “air-mindedness”), and the complicated interplay of aviation with military and diplomatic history.

The first chapters take us to the end of World War I, which was a turning point for Japanese aviation. Until that time, Japan had been most interested in French technologies, but the settlement of the Great War at Versailles provided an opportunity to take advantage of German aviation advancements. Parts 2 and 3 contrast the development of aviation in the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, exposing crucial differences not only between the two services but within each one. Part 4 begins with Japan’s turn to American civil aviation technologies in the wake of the 1931 Manchurian Incident, and the subsequent impact of Japanese aggression and US retaliatory sanctions leading up to Pearl Harbor. The final chapter covers the fevered development of rocket- and jet-propelled aircraft during the war, and therefore in the context of resource shortages and a fast-ticking clock. Melzer, a former Lufthansa pilot, has written a book that will appeal to readers interested in STS, military history, international relations, and Western history, in addition to Japanese history aficionados.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University.

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Christopher Thaiss, "Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century" (Broadview Press, 2019) Apr 14, 2021

Listen to this interview of Christopher Thaiss, author of Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century (Broadview Press 2019). We talk about the research article, about writing styles, and about the uses of rhetoric to scientists.

Interviewer: "Too many students learning to write in the sciences lack helpful feedback on their writing, and this causes them to experience, quite personally, that disconnect we were talking about, between doing science and writing science."

Christopher Thaiss: "Feedback is one of the things I return to again and again in the book. And in my teaching, I think that one of the ways that feedback is used––I think that the most effective way that feedback is used is not so much the feedback that I give students about their writing, although the students will always say, 'We love your feedback!' But what's really important is the feedback that they learn to give and get in peer response workshops. I'm very careful in designing peer response so that students feel that sense of responsibility to give good feedback to one another, but also how to ask for feedback on the work that they're doing themselves. I think that peer response is so important in the scientific context, but it is, you know, in any writing context, and so I really try to foreground that within the course. The way I talk about it in writing in STEM is actually in the context of how research is done and how scientific discoveries and advancements are made: It's through the process of peer review. And if we can teach students early on to become good readers and then careful, conscientious givers of feedback to one another, we have achieved so much in terms of their ability to become contributing members of the scientific community."

Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write Daniel.Shea@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de

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Maria San Filippo, "Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media" (Indiana UP, 2021) Apr 13, 2021

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms.

While such strategies may at times be no more than a profitable lure, the most probing and powerful instances of sexual provocation serve to illuminate, question, and transform our understanding of sex and sexuality. In Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media (Indiana UP, 2021), award-winning author Maria San Filippo looks at the provocative in films, television series, web series and videos, entertainment industry publicity materials, and social media discourses and explores its potential to create alternative, even radical ways of screening sex.

Throughout this edgy volume, San Filippo reassesses troubling texts and divisive figures, examining controversial strategies--from "real sex" scenes to scandalous marketing campaigns to full-frontal nudity--to reveal the critical role that sexual provocation plays as an authorial signature and promotional strategy within the contemporary media landscape.

A trailer for the books is available on YouTube. Both of San Filippo's IUP books are 30% off (through May) using code SANFILIPPO at iupress.org

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

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Philip N. Howard, "Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives" (Yale UP, 2020) Apr 12, 2021

Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (Yale UP, 2020) is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives--including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down.

As dangerous as things are now, they will only get worse; the enormous flood of data coming from the so-called Internet of Things, along with the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence, will make disinformation easier to generate and disseminate and much harder to spot and remove. Howard tackles the tough task of suggesting the changes that are needed to create a radically redesigned social media ecosystem that would reinforce, rather than erode, democracy.

Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her medp16@gwu.edu

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Mark A. Waddell, "Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2021) Apr 09, 2021

Today on New Books in History, Mark A. Waddell, Associate professor of History, Philosophy & Sociology of Science in the Department of History at Michigan State University in beautiful East Lansing Michigan, talks about his recent book, Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

From the recovery of ancient ritual magic at the height of the Renaissance to the ignominious demise of alchemy at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Mark A. Waddell explores the rich and complex ways that premodern people made sense of their world. He describes a time when witches flew through the dark of night to feast on the flesh of unbaptized infants, magicians conversed with angels or struck pacts with demons, and astrologers cast the horoscopes of royalty. Ground-breaking discoveries changed the way that people understood the universe while, in laboratories and coffee houses, philosophers discussed how to reconcile the scientific method with the veneration of God. This engaging, illustrated new study introduces readers to the vibrant history behind the emergence of the modern world.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Avi Loeb, "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth" (Houghton Mifflin, 2021) Apr 06, 2021

In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, an astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization.

In Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth(Houghton Mifflin, 2021), Loeb takes readers inside the thrilling story of the first interstellar visitor to be spotted in our solar system. He outlines his controversial theory and its profound implications: for science, for religion, and for the future of our species and our planet. A mind-bending journey through the furthest reaches of science, space-time, and the human imagination, Extraterrestrial challenges readers to aim for the stars--and to think critically about what's out there, no matter how strange it seems.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Lucas Richert, "Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture" (MIT Press, 2020) Apr 05, 2021

"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was mainstream psychiatry. A "Radical Caucus" formed within the psychiatric profession and the "antipsychiatry" movement arose. Critics charged that the mental health establishment was complicit with the military-industrial complex, patients were released from mental institutions, and powerful antipsychotic drugs became available. Meanwhile, practitioners and patients experimented with new approaches to mental health, from primal screaming and the therapeutic use of psychedelics to a new reliance on quantification.

In Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture (MIT Press, 2020), Lucas Richert investigates the radical challenges to psychiatry and to the conventional treatment of mental health that emerged in the 1970s and the lessons they offer for current debates. Drawing on archives and government documents, medical journals, and interviews, and interweaving references to pop (counter)culture into his account, Richert offers fascinating stories of the decade's radical mental health practices. He discusses anti-Vietnam War activism and the new diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder given to some veterans; the radical psychiatrists who fought the system (and each other); the entry of New Age-style therapies, including Esalen's Human Potential Movement, into the laissez-faire therapeutic marketplace of the 1970s; the development of DSM III; and the use of LSD, cannabis, and MDMA. Many of these issues have resonance today. Debates over medical marijuana and microdoses of psychedelics echo debates of the 1970s. With rising rates of such disorders as anxiety and depression, practitioners and patients continue to search for therapeutic breakthroughs.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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James S. J. Schwartz, "The Value of Science in Space Exploration" (Oxford UP, 2020) Apr 05, 2021

The Value of Science in Space Exploration(Oxford UP, 2020) provides a rigorous assessment of the value of scientific knowledge and understanding in the context of contemporary space exploration. It argues that traditional spaceflight rationales are deficient, and that the strongest defense of spaceflight comes from its potential to produce intrinsically and instrumentally valuable knowledge and understanding. It engages with contemporary epistemology to articulate an account of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and understanding. It also parleys with recent work in science policy and social philosophy of science to characterize the instrumental value of scientific research, identifying space research as an effective generator of new knowledge and understanding.

These values found an ethical obligation to engage in scientific examination of the space environment. This obligation has important implications for major space policy discussions, including debates surrounding planetary protection policies, space resource exploitation, and human space settlement. Whereas planetary protection policies are currently employed to prevent biological contamination only of sites of interest in the search for extraterrestrial life, it contends that all sites of interest to space science ought to be protected. Meanwhile, space resource exploitation and human space settlement would result in extensive disruption or destruction of pristine space environments. The overall ethical value of these environments in the production of new knowledge and understanding is greater than their value as commercial or real commodities, and thus, exploitation and settlement of space should be avoided until the scientific community adequately understands these environments.

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Edward Ashford Lee, "The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines" (MIT Press, 2020) Apr 02, 2021

Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020), Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet.

Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do--be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored--may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a "dataist" faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans--and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology.

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Doug Bierend. "In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms" (Chelsea Green, 2021) Apr 02, 2021

From ecology to fermentation, in pop culture and in medicine—mushrooms are everywhere. With an explorer’s eye, author Doug Bierend guides readers through the weird, wonderful world of fungi and the amazing modern mycological movement.

In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms (Chelsea Green, 2021) introduces us to an incredible, essential, and oft-overlooked kingdom of life—fungi—and all the potential it holds for our future, through the work and research being done by an unforgettable community of mushroom-mad citizen scientists and microbe devotees. This entertaining and mind-expanding book will captivate readers who are curious about the hidden worlds and networks that make up our planet.

Bierend uncovers a vanguard of mycologists; growers, independent researchers, ecologists, entrepreneurs, and amateur enthusiasts exploring and advocating for fungi’s capacity to improve and heal. From decontaminating landscapes and waterways to achieving food security, In Search of Mycotopia demonstrates how humans can work with fungi to better live with nature—and with one another.

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Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (Public Affairs, 2021) Mar 31, 2021

As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets.

Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began.

In War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2021), Gershom Gorenberg tells the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.

Gershom Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, as well as an Adjunct Faculty at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2021) Mar 31, 2021

Agnes Arnold-Forster's book The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain(Oxford UP, 2021) offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America.

The Cancer Problem argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist.

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Agnieszka Kościańska, "Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland" (Indiana UP, 2021) Mar 31, 2021

Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West.

While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland(Indiana UP, 2021), Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists--experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators--not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes.

By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.

Jill Massimo is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

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Katherine E. Standefer, "Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life" (Little, Brown Spark, 2020) Mar 30, 2021

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 more public conversations about access to and affordability of medical care. While many of us may not consider our health insurance until we need it, for those with chronic conditions, the American medical system can be a nightmare of insurance claims bureaucracy and that prevents patients from getting the care they need at a cost they can afford. Worse, the rising prices of drugs and treatments developed in this for-profit system mean that some patients receive more medical care than they want or need, sometimes at the expense of their quality of life.

When a young Katherine E. Standefer was suddenly diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome—the same congenital heart condition as her younger sister—she was faced with what felt like an impossible choice: implant a cardiac defibrillator and be forever tied to the American Medical System, or take a chance with death. In her stunning debut, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown, Spark, 2020) Standefer explores this system as both a patient and a consumer, visiting factories in California as well as mining communities in Rwanda and Madagascar where the metals in her defibrillator were sourced to learn more about the true human cost of the device that was meant to save her life. Throughout, Standefer wonders whether her life is worth this price, and asks us to reimagine approaches to care—both in medical and environmental.

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Roy Richard Grinker, "Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness" (Norton, 2021) Mar 30, 2021

A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma.

For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness(W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.

Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity.

Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity.

Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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William Max Nelson, "The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One" (U Toronto Press, 2021) Mar 29, 2021

A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present.

In The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One(University of Toronto Press, 2021), William Max Nelsonargues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

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Sara Ritchey, "Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health" (Cornell UP, 2021) Mar 29, 2021

We are here today with Sara Ritchey, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, about her new book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health, out with Cornell University Press this year, 2021.

The author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and numerous articles, including “Caring by the Hours: the Psalter as a Source of Gendered Healthcare,” “Health, Healing, and Salvation: Hagiography as a Source of Medieval Healthcare,” “The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence: The Experience of God in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript,” Dr. Ritchey discusses her profound understanding in the intersection of religious practice (writ large) and the practice of medicine (writ large) in the Medieval era.

In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical.

The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns.

Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris, "Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation" (MIT Press, 2020) Mar 26, 2021

As we mark the one-year anniversary of the COIVD-19 pandemic, take the time to listen to this discussion of previous efforts to fight yellow fever, cholera, and plague pandemics. Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris’s Sulfuric Utopias: A History Maritime Fumigation (MIT Press, 2020) tells the story of the international dream of stopping the spread of infectious disease in global shipping networks. Their work shows how the interests of capitalism clashed with the efforts of public health officials. At the center of their narrative lies the Clayton, a machine which combined technocratic enthusiasm and necropolitical logic. Sulfuric Utopias brings together the history disease, capitalism, public health, and science. It is both a contribution to maritime history and urban history. Personally, I was so excited to interview two authors who know more about the history of rat killing than I do.

Lukas Engelmann is a Chancellor's Fellow in the History and Sociology of Biomedicine, in the department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Christos Lynteris is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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John Durham Peters et al., "Action at a Distance" (Meson Press, 2020) Mar 26, 2021

Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. Action at a Distance (Meson Press, 2020) this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial.

Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often with a focus on film and television studies.

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Aaron Tugendhaft, "The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Mar 25, 2021

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020) unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet.

Beginning with the Islamic State’s claim that the smashed objects were idols of the “age of ignorance,” Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage.

Finally, he compares the Islamic State’s production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often with a focus on film and television studies.

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Courtney E. Thompson, "An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America" (Rutgers UP, 2021) Mar 19, 2021

An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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A. Blair and K. von Greyerz, "Physico-Theology: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650–1750 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) Mar 19, 2021

Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz have edited an outstanding volume that breaks important new ground in the history of early modern science and religion. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the long-standing discussion of natural theology gave way in the mid-seventeenth century to a new conversation about physico-theology, a distinctive genre of science and religion writing that emphasised the goodness and the predictability of the divine being. Emerging first in the immediate aftermath of the crisis of the English civil wars, this discourse emphasised order and causality, and subjected the being of God to the science of order that was emerging in the same period. But, constructed to explain the benevolence of the creator and creation, physico-theology struggled to make sense of creaturely suffering, and eventually was understood as undermining its own presuppositions. Just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Physico-Theology: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650-1750 will be a landmark text in early modern intellectual history.

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Alisha Rankin, "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science" (Alisha Rankin, 2021) Mar 18, 2021

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story.

At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend.

Alisha Rankin's The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (U Chicago Press, 2021) sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

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Mitchell L. Hammond, "Epidemics and the Modern World" (University of Toronto Press, 2020) Mar 17, 2021

Normally we write blogposts that try to convince you to listen to a conversation with an author about their fascinating book. In the time of COVID-19, it doesn't seem necessary to have to sell you on why you should listen to this podcast. Suffice it to say that Mitchell Hammond’s excellent survey of a dozen deadly diseases is a must-read primer to make sense of epidemic history. In Epidemics and the Modern World (University of Toronto Press, 2020), he balances the science of disease etiology and disease cycles with political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. Read this book!

Mitchell L. Hammond, an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria in beautiful British Columbia. Dr. Hammond studied at Yale, where he earned a BA in Political Science and a MA in Religious History before getting another MA and a PhD in European History at the University of Virginia. His dissertation was entitled “The Origins of Civic Health Care in Early Modern Germany”. He has published several articles and book chapters on the intersection of medicine and religion in 16th and 17th century Germany.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Katie Hindmarch-Watson, "Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital" (U California Press, 2020) Mar 15, 2021

How did telecommunications shape Victorian London? In Serving a Wired World London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital Katie Hindmarch-Watson, an Assistant Professor in history at Johns Hopkins University, tells the history of London through the lenses of technology, gender, class, and sexuality. The book offers a rethinking of liberal subjectivity and the city at the end of the nineteenth century, showing how the Victorian obsessions with privacy and respectability intersected with technology to create the urban and social fabric of London. The book also draws on queer history, demonstrating the importance of sex scandals in the Victorian and Edwardian eras for understanding urban, technology, and gender histories. A fascinating read, the book will be an essential text across the humanities and social sciences.

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Juno Salazar Parreñas, "Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation" (Duke University Press, 2018) Mar 15, 2021

Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation(Duke University Press, 2018) presents a multi-species ethnography of orangutans and humans that probes the shared susceptibilities of both species in the face of future extinction. In a series of provocative chapters, the book interweaves intimate entanglements in the workings of an orangutan rehabilitation centre with reflection on the work of care that draws on queer theory and feminist conceptions of welfare. By centralizing such rehabilitation efforts, the book reveals the contradictions inherent in such a system. The practice of rehabilitation, it shows, is underpinned by violence. Parreñas demonstrates the colonial origins of such an approach to conservation biology and how care within enclosures traps both humans and endangered primates alike. As such, we should urgently question how we could divest ourselves from the need for security that is dependent on cruelty and seek instead a decolonial era of co-existence which welcomes and finds joy in our moments of brief, mutual vulnerability.

In this conversation, we discuss models of orangutan care, coerced copulations, the concept of “arrested autonomy” and how we as a species could love better.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests centre on human-animal relations and the institution of environmental justice. This book received the 2019 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize, biennially awarded by the Association for Feminist Anthropology for a first book as well as honourable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Prize, the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

For more on orangutans in Borneo, check out the following:

SSEAC Interview with conservation scholar Dr. June Rubis here.

NBN Interview with historian Prof. Robert Cribb here.

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or Twitter @laurelinarien.

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David Payne on the Community of Scientists and Diversity Mar 12, 2021

Listen to this interview of David Payne, who is Chief Careers Editor at Nature. We talk about high quality writing, about the gracious community of scientists, and about diversity, diversity, diversity.

Interviewer : "What is the one thing you hope, for sure, that every piece of Careers content will achieve?"

David Payne : "Oh, that's a question, isn't it? You know what, I think it is about emotion. And I just want it to––not tug at your heartstrings, that sounds cheesy––but I feel, we spend so much time at work, and work does define us, rightly or wrongly, actually. So much of what we do is mediated through the jobs that we do. We spend so much time with our colleagues, and probably more than we do with family members often. So, I just hope that every piece we publish resonates. We can't resonate with everybody, of course, because it's a very diverse workforce in science. But, whenever I read any piece of content, I always think, how many boxes are we ticking here. You know, who is going to be interested in this. Of course, the target audience is currently the early career researcher, but of course you have all sorts of halo effects, as well. You want to think that funders are reading it, that they're finding it a useful take; people like yourself, who train people to write as a scientist; lab leaders; policymakers; thought leaders; and all the way down the line."

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Liat Ben-Moshe, "Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) Mar 12, 2021

Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.

Liat Ben-Moshe (https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/) provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom.

Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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J. L. Heilbron, "The Ghost of Galileo: In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2021) Mar 10, 2021

John Heilbron, professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of our most distinguished - and prolific - historians of science. His latest book, The Ghost of Galileo In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War(Oxford University Press, 2021), records how, during a tour of an English country house, he stumbled across what might be the earliest visual reference to Galileo outside portraiture. Heilbron's quest to understand this reference has resulted in a long and extraordinary account of debates in early modern science, religion, and medicine. Heilbron explains that there are reasons why a jobbing artist, working in the royalist base of Oxford during the first English civil war, might include in a double portrait of a tutor and his melancholy pupil this reference to recent trends in cosmology. In this lavishly illustrated and copiously argued book, Heilbron sets new agendas for our understanding of the politics of royalism, the material contexts of portraiture, and the religious significance of science.

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Pey-Yi Chu, "The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science" (U Toronto Press, 2021) Mar 09, 2021

In the Anthropocene, the thawing of frozen earth due to global warming has drawn worldwide attention to permafrost. Contemporary scientists define permafrost as ground that maintains a negative temperature for at least two years. But where did this particular conception of permafrost originate, and what alternatives existed?

The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science(University of Toronto Press, 2021) provides an intellectual history of permafrost, placing the phenomenon squarely in the political, social, and material context of Russian and Soviet science. Pey-Yi Chu shows that understandings of frozen earth were shaped by two key experiences in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. On one hand, the colonization and industrialization of Siberia nourished an engineering perspective on frozen earth that viewed the phenomenon as an aggregate physical structure: ground. On the other, a Russian and Soviet tradition of systems thinking encouraged approaching frozen earth as a process, condition, and space tied to planetary exchanges of energy and matter. Aided by the US militarization of the Arctic during the Cold War, the engineering view of frozen earth as an obstacle to construction became dominant. The Life of Permafrost tells the fascinating story of how permafrost came to acquire life as Russian and Soviet scientists studied, named, and defined it.

Pey-Yi Chu is an associate professor of history at Pomona College, where she teaches courses in modern European history.

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Edzard Ernst, "Chiropractic: Not All That It's Cracked Up to Be" (Springer, 2020) Mar 08, 2021

Of all forms of alternative medicine, chiropractic is the one that is most generally accepted. In the UK, for instance, chiropractors are regulated by statute and even have their own ‘Royal College of Chiropractic’. In the US, chiropractic’s country of origin, most chiropractors carry the title ‘doctor’ and many consumers believe they are medically trained.

Despite this high level of acceptance, chiropractic is wide open to criticism. The claims and assumptions made by chiropractors are far from evidence based. Chiropractic manipulations are of doubtful effectiveness and have regularly been associated with severe adverse effects, including multiple fatalities. The advice issued by chiropractors to patients and consumers is often less than responsible. The behaviour of chiropractors and their organisations is frequently less than professional.

Edzard Ernst's Chiropractic:' Not All That It's Cracked Up to Be (Springer, 2020) presents and discusses recent evidence in and around chiropractic in a factual and unemotional manner. It amounts to an evidence-based critique of this profession and discloses the often dangerously misleading information published for the lay audience. It thereby contributes to advancing public health and critical thinking.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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John M. Janzen, "Health in a Fragile State. Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo" (Wisconsin UP, 2019) Mar 08, 2021

John M. Janzen's Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo (Wisconsin University Press, 2019) offers a granular and insightful view of the state of healthcare services in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo), and examines the extent to which said services are able to improve the health of the communities that inhabit this region.

The collapse of the Congolese state during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the deterioration and virtual disappearance of state-sponsored healthcare institutions. This vacuum came to be filled by organisms such as the World Health Organization, other NGOs and health-based institutions organized under the new framework of the health zone.

As a result, a precarious healthcare system emerged, one that combines the ingenuity and resources of the local population with those from external sources. Unfortunately, this system is only able to offer a limited and fragile solution to the health needs of the populations it seeks to serve. Janzen uses this examination to remind us that positive health outcomes are not merely a factor of adequate knowledge and resources, but also require that those in charge of creating and implementing health policies are seen as legitimate within their communities.

To support this argument, he starts by describing the population history of the region in relation to policies of the colonial and postcolonial era, and the ways in which specific diseases affected the lives peoples in the region. He then explores the different kind of institutions that support the social reproduction of health and the ways in which people in this region explain what it means to be healthy. Finally, he looks at theories of legitimation, both in Western thought and in the Kongo culture, and argues that legitimacy is a key element in the creation of a robust and effective healthcare system.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Evan Friss, "The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s" (U Chicago Press, 2015) Mar 05, 2021

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 about The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). This book was originally released in 2015 by the University of Chicago press and we are chatting on the occasion of its paperback release in January.

Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.

The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.

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Common Ground Scholar: A Discussion with Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis Mar 04, 2021

Listen to this interview of Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, creators of the website newlearningonline.com and also professors at the College of Education, University of Illinois. We talk about monastic instruction in the sixth century, we talk about textbook learning in the sixteenth century, and we talk about cybersecurity education in the twenty-first century, but overall we talk about imbalances in self agency.

Interviewer: "Could you describe one pedagogical affordance of the technology on your learning platform CGScholar?"

Bill Cope: "So, what we're doing is we're using big data and learning analytics as an alternative feedback system. So, what we say, then, is, okay, well: 'The test is dead! Long live assessment!' We have so much data from CGScholar. Why would you create a little sample of an arrow or two at the end of a course, when we can from day one be data mining every single thing you do? And by the way, by the end of the course, we have these literally millions of data points and for every student. Now, the other thing, as well, is, our argument is––and we call this recursive feedback––is that every little data point is a piece of actionable feedback. Someone makes a comment on what you do, you get a score from somebody on your work against a Likert scale...so what we're doing is, we have this idea of complete data transparency, but also, we're not going to make any judgments for you or about you, or the system's not going to do it, without that feedback being actionable, so that you can then improve your work. It feeds into your work. So, the difference is, instead of assessment being retrospective and judgmental, what we're doing is making micro-judgments which are prospective and constructive and going towards your learning."

Visit the Learning Design and Leadership Program here and visit CGScholar here.

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Roland T. Rust and Ming-Hui Huang, "The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) Mar 04, 2021

Today I talked to Ming-Hui Huang about her book (coauthored with Roland T. Rust), The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)

This episode covers the movement of the economy from brawn to brains to hearts. Put another way, the focus here is on the movement from the Physical Economy (farming, factories, etc.) to the Thinking Economy to now the dawning of the Feeling Economy. In the near-term future, artificial intelligence (AI) will handle the thinking tasks and humans on the job will focus on adding value through empathy and their interpersonal skills. The episode explores everything from workers re-skilling, cross-skilling and up-skilling to handle this change, to the impact of this change to being feeling-centric on our politics, educational practices, and the expectations of consumers. Of special note is that the new economic era may privilege female “soft” skills over the “hard” skills men are known by and often more comfortable with.

Ming-Hui Huang holds a number of posts. She’s a Distinguished Professor at National Taiwan University; a fellow of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC); an International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation, University of Oxford, UK; and a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Service, University of Maryland, USA. She is also the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Service Research.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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J. Jureidini and L. B. McHenry, "The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research" (Wakefield Press, 2020) Mar 03, 2021

An exposé of the corruption of medicine by the pharmaceutical industry at every level, from exploiting the vulnerable destitute for drug testing, through manipulation of research data, to disease mongering and promoting drugs that do more harm than good.

Authors, Professor Jon Jureidini and Dr Leemon McHenry, made critical contributions to exposing the scientific misconduct in two infamous trials of antidepressants. Ghostwritten publications of these trials were highly influential in prescriptions of paroxetine (Paxil) and citalopram (Celexa) in paediatric and adolescent depression, yet both trials (Glaxo Smith Kline's paroxetine study 329 and Forest Laboratories' citalopram study CIT-MD-18) seriously misrepresented the efficacy and safety data.

The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research (Wakefield Press, 2020) provides a detailed account of these studies and argues that medicine desperately needs to re-evaluate its relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. Without a basis for independent evaluation of the results of randomised, placebo-controlled clinical trials, there can be no confidence in evidence-based medicine.

Science demands rigorous, critical examination and especially severe testing of hypotheses to function properly, but this is exactly what is lacking in academic medicine.

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Han Yu, "Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer's" (Columbia UP, 2021) Mar 03, 2021

Alzheimer’s disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world’s most common causes of death. Alzheimer’s lingers for years, with patients’ outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer’s because its causes remain unknown.

Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer's (Columbia UP, 2021) is a comprehensive and engaging history of Alzheimer’s that demystifies efforts to understand the disease. Beginning with the discovery of “presenile dementia” in the early twentieth century, Han Yu examines over a century of research and controversy. She presents the leading hypotheses for what causes Alzheimer’s; discusses each hypothesis’s tangled origins, merits, and gaps; and details their successes and failures. Yu synthesizes a vast amount of medical literature, historical studies, and media interviews, telling the gripping stories of researchers’ struggles while situating science in its historical, social, and cultural contexts. Her chronicling of the trajectory of Alzheimer’s research deftly balances rich scientific detail with attention to the wider implications. In narrating the attempts to find a treatment, Yu also offers a critical account of research and drug development and a consideration of the philosophy of aging. Wide-ranging and accessible, Mind Thief is an important book for all readers interested in the challenge of Alzheimer’s.

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Ronald J. Deibert, "Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society" (House of Anansi, 2020) Feb 26, 2021

Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organization that uncovers privacy and human rights abuses on the internet.

In his latest book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society(House of Anansi Press, 2020), Deibert unites a growing corpus of academic literature on the perils of surveillance capitalism to show how today’s data-hungry communications technologies have poisoned our political institutions, our minds, and even our environment. Deibert believes that it is not too late to rescue our politics from our technology, and he argues that the answer lies not in silicon or code but age-old political principles. Look to Montesquieu, not Zuckerberg, Deibert tells us, if you want to find a stable framework for digital governance in the 21st century.

On this episode, in addition to all the above, Professor Deibert and I explore the economic engines of surveillance capitalism, the dangers of ritualistic privacy policies, the internet’s immense carbon footprint, and the importance of data privacy law, among other topics.

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Teresa Berger, "@Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds" (Routledge, 2018) Feb 26, 2021

Digital dualism, or a sharp division between online and offline activity as "virtual" or "real" has long been a feature of liturgical studies and discussions around worship gatherings for theorists and practitioners alike. Teresa Berger's new book @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds(Routledge, 2017) provides a manifesto for more nuanced thinking about digital mediation, materiality, ecclesial gathering, and sacramental presence in our digitally suffused world. While this book was published several years before the COVID-19 pandemic, the careful thinking Berger presents here can certainly guide church leaders and participants in present and future conversations as worshiping communities find themselves facing prolonged seasons of online gatherings and digital devotion.

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Erika Engelhaupt, "Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science" (National Geographic, 2020) Feb 25, 2021

Would your dog eat you if you died? What are face mites? Why do clowns creep us out? In this illuminating collection of grisly true science stories, journalist Erika Engelhaupt, the writer of National Geographic’s highly acclaimed Gory Details blog, shares the answers to these questions and many more. Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science (National Geographic, 2020) explores the strange and shocking realities of our minds, our bodies and our universe, taking readers on a fascinating tour through overlooked but astonishing aspects of biology, anatomy, nature and more, as well as the ways that science helps to break down taboos surrounding such conversation topics as women’s bodies.

Blending humor and real science, Engelhaupt shares captivating stories and intriguing research that will alter the way readers view the world. From a peek inside the world's smallest crime scenes to a hands-on look at maggot farming, Gory Details features top-notch reporting, interviews with leading scientists and a healthy dose of wit.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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L. Vinsel and A. L. Russell, "The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most" (Currency, 2020) Feb 24, 2021

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 new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on the state of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and—ironically—less innovative.

Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most(Currency, 2020) shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster. Corporations have spent millions hiring chief innovation officers while their core businesses tank. Computer science programs have drilled their students on programming and design, even though the overwhelming majority of jobs are in IT and maintenance. In countless cities, suburban sprawl has left local governments with loads of deferred repairs that they can’t afford to fix.

For anyone concerned by the crumbling state of our roads and bridges or the direction our economy is headed, The Innovation Delusion is a deeply necessary reevaluation of a trend we can still disrupt.

Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. I study science and its history, in the hope that understanding the past can help us make sense of the present and build a better future.

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Tracie White and Ronald W. Davis, "The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist's Desperate Hunt to Cure the Illness That Stole His Son" (Hachette, 2021) Feb 24, 2021

Based on a viral article, the gripping medical mystery story of Ron Davis, a world-class Stanford geneticist who has put his career on the line to find the cure for chronic fatigue syndrome, the disease killing his son. For the past six years, Whitney Dafoe has been confined to a bedroom in the back of his parents' home, unable to walk, to eat, to speak. The sound of music causes him pain. At one point, the formerly healthy, young, freelance photographer, faced starvation as his 6'3" frame withered to 115 pounds. In desperation, Whitney and his parents went from one specialist to another, and still no answers. Then, finally, a diagnosis: the mysterious disease myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Whitney's story is heartbreaking, but it's also one of redemption. It reaches far beyond just one family's harrowing tale.

Today, ME/CFS affects between 1 and 2.5 million Americans--and 20 million people around the world. Those afflicted largely suffer in silence because the disease is little known and much misunderstood. The question lingers still whether it even exists outside the patient's mind. Often disbelieved, they're abandoned by family and friends. They lose their jobs, and battle with insurance companies over rising medical costs as the chronic disease continues on year after year. In one way, Whitney has been lucky. He could reach out to his father, a world renowned, scientist, for answers. This book is the story of one father's desperate hunt for the insidious illness that stole his son away. The Puzzle Solver follows Ron as he unravels the molecular trail within his own son's donated blood and genome, to began to find answers. He confirms this is a biological disease and uncovers new possibilities for treatments and potentially a cure. At its heart, The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist's Desperate Hunt to Cure the Illness That Stole His Son by Tracie White and Ronald W. Davis (Hachette Books, 2021) is about more than just cutting edge research or a race to find the cure for ME/CFS--it's about the unbreakable bond between a father and his son, and the lengths to which a parent will go to save their child's life.

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Seema Yasmin, "Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) Feb 22, 2021

Can your zip code predict when you will die? Should you space out childhood vaccines? Does talcum powder cause cancer? Why do some doctors recommend e-cigarettes while other doctors recommend you stay away from them? Health information―and misinformation―is all around us, and it can be hard to separate the two. A long history of unethical medical experiments and medical mistakes, along with a host of celebrities spewing anti-science beliefs, has left many wary of science and the scientists who say they should be trusted. How can we unravel the knots of fact and fiction to find out what we should really be concerned about, and what we can laugh off?

In Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), medical journalist, doctor, professor, and former CDC disease detective Seema Yasmin, driven by a need to set the record straight, dissects some of the most widely circulating medical myths and pseudoscience. Exploring how epidemics of misinformation and disinformation can spread faster than microbes, Dr. Yasmin asks why bad science is sometimes more believable and contagious than the facts. Each easy-to-read chapter covers a specific myth, whether it has endured for many years or hit the headlines more recently.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Jacob Steere-Williams, "The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England" (U Rochester Press, 2020) Feb 19, 2021

Typhoid fever is a food- and water-borne infectious disease that was insidious and omnipresent in Victorian Britain. It was one of the most prolific diseases of the Industrial Revolution. There was a palpable public anxiety about the disease in the Victorian era, no doubt fueled by media coverage of major outbreaks across the nation, but also because Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died of the disease in 1861. Their son and heir, Prince Albert Edward, contracted and nearly succumbed to typhoid a decade later in 1871.

The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England (U Rochester Press, 2020) shows that typhoid was at the center of a number of critical debates about health, science, and governance. Victorian public health reformers, the book argues, working in central and local government, framed typhoid as the most pressing public health problem in order to persuade local officials to implement sanitary infrastructure to prevent the spread of disease. In this period British epidemiologists uncovered how typhoid is spread via food and water supplies, disrupting the longstanding idea that typhoid was spread via filth. In the process the modern disciple of epidemiology emerged as the chief science of public health. Typhoid was as much a social and political problem as it was a scientific one, and The Filth Disease provides a striking reminder of the cultural context in which infectious diseases strike populations and how scientists study them.

Jacob Steere-Williams is Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context

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Alan Lightman, "Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings" (Pantheon, 2021) Feb 18, 2021

Imagination with a Straight Jacket

Alan Lightman is a writer, physicist, and social entrepreneur. He has served on the faculties of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities. He is the author of many books, both fiction and nonfiction, including the international best seller Einstein’s Dreams and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award.

This episode goes to both what’s epic in scope and to what’s more intimate and personal. Epic is knowledge now about how the universe began and that it will end with the sun basically engulfing the earth and then burning out. More personal is that the book explores the moral, even religious issues that scientific knowledge brings with it. Most of all, this episode explores the act of intellectual inquiry and exploration through the careers of leading scientists.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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S. Carlsson and J. Leijonhufvud, "The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance" (Diversion Books, 2021) Feb 18, 2021

Fifteen years ago in Stockholm, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon had a big idea. The music industry was playing a desperate game of whack-a-mole with piracy via file sharing but this was proving as hopeless as the War on Drugs. Why not, they thought, use the new torrenting technologies to bring piracy in from the cold and make themselves rich in the process?

In 2006, they founded Spotify with a handful of engineers, no licences and no revenue. Today, Spotify is the world's most popular audio streaming subscription service with 345 million users and a market capitalization of $60 billion.

How did the shy computer nerd and hyperactive investor tame hostile music labels and withstand competition from US tech giants more than ten times their size? Still struggling to achieve sustained profitability in cut-throat market segments, will Ek’s latest foray into podcasting eventually free Spotify of its dependency on the music labels or suffer the same fate as Spotify TV?

The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance(Diversion Books, 2021) is the new English-language update of Spotify Untold – their 2019 Swedish business biography – Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud put Europe’s only tech giant under the microscope using information gleaned from interviews more than 80 sources and a mountain of public and private documents. The book has been translated into 15 languages and will soon be turned into a Netflix Originals miniseries.

Sven Carlsson is a technology reporter at Swedish Radio and and Jonas Leijonhufvud a business journalist at Di Digital.

*The authors own book recommendations are Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac (W. W. Norton, 2019) and Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (William Collins, 2018).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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Nicole Perlroth, "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race" (Bloomsbury, 2021) Feb 18, 2021

For years, cybersecurity experts have debated whether cyber-weapons represent a destabilizing new military technology or merely the newest tool in the spies’ arsenal. In This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends(Bloomsbury, 2021), Nicole Perlroth makes a compelling case that cyber-conflict is quickly spiraling out of control. Worse, the United States set us down the precarious path we’re now on.

A cybersecurity reporter at the The New York Times, Nicole makes her case by taking us on a journey from the shadowy underworld of the cyber-arms market, to Silicon Valley, the White House, and the NSA’s elite offensive hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations. On this episode, I talk to Nicole about the nature of the cyber-arms underground, why the NSA has traditionally favored offense over defense, and why no one—not Congress and not the public—seems to understand the gravity of the cyber-threat.

We wrap up with a story likely to be of interest to the NBN community: someone—were not sure who yet—is hacking authors’ email accounts and stealing their manuscripts.

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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David Badre, "On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done" (Princeton UP, 2020) Feb 17, 2021

On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives.

Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done?

In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being. Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do. A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior.

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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Emily Willingham, "Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis" (Avery, 2020) Feb 17, 2021

The fallacy sold to many of us is that the penis signals dominance and power. But this wry and penetrating book reveals that in fact nature did not shape the penis–or the human attached to it–to have the upper…hand.

Phallacy looks closely at some of nature’s more remarkable examples of penises and the many lessons to learn from them. In tracing how we ended up positioning our nondescript penis as a pulsing, awe-inspiring shaft of all masculinity and human dominance, Phallacy also shows what can we do to put that penis back where it belongs.

Emphasizing our human capacities for impulse control, Phallacy ultimately challenges the toxic message that the penis makes the man and the man can’t control himself. With instructive illustrations of unusual genitalia and tales of animal mating rituals that will make you particularly happy you are not a bedbug, Phallacy shows where humans fit on the continuum from fun to fatal phalli and why the human penis is an implement for intimacy, not intimidation.

Emily Anthes is a science journalist and author. Her books include Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts and The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. Read more about her work at emilyanthes.com or follow her on Twitter at @emilyanthes.

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Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean" (Oxford UP, 2020) Feb 16, 2021

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 expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to suit their "tropical" needs and increase profitability. Not only were technologies reinvented so as to keep manufacturing processes local but slaveholders' adaptation of new racial ideologies also shaped their particular usage of new machines. Finally, these businessmen forged a new set of relationships with one another in order to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States.

In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineers and iron-makers in Virginia to collaborate with railroad and sugar entrepreneurs in Cuba.

Through his examination of the creation of these industrial bodies of knowledge, Daniel B. Rood demonstrates the deepening dependence of the Atlantic economy on forced labor after a few revolutionary decades in which it seemed the institution of slavery might be destroyed. The reinvention of this plantation world in the 1840s and 1850s brought a renewed movement in the 1860s, especially from enslaved people themselves in the United States and Cuba, to end chattel slavery.

This account of capitalism, technology, and slavery offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Americas.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Hannah Marcus, "Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Feb 16, 2021

Today we speak to Hannah Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about her new monograph, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy(University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities.

Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton, "Vera Rubin: A Life" (Harvard UP, 2021) Feb 16, 2021

Few astronomers in the 20th century did as much to expand our understanding of the universe as Vera Rubin. To tell her remarkable story in their biography Vera Rubin: A Life (Belknap Press, 2021), authors Jacqueline and Simon Mitton describe both the range of her accomplishments as well as the barriers she overcame in order to achieve them.

As they explain, Rubin was drawn early to the study of the stars, determining early in her life that she wanted to be an astronomer. To become one she had to overcome the assumptions of many of her peers that science was not an appropriate field of study for a woman, or that she would abandon her studies once she married and had children.

Defying their expectations, Rubin balanced child-rearing with earning her doctorate in astronomy and undertaking observational work. Though she participated in a number of different studies, her passion was for understanding galaxies, and her discoveries proved critical for the acceptance of the existence of dark matter in the universe.

Acclaimed for her work, she used her position to fight for improve the status of women in the sciences, a fight that she continued alongside her research for the rest of her life.

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Henry T. Greely, "CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans" (The MIT Press, 2021) Feb 15, 2021

What does the birth of babies whose embryos have gone through genome editing mean—for science and for all of us?

In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences in CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (The MIT Press, 2021). Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.

The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers, in a balanced and thoughtful way, the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next.

Greely doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Nathaniel Greenberg, "How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Egypt and Tunisia" (Edinburgh UP, 2019) Feb 12, 2021

On January 28 2011 WikiLeaks released documents from a cache of US State Department cables stolen the previous year. The Daily Telegraph in London published one of the memos with an article headlined 'Egypt protests: America's secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising'. The effect of the revelation was immediate, helping set in motion an aggressive counter-narrative to the nascent story of the Arab Spring. The article featured a cluster of virulent commentators all pushing the same story: the CIA, George Soros and Hillary Clinton were attempting to take over Egypt. Many of these commentators were trolls, some of whom reappeared in 2016 to help elect Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Nathaniel Greenberg's book How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Egypt and Tunisia (Edinburgh UP, 2019) tells the story of how a proxy-communications war ignited and hijacked the Arab uprisings and how individuals on the ground, on air and online worked to shape history.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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Jeremy Black, "A History of the 20th Century: Conflict, Technology & Rock'n'roll" (Sirius Entertainment, 2021) Feb 12, 2021

Jeremy Black – professor of history at Exeter University, and one of the world’s most prolific writers – has just published an outstanding illustrated history of the twentieth century, in A History of the 20th Century: Conflict, Technology & Rock'n'roll (Sirius Entertainment, 2021).

In 250 pages, and with copious and superbly chosen illustrations, he unpacks the realities of rapid population growth and the political, economic and cultural changes that came in its wake.

Thinking about the reality of American dominance of the West, and the rise and fall of rival anti-imperial powers elsewhere, while never forgetting the importance of experiences in the so-called “third world,” Black pulls together themes that explain the horrors and achievements of this period – and which never fail to surprise.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Jack Price, "The Future of Brain Repair: A Realist's Guide to Stem Cell Therapy" (MIT Press, 2020) Feb 10, 2021

A scientist assesses the potential of stem cell therapies for treating such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.

Stem cell therapies are the subject of enormous hype, endowed by the media with almost magical qualities and imagined by the public to bring about miracle cures. Stem cells have the potential to generate new cells of different types, and have been shown to do so in certain cases. Could stem cell transplants repair the damaged brain? In his book The Future of Brain Repair: A Realist's Guide to Stem Cell Therapy (MIT Press, 2020), neurobiologist Jack Price assesses the potential of stem cell therapies to treat such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries.

Certainly brain disorders are in need of effective treatments. These disorders don’t just kill, they disable, and conventional drug therapies have not had much success in treating them. Price explains that repairing the human brain is difficult, largely because of its structural, functional, and developmental complexity. He examines the self-repairing capacity of blood and gut cells—and the lack of such capacity in the brain; describes the limitations of early brain stem cell therapies for neurodegenerative disorders; and discusses current clinical trials that may lead to the first licensed stem cell therapies for stroke, Parkinson’s and macular degeneration. And he describes the real promise of pluripotential stem cells, which can make all the cell types that constitute the body.

New technologies, Price reports, challenge the very notion of cell transplantation, instead seeking to convince the brain itself to manufacture the new cells it needs. Could this be the true future of brain repair?

You can find more about Jack’s work here and here.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Nina Jankowicz, "How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict" (Bloomsbury, 2020) Feb 10, 2021

Barely a month after the riot on the Capitol Building, the United States is no more adept at fending off foreign information operations than it was four years ago, when “fake news” and “information operations” became household terms. Why has the United States been so slow to adapt, and what can it do to reverse the tide?

In How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict(Bloomsbury, 2020), Nina Jankowicz, a Disinformation Fellow at the Wilson Center, explores how five central and eastern European countries have fared in their battles against Russian information operations. Though Estonia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic still have their struggles, each has lessons to offer the United States—if only it would listen.

On this episode, I talk with Nina about what makes Russian information operations so effective, how victims should repair their information ecosystems, and what Alexei Navalny can teach the West about waging information battles against the Kremlin.

Please be advised: We get a surprise guest in the middle of the podcast, when Nina’s dog makes a quick cameo!

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Tara Fickle, "The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities" (NYU Press, 2019) Feb 09, 2021

This unique episode features a dual/duel interview with two authors whose recent books focus on the overlapping contexts and theories of Game Studies and Asian American Studies. The first is Tara Fickle and her book The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (NYU Press, 2019), which investigates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit roles, play games, and follow rules in order to be seen as valuable in the US. The second author is Christopher B. Patterson, who discusses his book Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Empire(NYU Press, 2020), which asks similar questions to theorize ways of seeing games as queer erotics, as expressions of empire, and as withholding “The Asiatic.” During this duel/dual interview, each author asks the other questions about their books, with the goal of having a broader conversation about the various concepts that both books play with.

Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia.

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Jennifer M. Rampling, "The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Feb 08, 2021

A four-hundred-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. Tracing the development of alchemy in England from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history.

Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Ethan Lou, "Field Notes from a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended" (Signal, 2020) Feb 05, 2021

We are just over a year from when global news first reported a new type of pneumonia emerging in the Chinese city of Wuhan. A lockdown of Wuhan on January 23rd, 2020, was the first indication that these stories were more serious than originally thought.

All of us know what happened next: COVID-19 spread from China to other countries in Asia, then to Europe, then to North America, then worldwide. To slow the spread, countries frantically imposed travel restrictions on those coming from places affected by COVID-19: a massive shift away from the increasingly open borders seen over the past two decades.

One traveller caught up in these new restrictions was Ethan Lou, author of Field Notes From a Pandemic: A Journey Through a World Suspended (Signal, 2020). Ethan arrives in China in early 2020 to visit his family, as the first leg of a trip around the world. On each leg of his journey, he sees how different parts of the world are transformed by the global pandemic. Field Notes From a Pandemic, named among the CBC’s best Canadian non-fiction books of 2020, is one half travelogue, one half commentary, in and about a changed world.

In this interview, Ethan and I talk about his journey around the world, and how COVID-19 made a routine trip exceptionally complicated. He shares how he saw the world change in real-time, and which of those changes may end up sticking around.

Ethan Lou is a former Reuters reporter and has served as a visiting journalist at the University of British Columbia. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, the South China Morning Post, the Walrus, and the Washington Post. His next book is Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West. He can be found on Twitter at @Ethan_Lou, and his work can be found at https://ethanlou.com/.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Field Notes From a Pandemic. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Matthieu Ricard, "A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion" (Shambhala, 2016) Feb 05, 2021

Today I talked to Matthieu Ricard about two books.

The first is A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion(Shambhala, 2016) It is a powerful and wide-ranging indictment of the treatment of animals by humans--and an eloquent plea for animal rights. Every cow just wants to be happy. Every chicken just wants to be free. Every bear, dog, or mouse experiences sorrow and feels pain as intensely as any of us humans do. In a compelling appeal to reason and human kindness, Matthieu Ricard here takes the arguments from his best-sellers Altruism and Happiness to their logical conclusion: that compassion toward all beings, including our fellow animals, is a moral obligation and the direction toward which any enlightened society must aspire. He chronicles the appalling sufferings of the animals we eat, wear, and use for adornment or “entertainment,” and submits every traditional justification for their exploitation to scientific evidence and moral scrutiny. What arises is an unambiguous and powerful ethical imperative for treating all of the animals with whom we share this planet with respect and compassion.

The second, co-authored with Jason Gruhl, is Our Animal Neighbors: Compassion for Every Furry, Slimy, Prickly Creature on Earth(Bala Kids, 2020).It offers a story about the fundamental connection between animals and people and how we can treat all of Earth's creatures with compassion and empathy.

Furry polar bears, playful sea otters, slow sloths, prickly porcupines, and slimy snakes are just a few of the many animals we share our world with. And even though we might not look the same or have the same needs as our animal neighbors, we have more in common with them than we might think. Our Animal Neighbors introduces children to the importance of treating all animals with the care and compassion they deserve. We all want to experience love, safety, and respect and this book is the first step to instilling those values at an early age. This planet is our home, and we should all be free to live a prosperous life regardless of whether we have hands, hooves, scales, or fur.

Matthieu Ricard is a French writer, photographer, translator and Buddhist monk. Ricard received a PhD in molecular genetics from the Pasteur Institute in 1972 before departing his native France to study Buddhism in the Himalayas, eventually becoming a monk of the Shechen Tennyi Dargyeling Monastery in Nepal. Renowned also as a photographer and translator, he is the author of numerous previous books, including Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and Your World, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, and, with his father, the late Jean-François Revel, The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life. He dedicates all the income of his work to two hundred humanitarian projects run in the Himalaya by the organization he founded, Karuna-Shechen.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Michael Rossi, "The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America" (Chicago UP, 2019) Feb 05, 2021

The appreciation of color is considered universal among human societies, yet varies vastly according to cultural norms and material circumstances. In the nineteenth century, synthetic chemistry produced new hues like mauve that changed the sensory worlds of people living in industrial societies. In The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America (Chicago UP 2019), historian Michael Rossi explores how reformers and scientists turned to color science to ask and answer profound questions about the relationship between perception and personhood. Their efforts to define and standardize the modern sensorium were often proposed as solutions to practical problems of education and accountability. In this way, color systems made moral and political claims on what good governance in an increasingly bureaucratized society might look like.

From the Pragmatists’ protoplasmic preoccupations to the educational experiments of board game magnates, Rossi’s study of color in American life brings anxieties over the possibility of community in the modern world into brilliant focus. Whether rooted in philosophical paradoxes or unabashed racial animus, standardizing color cut to the heart of human difference at a crucial moment in the development of the human sciences. This vibrant book will find an audience in aesthetes and Americanists alike, or virtually anyone interested in why the technical tools for making and modulating color look the way they do—not to spoil it, but how deeply have you considered the color options in software like Photoshop?

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and numbers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law.

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Earl Wright II, "Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology" (University of Cincinnati Press, 2020) Feb 05, 2021

Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology(U Cincinnati Press, 2020)is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good" and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans.

Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright II demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois's Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology.

Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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Jon Birger, "Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge" (BenBella Books, 2021) Feb 02, 2021

Modern romance is broken. It's time to flip the script.

Apps have transformed dating from a mysterious adventure into a daily chore. Young, single, college-educated women are sick and tired of competing for a shrinking supply of guys. And marriage-material men, long expected to take the lead when it comes to asking women out, are suddenly balking at making the first move, fearing they'll come across as creepy or inappropriate.

Society is changing, which means it's time for dating to evolve. Millennial and Gen Z women are more than capable of seeking out what—and who—they want. They're standouts in the classroom and champions on the playing fields. They're leaders in the workplace and trailblazers in city halls, state houses, and Congress. So why would we tell a generation of badass women that they're not allowed to be bold when it comes to finding love? Why should they have to sit back and wait (and wait and wait) for men to find them?

In Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (BenBella Books, 2021) Jon Birger, author of Date-onomics, offers women bold new strategies for finding the one. Backed by research showing that women can win at romance by making the first move with the men of their choice, Birger explains why:

It's better to choose than to be chosenThe "play hard to get" method is not only outdated but grounded in bad science

The first move does not have to be a big move

It's time to log off of dating apps and date men you actually know

The workplace can be a terrific place to meet a long-term romantic partner

. . . and more!

Make Your Move is an honest, solution-based guide to finding love that lasts. If you're tired of playing by old rules, look no further: Make your move and win.

Jon Birger is an award-winning magazine writer and author of two dating books -- Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (2021) and Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game (2015). A former senior writer at Fortune, Jon has been named to AlwaysOn Network's list of "Power Players in Technology Business Media." He's also a familiar face and voice on television and radio, having made appearances on ABC's Good Morning America, BBC World Service, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News -- discussing topics ranging from the dating market to the stock market. A graduate of Brown University, Jon lives with his family in Larchmont, N.Y. To contact Jon about media interviews, speaking opportunities, or consulting work, please visit his author website, www.jonbirger.com.

Clint Sabom is an award winning writer who hosts a podcast on mental health and psychology called The Sanity Sessions: Exploring Mental Illness And Maladaptations.

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Theresia Hofer, "Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform" (U Washington Press, 2018) Jan 29, 2021

Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform(University of Washington Press, 2018) is the first full-length ethnography of Tibetan medical practitioners (amchi) in central Tibet working outside of major Tibetan medical institutions in Lhasa. Departing from extant ethnographies and scholarship on Tibetan medicine in the twentieth-century that often focus on institutions such as the Mentsikhang, Tibetan Medical College, and TAR Tibetan Pharmaceutical Factory, Theresia Hofer follows and traces the medical work of local Tibetan doctors in rural settings in Tsang and in Shigatse Town.

By centering on amchis who were not part of the Tibetan state-sponsored medical structures that were incorporated into the PRC socialist health care system in the 1950s, Hofer reveals perspectives and experiences that have been overlooked in national and institutional narratives. Drawing on literature addressing Tibetan amchis' memory and oral history in socialist and postsocialist contexts, Hofer also inquires into the social and political dynamics that influence memory and history-making, especially with regard to the violent past. Medicine and Memory in Tibet also consistently considers gender and aims to tackle the lack of understanding of gender in Tibetan medicine in the twentieth century. The perspectives of the amchis allow the inclusion of more women in the study of Tibetan medicine and uncover different subaltern histories of the Tibetan experience.

Medicine and Memory in Tibet demonstrates that amchis outside of major state-sponsored institutions have continued to contribute significantly to the survival and revival of Tibetan medicine and culture into the present day. Through the amchis' negotiations and agency within the new regime since the 1950s, Tibetan medicine was able to not only become an important health care resource for Tibetans and the state into the 1990s, it also became a stronghold for the preservation and revival of other aspects of Tibetan culture, language, and the local economy in contemporary China.

Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

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James E. Baker, "The Centaur's Dilemma: US National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution" (Brookings, 2020) Jan 28, 2021

From facial recognition to online shopping, artificial intelligence has become the backbone of the internet and has led to an unprecedented extraction and utilization of personal data. As a result, AI has rapidly outpaced existing free speech, privacy, and national security law.

In The Centaur’s Dilemma: National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution (Brookings Institute Press, 2020), Judge James E. Baker deploys his extensive experience in national security law to argue for AI regulation through legislation. By first tackling the creation of a precise definition of artificial intelligence, Judge Baker then vividly explains the national security applications and implications of AI. In part two, he goes about suggesting a purposeful, legal framework for addressing those national security applications and implications while exploring legal arguments in the absence of clear laws. This timely and insightful work provides an accessible primer of AI for legal generalists while demonstrating how technologists can thoroughly think about the safety and ethics of artificial intelligence.

Kyle Beadle is a recent graduate of Louisiana State University, where he studied International Studies and Spanish. He is now seeking a master’s in International Relations and Security.

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Simon Baron-Cohen, "The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention" (Allen Lane, 2020) Jan 26, 2021

Why are humans alone capable of invention? This question is relevant to every human invention, from music to mathematics, sculpture and science, dating back to the beginnings of civilization. In The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention, Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, presents a new theory of human invention. His unexpected claim is that understanding autistic people — specifically their unstoppable drive to seek patterns, a characteristic of the condition — is the key to understanding both the ancient origins and the modern flowering of human creativity.

In The Pattern Seekers, Simon Baron-Cohen’s goal is two-fold: to provide an answer to the long-standing question about human invention and to understand the role that autistic people played in the evolution of human invention. His higher message is to change the way our society views and treats autistic people. “Among the new generation of hypersystemizers will be some of the great inventors of our future…If we acknowledge that some autistic people were and still are the drivers of the evolution of science, technology, art, and other forms of invention, their future can be different.”

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Emmanuel Kreike, "Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature" (Princeton UP, 2021) Jan 25, 2021

In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature(Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it should be a crime. The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature.

In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth-century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.

Dr. Emmanuel Kreike is a professor of history at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in African history from Yale University (1996) and a Dr. of Science (PhD) in Tropical Forestry from the School of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University (2006), the Netherlands. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of war/violence, population displacement, environment, and society.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

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J. Rosenhouse, "Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jan 25, 2021

Jason Rosenhouse's Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles(Princeton UP, 2020) is about a panoply of logic puzzles. You’ll find Mastermind and sudoku discussed early on, and then you’ll be hit with an incredible array of some of the most intriguing logic puzzles that have ever been devised. Some will be familiar to you, but some will almost certainly be brain-teasers you have never heard of. It’s absolutely amazing what a truly deep field grew from recreational pastimes – and this book is an absolute treasure trove of stuff you can’t help thinking about. If you like logic, you’re certain to be sucked in – but you’ll enjoy the ride.

Logic puzzles were first introduced to the public by Lewis Carroll in the late nineteenth century and have been popular ever since. Games like Sudoku and Mastermind are fun and engrossing recreational activities, but they also share deep foundations in mathematical logic and are worthy of serious intellectual inquiry. Games for Your Mind explores the history and future of logic puzzles while enabling you to test your skill against a variety of puzzles yourself.

In this informative and entertaining book, Jason Rosenhouse begins by introducing readers to logic and logic puzzles and goes on to reveal the rich history of these puzzles. He shows how Carroll's puzzles presented Aristotelian logic as a game for children, yet also informed his scholarly work on logic. He reveals how another pioneer of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan, drew on classic puzzles about liars and truthtellers to illustrate Kurt Gödel's theorems and illuminate profound questions in mathematical logic. Rosenhouse then presents a new vision for the future of logic puzzles based on nonclassical logic, which is used today in computer science and automated reasoning to manipulate large and sometimes contradictory sets of data.

Featuring a wealth of sample puzzles ranging from simple to extremely challenging, this lively and engaging book brings together many of the most ingenious puzzles ever devised, including the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever, metapuzzles, paradoxes, and the logic puzzles in detective stories.

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Brian Deer, "The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's War on Vaccines" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) Jan 25, 2021

A reporter uncovers the secrets behind the scientific scam of the century.

The news breaks first as a tale of fear and pity. Doctors at a London hospital claim a link between autism and a vaccine given to millions of children: MMR. Young parents are terrified. Immunization rates slump. And as a worldwide ‘anti-vax’ movement kicks off, old diseases return to sicken and kill. But a veteran reporter isn’t so sure, and sets out on an epic investigation. Battling establishment cover-ups, smear campaigns, and gagging lawsuits, he exposes rigged research and secret schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific deception of our time.

Brian Deer's The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's War on Vaccines (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) tells the troubling story of Andrew Wakefield: a man in search of greatness, who stakes his soul on big ideas that, if right, might transform lives. But when the facts don’t fit, he can’t face failure. He’ll do whatever it takes to succeed.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Anna L. Tsing, "Feral Atlas: The More-than-human Anthropocene" (Stanford UP, 2020) Jan 22, 2021

Do you feel lost in the Anthropocene? Would you like a map to chart your way through our changing world? How about an atlas? Well, the Feral Atlas Collective has something that might help you out. In this episode Anna Tsing, an anthropologist from U.C. Santa Cruz, tells us about the Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene.

Feral Atlas is one of the most unusual book projects that I have seen or been a part of (it includes my “field report” about colonial era sewer rats in Hanoi). It is a digital book published by Stanford University Press in 2020 and can be accessed for free here.

Exploring Feral Atlas is like taking a walk on the wild side as there is no structured or required way to enter into its various conversations. Instead, you are invited to explore at your own risk. There are luminary essays by Sven Beckert, Amitav Ghosh, Gabrielle Hecht, Karen Ho, Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, David M. Richardson, and Will Steffen; field reports by dozens of scholars from the humanities and sciences; and art ranging from video to poetry to music. Informative and thought-provoking, alternately humorous and emotionally gut wrenching, and provocative in both form and content, Feral Atlas invites you to go wild.

Anna Tsing is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her numerous books include In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (1993) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). She has received far too many awards to list here but they include Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, the Victor Turner Award, and a Guggenheim. The Feral Atlas Collective is composed of: Jennifer Deger: a visual anthropologist, filmmaker, and research leader at James Cook University, as well as the president of the Australian Anthropological Society; Alder Keleman Saxena: an environmental anthropologist at Northern Arizona University who examines the relationships linking agricultural biodiversity to human food cultures; Feifei Zhou: an artist and architect who explores ecological and cultural preservation through architectural interventions; and my guest, Anna Tsing.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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David Sepkoski, "Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Jan 22, 2021

We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded—by scientists, by the media, by popular culture—of the looming threat of mass extinction. We’re told that human activity is currently producing a sixth mass extinction, perhaps of even greater magnitude than the five previous geological catastrophes that drastically altered life on Earth. Indeed, there is a very real concern that the human species may itself be poised to go the way of the dinosaurs, victims of the most recent mass extinction some 65 million years ago.

How we interpret the causes and consequences of extinction and their ensuing moral imperatives is deeply embedded in the cultural values of any given historical moment. And, as David Sepkoski reveals, the history of scientific ideas about extinction over the past two hundred years—as both a past and a current process—is implicated in major changes in the way Western society has approached biological and cultural diversity. It seems self-evident to most of us that diverse ecosystems and societies are intrinsically valuable, but the current fascination with diversity is a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, the way we value diversity depends crucially on our sense that it is precarious—that it is something actively threatened, and that its loss could have profound consequences. In Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Sepkoski uncovers how and why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to think catastrophically about extinction.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

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R. A. Woldoff and R. C. Litchfield, "Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy" (Oxford UP, 2021) Jan 21, 2021

In the space of a few weeks this spring, organizations around the world learned that many traditional, in-person jobs could, in fact, be performed remotely. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, however, some individuals were already utilizing new options for personal mobility and online work to strike out on their own.

In the new book, Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy (Oxford UP, 2020), Rachael A. Woldoff and Robert C. Litchfield examine the growing demographic of individuals disaffected by the daily grind of office work who have left the U.S. and Europe to work remotely from low-cost global hubs around the world. These “digital nomads” seek out communities of like-minded unconventional people—what they call a tribe—in places like Indonesia, Thailand, Colombia, Mexico, or Portugal. Taking advantage of advancements in mobility, technology, and telecommunication, digital nomads are venturing around the world in search of a new way of living and working.

Through dozens of interviews and several stints living in a digital nomad hub in Bali, Indonesia, Woldoff and Litchfield show why digital nomads leave their conventional lives behind, arguing that the creative class and Millennial workers, though successful, often feel that “world class cities” and desirable jobs are anything but paradise. Digital Nomads follows these new workers through their transitions into freelancing, entrepreneurship, and remote work, and explains how digital nomads create fluid, intimate communities abroad.

Complete with a preface that addresses how COVID-19 is inevitably changing the landscape of work, Digital Nomads offers insight into the new ways people are balancing freedom, work, community, and creative fulfillment in the digital age.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019 Jan 20, 2021

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire.

Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio received her BA in history at the University of Puerto Rico and her PhD in Central/East European history from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her dissertation, “The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and Biopolitics in the Prussian-Polish Provinces, 1840-1914,” was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Award in Polish Studies by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) in 2010.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is the winner of the 2020 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies and honorable mention for the 2020 Heldt Prize for the best book by a woman in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

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L. Ferlier and B. Miyamoto, "Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832" (Brill, 2020) Jan 19, 2021

Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832(Brill, 2020) explores the printscape – the mental mapping of knowledge in all its printed shapes – to chart the British networks of publishers, printers, copyright-holders, readers and authors. This transdisciplinary volume skilfully recovers innovations and practices in the book trade between 1688 and 1832. It investigates how print circulated information in a multitude of sizes and media, through an evolving framework of transactions. The authority of print is demonstrated by studies of prospectuses, blank forms, periodicals, pamphlets, globes, games and ephemera, uniquely gathered in eleven essays engaging in legal, economic, literary, and historical methodologies. The tight focus on material format reappraises a disorderly market accommodating a widening audience consumption.

Louisiane Ferlier, Ph.D. (2012, Université Paris Diderot), is the Digital Resources Manager at Centre for the History of Science at the Royal Society. She has published articles on John Wallis, the Bodleian Library and cross-Atlantic circulation of books.

Bénédicte Miyamoto, Ph.D. (2011, Université Paris Diderot), is Associate Professor of British History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She has published on eighteenth-century drawing manuals, sales catalogues and art markets.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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Andrew Jewett, "Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America" (Harvard UP, 2020) Jan 19, 2021

Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that "tenured radicals" have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science's celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions--and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers.

Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America(Harvard UP, 2020) reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation's bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s.

Looking at today's battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists' claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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R. Douglas Fields, "Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better" (BenBella, 2020) Jan 19, 2021

In Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better(BenBella, 2020), eminent neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields surveys the history and current state of scientific understanding about the brain as an electrical organ, and how the electrical activity of the brain relates to cognitive functioning and various clinical conditions. The book begins by documenting some of the fascinating and obscure history of the discovery and early science of electrical brain activity measurements, or ‘brainwaves’. It then goes on to summarize the latest cutting edge research on brainwaves in a wide variety of basic and applied areas of science and medicine - including neuroimaging, neuroplasticity, brain-machine interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurofeedback, brain stimulation therapies, and many others. Electric Brain is a highly accessible, but fact-filled and up-to-date, treatment of one of the most central - and yet still so enigmatic - topics in all of modern science.

Dr. R Douglas Fields is Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the United States National Institutes of Health. He is a world expert on neuron-glia interactions and cellular mechanisms of memory, and is particularly well known for his work on white matter plasticity.

Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness.

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M. Nestle and K. Trueman, "Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health" (U California Press, 2020) Jan 13, 2021

Marion Nestle describes her new book as “a small, quick and dirty reader for the general audience” summarizing some of her biggest and most influential works. Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know About the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health published September 2020 by University of California Press, was written in conversation with Kerry Trueman, a blogger and friend. Trueman’s questions served as prompts to organize Nestle’s 800-1000 word summaries in approachable and engaging prose. Readers familiar with Nestle’s groundbreaking Food Politics will recognize many of the ideas and information, but this new pocket-sized and affordable volume serves as an introduction for undergraduate students or readers new to Food Studies. However, Nestle does cover some new material in her explanation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, especially the campaign for Zero Hunger. Nestle also summarizes how nutrition advice has changed in the last few years by thinking about food in categories ranging from unprocessed (corn on the cob) to ultraprocessed (Nacho Cheese tortilla chips). This reevaluation makes it easier to identify foods that are acceptable to eat without excessive focus on micronutrients. In the conversation, Nestle addresses the ethics of marketing food to children, food as a human right and access in the Covid era, the possibility of a National Food Policy Agency, the politics of food banks, and the promise of regenerative agricultural practices. Nestle concludes by talking about the pleasures of food and eating and how to establish a “loving relationship” with food that doesn’t include fear, guilt, or anxiety about nutrition.

Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, and the author of books about food politics, most recently Unsavory Truth.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

Lindsay Herring is a first-year M.A. Food Studies Candidate at Chatham University. She loves historical cookbooks, food policy and activism through history, and vegan baking. Personally, she enjoys theatre, singing and traveling (someday again!).

Archish Kashakar is a chef and culinary educator who is currently a second-year M.A. Food Studies Candidate at Chatham University. He works with the program’s research offshoot CRAFT as a Food Lab Graduate Consultant and also serves on the board of the Graduate Association of Food Studies as a Social Media Manager. He is currently working on his thesis that traces the history of Singaporean street food dishes and their development in a post-World War II era. Follow on Twitter @archishkash.

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Rob DeSalle, "A Natural History of Color: The Science Behind What We See and How We See it" (Pegasus Books, 2020) Jan 13, 2021

Is color a phenomenon of science or a thing of art? Over the years, color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see, embraced through the experimental palettes of painting, the advent of the color photograph, Technicolor pictures, color printing, on and on, a vivid and vibrant celebrated continuum. These turns to represent reality in “living color” echo our evolutionary reliance on and indeed privileging of color as a complex and vital form of consumption, classification, and creation. It’s everywhere we look, yet do we really know much of anything about it?

Finding color in stars and light, examining the system of classification that determines survival through natural selection, studying the arrival of color in our universe and as a fulcrum for philosophy, DeSalle’s brilliant A Natural History of Color: The Science Behind What We See and How We See it(Pegasus Books, 2020)establishes that an understanding of color on many different levels is at the heart of learning about nature, neurobiology, individualism, even a philosophy of existence. Color and a fine tuned understanding of it is vital to understanding ourselves and our consciousness.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Kyle Johannsen, "Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering" (Routledge, 2020) Jan 11, 2021

Many sentient (or possibly sentient) wild animals follow a reproductive strategy whereby they have large numbers of offspring, the vast majority of which suffer and die quickly or suffer and die slowly. Either way, there is a huge amount of suffering in the wild. And it is a truism in ethics that we have a duty to alleviate or prevent unnecessary suffering. If we could intervene in nature to prevent this suffering, shouldn’t we?

In Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2020), Kyle Johannsen argues that we do have this duty. On his view, the value of unspoiled nature only conflicts with botched interventions, not effective ones, and we already do intervene in ways that help wild animals, such as through rabies vaccinations intended primarily to protect domesticated animals. But through gene editing we could do quite a bit more – create a 3-week window from birth where newborns do not suffer from pain, or even turn carnivores into herbivores. Johannsen, an adjunct assistant professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, offers a savvy and provocative discussion of this relatively neglected issue of animal welfare, along with some recommendations on how we can address it.

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Snezana Lawrence, "A New Year's Present from a Mathematician" (CRC Press, 2019) Jan 08, 2021

It would be simple enough to say that mathematics is being done, and that those who do it are mathematicians. Yet, the history and culture of the mathematical community immediately complicate these statements. In her book A New Year's Present from a Mathematician (CRC Press, 2020), Snezana Lawrence guides a tour of European mathematical history that broadens conventional ideas of who mathematicians are and what we do. Framed as journey across the desert out from Alexandria, the book recounts a vignette from European mathematical history anchored to each month of the year, as drops of creativity and wisdom to sustain the trek.

It is not unusual for books on the history of mathematics to tell very human stories about their often famous subjects. What is remarkable about Lawrence's collection is the breadth of these stories: Her subjects were idealists, pragmatists, mystics, skeptics, radicals, ascetics, and collectives. (Contrast, for example, the self-aware spite of Isaac Newton with the defiant good humor of Jean-Baptiste d'Alembert.) They contributed a mix each of original study, stewardship, and education. (Witness the precocious and persistent advocacy of Maria Agnesi and the devoted reciprocity of Johannes Kepler.) And they may or may not have been considered in their time, or even considered themselves, mathematicians.

This book also showcases the diversity of mechanisms through which mathematics is transmitted and expanded. The projects undertaken by Lawrence's subjects are inspired by surviving ancient texts, popular treatments, and personal correspondence, and they yielded instructional texts, organizational schema, reference works, and popular fiction still in circulation today. The book drove home for me that the history of mathematics is ultimately a history of dialogue, and one that any person has the potential to contribute to—and thereby to be a mathematician.

Suggested companion work: "Interstellar" (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Snezana Lawrence is a mathematical historian, with a particular interest in the links between mathematics, architecture, and the belief systems related to mathematics. Her work on the creativity, identity, and engagement in the learning of mathematics has taken her to be involved in national and international initiatives to promote the use of the history of mathematics in mathematics education. She maintains the website Maths Is Good For You! and tweets @snezanalawrence.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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Michael Fisch, "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network" (U of Chicago Press, 2018) Jan 08, 2021

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network(University of Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities. An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population.

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Daniel A. Barber, "Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jan 06, 2021

Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design.

Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning (Princeton UP, 2020) provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

Daniel A. Barber is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Daniel Oberhaus, "Extraterrestrial Languages" (MIT Press, 2019) Jan 06, 2021

In Extraterrestrial Languages(MIT Press 2020), Daniel Oberhaus tells the history of human efforts to talk to aliens, but in doing so, the book reflects on the relationship between communication and cognition, the metaphysics of mathematics, about whether dolphins have a language, and more. The challenge of communicating with extraterrestrials forces scientists and linguists to consider a range of problems. Would these listeners recognize radio signals as linguistic? How would they decode and interpret them? Would ETs even have linguistic capacities to begin with? Oberhaus shares the stories of, and theoretical bases for, a range of attempts to communicate with ETs, along the way tackling fundamental questions in linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, science, and even art.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

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Robert Baker, "The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution" (MIT Press, 2019) Jan 06, 2021

We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions that follow a pattern similar to that of the scientific revolutions analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution(MIT Press, 2019).

After laying out the theoretical terrain, Baker develops his argument with examples of moral reversals from the recent and distant past. He describes the revolution, led by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that transformed the postmortem dissection of human bodies from punitive desecration to civic virtue; the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century and its decriminalization in the twentieth century; and the invention of a new bioethics paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a patient-led rebellion against medical paternalism. Finally, Baker reflects on moral relativism, arguing that the acceptance of "absolute" moral truths denies us the diversity of moral perspectives that permit us to alter our morality in response to changing environments.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Jennifer Burek Pierce, "Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media" (U Iowa Press, 2020) Jan 05, 2021

Nerdfighteria started over a decade ago by brothers Hank and John Green who decided to provide literacy themed programming on their website and YouTube channel. With almost three million members, Nerdfighteria is more than just a space for fans to talk about the work of John Green and other young adult authors. In her new book, Narratives, Nerd Fighters, and New Media (University of Iowa Press, 2020), Jennifer Burek Pierce explores the ways the media platforms created by the Green brothers have become spaces for fans to not only learn about the writing of John Green, and more recently his brother Hank as well, but to also share their own fan art and make connections with one another. Burek Pierce examines the ways in which readers use videos and other activities to engage authors and other readers. Nerdfighters are readers and Burek Pierce's work examines not only the online community they have created, but how this community tells us about reading in the digital age.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Can we Bring Extinct Species Back?: A Conversation with Beth Shapiro Jan 04, 2021

Could extinct species, like mammoths and passenger pigeons, be brought back to life? The science says yes. In How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton UP, 2020), Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist and pioneer in “ancient DNA” research, walks readers through the astonishing and controversial process of de-extinction. From deciding which species should be restored, to sequencing their genomes, to anticipating how revived populations might be overseen in the wild, Shapiro vividly explores the extraordinary cutting-edge science that is being used—today—to resurrect the past. Journeying to far-flung Siberian locales in search of ice age bones and delving into her own research—as well as those of fellow experts such as Svante Paabo, George Church, and Craig Venter—Shapiro considers de-extinction’s practical benefits and ethical challenges. Would de-extinction change the way we live? Is this really cloning? What are the costs and risks? And what is the ultimate goal?

Using DNA collected from remains as a genetic blueprint, scientists aim to engineer extinct traits — traits that evolved by natural selection over thousands of years—into living organisms. But rather than viewing de-extinction as a way to restore one particular species, Shapiro argues that the overarching goal should be the revitalization and stabilization of contemporary ecosystems. For example, elephants with genes modified to express mammoth traits could expand into the Arctic, re-establishing lost productivity to the tundra ecosystem.

Looking at the very real and compelling science behind an idea once seen as science fiction, How to Clone a Mammoth demonstrates how de-extinction will redefine conservation’s future.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

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Elizabeth Catte, "Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia" (Belt, 2021) Dec 29, 2020

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia(Belt, 2021), a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia's twentieth-century eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, with clarity and ferocity. It was a manifestation of white supremacy. It was a form of employment insurance. It was a means of controlling "troublesome" women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land. It was cruel and it was wrong, and yet today sites where it was practiced like Western State Hospital, in Staunton, VA, are rehabilitated as luxury housing, their histories hushed up in the service of capital. As was amply evidenced by her acclaimed 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Catte has no room for excuses; no patience for equivocation. What does it mean for modern America, she asks here, that such buildings are given the second chance that 8,000 citizens never got? And what possible interventions can be made now, repair their damage?

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Charles R. Acland, "American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder" (Duke UP, 2020) Dec 29, 2020

Ben-Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture for decades. In American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder(Duke University Press, 2020), Charles R. Acland charts the origins, impact, and dynamics of this most visible, entertaining, and disparaged cultural form. Acland narrates how blockbusters emerged from Hollywood's turn to a hit-driven focus during the industry's business crisis in the 1950s. Movies became bigger, louder, and more spectacular. They also became prototypes for ideas and commodities associated with the future of technology and culture, accelerating the prominence of technological innovation in modern American life. Acland shows that blockbusters continue to be more than just movies; they are industrial strategies and complex cultural machines designed to normalize the ideologies of our technological age.

Charles R. Acland is Distinguished University Research Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence and Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture, and coeditor of Useful Cinema, all also published by Duke University Press.

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Alyson K. Spurgas, "Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity Into the Twenty-First Century" (Ohio State UP, 2020) Dec 28, 2020

In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), Alyson K. Spurgas, Ph.D. examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal, contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire, new models for understanding women’s sexual response, and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing.

Spurgas makes the case that, together, all of these technologies create a “feminized responsive desire framework” for understanding women’s sexuality, and that this, in fact, produces women’s sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem, Spurgas argues, is that gendered and sexualized trauma—including as it is produced within techno-scientific medicine itself—is too often ignored in contemporary renderings. Through incisive textual analysis and in-depth qualitative research based on interviews with women with low desire, Spurgas argues for a more radical and communal form of care for feminized—and traumatized—populations, in opposition to biopolitical mandates to individualize and neo-liberalize forms of self-care. Ultimately, this is a book not just about a specific diagnosis or dysfunction but about the material-discursive regimes that produce and regulate femininity.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot edu.

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Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Dec 24, 2020

What is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. Huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery. In this penetrating and wide-ranging book, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name; it is a domain where biology, computing, logic, chemistry, quantum physics, and nanotechnology intersect. At the heart of these diverse fields, Davies explains, is the concept of information: a quantity which has the power to unify biology with physics, transform technology and medicine, and force us to fundamentally reconsider what it means to be alive—even illuminating the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.

From life’s murky origins to the microscopic engines that run the cells of our bodies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life(U Chicago Press, 2020) journeys across an astounding landscape of cutting-edge science. Weaving together cancer and consciousness, two-headed worms and bird navigation, Davies reveals how biological organisms garner and process information to conjure order out of chaos, opening a window onto the secret of life itself.

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Eben Kirksey, "The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans" (St. Martin's Press, 2020) Dec 23, 2020

In The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans (St. Martin's Press, 2020), anthropologist Eben Kirksey visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask: Whose values are guiding gene editing experiments? And what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species?

At a conference in Hong Kong in November 2018, Dr. He Jiankui announced that he had created the first genetically modified babies—twin girls named Lulu and Nana—sending shockwaves around the world. A year later, a Chinese court sentenced Dr. He to three years in prison for “illegal medical practice.”

As scientists elsewhere start to catch up with China’s vast genetic research program, gene editing is fueling an innovation economy that threatens to widen racial and economic inequality. Fundamental questions about science, health, and social justice are at stake: Who gets access to gene editing technologies? As countries loosen regulations around the globe, from the U.S. to Indonesia, can we shape research agendas to promote an ethical and fair society?

Eben Kirksey takes us on a groundbreaking journey to meet the key scientists, lobbyists, and entrepreneurs who are bringing cutting-edge genetic engineering tools like CRISPR to your local clinic. He also ventures beyond the scientific echo chamber, talking to disabled scholars, doctors, hackers, chronically-ill patients, and activists who have alternative visions of a genetically modified future for humanity.

The Mutant Project empowers us to ask the right questions, uncover the truth, and navigate this brave new world.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Jeff Levin, "Religion and Medicine: A History of the Encounter Between Humanity's Two Greatest Institutions" (Oxford UP, 2020) Dec 22, 2020

Though the current political climate might lead one to suspect that religion and medicine make for uncomfortable bedfellows, the two institutions have a long history of alliance. From religious healers and religious hospitals to religiously informed bioethics and research studies on the impact of religious and spiritual beliefs on physical and mental well-being, religion and medicine have encountered one another from antiquity through the present day. In Religion and Medicine: A History of the Encounter Between Humanity’s Two Greatest Institutions(Oxford University Press, 2020), Dr. Jeff Levin outlines this longstanding history and the multifaceted interconnections between these two institutions. The first book to cover the full breadth of this subject, it documents religion-medicine alliances across religious traditions, throughout the world, and over the course of history. Levin summarizes a wide range of material in the most comprehensive introduction to this emerging field of scholarship to date.

Jeff Levin holds a distinguished chair at Baylor University, where he is university professor of epidemiology and population health, professor of medical humanities, and director of the program on religion and population health at the Institute for the Studies of Religion.

Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Richard Ovenden, "Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge" (Harvard UP, 2020) Dec 18, 2020

Living in an age awash with information can sometimes obscure its extraordinary fragility. Indeed, as Richard Ovenden demonstrates in Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 2020), the burning of books and the looting of archives has long been a tool for controlling access to information and the power that it offers. Many rulers throughout history have deliberately targeted libraries and archives for plundering and destruction, knowing that doing so limits the ability of their victims to benefit from the knowledge therein. Ordinary individuals have often engaged in similar actions on a smaller scale in an attempt to control public perceptions of themselves and how they will be remembered. Ovenden shows how these efforts highlight the role that libraries and archives have long served in society, both as repositories of information and as institutions that work to ensure that knowledge and the power that comes from it is available to everyone and not just the few who seek to limit it for their own benefit.

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Alicia Puglionesi, "Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science" (Stanford UP, 2020) Dec 18, 2020

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science(Stanford UP, 2020) brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences.

Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, "The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene" (Yale UP, 2018) Dec 18, 2020

Meteorites, mega-volcanoes, and plate tectonics--the old forces of nature--have transformed Earth for millions of years. They are now joined by a new geological force--humans. Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion-year history a single species is increasingly dictating Earth's future.

To some the Anthropocene symbolizes a future of superlative control of our environment. To others it is the height of hubris, the illusion of our mastery over nature. Whatever your view, just below the surface of this odd-sounding scientific word, the Anthropocene, is a heady mix of science, philosophy, and politics linked to our deepest fears and utopian visions.

In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Yale UP, 2018), scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin reveal a new view of human history and a new outlook for the future of humanity in the unstable world we have created.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Nick Haddad, "The Last Butterflies: A Scientist's Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature" (Princeton UP, 2019) Dec 16, 2020

Butterflies have long captivated the imagination of humans, from naturalists to children to poets. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies. And yet their populations are declining at an alarming rate, to the extent that even the seemingly ubiquitous Monarch could conceivably go the way of the Passenger Pigeon. Many other, more obscure, butterfly species are already perilously close to extinction. For the last 20 years, Nick Haddad has worked to identify and save some of the rarest butterflies on earth, a quest that has taken him to both surprisingly ordinary and extraordinarily inhospitable areas, including a swampy, active artillery range on a military installation in North Carolina. It has also led him to some surprising conclusions about the best ways to protect these increasingly endangered butterflies.

In The Last Butterflies: A Scientist’s Quest to Save a Rare and Vanishing Creature (Princeton UP, 2019), Haddad profiles five such species – the ones he has determined to be the rarest of all – and takes us into each one’s unique habitat, life cycle, and existential challenges. From the Crystal Skipper, bouncing over sand dunes adjacent to vacation homes on barrier islands, to the Schaus’ Swallowtail, confined to increasingly remote areas of the Florida Keys, Haddad shows how human activities have affected rare butterfly populations. His unexpected conclusion is that leaving them in peace is not a viable option; disturbances, both natural and human-caused, are necessary for the ecosystems that support butterfly populations to thrive. One of the hardest lessons for him to absorb was that to save populations, some individuals have to be killed in the process.

Haddad’s intrepid field work – he describes one of his strengths as “an unusual capacity to tolerate harsh environments - informs the story of each butterfly species. His lab’s effort to collect, quantify, propagate, and ultimately perpetuate, the rarest butterflies has led to increasing awareness of how much more biologists have to learn about their natural histories, and how critical such knowledge is to saving them. In perhaps the most dramatic example of unintended consequences, Haddad’s team discovered that the St. Francis Satyr, a small brown butterfly, was protected by regular artillery fire on the Fort Bragg army installation in southern North Carolina. The resulting fires were one disturbance the St. Francis Satyr needed to sustain viable conditions (dams built by beavers was another). In another twist, it turned out that Haddad’s initial efforts to help the species were having the opposite effect. Yet over time, these discoveries led to lessons that ultimately have helped the St. Francis Satyr and can be applied to other conservation efforts.

The Last Butterflies could be read as a warning, but Haddad’s tone is never dire. The book is infused with enthusiasm for conservation efforts, both now and in the future, and with an admiration for the beauty, fragility, and resilience of butterflies. It is an important book for anyone concerned with biodiversity and conservation issues. It’s also an eye-opening and engaging read for anyone with an interest in butterflies.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. She is a longtime butterfly enthusiast and is working, slowly, on a fictional book for middle-grade readers about butterfly conservation.

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Christopher M. Kelty, "The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Dec 16, 2020

Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participation easier, but new technologies have had the opposite effect. We find ourselves suspicious of how participation extracts our data or monetizes our emotions, and the more procedural participation becomes, the more it seems to recede from our grasp.

In The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Christopher M. Kelty traces four stories of participation across the twentieth century, showing how they are part of a much longer-term problem in relation to the individual and collective experience of representative democracy. Kelty argues that in the last century or so, the power of participation has dwindled; over time, it has been formatted in ways that cramp and dwarf it, even as the drive to participate has spread to nearly every kind of human endeavor, all around the world. The Participant is a historical ethnography of the concept of participation, investigating how the concept has evolved into the form it takes today. It is a book that asks, "Why do we participate?" And sometimes, "Why do we refuse?"

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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Jeremy Black, "Tank Warfare" (Indiana UP, 2020) Dec 16, 2020

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 tanks. In Tank Warfare(Indiana UP, 2020), prominent military historian Professor Jeremy Black offers a comprehensive global account of the history of tanks and armored warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries. First introduced onto the battlefield during the Great War, tanks represented the reconciliation of firepower and mobility and immediately seized the imagination of commanders and commentators concerned about the constraints of ordinary infantry on the western front. The developments of technology and tactics in the interwar years were realized to a degree in the German blitzkrieg in World War II and beyond. Yet the account of armor on the battlefield is a tale of limitations and defeats as well as of potential and achievements. Tank Warfare examines the traditional narrative of armored warfare while at the same time challenging it, and Black suggests that tanks were no "silver bullet" on the battlefield. Tanks very much not being a sort of deus ex machina. Instead, their success was based on their inclusion in the general mix of weaponry available to commanders and the context in which they were used by various armies in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Jose Sanchez, "Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms" (Routledge, 2020) Dec 15, 2020

Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms (Routledge, 2020) dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design.

The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies.

This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Trevor Pearce, "Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Dec 15, 2020

In Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy(University of Chicago Press, 2020), Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. Many are familiar with John Dewey's 1909 assertion that evolutionary ideas overturned two thousand years of philosophy--but what exactly happened in the fifty years prior to Dewey's claim? What form did evolutionary ideas take? When and how were they received by American philosophers?

Although the various thinkers associated with pragmatism--from Charles Sanders Peirce to Jane Addams and beyond--were towering figures in American intellectual life, few realize the full extent of their engagement with the life sciences. In his analysis, Pearce focuses on a series of debates in biology from 1860 to 1910--from the instincts of honeybees to the inheritance of acquired characteristics--in which the pragmatists were active participants. If we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, Pearce argues, we need to understand the relationship between pragmatism and biology.

Trevor Pearce is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Alec Kacew is a medical school student at the University of Chicago.

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Anne Lawrence-Mathers, "Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Dec 15, 2020

In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, out this year, 2020, with Cambridge University Press.

The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in its approach than earlier forms of meteorology, this new science claimed to deliver weather forecasts for months and even years ahead, on the premise that weather is caused by the atmospheric effects of the planets and stars, and mediated by local and seasonal climatic conditions. Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores how these forecasts were made and explains the growing practice of recording actual weather. These records were used to support forecasting practices, and their popularity grew from the fourteenth century onwards. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval science, Medieval Meteorology demonstrates that the roots of scientific forecasting are much deeper than is usually recognized.

Professor Lawrence-Mathers is the author of The True History of Merlin the Magician and Magic and Medieval Society,(along with Carolina Escobar-Vargas) as well as a host of articles and reviews about Medieval magic and religion. With this book the author continues her examination of spiritual practice – licit and illicit, clerical and lay – as it was culturally understood in the medieval era.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Edward Wilson-Lee, "The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library" (Scribner, 2019) Dec 11, 2020

Edward Wilson-Lee's book A Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scribner, 2018) details the life of Hernando Colón as he sailed with his father, Christopher Columbus, on Columbus’s final voyage to the New World, which was a journey of disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library to collect everything ever printed. Colon’s library was a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues—which was really the very first database for exploring a diversity of written matter. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522 set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, and such was a race against time in realizing a vision of near-impossible perfection.

Dr. Edward Wilson-Lee teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, and medieval literature for University of Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College.

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Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019) Dec 11, 2020

We are joined by Dr. Andrea Ballestero, associate Professor of Anthropology and Director Ethnography Studio, at Rice University. We will be talking about her book A Future History of Water, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Thanks to the Fondren Library's support, an Open Access pdf copy of the book can also be downloaded from the author's website at no cost. In A Future History of Water, Dr. Ballestero looks at the unexpected ethical and technical entanglements through which experts understand water in Latin America. Following regulators, policy-makers, and NGOs across governance and regulatory spaces in Costa Rica and Brazil, the book asks how the difference between a human right and a commodity is produced. In this way, the book poses profound questions about the foundations of liberal capitalist societies, while attending to the ways its non-linear and generative futures are being produced.

Alejandro Ponce de Leon is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Davis. He teaches and learns in the STS program.

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Erica Fretwell, "Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling" (Duke UP, 2020) Dec 11, 2020

We so often take our senses as natural, but perhaps we should understand them as historically situated. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press, 2020) allows us to reconsider the history of psychophysics and psychology through the lens of sensory studies and to rethinking science in the context of racial capitalism. Breathing new life into nineteenth century psychophysics, Erica Fretwell presents a history of how science, technology, and literature came together to both reinforce and challenge racial boundaries.

While each central chapter of Sensory Experiments deals with the recognized five senses, Fretwell also writes short intervals, or what she calls intervals, on the synthesis of particular senses (for instance, color and sound or mouthfeel). The synthesia assumed in these intervals challenge the hierarchy of senses often assumed by scientists during this time period. Through examining these scientific models of sense and sensitivity, Fretwell provides the reader with the nineteenth and early twentieth century evolutionary frameworks of Lamarckism and Darwinism, alongside Galton’s eugenics program. Fretwell contrasts these theories with psychophysics, including the spiritually motivated psychophysicist, Gustav Fechner, as well as many media and literature that focuses on sensitivity. Spirit photography provides one such example, a visual medium intended to provide some healing to family members who lost loved ones during the American Civil War. Through these images sight is transformed into a sense of loss; this was particularly the case for white bodies, which were more likely to have their pictures taken and more likely to be seen as “particularly capable of feeling loss.”

To help us understand the racial politics of sound, Fretwell not only turns to the nascent field of psychoacoustics led by Hermann Helmholtz, but also the utopian fiction stories of Pauline Hopkins and Edward Bellamy. Each of these writers thought that differences in tonal sensitivity renders difference as racialized, and thus promoted segregated forms of social harmony from the most sensitive, civilized ear to the least sensitive, “primitive” ear. Meanwhile, inventions in chemistry and manufacturing of perfume performed functions of designating socially appropriate odors, which often segregated individuals by race and gender, while at other times challenging such segregation. In her taste chapter, Fretwell positions gastronomy and culinary science as ostensibly racial uplift projects. This can be further seen in Fretwell’s discussion of the racial framing of sweetness and black cake (the latter of which is taken up in the work of Emily Dickinson). In her penultimate chapter, Fretwell explores the relationality of touch through some of Helen Keller’s biography. While figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois thought that Keller could be an example of going beyond the sight of racial differences, as Fretwell points out, Keller, a deaf-blind woman, was actually attentive to the sensation of racial difference. In the Coda, Fretwell implores humanities and social science scholars to think about the historical dimensions of our sensory experiences. Overall, Sensory Experiments delivers a much needed history of senses that can provide important context for the racial politics of today.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. CJ’s research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and digital wellness culture.

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Gemma Milne, "Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It" (Robinson, 2021) Dec 10, 2020

Bombastic headlines about science and technology are nothing new. To cut through the constant stream of information and misinformation on social media, or grab the attention of investors, or convince governments to take notice, strident headlines or bold claims seem necessary to give complex, nuanced information some wow factor. But hype has a dark side, too. It can mislead. It can distract. It can blinker us from seeing what is actually going on.

From AI, quantum computing and brain implants, to cancer drugs, future foods and fusion energy, science and technology journalist Gemma Milne reveals hype to be responsible for fundamentally misdirecting or even derailing crucial progress. Hype can be combated and discounted, though, if you're able to see exactly where, how and why it is being deployed. Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It (Robinson, 2021) is your guide to doing just that.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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O. Carter Snead, "What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics" (Harvard UP, 2020) Dec 09, 2020

At first glance, the term “expressive individualism” seems benign enough. After all, people throughout the Western world value their personal freedom and the liberty to make crucial life decisions such as whether to have children and how and when they wish to die. What could possibly be wrong with the idea that everyone should be in control of his or her own body and fate to the greatest extent possible and with the least intrusion by either the state or “outdated” social mores?

But there is a dark side to expressive individualism when one enters the realm of public bioethics. In his 2020 book What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard University Press, 2020), O. Carter Snead defines for us what the term “public bioethics” encompasses and provides a much-needed genealogy of the field.

He profiles key players in many of the most momentous bioethics-related developments of the post-WWII era from physicians such as Henry Knowles Beecher to jurists like Harry Blackmun and influential scholars in fields such as philosophy and sociology like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah.

Snead chronicles how the field of bioethics came to be shaped by shocking revelations of cases of inhumanity many of which are well-known (such as the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study) but many of which are rarely discussed such as medical experiments performed on near-term alive aborted babies. Such cases shocked the public and led to legislation creating commissions and other bodies designed to prevent such horrors.

But Snead argues that much of the action on the public policy front failed for multiple reasons and left vulnerable groups (e.g., the aged, the cognitively disabled, the unborn) outside a legal regime built upon the precepts of expressive individualism. And even those who were supposedly able to express their wishes were often harmed by the expressive individualism paradigm and its legal framework. Snead gives examples of the many actors in the area of assisted reproduction and assisted suicide whose rights can be trampled in the name of a notion of personal liberty that does not account for changes of mind. He also demonstrates that regulation and oversight was often, for all intents and purposes, absent in many cases.

Snead’s book is a clarion call for what he calls “remembering the body.” This is an important book for anyone who may at some point become ill or disabled or who will end up caring for someone who is. That is, it is a book for everyone. It is by a leading scholar, but its readership is anyone with a body and who loves other people—or at least has some control over them.

Give a listen.

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Virginia Postrel, "The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World" (Basic Books, 2020) Dec 09, 2020

In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World(Basic Books, 2020), Virginia Postrel describes how humans coevolved with textiles.

The story begins with our distant ancestors who used string to fashion the earliest tools. Then, ten thousand years ago, humans began farming not only for food but also for fiber to make cloth. In the intervening millennia, for people everywhere, an inordinate amount of human time and energy went into the growing, harvesting, spinning, weaving, and dying of cloth for garments, bedding, blankets, rugs, hangings, tents, tarps, sails, sacks, and all manner of containers and fittings. Based on investigation and practice, Ms. Postrel explains the artisanal processes and sciences involved.

In addition, this book is about how textiles shaped our society more broadly: labor, trade, tribute, collaboration (and also exploitation), credit, banking, migration (some voluntary, some forced), style and cultural restrictions, all figure into the discussion. The Industrial Revolution that began when steam power replaced human toil in the spinning of thread and the weaving of cloth, changed our world. Cheap, high-quality, cloth became available to people everywhere. In the twentieth century, the advent of plastics, of synthetic fabrics, transformed our world again. All of this, Ms. Postrel achieves in 250 beautifully-written pages, with numerous helpful pictures and diagrams. She also has a blog filled with videos explaining the processes she investigates in the book at https://vpostrel.com/blog.

Virginia Postrel is a journalist, author, and independent scholar. Her books include author of The Substance of Style, The Power of Glamour, and The Future and its Enemies. She is currently a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and has been a columnist for the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe, the Spanish Empire, and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel.

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Abigail A. Dumes, "Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine" (Duke UP, 2020) Dec 08, 2020

While many doctors claim that Lyme disease--a tick-borne bacterial infection--is easily diagnosed and treated, other doctors and the patients they care for argue that it can persist beyond standard antibiotic treatment in the form of chronic Lyme disease. In Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine(Duke UP, 2020), Abigail A. Dumes offers an ethnographic exploration of the Lyme disease controversy that sheds light on the relationship between contested illness and evidence-based medicine in the United States. Drawing on fieldwork among Lyme patients, doctors, and scientists, Dumes formulates the notion of divided bodies: she argues that contested illnesses are disorders characterized by the division of bodies of thought in which the patient's experience is often in conflict with how it is perceived. Dumes also shows how evidence-based medicine has paradoxically amplified differences in practice and opinion by providing a platform of legitimacy on which interested parties--patients, doctors, scientists, politicians--can make claims to medical truth.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Colleen Plumb, "Thirty Times a Minute" (Radius Books, 2020) Dec 08, 2020

Captive elephants exhibit what biologists refer to as stereotypy, which includes rhythmic rocking, head bobbing, stepping back and forth, and pacing.

Colleen Plumb traveled to over seventy zoos in the US and Europe, and created video featuring dozens of captive elephants in their small enclosures. She has photographed her guerrilla public projections of the video in over 100 locations worldwide.

Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020) includes a selection of these photos, along with nine contributions from animal rights activists and scientists, in order to examine the way animals in captivity function as colonialist symbols of human domination over nature.

Colleen Plumb is a Chicago based artist who makes photographs and videos that explore the ambivalence and contradiction in our relationships with non-human animals.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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James D. Stein, "The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive" (World Scientific, 2020) Dec 07, 2020

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 lifetime of experience, tells us that we cannot, as these are classic examples of what are known to be 50-50 guesses. But mathematics is filled with counterintuitive results -- and this book discusses some surprising and entertaining examples. It is possible to devise experiments in which a flipped coin lands heads completely at random half the time, but we can also correctly predict when it will land heads more than half the time.

James D. Stein's The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive (World Scientific, 2020) shows how high-school algebra and basic probability theory, with the invaluable assistance of computer simulations, can be used to investigate both the intuitive and the counterintuitive. This book explores fascinating and controversial questions involving prediction, decision-making, and statistical analysis in a number of diverse areas, ranging from whether there is such a thing as a 'hot hand' in shooting a basketball, to how we can successfully predict, more than half the time, the decay of the radioactive atom that determines the fate of Schrodinger's Cat.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains.

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Nicolas Petit, "Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario" (Oxford UP, 2020) Dec 07, 2020

Consumers may love their products and services but, among politicians and activists, the big-technology companies are fast developing a reputation as the Robber Barons of the 21st century.

Google recently joined Apple, Amazon and Microsoft as a so-called “tera-cap” – companies valued at more than a trillion dollars. Add Facebook and the five tech giants alone account for a quarter of the S&P500. How have they managed this in such a short timeframe? Their critics claim that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and Tim Cook are just digital versions of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller – monopolists who control entry nto their markets.

Not so simple, claims Nicolas Petit in Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario (Oxford University Press, 2020). Concerns about privacy or the dissemination of “fake news” are valid but “looking at these predicaments through monopoly lenses is like using Facebook to get your news. It seems to do the job. But it might well be fake”.

“The picture of big tech firms as monopolists is intuitively attractive but analytically wrong,” he writes. “A better picture is one of big tech firms as moligopolists, that is firms that coexist as monopolists and oligopolists”.

Nicolas Petit is the Joint Chair in Competition Law at the European University Institute and the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies in Florence.

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, "Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It" (FSG Originals, 2020) Dec 07, 2020

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 cofounders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff take an unprecedented dive into the tech industry, conducting unfiltered, in-depth, anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, including a data scientist, a start-up founder, a cook who serves their lunch, and a PR wizard. In the process, Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation that has previously been dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley is a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives.

Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

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A. Espay and B. Stecher, "Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Dec 04, 2020

An estimated 80 million people live with a neurodegenerative disease, with this number expected to double by 2050. Despite decades of research and billions in funding, there are no medications that can slow, much less stop, the progress of these diseases. The time to rethink degenerative brain disorders has come. With no biological boundaries between neurodegenerative diseases, illnesses such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's result from a large spectrum of biological abnormalities, hampering effective treatment. In Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them (Cambridge UP, 2020), acclaimed neurologist Dr Alberto Espay and Parkinson's advocate Benjamin Stecher present compelling evidence that these diseases should be targeted according to genetic and molecular signatures rather than clinical diagnoses. There is no Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, simply people with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. An incredibly important story never before told, Brain Fables is a wakeup call to the scientific community and society, explaining why we have no effective disease-modifying treatments, and how we can get back on track.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020) Dec 03, 2020

Reducing harm or shrinking the likelihood of accidental death are remarkably contentions projects—in areas from sex education, to pandemic management, to drug use. Nancy Campbell’s important new book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020) explores how a therapy that can stop an accidental drug overdose, called Naloxone, emerged in the American mainstream in the early years of the new millennium—despite existing in some form for nearly a century. What are now called “opioid antagonists” were used, not to save lives, but deployed by the carceral state to police drug users in the early twentieth century; sequestered within bioscience laboratories to build molecular theories of how the brain worked at midcentury; approved by the FDA in 1971 for the treatment of overdose only by physicians; and illicitly administered and widely shared in the 1980s and 1990s among drug-user-led activist organizations and communities, who created their own troves of training protocols, peer-education networks, and experiential evidence of its effectiveness. In the twenty-first century, Naloxone appeared on public policy agendas around harm reduction and arrived legally in the hands of the people best situated to intervene when an overdose was underway—but only in some US states and some countries.

Campbell tunes readers’ ears to the politics of evidence, the health effects of stigma, and the racism of false medical claims as she listens, amid a century of contention, to the quietness of “undone science.” As evidence, this intrepid book uses visual culture, vernacular documents, oral histories, and (expertly explained) scientific publications. It connects American histories at federal and local levels with the UK and especially Scotland. And it relates medical communities and activist networks without imposing false divides or drawing caricatures of either. The book builds on Campbell’s four previous books on the history of addiction, gendering knowledge, and social theory from the position of Science and Technology Studies.

The interview was a collaborative project among participants in the Vanderbilt University course, American Medicine & the World. For information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.

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Peter Singer, "Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically" (Liveright, 2020) Dec 03, 2020

Even before the publication of his seminal Animal Liberation in 1975, Peter Singer, one of the greatest moral philosophers of our time, unflinchingly challenged the ethics of eating animals. Now, in Why Vegan?: Eating Ethically (Liveright, 2020), Singer brings together the most consequential essays of his career to make this devastating case against our failure to confront what we are doing to animals, to public health, and to our planet.

From his 1973 manifesto for animal liberation to his personal account of becoming a vegetarian in “The Oxford Vegetarians” and to investigating the impact of meat on global warming, Singer traces the historical arc of the animal rights, vegetarian, and vegan movements from their embryonic days to today, when climate change and global pandemics threaten the very existence of humans and animals alike. In his introduction and in “The Two Dark Sides of COVID-19,” cowritten with Paola Cavalieri, Singer excoriates the appalling health hazards of Chinese wet markets—where thousands of animals endure almost endless brutality and suffering—but also reminds westerners that they cannot blame China alone without also acknowledging the perils of our own factory farms, where unimaginably overcrowded sheds create the ideal environment for viruses to mutate and multiply.

Spanning more than five decades of writing on the systemic mistreatment of animals, Why Vegan? features a topical new introduction, along with nine other essays.

Written in Singer’s pellucid prose, Why Vegan? asserts that human tyranny over animals is a wrong comparable to racism and sexism. The book ultimately becomes an urgent call to reframe our lives in order to redeem ourselves and alter the calamitous trajectory of our imperiled planet.

One of the great moral philosophers of the modern age, Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. The best-selling author of Animal Liberation and The Ethics of What We Eat, among other works, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and Melbourne, Australia.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Richard Seymour, "The Twittering Machine" (Verso, 2020) Dec 03, 2020

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. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.

The Twittering Machine (Verso, 2020) is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think.

Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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Glenn Sauer, "Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth" (Orbis Books, 2020) Dec 02, 2020

As a scientist and practicing Catholic, Dr. Sauer brings a unique perspective to several of the important issues related to finding a space for dialogue between the at times opposing fields of science and religion. Drawing on insights from Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Kuhn, and many others, Dr. Sauer presents a powerful and important framework for reconciling the historically changing divide between science and religion. His take is that we need to encourage a stance of intellectual humility on all sides of the discussion as a means for finding common ground--or at least identifying points where we can have fruitful exchanges of ideas about how scientific and religious perspectives can coexist without ongoing conflict. Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth (Orbis Books, 2020) will be valuable to people who inhabit both sides of this divide and has the potential to generate more openness about what can be radically different ways of seeing the world.

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Harmony Bench, "Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) Dec 02, 2020

Harmony Bench's Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Minnesota UP, 2020) traces the changing ways dance is distributed and created on the internet from the heady early internet of the 1990s to the ubiquitous social media platforms of today. Bench discusses how flash mobs reclaimed public space in the aftermath of 9/11, how "hyperdance" promised that every viewer would also be a co-choreographer, and how viral dance crazes unite people across borders in ways that are potentially liberatory but also can erase the specificities of specific dance cultures. This is a book that will be of interest to dancers and dance scholars especially during a year when almost all dance was presented online, but it will also be of use to scholars and readers interested in the changing role of the internet in our daily lives.

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Anna Weltman, "Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) Dec 01, 2020

Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set it apart, such as impartiality, universality, and elegance. Far from incidental, these ideas prime mathematicians and the public to see in mathematics the answers—for example, an impartial arbiter, or a meritocratic equalizer—to many urgent societal questions. Anna Weltman's new book, Supermath: The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), surveys a number of ways this conception of mathematics has informed scientific undertakings and public policies, not to mention our everyday behaviors, and makes a powerful case for reevaluating its assumptions.

The book's five chapters contain stories of mathematical exploits from ancient to ongoing and across the spectrum from pure to applied. Many may be familiar, for example active research and journalism into the use and misuse of predictive algorithms or G. H. Hardy's enumeration of the elements of mathematical beauty. Others, including continuing work to interpret Incan documents that survived European colonial erasure and the epidemiological insights obtained from massively multiplayer online gaming, will be new even to many mathematical readers. What they share is the essential but often ignored interplay between theory and culture that makes mathematics a thoroughly human activity. Weltman's book can be read as a call for scholars, educators, and communicators of mathematics to grapple with the power our training and credentialing in mathematics grants us, and to understand that its most basic promise of solving problems is not automatic but one that we must realize.

Anna Weltman is a math teacher and writer who earned her PhD in mathematics education from the University of California at Berkeley. She is also the author of This Is Not a Math Book and This Is Not Another Math Book.

Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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Jeremy Snyder, "Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us--and Makes Us Vulnerable" (Oxford UP, 2020) Dec 01, 2020

We often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations who are preyed upon by someone offering promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned in terms of "exploiting hope." These accusations are made in a range of contexts: human smuggling, employment relationships, unproven medical 'cures.' We hear this concept so often and in so many contexts that, with all its heavy lifting in public discourse, its actual meaning tends to lose focus. Despite its common use, it can be hard to understand precisely what is wrong about exploiting hope what can accurately be captured under this concept, and what should be done.

In Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us--and Makes Us Vulnerable (Oxford UP, 2020), philosopher Jeremy Snyder offers an in-depth study of hope's exploitation. First, he examines the concept in the abstract, including a close look at how this term is used in the popular press and analysis of the concepts of exploitation and hope. This theory-based section culminates in a definitive account of what it is to exploit hope, and when and why doing so is morally problematic. The second section of the book examines the particularly dangerous cases in which unproven medical interventions target the most vulnerable: for example, participants in clinical trials, purchasing unproven stem cell interventions, "right to try" legislation, and crowdfunding for unproven medical interventions.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Jinee Lokaneeta, "The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India" (U Michigan Press, 2020) Nov 30, 2020

Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of “truth serum,” Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale.

The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India(University of Michigan Press, 2020) examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors.

Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention.

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Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Nov 30, 2020

In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This book provides an ethnographic study of students and teachers at three Los Angeles schools utilizing instructional technology. We discuss the role of play in learning, how disciplinary dispositions are influenced by race and class, and how the prevalence ed tech can reinforce existing social heirarchies.

His recommended books included the following:

Teachers and Machines: Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920by Larry Cuban (Teachers' College Press, 1986)
Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs by Paul Willis and Stanley Aronowitz (Columbia University Press, 1981)
Keepin' It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White: Why School Success Has No Color by Prudence L. Carter (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea.

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Ray Ison, "Systems Practice: How to Act In Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Change World" (Springer, 2017) Nov 25, 2020

While various systems theories have received rigorous treatments across the literature of the field, reliable and robust advice for systems practice can be somewhat harder to come by. Ray Ison has done much to remedy this state of affairs through his deeply theoretically grounded yet eminently practical book: Systems Practice: How to Act In Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Change World which was reprinted by Springer in 2017.

After first drawing a distinction between metaphors and the much less well-known notion of isophors, Ison builds a conception of the systems practitioners work around his central isophor of The Juggler. For Ison, the systems practitioner must keep four essential balls in the air. These are (1) the B-ball which concerns the attributes of Being a practitioner with a particular tradition of understanding; (2) the E-ball which concerns the characteristics ascribed to the ‘real-world’ situation that the juggler is Engaging with; (3) the C-ball which concerns the act of contextualising a particular approach to a new situation, and; (4) the M-ball which is about how the practitioner is Managing their overall performance in a situation. Interspersed with extensive excerpts from a wide array of systems practitioners such as Donella Meadows, Russ Ackoff and beyond, Ison blends cybernetics and systems in a rare and deft manner, and his thoughtful book, underwritten by years of fieldwork, makes a significant contribution to the systems literature by asking, in his own words, “What do we do when we do what we do?” The answers are as illuminating as the lively conversation we had about this book.

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Xiaowei Wang, "Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside" (FSG Originals, 2020) Nov 25, 2020

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 about China, we focus on its major cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Xiaowei Wang corrects this metronormativity in their recent book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (FSG Originals: 2020), which explores how rural China is not just adapting the technology used around the world, but innovating on it.

In this interview, we talk about the frontiers of technology that are being charted in rural China, and why China’s countryside may be the best place to understand how technology, capitalism and society will intersect in the coming years — often in not altogether positive ways. We also talk about some of the more recent developments in how Chinese technology is treated in the United States, with reference to their recent articles: "WeChat Has Both Connected Families and Torn Them Apart" in Slate and "How the Theatrics of Banning TikTok Enables Repression at Home" in The Nation.

Xiaowei Wang is the creative director at Logic Magazine, whose work encompasses community-based and public art projects, data visualization, technology, ecology, and education. Their projects have been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, VICE, and elsewhere. You can follow them on Twitter at @xrw.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Blockchain Chicken Farm. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Amalia Leguizamón, "Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina" (Duke UP, 2020) Nov 24, 2020

In 1996 Argentina adopted genetically modified (GM) soybeans as a central part of its national development strategy. Today, Argentina is the third largest global grower and exporter of GM crops. Its soybeans—which have been modified to tolerate being sprayed with herbicides—now cover half of the country's arable land and represent a third of its total exports. While soy has brought about modernization and economic growth, it has also created tremendous social and ecological harm: rural displacement, concentration of landownership, food insecurity, deforestation, violence, and the negative health effects of toxic agrochemical exposure.

In Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina(Duke UP, 2020), Amalia Leguizamón explores why Argentines largely support GM soy despite the widespread damage it creates. She reveals how agribusiness, the state, and their allies in the media and sciences deploy narratives of economic redistribution, scientific expertise, and national identity as a way to elicit compliance among the country’s most vulnerable rural residents. In this way, Leguizamón demonstrates that GM soy operates as a tool of power to obtain consent, to legitimate injustice, and to quell potential dissent in the face of environmental and social violence.

Stentor Danielson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment at Slippery Rock University.

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Soraya de Chadarevian, "Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Nov 24, 2020

“What are chromosomes? And what does it mean to treat them as visual objects?” asks Soraya de Chadarevian in her new book, Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Considering this question as she follows the history of microscope-based practices in chromosomal research across a variety of contexts—from the medical clinic to the study of human variation—de Chadarevian offers readers a new history of postwar human genetics. This approach enables her to argue that cytogenetics was far from just “old fashioned biology that was eventually superseded by molecular approaches” and to show the continuities and interdependencies between different methods for studying our DNA.

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Dale Kedwards, "The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland" (D. S. Brewer, 2020) Nov 23, 2020

The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, scientific thinking and regional geopolitics.

In The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (D.S. Brewer, 2020), Dale Kedwards explores the plethora of meanings that medieval Icelandic mapmakers invested into their works, from political statements about national origin, to diagrammatic expressions of cosmological theories. The mappae mundi provided a medium for medieval Icelanders to imagine their place in relation to the wider world, and even the physical universe.

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Rosamond Rhodes, "The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism" (Oxford UP, 2020) Nov 23, 2020

Common morality has been the touchstone of medical ethics since the publication of Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics in 1979. Rosamond Rhodes challenges this dominant view by presenting an original and novel account of the ethics of medicine, one deeply rooted in the actual experience of medical professionals. She argues that common morality accounts of medical ethics are unsuitable for the profession, and inadequate for responding to the particular issues that arise in medical practice. Instead, Rhodes argues that medicine's distinctive ethics should be explained in terms of the trust that society allows to the profession. Trust is the core and starting point of Rhodes' moral framework, which states that the most basic duty of doctors is to "seek trust and be trustworthy."

In The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism (Oxford UP, 2020), Rhodes explicates the sixteen specific duties that doctors take on when they join the profession, and demonstrates how her view of these duties is largely consistent with the codes of medical ethics of medical societies around the world. She then explains why it is critical for physicians to develop the attitudes or "doctorly" virtues that comprise the character of trustworthy doctors and buttress physicians' efforts to fulfill their professional obligations. Her book's presentation of physicians' duties and the elements that comprise a doctorly character, together add up to a cohesive and comprehensive description of what medical professionalism really entails. Rhodes's analysis provides a clear understanding of medical professionalism as well as a guide for doctors navigating the ethically challenging situations that arise in clinical practice.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.

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K. C. Smith and C. Mariscal, "Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology" (Oxford UP, 2020) Nov 23, 2020

Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology(Oxford University Press, 2020) focuses on the emerging scientific discipline of astrobiology, exploring many of the humanistic issues this multidisciplinary field is generating. Despite there being myriad scientific questions that astrobiologists have only begun to address, this is not a purely scientific enterprise. More research on the broader social and conceptual aspects of astrobiology is needed and this volume does an outstanding job of setting the course for important themes to be explored in the future. The authors of the chapters in the book ask questions such as: What are our ethical obligations towards different sorts of alien life? Should we attempt to communicate with life beyond our planet? What is "life" in the most general sense? Kelly C. Smith and Carlos Mariscal's important book addresses these questions by looking at different perspectives from philosophers, historians, theologians, social scientists, and legal scholars. It sets a benchmark for future work in astrobiology, giving readers the groundwork from which to base the continuous scholarship coming from this ever-growing scientific field.

John W. Traphagan is a professor in Department of Religious Studies and Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Sharon T. Strocchia, "Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019) Nov 17, 2020

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the book we are here to talk about today, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, a 2019 Harvard University Press release. In this book, Professor Strocchia continues the work of her career: recentering the discourse to include the formative contributions of women in the Italian Renaissance. Through a discussion of Medici women, convent pharmacists, and hospital nurses, Strocchia adeptly argues that women played a leading role in the development of Renaissance medicine.

Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective.

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Marisa Anne Bass, "Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt" (Princeton UP, 2019) Nov 17, 2020

In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt(Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At the book’s center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel’s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens.

Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. She reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.

Akash Ondaatje is a Research Associate at Know History. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca

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Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science" (Princeton UP, 2020) Nov 16, 2020

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the imagination—and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed forward the frontiers of science and technology.

Spanning four centuries of discovery—from René Descartes, whose demon could hijack sensorial reality, to James Clerk Maxwell, whose molecular-sized demon deftly broke the second law of thermodynamics, to Darwin, Einstein, Feynman, and beyond—Jimena Canales tells a shadow history of science and the demons that bedevil it.

InBedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (Princeton UP, 2020), she reveals how the greatest scientific thinkers used demons to explore problems, test the limits of what is possible, and better understand nature. Their imaginary familiars helped unlock the secrets of entropy, heredity, relativity, quantum mechanics, and other scientific wonders—and continue to inspire breakthroughs in the realms of computer science, artificial intelligence, and economics today.

The world may no longer be haunted as it once was, but the demons of the scientific imagination are alive and well, continuing to play a vital role in scientists’ efforts to explore the unknown and make the impossible real.

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Daniel Deudney, "Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2020) Nov 12, 2020

Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. The Trump Administration has created a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing, a positive future in increasingly dark times.

But despite even basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the first book to critically assess the major consequences of space activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity(Oxford UP, 2020) that the major result of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life, but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.

This is a provocative and exceptionally well-researched book that represents a must-read for anyone interested in space exploration and the growth of the space industry.

John W. Traphagan is a professor in Department of Religious Studies and Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Laura DeNardis, "The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch" (Yale UP, 2020) Nov 11, 2020

Most people recognize that the internet is growing at an exponential rate. But few have thought as deeply as Laura DeNardis, a Professor and Interim Dean at the School of Communication at American University, about what those changes will mean for privacy, security, human rights, and democracy.

In The Internet in Everything: Privacy and Security in a World With No Off Switch(Yale, 2020), Professor DeNardis shows that the policy tools and normative constructs we have built around the internet are outdated. The internet has evolved from a system of communication to one of control—and that demands a new approach to internet governance.

On this episode, I talked with Dr. DeNardis about why we need to move beyond an understanding of internet governance as content governance; whether governments can resist exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities; and why she thinks ‘internet freedom’ is a “somewhat fetishized ideal.” At one point, Dr. DeNardis’s dog weighs in on the virtues of techno-libertarianism.

We wrap up with some predictions for the future of the multi-stakeholder governance model and Dr. DeNardis’s thoughts on 2020.

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020) Nov 10, 2020

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, our capacity to set goals and pursue them. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), Nguyen argues that a game designer sculpts agency by specifying the goals and abilities of the potential player – what the player should care about and what their abilities are in the game environment. The resulting disposable ends and interesting struggles yields valuable aesthetic experiences that enhance our capacities for autonomous agency. Yet Nyugen, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, also warns of the harmful effects of the gamification of real life, when the simple goals and motivations in games leak into our real- world agency and can lead to social and moral disaster.

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Jamie Merisotis, "Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines" (RosettaBooks, 2020) Nov 05, 2020

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 can make them our friends.

Jamie Merisotis is a globally recognized leader in philanthropy, education, and public policy. Since 2008, he’s served as president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Jamie previously served as co-founder and president of the nonpartisan, D.C.-based Institute for Higher Education Policy.

This episode covers the need to link ongoing learning and work in a virtuous cycle that provides workers with both meaning and stability. It addresses the challenges of the 4th Industrial Revolution and how in the new people-centered economy it’s important to develop those flexible skills and capabilities that will enable workers to distinguish themselves from what automation and artificial intelligence is capable of.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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John Durham Peters, "Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Nov 05, 2020

Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (U Chicago Press, 2020), begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present.

Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age. A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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Eric Rutkow, "The Longest Line on the Map The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas" (Scribner, 2019) Nov 05, 2020

In his book The Longest Line on the Map The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas (Scribner, 2019), Professor Eric Rutkow retraces the fascinating, decades-long history of the attempt to build the world’s longest highway. This seemingly chimerical project coincided with the era of Pan-Americanism, a 19th and 20th century movement that advanced a rhetoric of solidarity between the nations of the Western hemisphere. Rutkow’s critical account provides a new angle on the history of Pan-Americanism and US-Latin American relations by offering both a materialist and culturalist account of the movement and the many tensions it brought out between the US and Latin American elites and policymakers. More broadly, the monograph challenges us to consider the malleability and artificiality of familiar geographical concepts like “Latin America,” “The western hemisphere,” and the idea of “Americas” more generally.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

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Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World" (Part 2) (Routledge, 2020) Nov 04, 2020

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 play in ‘decision integrity’. Hodgson then talks about the second half of the book which focuses on “developing latent capacities beyond the analytical rational” and offers possibilities for more enlightened co-creation in these hyper-turbulent times.

In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, Hodgson believes we need to reintroduce the human element into our understandings – whether the context is civic or scientific – and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making; and that the application of appropriate concepts and methods, will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncertainty. The intended outcome is the privileging of the positive human skills for collaborative navigation through uncertainty over the disjointed rationality of mechanism and artificial intelligence, which increasingly alienates us.

In Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives out from Routledge in 2020, Hodgson’s readers are introduced to concepts new to systems thinking that integrate systems thinking and futures thinking. Guiding readers through the unfolding of the ideas and practices with a narrative based on the metaphor of search portrayed in the tradition of ox herding, found in traditional Far Eastern consciousness practice, the concept of anticipatory present moment (APM) serves as a basis for learning the cognitive skills that better enable navigation through turbulent times. In his conversation with guest interviewer, Kevin Lindsay, Hodgson pulls together many of the threads with which long-time listeners of this podcast will be familiar and builds upon the work of Robert Rosen, a currently somewhat neglected pioneer of the systems field whose ideas about anticipatory systems has much to offer us in our current turbulent times.

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 play in ‘decision integrity’. Hodgson then talks about the second half of the book which focuses on “developing latent capacities beyond the analytical rational” and offers possibilities for more enlightened co-creation in these hyper-turbulent times.

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Andrew Liu, "Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India" (Yale UP, 2020) Nov 04, 2020

After water, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world. It is beloved by consumers in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and it comes in a bewildering array of varieties: from the cheap sachet of finely ground English black tea to fermented bricks of pu’er from Yunnan province. This beverage also has a fascinating place in the global history of science and capitalism. At the turn of the first millennium, it was prized as a medical concoction in southwestern China, and it became a ubiquitous beverage throughout the Chinese empire during the Tang Dynasty, when its spread coincided with the rising popularity of Buddhism. By the fifteenth century, the preparation of modern loose-leaf tea began to emerge, while the seventeenth century witnessed its ascent as major export commodity for the early Qing Empire, becoming enmeshed in a global circuit of bullion, commodities, and people. Then, during the 19th century, tea became absolute staple in Europe, especially among industrial workers in England, who sweetened the drink with cane sugar imported from the Caribbean. Anxious to stop hemorrhaging bullion to China and eager to assert its imperial self-sufficiency, the British empire fought two Opium Wars that severely weakened the Qing. Around the same time, English capitalists also began to export Chinese workers and knowledge to newly acquired colonial possessions in the Assam region of what is now Northeastern India. It was this aggressive push to begin cultivating tea as a British export commodity in South Asia that gave rise to the global competition between British India and China referenced in the title of Andrew B. Liu’s book: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (Yale University Press, 2020).

Liu’s book offers a fascinating new history of this ubiquitous beverage, leveraging its production, consumption, and global circulation to offer a fresh and compelling account of capitalist accumulation. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style plantations. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism, one that explicitly highlights global competition and coerced labor as a driving force in economic development.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

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M. Bekoff and J. Pierce, "The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age" (Beacon Press, 2017) Nov 03, 2020

A compelling argument that the time has come to use what we know about the fascinating and diverse inner lives of other animals on their behalf

Every day we are learning new and surprising facts about just how intelligent and emotional animals are—did you know rats like to play and laugh, and also display empathy, and the ears and noses of cows tell us how they’re feeling? At times, we humans translate that knowledge into compassion for other animals; think of the public outcry against the fates of Cecil the lion or the captive gorilla Harambe. But on the whole, our growing understanding of what animals feel is not resulting in more respectful treatment of them.

Renowned animal-behavior expert Marc Bekoff and leading bioethicist Jessica Pierce explore the real-world experiences of five categories of animals, beginning with those who suffer the greatest deprivations of freedoms and choice—chickens, pigs, and cows in industrial food systems—as well as animals used in testing and research, including mice, rats, cats, dogs, and chimpanzees. Next, Bekoff and Pierce consider animals for whom losses of freedoms are more ambiguous and controversial, namely, individuals held in zoos and aquaria and those kept as companions. Finally, they reveal the unexpected ways in which the freedoms of animals in the wild are constrained by human activities and argue for a more compassionate approach to conservation.

In each case, scientific studies combine with stories of individual animals to bring readers face-to-face with the wonder of our fellow beings, as well as the suffering they endure and the major paradigm shift that is needed to truly ensure their well-being.

The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age (Beacon Press, 2017) will educate and inspire people to rethink how we affect other animals, and how we can evolve toward more peaceful and less violent ways of interacting with our animal kin in an increasingly human-dominated world.

Marc Bekoff has published thirty books, including The Emotional Lives of Animals. He is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a former Guggenheim fellow. Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Micha Rahder, "An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation" (Duke UP, 2020) Oct 30, 2020

We are joined today by Dr. Micha Rahder, writer, editor, and independent scholar based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We will be talking about her new book, An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation, published by Duke University Press in 2020.

In An Ecology of Knowledges, Dr. Rahder offers a rich ethnography of knowledge-making practices in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest nature reserve in Central America. Following the practical engagements between humans and nonhumans, institutions, and local actors, Dr. Rahder examines how technoscience, endemic violence, and an embodied love of wild species and places shape Guatemala's conservation practices. The book highlights how situated ways of knowing impact conservation practices and natural places, often in unexpected and unintended ways. In so doing, "An Ecology of Knowledges" offers new ways of thinking about the complexities of environmental knowledge and conservation in the context of instability, inequality, and violence around the world.

Alejandro Ponce de Leon is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Davis. He teaches and learns in the STS program. www.alejandroponcedeleon.me

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I. Newkirk and G. Stone, "Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion" (Simon and Schuster, 2020) Oct 30, 2020

The founder and president of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, and bestselling author Gene Stone explore the wonders of animal life and offer tools for living more kindly toward them.

In the last few decades, a wealth of new information has emerged about who animals are—intelligent, aware, and empathetic. Studies show that animals are astounding beings with intelligence, emotions, intricate communications networks, and myriad abilities. In Animalkind: Remarkable Discoveries about Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion (Simon and Schuster, 2020), Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Stone present these findings in a concise and awe-inspiring way, detailing a range of surprising discoveries: that geese fall in love and stay with a partner for life, that fish “sing” underwater, and that elephants use their trunks to send subsonic signals, alerting other herds to danger miles away.

Newkirk and Stone pair their tour of the astounding lives of animals with a guide to the exciting new tools that allow humans to avoid using or abusing animals as we once did. They show readers what they can do in their everyday lives to ensure that the animal world is protected from needless harm. Whether it’s medicine, product testing, entertainment, clothing, or food, there are now better options to all the uses animals once served in human life. We can substitute warmer, lighter faux fleece for wool, choose vegan versions of everything from shrimp to sausage and milk to marshmallows, reap the benefits of medical research that no longer requires monkeys to be caged in laboratories, and scrap captive orca exhibits and elephant rides for virtual reality and animatronics.

Animalkind is a fascinating study of why our fellow living beings deserve our respect, and moreover, the steps every reader can take to put this new understanding into action.

Ingrid Elizabeth Newkirk is the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the world's largest animal rights organization.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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S. Myers and H. Frumkin, "Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves" (Island Press, 2020) Oct 30, 2020

In Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves (Island Press, 2020), Dr. Samuel Myers and his co-authors illustrate the interconnectedness of human health and the health of our planet. In this interview, Dr. Myers’ passion is felt as he describes the expanding and evolving field of Planetary Health. We talk about the current state of the world from the perspective of experts across disciplines. This foundational knowledge sets the stages to explore threats to food production, ecological health, and humanity’s physical and mental health. Much like the final section in the book we discuss the abounding opportunities to create a healthier world. Those opportunities are fueled by various technologies from apps to precision agriculture. After listening to Dr. Myers and reading Planetary Health our future is as bright and beautiful as the cover of the book, if we lean into the knowledge produced by the field of Planetary Health.

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Doug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping" (U London Press, 2020) Oct 29, 2020

The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of those in crisis, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data has become ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data collected from people in crisis, before selling it back to them.

Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping (University of London Press, 2020) brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations, and questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis.

Doug Sprecht is a Chartered Geographer (CGeog. FRGS), a Senior Lecturer (SFHEA) and the Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. His research examines how knowledge is constructed and codified through digital and cartographic artefacts, focusing on development issues in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, where he has carried out extensive fieldwork. He also writes and researches on pedagogy, and is author of the Media and Communications Student Study Guide. He speaks and writes on topics of data ethics, development, education and mapping practices at conferences and invited lectures around the world. He is a member of the editorial board at Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, and the journal Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. He is also Chair of the Environmental Network for Central America.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London

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M. Newhart and W. Dolphin, "The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience" (Routledge, 2018) Oct 26, 2020

Medical marijuana laws have spread across the U.S. to all but a handful of states. Yet, eighty years of social stigma and federal prohibition creates dilemmas for patients who participate in state programs.

Michelle Newhart and William Dolphin's The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience (Routledge, 2018) takes the first comprehensive look at how patients negotiate incomplete medicalization and what their experiences reveal about our relationship with this controversial plant as it is incorporated into biomedicine. Is cannabis used similarly to other medicines? Drawing on interviews with midlife patients in Colorado, a state at the forefront of medical cannabis implementation, this book explores the practical decisions individuals confront about medical use, including whether cannabis will work for them; the risks of registering in a state program; and how to handle questions of supply, dosage, and routines of use.

Individual stories capture how patients redefine and reclaim cannabis use as legitimate―individually and collectively―and grapple with an inherently political identity. These experiences help illustrate how stigma, prejudice, and social change operate.

By positioning cannabis use within sociological models of medical behavior, Newhart and Dolphin provide a wide-reaching, theoretically informed analysis of the issue that expands established concepts and provides new insight on medical cannabis and how state programs work.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Li Zhang, "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy" (U California Press, 2020) Oct 22, 2020

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press, 2020) offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains.

Suvi Rautio is a Course Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. As an anthropologist, her research seeks to deconstruct the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China to reveal the layers of social difference that characterize the nation today. She can be reached at suviprautio@gmail.com

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Michael E. McCullough, "The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code" (Basic Books, 2020) Oct 22, 2020

Why Give a Damn About Strangers? In his book The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code (Basic Books, 2020), Michael E. McCullough explains.

McCullough is a professor of psychology at the University of California San Diego, where he directs the Evolution and Human Behavior laboratory. Long interested in prosocial behavior and morality, he’s conducted research on forgiveness, revenge, gratitude, empathy, altruism, and religion. His other books include Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. This episode covers four evolved human instincts related to empathy; why “natural selection is a penny-pincher; and seven hinges of history that explain the historical progression of empathy—culminating in today’s Age of Impact.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Dan Royles, "To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS" (UNC Press, 2020) Oct 21, 2020

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial surrounding a "white gay disease" in Black America, but also to bring resources to struggling communities that were often dismissed as too "hard to reach." To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS (UNC Press, 2020) offers the first history of African American AIDS activism in all of its depth and breadth. Dan Royles introduces a diverse constellation of activists, including medical professionals, Black gay intellectuals, church pastors, Nation of Islam leaders, recovering drug users, and Black feminists who pursued a wide array of grassroots approaches to slow the epidemic's spread and address its impacts. Through interlinked stories from Philadelphia and Atlanta to South Africa and back again, Royles documents the diverse, creative, and global work of African American activists in the decades-long battle against HIV/AIDS.

Dan Royles is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.

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D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s 'Atalanta fugiens' (1618)" (U Virginia Press, 2020) Oct 21, 2020

In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains an accompanying "fugue" music scored for three voices. Historians of alchemy have long understood this virtuoso work as an ambitious demonstration of the art’s literary potential and of the possibilities of the early modern printed book.

Atalanta fugiens lends itself unusually well to today’s digital tools. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia alchemical project as an enhanced online publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that Maier perhaps imagined but that were impossible to fully realize before now. An interactive, layered digital edition provides accessibility and flexibility, presenting all the elements of the original book along with significant enhancements that allow for deep engagement by specialists and nonspecialists alike.

Three short introductory essays invite readers to get acquainted with early modern alchemy, and Michael Maier. Eight extended interpretive essays explore Atalanta fugiens and its place in the history of music, science, print, and visual culture in early modern Europe. These interdisciplinary essays also include interactive features that clarify and/or advance the authors’ arguments while positioning Furnace and Fugue as an original, uniquely engaging contribution to our understanding of early modern culture.

Drs. Bilak and Nummedal are the editors of this innovative digital edition of a seventeenth-century alchemical text that combines text, image, and music. Furnace & Fugue was developed by Brown University’s Mellon-supported Digital Publications Initiative, and published by the University of Virginia Press (2020) as an open-access edition.

Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute at Brown University.

Dr. Bilak is an academic and a goldsmith. She is the Creative Director of 12 Keys Consultancy & Design, LLC, and an Independent Scholar. She is an historian of early modern science Donna's research extends to the cross-cultural examination of jewellery, artisanal technologies, and meaning-making with materials. Dr. Nummedal is Professor of History and of Italian Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). With Janice Neri and John V. Calhoun, she published John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History.

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Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) Oct 20, 2020

What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth (U Minnesota Press, 2018), revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control.

Olson’s book shifts our attention from space’s political geography to its political ecology, showing how scientists, physicians, and engineers across North America collaborate to build the conceptual and nuts-and-bolts systems that connect Earth to a specifically ecosystemic cosmos. This cosmos is being redefined as a competitive space for potential economic resources, social relations, and political strategies.

Showing how contemporary U.S. environmental power is bound up with the production of national technical and scientific access to outer space, Into the Extreme brings important new insights to our understanding of modern environmental history and politics. At a time when the boundaries of global ecologies and economies extend far below and above Earth’s surface, Olson’s new analytic frameworks help us understand how varieties of outlying spaces are known, made, and organized as kinds of environments—whether terrestrial or beyond.

John W. Traphagan is a professor in Department of Religious Studies and Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Kristina M. Lyons, "Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics" (Duke UP, 2020) Oct 19, 2020

In Colombia, decades of social and armed conflict and the US-led war on drugs have created a seemingly untenable situation for scientists and rural communities as they attempt to care for forests and grow non-illicit crops. In her new book Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke University Press, 2020), Kristina M. Lyons presents an ethnography of human-soil relations. By following the practical engagements of soil scientists and peasants across labs, forests, and farms, the book attends to the struggles and collaborations between multiple actors over the meanings of peace, productivity, rural development, and sustainability in contemporary Colombia.

Alejandro Ponce de Leon is a Ph.D candidate at the University of California, Davis. He works, learns, and thinks in the Science and Technology Studies program.

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Rene Almeling, "GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health" (U California Press, 2020) Oct 15, 2020

Rene Almeling’s new book GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (University of California Press, 2020) provides an in-depth look at why we do not talk about men’s reproductive health and this knowledge gap shapes reproductive politics today.

Over the past several centuries, the medical profession has made enormous efforts to understand and treat women’s reproductive bodies. It is only recently, however, that researchers have begun to ask basic questions about how men’s health matters for reproductive outcomes, from miscarriage to childhood illness. Andrology failed to establish itself as a medical specialty in the nineteenth-century and there continues to be a lack of attention to the importance of men’s age, health, and exposure.

Dr. Almeling examines the production, circulation, and reception of biomedical knowledge about men’s reproductive health. Throughout this book she conducts an in-depth analysis of male reproductive health by using historical documents, media messages, and qualitative interviews. The findings outlined in this book demonstrate how this non-knowledge shapes reproductive politics today.

Rene Almeling, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology, and, by courtesy, American Studies, Public Health, and Medicine at Yale University.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Scholarly Communication: An Interview with Joerg Heber of PLOS Oct 14, 2020

Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher. Among PLOS's suite of journals, PLOS One is the nonprofit's largest in number of articles published and its broadest in coverage, ranging as it does over all topics in the natural sciences and medicine, to include, as well, some in the social sciences, too. PLOS One appears only online, a format the staff bring into service to foster Open Access Science, whether they do this through initiatives for Open Citations and Open Abstracts, or through Transparent Peer Review, or also through PLOS One's newest endeavor, registered reports.

Since its inception in 2006, PLOS One has been at the forefront of Open Access publishing. And today, against the trend to equate Impact Factors with journal names, PLOS One does not promote their own Impact Factor because the measure has been shown to be, at best, only an approximate indicator of research significance. However, in true PLOS fashion, PLOS One offers an alternative in various Article-Level Metrics. These ALMs (as the abbreviation goes) make a closer, tighter fit between value of research and quantifiable measures.

Joerg Heber is Editor-in-Chief of PLOS One. When you track Joerg Heber's career in publishing, you get the sense of a clear mission: (1) provide access to good science and (2) make providing that access not only viable, but enviable.

Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better.

The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de

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Ernest Freeberg, "A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement" (Basic Books, 2020) Oct 13, 2020

In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and animal alike. The industrial city brought suffering, but it also inspired a compassion for animals that fueled a controversial anti-cruelty movement. From the center of these debates, Henry Bergh launched a shocking campaign to grant rights to animals.

Ernest Freeberg's book A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement (Basic Books, 2020) is revelatory social history, awash with colorful characters. Cheered on by thousands of men and women who joined his cause, Bergh fought with robber barons, Five Points gangs, and legendary impresario P.T. Barnum, as they pushed for new laws to protect trolley horses, livestock, stray dogs, and other animals.

Raucous and entertaining, A Traitor to His Species tells the story of a remarkable man who gave voice to the voiceless and shaped our modern relationship with animals.

Ernest Freeberg is a distinguished professor of humanities and head of the history department at the University of Tennessee. He has authored three award-winning books, including The Age of Edison. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020) Oct 12, 2020

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos. Was the transfusion of lamb blood into desperately sick humans really defensible?

Boel Berner, Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th Century Medicine and Beyond (Transcript Verlag, 2020) takes the reader on a journey into hospital wards and lunatic asylums, physiological laboratories and 19th century wars. It presents a fascinating story of medical knowledge, ambitions and concerns – a story that provides lessons for current debates on the morality of medical experimentation and care.

Boel Berner is a sociologist, historian, and professor emerita at Linköping University in Sweden. In her research she investigates the character and power of expertise, historically and today. She has studied education and work, the gendered nature of technical knowledge, household modernization, and issues of risk. Her current work is oriented towards the history of medicine. It focuses, besides questions of blood donation and transfusion, on the politics of blood group analysis in the interwar years.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine

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Margaret Heffernan, "Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together" (Simon and Schuster, 2020) Oct 12, 2020

Today I spoke with Dr Margaret Heffernan about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together (Simon and Schuster, 2020). Margaret produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she became a businesswomen. She is the author of six books and a successful TED Talk speaker. She is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath.

In her 2012 TED Talk, ‘Dare to disagree’, she told the story Alice Stewart. This is the story of how clear, certain medical data, are not always enough to change rapidly our professional rules and personal habits.

In her 2019 TED Talk she argued that the more we rely on technology to make us efficient, the fewer skills we have to confront the unexpected. That’s why we need less technology and ‘more messy human skills - imagination, humility, bravery - to solve problems in business, government and life in an unpredictable age’.

In her new book, she explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty: ‘We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t allow that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out’.

Uncertainty is clearly an important construct in both macroeconomics and behavioural economics. This book starts with an anecdote on the early life of a great American economist, Irving Fisher. His swimming accident and the discovery of his tuberculosis contributed to the development his research interest in stability and monetary economics.

Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milano-Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Co-operative economy and collective ownership. Currently he is associate editor of The Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE)

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John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbia UP, 2020) Oct 08, 2020

Since the dawn of the industrial age, we have unleashed a bewildering number of potentially harmful chemicals. But out of this vast array, how do we identify the actual threats? What does it take to prove that a certain chemical causes cancer? How do we translate academic knowledge of the toxic effects of particular substances into understanding real-world health consequences? The science that answers these questions is toxicology.

In The Alchemy of Disease: How Chemicals and Toxins Cause Cancer and Other Illnesses (Columbia University Press), John Whysner offers an accessible and compelling history of toxicology and its key findings. He details the experiments and discoveries that revealed the causal connections between chemical exposures and diseases. Balancing clear accounts of groundbreaking science with human drama and public-policy relevance, Whysner describes key moments in the development of toxicology and their thorny social and political implications.

The book features discussions of toxicological problems past and present, including DDT, cigarettes and other carcinogens, lead poisoning, fossil fuels, chemical warfare, pharmaceuticals—including opioids—and the efficacy of animal testing. Offering valuable insight into the science and politics of crucial public-health concerns, The Alchemy of Disease shows that toxicology’s task—pinpointing the chemical cause of an illness—is as compelling as any detective story.

John Whysner was formerly an associate clinical professor of environmental health sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. A board-certified toxicologist, he has consulted for the International Agency for Research on Cancer and federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and was director of biomedical research for the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, Executive Office of the President.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Daniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall" (UBC Press, 2020) Oct 07, 2020

Water and diplomatic historian Dan MacFarlane has written a fascinating book on a fundamental debate in environmental history: What is a natural landscape? Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall (UBC Press, 2020) argues that one of the world's most famous natural attractions is not wholly natural but is an engineered landscape. Though the falls have been altered, it's designers seemingly found a balance between preserving its wonder and utilizing its power, MacFarlane argues.

The first people to record their reactions to the falls in North America were fascinated by its beauty and power. By the end of the nineteenth century, the falls had drawn the attention of both Canadian and American industrialist who saw in its majesty a great potential for energy generation. Since the falls is located on the border, it provoked conflict and negotiations between these two countries over how much water could be drawn upon by each. Utilizing the falls for power generation provoked another conflict over the extent to which power generation might hinder the natural beauty of this thriving tourist attraction. These two conflicts—one about power the other about natural appeal— would continue into the twenty-first century.

The book unravels the details of these conflicts while at the same time drawing the readers' attention to the often unseen changes being made in, around, and behind the falls. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are those that explain technocrats' debates over, and explorations into, how water reduction might change the natural look of the falls. Exposing these engineered elements of Niagara encourages readers to reimagine this popular natural attraction, and others like it.

Jason L. Newton is a post-doctoral fellow in the history of capitalism and the environment at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on capitalism and the environment.

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Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020) Oct 07, 2020

In her new book Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale University Press, 2020), Arleen Tuchman, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, describes the history of how the perception of diabetes has evolved over the past two centuries. She charts the chronology of diabetes, from its beginnings as a disease associated with Jews to one associated with “non-whites.” She explores the connotations that patients, advocates, physicians, and policymakers have attached to diabetes (e.g., disease of the “civilized” versus disease of the “primitive”) and how researchers have consistently missed socioeconomic factors that may represent the most important risk factor for the disease.

Alec Kacew is a medical school student at the University of Chicago.

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Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016) Oct 07, 2020

Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius.

Beginning with Athens in the Golden age, and ending with Palo Alto in the Silicon age, Weiner steps lightly through a most serious and fascinating topic, aided and supplemented with the latest social science research on creativity and its cultivation.

The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places (Simon and Schuster, 2016) is an intellectual odyssey that examines the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas, and has fun doing it. What inspires genius? Why do certain urban settings – and certain historical challenges – foster innovation?

Would geniuses like Socrates, Michelangelo, Einstein and Disney have flourished, had they found themselves in other locations and other historical circumstances?

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020) Oct 07, 2020

In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles. To heal the rifts, Hodgson believes we need to reintroduce the human element into our understandings – whether the context is civic or scientific – and strengthen truth-seeking in decision-making; and that the application of appropriate concepts and methods, will enable a switch from reaction to anticipation, even in the face of discontinuous change and high uncertainty. The intended outcome is the privileging of the positive human skills for collaborative navigation through uncertainty over the disjointed rationality of mechanism and artificial intelligence, which increasingly alienates us.

In Systems Thinking for a Turbulent World: A Search for New Perspectives out from Routledge in 2020, Hodgson’s readers are introduced to concepts new to systems thinking that integrate systems thinking and futures thinking. Guiding readers through the unfolding of the ideas and practices with a narrative based on the metaphor of search portrayed in the tradition of ox herding, found in traditional Far Eastern consciousness practice, the concept of anticipatory present moment (APM) serves as a basis for learning the cognitive skills that better enable navigation through turbulent times. In his conversation with guest interviewer, Kevin Lindsay, Hodgson pulls together many of the threads with which long-time listeners of this podcast will be familiar and builds upon the work of Robert Rosen, a currently somewhat neglected pioneer of the systems field whose ideas about anticipatory systems has much to offer us in our current turbulent times.

Our guest interviewer, Keven Lindsay, is a 25 year veteran of the software industry, currently with Adobe, who recently began graduate work in Transformative Leadership at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he encountered Dr. Hodgson and his work first hand. While it was in this recent coursework that he was formally introduced to systems thinking, Kevin is rapidly becoming a systems enthusiast—recognizing the significant potential for the application of systems thinking in addressing big issues ranging from customer experience (CX), to social justice reform and climate action. We look forward to having Kevin join the channel as a full-fledged co-host in the very near future.

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Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020) Oct 05, 2020

“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins.

In Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things (Basic Books, 2020), England presents, for the first time for a general audience, his groundbreaking theory of dissipative adaptation. Described simply, in any disordered system, matter clumps together and breaks apart mostly randomly. But some of the clumps that form momentarily dissipate more energy, and these structures are less likely to fall apart. Over time, they become better at both withstanding the disorder surrounding them and creating copies of themselves. From this deep insight, grounded in thermodynamics, England isolates the emergence of the first life-like behaviors. As he shows, rather than being a stroke of miraculous luck, life-like fine-tuning can emerge in matter under a variety of fairly generic experimental conditions.

In this fascinating account, England walks readers through a range of different concepts in physics and biology to sketch out his novel description of how life might emerge. One of the beauties of his approach is the way it matches recognizably with the messy complexity of the everyday world, from the way sleet slides down a windshield in cold rain to how salt and pepper grains dance together in a pan of heated oil.

But that is not the whole story. While the difference between being alive or not may seem as obvious as night and day, physics does not in fact make a clear distinction. That, as England argues, is a matter of perspective, and throughout the book he describes what he sees as the remarkable synergy between the account of life’s origins given by physics, and the account given in the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, England reckons with what, if anything, science can really tell us about life’s great mysteries.

Full of scientific and philosophical insight, Every Life is on Fire is a singular book from one of the most exciting physicists of his generation.

Jeremy England is senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, and is the former Thomas D. & Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a Hertz Fellow, and was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Rising Stars in Science. He lives in Brookline, MA.

Galina Limorenko is a post-doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch

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Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" (Columbia UP, 2019) Sep 30, 2020

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts.

The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP, 2019) is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people, The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.

Thom van Dooren is associate professor at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia, 2014) and coeditor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (Columbia, 2017).

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science" (Lexington, 2018) Sep 29, 2020

What is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism? We speak with Robert M. Geraci about his research into religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering circles.

Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science (Lexington, 2018) uses ethnographic data to investigate the presence of religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering. Geraci shows 1) how the integration of religion, science and technology undergirds pre- and post-independence Indian nationalism, 2) that traditional icons and rituals remain relevant in elite scientific communities, and 3) that transhumanist ideas now percolate within Indian visions of science and technology. This work identifies the intersection of religion, science, and technology as a worldwide phenomenon and suggests that the study of such interactions should be enriched through attention to the real experiences of people across the globe.

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Yves Citton, "Mediarchy" (Polity Press, 2019) Sep 28, 2020

We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated publics, ‘intra-structured’ by the apparatuses of communication that govern our interactions.

In his new book Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019), Yves Citton maps out the new regime of experience, media and power that he designates by the term “mediarchy.” To understand mediarchy, we need to look both at the effects that the media have on us and also at the new forms of being and experience that they induce in us. We can never entirely escape from the effects of the mediarchies that operate through us but by becoming more aware of their conditioning, we can develop the new forms of political analysis and practice which are essential if we are to rise to the unprecedented challenges of our time.

This comprehensive and far-reaching book will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, politics and sociology, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the multiple and complex ways that the media – from newspapers and TV to social media and the internet – shape our social, political and personal lives today.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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James L. Nolan, Jr., "Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" (Harvard UP, 2020) Sep 24, 2020

After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the “Little Boy” bomb from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Participation on the project challenged Dr. Nolan’s instincts as a healer. He and his medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life. Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Harvard UP, 2020) follows these physicians as they sought to maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity.

A vital and vivid account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that ordinary people face in extraordinary times.

James L. Nolan, Jr., is Washington Gladden 1859 Professor of Sociology at Williams College. His previous books include What They Saw in America: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb and Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought" (Princeton UP, 2020) Sep 21, 2020

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton UP, 2020), Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society.

Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women’s performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women’s sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world.

Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia.

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Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family" (Doubleday, 2020) Sep 21, 2020

Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the “schizophrenogenic” mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, bringing hope for paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The NBN’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Sep 18, 2020

In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ingested them.

By investigating the different contexts and practices associated with the British long-distance trade in patent medicines, Zachary Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets, health concerns, and colonial warfare. He argues that from the late seventeenth-century, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways, providing solutions to the problems of labor shortages in the armed forces, trading companies and plantations, while also informing the categories of difference that organized such institutions.

Zachary Dorner is the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in history at Johns Hopkins University.

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Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Sep 18, 2020

Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the biological: instead of treating the heart, soul, and mind, we take a pill to treat the brain.

Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery (University of Chicago Press) is a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they’re increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the “body/brain,” and what these encounters might tell us.

Drawing on interviews with people dealing with struggles such as underperformance in school or work, grief after the end of a relationship, or disappointment with how their life is unfolding, Joseph E. Davis reveals the profound revolution in consciousness that is underway. We now see suffering as an imbalance in the brain that needs to be fixed, usually through chemical means. This has rippled into our social and cultural conversations, and it has affected how we, as a society, imagine ourselves and envision what constitutes a good life.

Davis warns that what we envision as a neurological revolution, in which suffering is a mechanistic problem, has troubling and entrapping consequences. And he makes the case that by turning away from an interpretive, meaning-making view of ourselves, we thwart our chances to enrich our souls and learn important truths about ourselves and the social conditions under which we live.

Joe Davis is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace" (Henry Holt, 2020) Sep 17, 2020

Some people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of? Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt and Co.) looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community.

You too are not who you are by genes alone; your culture is a second form of inheritance, received from thousands of individuals as pools of knowledge passing through generations like an eternal torch. You too may raise young, know beauty, or struggle to negotiate a peace. And your culture, too, changes and evolves. As situations shift, so does your community’s capacity for learning, especially social learning, which allows behaviors to adjust much faster than genes alone could adapt.

Becoming Wild brings readers close to the lives of non-human animals to show how other creatures teach and learn. With reporting from deep in nature, alongside portraits of various animals in their free-living communities, Safina offers a fresh understanding of what is constantly going on beyond humanity. Readers are taken behind the curtain of life on Earth and asked to reckon with the most urgent of questions: Who are we here with?

Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019) Sep 17, 2020

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, Chater first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.

Dr. Nick Chater is Professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School and cofounder of Decision Technology Ltd. He has contributed to more than two hundred articles and book chapters and is author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books.

Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness.

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Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets" (U Chicago Press, 2016) Sep 14, 2020

A life shared with pets brings many emotions. We feel love for our companions, certainly, and happiness at the thought that we’re providing them with a safe, healthy life. But there’s another emotion, less often acknowledged, that can be nearly as powerful: guilt. When we see our cats gazing wistfully out the window, or watch a goldfish swim lazy circles in a bowl, we can’t help but wonder: are we doing the right thing, keeping these independent beings locked up, subject to our control? Is keeping pets actually good for the pets themselves?

That’s the question that animates Jessica Pierce’s powerful Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets (University of Chicago Press). A lover of pets herself (including, over the years, dogs, cats, fish, rats, hermit crabs, and more), Pierce understands the joys that pets bring us. But she also refuses to deny the ambiguous ethics at the heart of the relationship, and through a mix of personal stories, philosophical reflections, and scientifically informed analyses of animal behavior and natural history, she puts pet-keeping to the test.

Is it ethical to keep pets at all? Are some species more suited to the relationship than others? Are there species one should never attempt to own? And are there ways that we can improve our pets’ lives, so that we can be confident that we are giving them as much as they give us?

Deeply empathetic, yet rigorous and unflinching in her thinking, Pierce has written a book that is sure to help any pet owner, unsettling assumptions but also giving them the knowledge to build deeper, better relationships with the animals with whom they’ve chosen to share their lives.

Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer. She currently has a loose affiliation with the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado Denver, but considers herself mostly independent.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Angèle Christin, "Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms" (Princeton UP, 2020) Sep 14, 2020

How are algorithms changing journalism? In Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press), Angèle Christin, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, explores the impact of metrics and analytics on the newsrooms of New York and Paris.

Using an ethnography of two organisations, the book demonstrates the complexity, ambivalence, and difference in the use of metrics to make editorial and journalistic judgements. Covering a vast range of issues, from the history of journalism, through methods of managing organisations, to careers and pay, the book gives important insights into the current, and future, practices of our news organisations.

As a result, the book is essential reading for social science and humanities scholars, as well as for anyone interested in how we get the news we have today.

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Gerald Posner, "Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America" (Simon and Schuster, 2020) Sep 14, 2020

Today’s guest is investigative journalist and author, Gerald Posner. His new book, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (Simon and Schuster), explores the fascinating and complex history of pharmaceutical and bio-tech industries. It is an industry like no other and a story like no other.

Gerald Posner is an award-winning journalist who has written twelve books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Case Closed and multiple national bestsellers.

Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon.

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S. J. Potter, "Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939" (Oxford UP, 2020) Sep 11, 2020

In the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote understanding across national boundaries. In his book Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939 (Oxford UP, 2020), Simon J. Potter describes these efforts to use radio to promote global harmony and how they were eclipsed by nationalism and the weaponization of broadcasting as a propaganda tool. As Potter details, the nature of early radio lent itself to this internationalist vision, with listeners often picking up signals and enjoying broadcasts from other countries. By the 1930s, however, a more nationalistic vision for radio took hold, as Germany led the way in using the airwaves to advance nationalistic goals. Though famed today for its global radio services, Britain lagged in response to this, only belatedly employing the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Empire Service as a tool to shore up support for British interests in the United States and elsewhere. Potter shows how this laid the groundwork for the British government’s subsequent propaganda broadcasts during the Second World War and into the postwar era.

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David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020) Sep 10, 2020

In his book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (MIT Press), evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning.

Natural selection is a process without purpose, yet gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. Haig proposes that the key to this is the origin of mutable “texts” that preserve a record of what has worked in the world, in other words: genes. These texts become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living beings.

Haig draws on a wide range of sources to make his argument, from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to the work of Jacques Derrida to the latest findings on gene transmission, duplication, and expression.

Genes and their effects, he explains, are like eggs and chickens. Eggs exist for the sake of becoming chickens and chickens for the sake of laying eggs. A gene's effects have a causal role in determining which genes are copied. The gene persists if its lineage has been consistently associated with survival and reproduction. Organisms can be understood as interpreters that link information from the environment to meaningful action in the environment.

Meaning, Haig argues, is the output of a process of interpretation; there is a continuum from the very simplest forms of interpretation, found in single RNA molecules near the origins of life, to the most sophisticated, like those found in human beings. Life is interpretation—the use of information in choice.

David Haig is George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Because he is a theorist, his research is wide and varied, working on everything from maternal-fetal conflict in human pregnancy to the evolution of plant life cycles. He has a particular interest in genetic conflicts within individual organisms, as exemplified by genomic imprinting.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, "NeuroScience Fiction" (Benbella Books, 2020) Sep 10, 2020

In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the illusion of reality, Blade Runner and android emotion, and more. A heady mix of science fiction, neuroscience, and philosophy, NeuroScience Fiction takes us from Vanilla Sky to neural research labs, and from Planet of the Apes to what makes us human. The end result is a sort of bio-technological “Sophie’s World for the 21st Century”, and a compelling update on the state of human knowledge through its cultural expressions in film and art.

Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is the director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and the Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on the principles of visual perception and memory, and is credited with the discovery of "Concept cells" or "Jennifer Aniston neurons" - neurons in the human brain that play a key role in memory formation.

Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness.

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Emily Anthes, "The Great Indoors" (Scientific American, 2020) Sep 09, 2020

Modern humans are an indoor species. We spend 90 percent of our time inside, shuttling between homes and offices, schools and stores, restaurants and gyms. And yet, in many ways, the indoor world remains unexplored territory. For all the time we spend inside buildings, we rarely stop to consider: How do these spaces affect our mental and physical well-being? Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Our productivity, performance, and relationships?

In this wide-ranging, character-driven book, science journalist Emily Anthes takes us on an adventure into the buildings in which we spend our days, exploring the profound, and sometimes unexpected, ways that they shape our lives. Drawing on cutting-edge research, she probes the pain-killing power of a well-placed window and examines how the right office layout can expand our social networks. She investigates how room temperature regulates our cognitive performance, how the microbes hiding in our homes influence our immune systems, and how cafeteria design affects what―and how much―we eat.

Along the way, Anthes takes readers into an operating room designed to minimize medical errors, a school designed to boost students’ physical fitness, and a prison designed to support inmates’ psychological needs. And she previews the homes of the future, from the high-tech houses that could monitor our health to the 3D-printed structures that might allow us to live on the Moon.

The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness provides a fresh perspective on our most familiar surroundings and a new understanding of the power of architecture and design. It's an argument for thoughtful interventions into the built environment and a story about how to build a better world―one room at a time.

Emily Anthes is a freelance science journalist. Her work has appeared in Seed, Scientific American Mind, Discover, Slate, Good, New York, and the Boston Globe.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is a professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Sandra Young, "The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge" (Routledge, 2015) Sep 07, 2020

Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices of early modernity brings to light the emergence of the early modern global south.

In The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge (Routledge, 2015), Young proposes a new set of terms with which to understand the racialized imaginary inscribed in the scholarly texts that presented the peoples of the south as objects of an inquiring gaze from the north. Through maps, images and even textual formatting, equivalences were established between ’new’ worlds, many of them long known to European explorers, she argues, in terms that made explicit the divide between ’north’ and ’south.’

This book takes seriously the role of form in shaping meaning and its ideological consequences. Young examines, in turn, the representational methodologies, or ’artes,’ deployed in mapping the ’whole’ world: illustrating, creating charts for navigation, noting down observations, collecting and cataloguing curiosities, reporting events, formatting materials, and editing and translating old sources. By tracking these methodologies in the lines of beauty and evidence on the page, we can see how early modern producers of knowledge were able to attribute alterity to the ’southern climes’ of an increasingly complex world, while securing their own place within it.

Sandra Young is Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London

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David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020) Sep 04, 2020

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—that is, careful consideration of not only what is seen but what is unseen. David assembles wide-ranging examples, from the histories of science and finance to his own research and consultancy, to show how this perspective can shed new light on concepts as classical as random sampling and survey design and as cutting-edge as machine learning and the measurement of honesty. I expect the book to inspire the same enjoyment and reflection in general readers as it is sure to in statisticians and other data analysts.

Suggested companion work: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

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Paul Offit, "Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far" (HarperCollins, 2020) Sep 03, 2020

Why Do Unnecessary and Often Counter-Productive Medical Interventions Happen So Often?

Today I talked to Paul Offit about his book Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (HarperCollins, 2020)

Offit is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. A prolific author, he’s also well known for being the public face of the scientific consensus that vaccines have no association with autism.

Topics covered in this episode include:

The degree to which opportunities to make money and avoid law suits drives the behavior of doctors, though inertia and unwillingness to accept advances in knowledge are also common explanations for being at times too active in treating patients.
How the marketing campaigns of pharmaceutical companies can warp treatment plans.
The conclusions from countless studies that in at least the 15 common medical interventions covered in this book, many patients are better off with more basic, common sense approaches like eating well, exercise, et cetera.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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M. del Pilar Blanco and J. Page, "Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America" (U Florida Press, 2020) Sep 02, 2020

Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (University of Florida Press 2020), a collection edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page is a wonderful and imaginative contribution to the fields of history of science, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. This volume assembles a broad and varied collection of chapters that span from the colonial period to the twenty first century, and explore diverse themes in varied Latin American regions: utopianism; science and the modern nation; Latin America as a site of knowledge production; the convergence between science and arts; critiques to modernity; among others. In this exciting conversation Blanco and Page tell us about the collaborative process that led to this book, the many topics and time periods they covered, and the specific contributions of their own chapters. Listeners will find in this book an exciting new addition to the literature, one that is particularly important today because, as the authors remind us, political actors use ‘science’ as a concept in varied and contradictory ways. This makes evident one of the most important claims of this book: the scientific and the political are always entangled. As the collection demonstrates, Latin America has been a site where this relationship has been explored, exposed and analyzed many times over.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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Mary Augusta Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019) Aug 31, 2020

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mass Vaccination. Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell University Press), Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases.

Mass Vaccination tells the story of the people, materials, and systems that built these campaigns, exposing how, by improving the nation's health, the Chinese Communist Party quickly asserted itself in the daily lives of all citizens. This crusade had deep roots in the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when researchers in China's southwest struggled to immunize as many people as possible, both in urban and rural areas. But its legacy was profound, providing a means for the state to develop new forms of control and of engagement.

Brazelton considers the implications of vaccination policies for national governance, from rural health care to Cold War-era programs of medical diplomacy. By embedding Chinese medical history within international currents, she highlights how and why China became an exemplar of primary health care at a crucial moment in global health policy.

Mary Augusta Brazelton is University Lecturer in Global Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.

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Scott Soames, "The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age" (Princeton UP, 2019) Aug 28, 2020

How has philosophy transformed human knowledge and the world we live in?

Philosophical investigation is the root of all human knowledge. Developing new concepts, reinterpreting old truths, and reconceptualizing fundamental questions, philosophy has progressed―and driven human progress―for more than two millennia. In short, we live in a world philosophy made. In this concise history of philosophy's world-shaping impact, Scott Soames demonstrates that the modern world―including its science, technology, and politics―simply would not be possible without the accomplishments of philosophy.

Firmly rebutting the misconception of philosophy as ivory-tower thinking, in The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2019) Scott Soames traces its essential contributions to fields as diverse as law and logic, psychology and economics, relativity and rational decision theory. Beginning with the giants of ancient Greek philosophy, The World Philosophy Made chronicles the achievements of the great thinkers, from the medieval and early modern eras to the present. It explores how philosophy has shaped our language, science, mathematics, religion, culture, morality, education, and politics, as well as our understanding of ourselves.

Philosophy's idea of rational inquiry as the key to theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom has transformed the world in which we live. From the laws that govern society to the digital technology that permeates modern life, philosophy has opened up new possibilities and set us on more productive paths. The World Philosophy Made explains and illuminates as never before the inexhaustible richness of philosophy and its influence on our individual and collective lives.

Scott Soames is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many books include Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century; The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, volumes one and two; and Analytic Philosophy in America (all Princeton). He lives in Marina Del Rey, California.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Nick Morgan, "Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World" (HBRP, 2018) Aug 27, 2020

How is communicating virtually Is like eating Pringles forever? Find out as I talk to Nick Morgan about his new book Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018).

Morgan is one of America’s top communication theorists and coaches. He’s written for Fortune 50 CEOs as well as for political and educational leaders, and coached people for events ranging from TED talks to giving testimony to Congress.

Topics covered in this episode include:

What’s the likeliest way to lose the trust of others during a conference call, and how can you best hope to restore it?
Why are most online webinars a disaster and what kind of format improves them best?
If powerpoint presentations are no longer the way to go in selling to prospects in online calls, what’s the alternative?

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Aug 26, 2020

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship.

Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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David Moon, "The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Aug 21, 2020

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They brought plants, in particular grain and fodder crops, trees and shrubs, as well as weeds. Following their example, and drawing on the expertise of émigré Russian-Jewish scientists, the US Department of Agriculture introduced more plants, agricultural sciences, especially soil science; and methods of planting trees to shelter the land from the wind. By the 1930s, many of the grain varieties in the Great Plains had been imported from the steppes. The fertile soil was classified using the Russian term 'chernozem'. The US Forest Service was planting shelterbelts using techniques pioneered in the steppes. And, tumbling across the plains was an invasive weed from the steppes: tumbleweed. Based on archival research in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, this book explores the unexpected Russian roots of Great Plains agriculture.

David Moon is a history professor at the University of York in the UK and holds an honorary professorship at University College London. He is a specialist on Russian, Eurasian, and transnational environmental history. He began his career as a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, at the southern end of the Great Plains, and completed his new book as a visiting professor at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, in the heart of the Eurasian steppes.The American Steppes: The Unexpected Russian Roots of Great Plains Agriculture, 1870s-1930s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores connections between these two regions, is his fifth book. He would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for supporting his work.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at University of Northern Colorado.

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J. Kim and E. Maloney, "Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education and The Low-Density University" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) Aug 21, 2020

Despite stereotypes of colleges and universities still stuck in the age of the blackboard and sage-on-stage lectures, a quiet revolution has been taking place on America’s campuses led by a diverse group of learning innovators. Digital technology is one catalyst for this “turn to learning,” but professionals leading the charge include instructional designers, media specialists, and experts in data analytics – as well as technologists - working in conjunction with faculty and administrators to transform higher education.

Joshua Kim, Director of Online Programs and Strategies at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, and Edward Maloney, Professor of English and Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown, document major transformations at colleges and universities that have been quietly taking place, even amidst noise about crisis and disruption, in their new book Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Kim and Maloney were also behind the influential Inside Higher Education series 15 Scenarios for Higher Education that describes the various ways colleges and universities might open in the face of the COVID-19 threat, a series that was just compiled into a new book (introduced on today’s podcast!) called The Low-Density University.

Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org.

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Amelia Moore, "Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas" (U California Press, 2019) Aug 21, 2020

Despite being a minor contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, like many other small island nations, The Bahamas’s ecology and society are especially vulnerable to current and expected changes to the oceans and the climate. Spectacular coral reefs, low-lying islands, and a social life oriented towards the sea makes The Bahamas a posterchild of the existential dangers of global warming. At the same time, The Bahamas’s economy, firmly founded on tourism, also heavily depends upon airline and cruise line fossil fuel consumption.

Wading into this nexus, Amelia Moore casts an ethnographic eye towards the scientists, conservationists, educators, politicians, fisherpeople, and tourism boosters who attempt to understand and react to an age of ecological volatility. In contrast to assumptions of scientific objectivity and independence, Moore finds that science, politics, and business are deeply entangled in ways that are not apolitical and which require scrutiny to make adaptations to climate change more democratic and equitable.

Through prolonged research on the islands and well-paired case studies, Moore illuminates the ways that such adaptations do, can, and might not have to reproduce the inequalities inherited from colonialism and the age of fossil fuels.

Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas (University of California Press) is a stellar example of the significance and role of humanistic – and specifically ethnographic – inquiry regarding how climate change has, is, and will change human and human-nonhuman relations. Well-written and theoretically sophisticated without heavy jargon, Destination Anthropocene is a joy to read and very well suited for use in the classroom.

Amelia Moore is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Coastal Tourism and Recreation in the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Khary O. Polk, "Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948" (UNC Press, 2020) Aug 19, 2020

Khary Oronde Polk is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Contagions of Empire examines how the shifting views of Black military through the first half of the 20th century, as the U.S. increased its global empire and warfare. At once viewed as both contagious and immune, Black workers attempted to navigate the complex pathways that were left open in the military, even as they were seen as simultaneously integral and threatening to both the U.S. military and nation state. Polk’s work shows not just how scientific racism developed during this period and how U.S. militarism expanded, but how the Black community responded at each step.

Khary Oronde Polk is an Associate Professor of Black Studies and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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C. Besteman and H. Gusterson, "Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Aug 18, 2020

How can we understand computerization as a social process? Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World(University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a timely and welcome edited volume in which a set of interdisciplinary contributors explore how people make automated processes work, and how these systems reciprocally transform everyday life. From farming to finance—not to mention schools to prisons—the volume amounts to an urgent plea to remove the veil of corporate and government secrecy shrouding technologies that subtly restructure our social and material worlds without any semblance of democratic oversight. I spoke with the book’s editors, Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, about how to do the anthropology of algorithms, and what they learned from bringing these accounts together.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and numbers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law.

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Katie Day Good, "Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education" (MIT Press, 2020) Aug 17, 2020

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global citizenship, connecting students across borders, and creating a participatory learning environment.

In Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (MIT Press), Katie Day Good amply illustrates that there is little new about these promises of tech-enhanced education. She demonstrates that already at the turn of the twentieth century, education reformers and technology entrepreneurs promoted emerging media as the necessary tools for preparing America’s children for a century of movement, interconnection, and rapid change.

Good examines the promulgation of both hi-tech gadgets, such as lantern slides and stereoscopes, and low-tech innovations that reformers believed would open the wide world to children’s senses and liberate them from provincial ignorance. Good’s analytical focus is on how these purportedly cosmopolitan technological applications served to strengthen American power on the world stage and masked, reinforced, and excused domestic racial and ethnic disparities instead of confronting them.

Bring the World to the Child is a thought-provoking and necessary read for anyone concerned about how the present necessity of online instruction exacerbates inequalities in education and technological access.

Katie Day Good is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, "The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2020) Aug 14, 2020

The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance(MIT Press), by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, demonstrates that this technology – which is mostly associated with covert surveillance and remote warfare – has also served as a vital tool for activists, social movements, and defenders of human rights to effect pro-social campaigns.

Through stories of exemplar initiatives and analyses of thousands of civil uses of drones, Choi-Fitzpatrick argues that scholars and others interested in the implications of emergent technologies for democracy need to look beyond the networks of social media and consider as well the material devises that populate our world.

Despite the risks and the nefarious (and obnoxious) applications of drones, these machines also have the capacity to “democratize surveillance,” putting a preeminent tool of statecraft in the hands of civil society. By tracing such uses, The Good Drone is an inspiring call for creativity, experimentation, and optimism regarding the humanitarian possibilities of emerging material technologies.

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego and concurrent Rights Lab Associate Professor of Social Movements and Human Rights at the University of Nottingham's School of Sociology and Social Policy.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the pedagogical applications of the digital humanities and the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Maile Arvin, "Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania" (Duke UP, 2020) Aug 13, 2020

From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans saw Polynesians as almost racially white, and speculated that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania(Duke University Press, 2020) Maile Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism in which Polynesians become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness.

This provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources. Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long contested these classifications, claims, and cultural representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of recognition.

In this episode of the podcast Maile talks to host Alex Golub about her book and its implications. She describes what 'possessing Polynesians' entails and how it plays out in anthropology. The discussion then shifts to ways in which Hawaiians are 'possessed' by this racial logic and use it in their own self-understanding and legal and political struggles. Finally, Maile discusses the concept of 'regenerative refusal' and how this strategy is being used by Hawaiians today.

Maile Arvin is an assistant professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and studies historical and contemporary issues of race, indigeneity and science.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles.

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Nadia Eghbal, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" (Stripe Press, 2020) Aug 12, 2020

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 collaboration, but is now a near-universal standard. But most open-source code is not developed by big teams or equitable collaborations; it’s maintained by unseen individuals who work tirelessly to write and publish code that's consumed by millions.

In Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Stripe Press), Nadia Eghbal takes an inside look at modern open source software development and its evolution over the last two decades. The book draws from hundreds of interviews with developers, and serves as a first-of-its-kind anthropological investigation of the open source community.

Eghbal examines the role of GitHub as a platform for hosting code, the way software developers are (and often aren’t) compensated for their work, and the complex dynamics between maintainers, contributors, and users of open-source software.

Nadia Eghbal is a writer and researcher who explores how the internet enables individual creators. From 2015 to 2019, she focused on the production of open source software, working independently and at GitHub to improve the open source developer experience.

Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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Jeffrey J. Kripal, "The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge" (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019) Aug 12, 2020

A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019) is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of the history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and is the associate director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He has previously taught at Harvard Divinity School and Westminster College and is the author of eight books, including The Flip. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020) Aug 12, 2020

Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study?

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are.

Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health.

Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Mack Hagood, "Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control" (Duke UP, 2019) Aug 12, 2020

How have we used twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound technologies to carve out sonic space out of the hustle and bustle of contemporary life?

In search for an answer, in this episode I speak with Mack Hagood, Blayney Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Miami University, writer, and podcaster about his book, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Duke University Press, 2011).

In Hush, Hagood examines a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies of sonic self-control that includes nature recordings, clinical audiometric tools, and “sound conditioners” through to top-selling white noise apps and the noise-canceling headphones offered under the commercially succesfull Bose and Beats brands.

What this assortment of tools and technologies have in common, Hagood argues, is that they are all “orphic media”: kinds of media that carry or generate content that is designed to efface itself as such. Orphic media can be understood as tactics and technologies that offer us respite from postmodern conditions of excess and distraction, even if that promise is not always fulfilled.

Hagood draws on a variety of sources, including the results of his own ethnographic work, patent documents, and archival material, to develop a critical account of these media that—ironically—fight sound with yet more sound, one that is both grounded in the technical detail of how specific devices do this work and is sensitive to their various use-contexts, both actual and intended.

Mack Hagood produces and hosts the Phantom Power podcast, an aural exploration of the sonic arts and humanities that launched in 2018 with the support of the Miami University Humanities Center and The National Endowment for the Humanities, and can be subscribed to wherever you get your podcasts.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Aug 11, 2020

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North(University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision.

Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world.

Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, U.S. history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.

New Books Network listeners can purchase The Nature of the Future for 25% off using the coupon code PAWLEY here.

Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Danielle Giffort, "Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) Aug 11, 2020

Psychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decades-long hiatus, researchers are once again testing how effective these drugs are in relieving symptoms for a wide variety of psychiatric conditions, from depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder to posttraumatic stress disorder and substance addiction. In Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Danielle Giffort examines how this new generation of researchers and their allies are working to rehabilitate psychedelic drugs and to usher in a new era of psychedelic medicine.

As this team of researchers and mental health professionals revive the field of psychedelic science, they are haunted by the past and by one person in particular: psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with people working on scientific psychedelia, Giffort shows how today’s researchers tell stories about Leary as an “impure” scientist and perform his antithesis to address a series of lingering dilemmas that threaten to rupture their budding legitimacy. Acid Revival presents new information about the so-called psychedelic renaissance and highlights the cultural work involved with the reassembly of dormant areas of medical science.

This colorful and accessible history of the rise, fall, and reemergence of psychedelic medicine is infused with intriguing narratives and personalities—a story for popular science aficionados as well as for scholars of the history of science and medicine.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Stuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020) Aug 10, 2020

So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on? In Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science (Penguin Books, 2020), Stuart Ritchie, a professor of psychology at King’s College London, lucidly explains how science works, and exposes the systemic issues that prevent the scientific enterprise from living up to its truth-seeking ideals.

While the scientific method will always be our best way of knowing about the world, the current system of funding and publishing incentivizes bad behavior on the part of scientists. As a result, many widely accepted and highly influential theories and claims—priming, sleep and nutrition, genes and the microbiome, and a host of drugs, allergies, and therapies—are based on unreliable, exaggerated and even fraudulent papers. Bad incentives in science have influenced everything from austerity economics to the anti-vaccination movement, and occasionally count the cost of them in human lives.

Stuart Ritchie has been at the vanguard of a movement within science aimed at exposing and fixing these problems. In this New Books Network conversation, we speak specifically about how even the most well-meaning and truth-seeking scientists can unwittingly introduce bias into their analyses. We discuss ways that scientists’ training is inadequate.

Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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Tanya Kant, "Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life" (Oxford UP, 2020) Aug 07, 2020

How are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet?

In Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press), Tanya Kant, a lecturer in Media And Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex interrogates the rise of algorithmic personalization, in the context of an internet dominated by platform providers and corporate interests.

Using detailed empirical case studies, along with a rich and deep theoretical framework, the book shows the negative impact of algorithmic personalization, the nuances and ambivalences in user behaviours, and their modes of resistance.

As we increasingly live our lives online, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how algorithms regulate our lives.

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Orit Kamir, "Betraying Dignity" (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2019) Aug 07, 2020

What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common?

Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals, political parties and nations around the world are abandoning the dignity-based culture we established in the aftermath of two world wars, less than a century ago.

Disappointed or intimidated, many turn their backs on the humanitarian, universalistic culture that presumes our inherent human dignity and celebrates it as the basis of every individual's equal human rights. Instead, people and nations are returning to a much older, honor-based cultural structure.

Because its ancient logic and mentality take new forms (such as social network shaming and certain aspects of "victimhood culture") -- we fail to recognize them, and overlook the pitfalls of the old honor-based structure. Narrating the history of honor-based societies, this book distinguishes their underlying principle from the post-WWII notion of dignity that underlies human rights. It makes the case that in order to revive and strengthen dignity-based culture, the concept of human dignity must be defined narrowly and succinctly, and enhanced with the principle of respect.

Continuing its historical and cultural narrative, the book discusses contemporary phenomena such as al-Qaeda terrorists, shaming via social network, FoMO, and some features of the emerging "victimhood culture". The book pays homage to Erich Fromm's classic Escape from Freedom.

Orit Kamir is founder and academic head of the Center for Human Dignity in Israel, and has taught law and culture studies at universities in Israel, the United States, and Europe.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Joshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) Aug 06, 2020

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy.

Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and globes, Nall offers a history of how astronomers’ cultivation of a mass public shaped their discipline as it managed controversies over the possibility of canals on Mars, and even interplanetary communication. This book is strongly recommended for historians of science and communication, as well as those with an eye for material culture.

Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and num- bers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law.

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Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020) Aug 06, 2020

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In Contraception: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2020), Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present. Drucker approaches the subject from the perspective of reproductive justice: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children safely and healthily.

Drucker describes contraceptive methods available before the pill, including the diaphragm (dispensed at the Jacobs clinic) and condom, spermicidal jellies, and periodic abstinences. She looks at the development and dissemination of the pill and its chemical descendants; describes technological developments in such non-hormonal contraceptives as the cervical cap and timing methods (including the “rhythm method” favored by the Roman Catholic church); and explains the concept of reproductive justice. Finally, Drucker considers the future of contraception—the adaptations of existing methods, new forms of distribution, and ongoing efforts needed to support contraceptive access

Dr. Donna Drucker leads the English as the Language for Instruction Project, which helps faculty, administrative staff, scientific staff, and students at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany) improve their English abilities for teaching and learning.

Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.

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J. Browning and T. Silver, "An Environmental History of the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2020) Aug 06, 2020

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world.

To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But in An Environmental History of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact.

As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale.

And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks.

In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

Judkin Browning is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Appalachian State University and has written two military histories of the Civil War: Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (2011) and The Seven Days’ Battle: The War Begins Anew (2012).

Timothy Silver is Professor of History at Appalachian State University and the author of Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America and A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800, a foundational work in the field of environmental history.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Alex Sayf Cummings, "Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy" (Columbia UP, 2020) Aug 05, 2020

Beginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina’s low-wage economy. They pitched the universities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as the kernel of a tech hub, Research Triangle Park, which would lure a new class of highly educated workers. In the process, they created a blueprint for what would become known as the knowledge economy: a future built on intellectual labor and the production of intellectual property.

In Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy (Columbia UP, 2020), Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. She analyzes the use of ideas of culture and creativity to fuel economic development, how workers experienced life in the Triangle, and the role of the federal government in bringing the modern technology industry into being. As Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill were transformed by high-tech development, the old South gave way to a distinctly new one, which welded the intellectual power of universities to a vision of the suburban good life. Cummings pinpoints how the story of the Research Triangle sheds new light on the origins of today’s urban landscape, in which innovation, as exemplified by the tech industry, is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of gentrification and inequality. Placing the knowledge economy in a broader cultural and intellectual context, Brain Magnet offers vital insight int

Dr. Alex Sayf Cummings is a historian of law, technology, and American political culture at Georgia State University. She earned a BA in History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and her PhD in History from Columbia University.

Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.

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Anton Howes, "Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation" (Princeton UP, 2020) Aug 04, 2020

Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence education, commerce, music, art, architecture, communications, food, and every other corner of society. Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2020), written by the historian of innovation and the RSA’s resident historian Anton Howes, is the fascinating story of this unique institution.

Drawing on exclusive access to a wealth of rare papers and artifacts from the Society’s own archives, Howes shows how the Society of Arts has constantly reinvented itself to keep in step with changing times. The Society has served as a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, purchased and restored an entire village, encouraged the planting of more than sixty million trees, and sought technological alternatives to child labour. Arts and Minds reveals how a society of public-spirited individuals tried to make their country a better place, and draws vital lessons from their triumphs and failures for all would-be reformers today.

Matthew Jordan is a professor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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Mari K. Webel, "The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019) Aug 03, 2020

In The Politics of Disease Control. Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Mari K. Webel tells a history of colonial interventions among three communities of the Great Lakes region of East Africa. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Eastern African societies faced a range of social, political and economic challenges, many of which were connected to the establishment of British and German colonial regimes. In the midst of these, African societies experienced an epidemic outbreak of human African Trypanosomiasis, commonly known as “sleeping sickness.” The epidemic posed a serious threat to the economic prospects of colonial regimes who felt it necessary to authorize and fund large scale campaigns aimed at researching a treatment that could cure and stop the spread of the disease. Dr. Webel locates these colonial interventions in the context of the rich intellectual worlds that Great Lakes’ communities used to make sense of experiences of misfortune and illness. She argues that only by understanding the concepts and strategies that Africans had historically used to navigate challenging times, can we explain how and whether they chose to interact with the health efforts promoted by colonial authorities. The book highlights the long, largely neglected, and mostly unsuccessful, quest to eradicate or treat human African trypanosomiasis. It explains the impact that early campaigns to contain the disease had on the rationale and design of subsequent public health interventions in other parts of Africa, and how colonial narratives continue to affect modern research agendas into tropical diseases. Moreover, the book underscores the importance of paying attention to local, cultural and historical factors in the design of any public health campaign.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

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Melissa J. Wilde, "Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion" (U California Press, 2020) Aug 03, 2020

Although it has largely been erased from the collective memory of American Christianity, the debate over eugenics was a major factor in the history of 20th-century religious movements, with many churches actively supporting the pseudoscience as a component of the Social Gospel.

In Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion (University of California Press, 2020), Dr. Melissa J. Wilde, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to white supremacist views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny. We discuss how birth control use and promotion was conceived as a religious duty, how Biblical exegesis was used in support of eugenics, how the fear of “race suicide” motivated predominantly White denominations to limit reproduction among marginalized people, how groups like the Catholics and the Orthodox Jews pushed back against the pro-eugenics tide, the hidden racist legacy of contemporary progressive churches, and the silence that continues to exist around the issue today.

Diana Dukhanova received her PhD from Brown University, where she is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies, in 2018. Her work focuses on gender, religion, and sexuality in Russian religious culture. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Jesus of Bethlehem: Vasily V. Rozanov’s Russian Family Values.

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Charlton D. McIlwain, "Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter" (Oxford UP, 2020) Aug 03, 2020

In Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford Univeristy Press), Charlton McIlwain, Vice Provost for Faculty Engagement and Development and professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, examines the intersection of racial justice movements, technology, and culture.

McIlwain names the often ignored or neglected African American pioneers of computer and Internet technology. At the same time, he explores how technological innovations are deployed on Black and other marginalized communities. In connecting these threads, McIlwain demonstrates the centrality of African Americans to both the history and future of the Internet.

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Olivia Weisser, "ll Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England" (Yale UP, 2015) Jul 31, 2020

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Olivia Weisser, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, to talk about her 2015 Yale University Press release, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. Olivia Weisser can be described as an historian of Early Modern England, an historian of medicine, and as a gender historian. This book sits right at the intersection of all three of these subfields and contributes to our understanding of the lived experience of religion, the lived experience of gender, ideas about ‘nature,’ and, of course, the history of medicine. Through its investigation of the gender-specific ways women and men talk about their illnesses, Weisser argues that illness is a construction, ongoing, that is specific to space and time, age, class, country of origin, race, and, specifically in this discussion: gender.

Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective.

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Sarah B. Rodriguez, "The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation" (Rutgers UP, 2020) Jul 30, 2020

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 surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process.

It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation(Rutgers University Press, 2020) asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action?

The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.

Sarah B. Rodriguez is a medical historian at Northwestern University in the Global Health Studies Program, the Department of Medical Education, and the Graduate Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. Her teaching and research focuses on the history of reproduction, clinical practice, and research ethics. Her publications include the book Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Practice.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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T. Paulus and A. Wise, "Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk " (Routledge, 2019) Jul 30, 2020

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Trena Paulus of Eastern Tennessee State University and Dr. Alyssa Wise of New York University on their new book, Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk (Routledge, 2019).

The book offers a comprehensive discussion of conducting research on online talk, which includes but is not limited to synchronous and asynchronous interactions on social media, discussion forums, and other forms of digital communication platforms.

It walks readers through the different stages and procedures of conducting online research, addresses the major challenges that researchers often encounter in doing this type of work, and presents a new research framework for conceiving online research. The book has a strong emphasis on supporting researchers to unpack their implicit assumptions and make informed decisions. It also pays close attention to the unique ethical challenges in doing research online.

In an era of physical distancing, many social and educational research activities have been moved from face-to-face to online settings. The book will provide researchers with timely, much-needed, and rich food for thought as they make this unexpected transition.

Novice and experienced researchers from multiple disciplines, such as education, communication, media studies, health sciences, political sciences and business, will all benefit from the methodological insights that Paulus and Wise shared in this book.

Trena M. Paulus is Professor of Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, USA.

Alyssa Friend Wise is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Director of the Learning Analytics Research Network at New York University, USA.

Pengfei Zhao is a qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.

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Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020) Jul 29, 2020

At age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate activist since age 11, studied engineering and public policy to understand what physically has to happen to solve climate change, and served in the Massachusetts state legislature on a climate-focused platform.

In 2018 he canceled his campaign for re-election so he could work full-time on climate change at the national and global levels. The 100% Solution framework is a product of his political experiences, numerous meetings with technical experts and activists, and intensive research and analysis.

The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change (Melville House) is a highly visual book, with informative and whimsical illustrations drawn by Violet Kitchen, a visual artist, illustrator, and writer based in western Massachusetts. She currently splits her time between being a full-time art student and a part-time hermit, and is available for commissions and freelance work. Violet also got her start at a young age: her instructional manual Drawing Comics Is Easy, Except When It’s Hard, written and drawn at age seven, earned her the title of youngest ever Eisner Award nominee.

In this New Books Network interview, we speak about the political, industrial, and scientific changes that need to occur by 2050 to solve climate change, as well as the importance of focusing on real solutions rather than wallowing in fear.

Solomon Goldstein-Rose was elected to the Massachusetts legislature on a climate change-focused platform at age 22. He previously interned in the Obama White House and in Congress, and ran a statewide carbon pricing campaign. He lives in Amherst, MA. For more see: SolomonGR.com

Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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Philip Butler, "Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) Jul 29, 2020

In his book Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Philip Butler explores what might happen if Black people in the United States merged technology and spirituality in their fight towards materializing liberating realities.

The discussions shaping what it means for humans to exist with technology and as part of technology are already underway: transhumanism suggests that any use of technology to augment intellectual, psychological, or physical capability makes one transhuman. In an attempt to encourage Black people in the United States to become technological progenitors as a spiritual act, Butler asks whether anyone has ever been 'just' human? Butler then explores the implications of this question and its link to viewing the body as technology.

Re-imagining incarnation as a relationship between vitality, biochemistry, and genetics, the book also takes a critical scientific approach to understanding the biological embodiment of Black spiritual practices. It shows how current and emerging technologies might align with the generative biological states of Black spiritualities in order to concretely disrupt and dismantle oppressive societal structures.

Dr. Philip Butler is the Term Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman and Artificial Intelligence Systems at the Iliff School of Theology. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities. His work primarily focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, technology, spirituality, and race. Currently, he is working to construct a Black posthumanism that is both critical and speculative in nature. He is also building a distinctly Black AI interface combining machine learning and psychotherapeutic systems.

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Paulo Drinot, "The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Jul 29, 2020

Paulo Drinot’s The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the interplay of sexuality, society, and the state in Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drinot analyzes the rules and norms that governed prostitution and venereal disease in this period, and tracks how regulation of prostitution was implemented in the early twentieth century, and then seemingly abandoned in the 1950s. Drinot’s story foregrounds the many agents that intervened in this process: prostitutes––or sex workers as we may call them today––but also government officials, physicians, journalists, feminists, among others.

Set in a global and comparative framework, this book centers on Peru, a country that came “late” to the regulation of prostitution, and did so under arguments that combined concerns about public health and ideas about proper female and male sexuality. The Sexual Question goes beyond the history of prostitution for it also sheds light on broader processes such as the medicalization of society and the construction of the nation-state in Latin American societies. Race figures prominently in this story: throughout this period, the regulation of prostitution was accompanied by the racialization of disease, and the policing of certain groups deemed especially dangerous or in need of protection (Afro-Peruvians and indigenous groups for example). This is a timely book, not only for those listeners concerned with Latin American history, but also for those who are interested in sexuality, the state, race, and medical history more generally. A must for our listeners!

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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Andrew Kettler, "The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Jul 27, 2020

In his new book, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Andrew Kettler charts the impact that smell had on the making of race and justifications for enslavement in the Atlantic world.

Western European defined the African subject as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. So powerful was this process of embodied cultural knowledge and racial othering that the very European biological function of smell altered in the early modern period.

While the first half of the book details this dialectical materialism from a European perspective, the second half speaks to the real consciousness and function that the sense of smell had in communities of African descent. Smell became a powerful tool for many enslaved peoples and racialized “others” to assert their agency, individualism, power, and perform everyday acts of resistance.

Deeply researched and theorized, The Smell of Slavery offers modern readers a deeper historical understanding of the unconscious development of their senses and the powerful legacy that such embodied cultural knowledge and olfactory racism still has on Atlantic societies.

Dr. Andrew Kettler is an Ahmason-Getty Fellow for the University of California, Los Angeles Center for 17th and 18th-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic word.

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Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (MIT Press, 2020) Jul 27, 2020

In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of Civic Media at MIT, builds the case for designers and researchers to make the communities they impact co-equal partners in the products, services, and organizations they create.

This requires more than eliciting participation from community members, particularly if the goal is extraction. On the contrary, design justice demands a deep understanding of the community and its needs, engagement with community members, and a recognition of their expertise, along with reciprocation of value.

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Sandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020) Jul 22, 2020

In Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity (Island Press), Sandra Postel acknowledges society’s past mishaps with managing water and emphasizes our future is contingent upon rehabilitating our science, tech, and political solutions.

To understand our past and provide hope for our future Sandra takes readers around the world to explore water projects that work with, rather than against, nature’s rhythms. Sandra discusses her journey to learning about these projects.

What’s more, Sandra recognizes the complex nature of issues and addresses all aspects of water issues and solutions. In our conversation, Postel discusses water as a gift and leaves the audience to think about how they will use this great gift.

Chris Gambino is an Assistant Professor in the School of Agriculture and Environmental Science at Delaware Valley University.

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Marc Zimmer, "The State of Science" (Prometheus Books, 2020) Jul 21, 2020

New research and innovations in the field of science are leading to life-changing and world-altering discoveries like never before. What does the horizon of science look like? Who are the scientists that are making it happen? And, how are we to introduce these revolutions to a society in which a segment of the population has become more and more skeptical of science? These are the questions which Marc Zimmer, professor of chemistry at Connecticut College, asks in his new book, The State of Science: What the Future Holds and the Scientists Making It Happen(Prometheus Books)

Zimmer also investigates phony science ranging from questionable "health" products to the fervent anti-vaccination movement. Zimmer introduces readers to the real people making these breakthroughs. Concluding with chapters on the rise of women in STEM fields, the importance of US immigration policies to science, and new, unorthodox ways of DIY science and crowdsource funding, The State of Science shows where science is, where it is heading, and the scientists who are at the forefront of progress

Marc Zimmer is the Jean C. Tempel ’65 Professor of Chemistry at Connecticut College and the author of Glowing Genes, the first popular science book on jellyfish and firefly proteins; IlluminatingDiseases (Oxford University Press 2015); and three books for young adults. His writing has appeared in USA Today and the Los AngelesTimes, and he has been interviewed and quoted in the Economist, Science and Nature.

Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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Will Rollason, "Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets" (Lexington Books, 2020) Jul 20, 2020

Will Rollason is senior lecturer of anthropology at Brunel University London. He’s written a fascinating book titled Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets (Lexington Books, 2020).

Will’s book is an ethnography of taxi-moto drivers in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. Not only is his book a rich account of the everyday lives of motorcylists’ (motari) everyday lives, Will’s research challenge anthropological understanding of the concept of power and its relationship to culture.

He argues that the concept of power is too expansive, too all-encompassing to provide explanations of how “power” operates in a given culture. Will finds that there is dearth of understanding in the social sciences, leading to a conceptual inability to engage in questions of justice and make common cause with the oppressed.

Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University.

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Philip Reid, "The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800" (Brill, 2020) Jul 20, 2020

To the average landlubber, the merchant ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1800 seem little different from their counterparts two centuries beforehand. By detailing how these ships were built and operated, though, Philip Reid shows in his book The Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600-1800 (Brill, 2020), how these vessels underwent considerable adaptation over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries in response to evolving technologies and the demands of their industry. As Reid explains, the first ships dispatched by the English across the Atlantic at the start of the period were sturdy galleons known for their versatility. These vessels, however, proved less profitable than their Dutch counterparts, which were less sturdy but far more capacious. Over time, British shipbuilders adapted to the Dutch example, with evolution occurring slowly though changes introduced at a variety of different points in the design and construction process. Nevertheless, continuities persisted, as shipbuilders and their operators often found themselves at the limits of what was possible given the intended purposes of the vessels and the boundaries of what was possible with the nautical technology of the era.

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Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jul 20, 2020

In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, explores the world of open technology – communities centered on knowledge sharing.

In particular, she investigates how these communities are considering the question of diversity and inclusion. Using ethnographic methods – interviews, participant observation, and deep readings of texts – Dunbar-Hester shows how the problem-solving ethos of open tech does not quite meet the challenge of structural social problems.

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Eugenia Lean, "Vernacular Industrialism in China"(Columbia UP, 2020) Jul 17, 2020

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns.

In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.

Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work.

Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the twenty-first century.

Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940 (Columbia University Press) offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

Eugenia Lean is professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures and current director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

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Mark Anderson, "From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology" (Stanford UP, 2019) Jul 17, 2020

Mark Anderson’s From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism and American Anthropology (Stanford University Press) is at once a story about US anthropology and US liberalism from the 1930s to the 1960s.

By interrogating the Boasian intervention into the idea of biological race, Anderson shows how, despite their progressive and anti-racist intentions, Boas and ‘the Boasians’ naturalised the idea of the United States as a white nation and helped to entrench problematic discourses, such as “colour-blindness”.

Alongside tracing the history of Boasian thought on race, highlighting the paradoxes and strange logics in Boasian anti-racism, Anderson identifies contemporaries who undertook more rigorous examinations of race, who offered more critical anti-racist analytics, but were sidelined in the history of US anthropology.

From Boas to Black Power doesn’t attempt to deny that the Boasians offered a trenchant critique of the biological conception of race, but shows that their commitment to liberalism undermined a true reckoning with how race shapes the United States.

Mark D. Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, and also wrote Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (University of Minnesota Press).

Lachlan Summers is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, USA, where he researches earthquake politics in Mexico City. He and his friends were permanently banned from teaching at UCSC for participating in the wildcat strike of 2019-2020. He is a contributing editor for Cultural Anthropology and can be found on Twitter @backup_sandwich.

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Luz María Hernández Sáenz, "Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018) Jul 16, 2020

In Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Luz María Hernández Sáenz follows the trajectory of physicians in their quest for the professionalization of medicine in Mexico.

In the nineteenth century, medical practitioners sought to earn scientific and professional recognition both at home an internationally, and in doing so, they created institutions that shaped their profession, and sought to establish a monopoly in the realm of public health.

Hernández Sáenz places this story in an international context and demonstrates the importance of the French model in the establishment of a modern medical profession in Mexico. Significantly, we see how medical institutions changed as Mexico transitioned from a colonial society to a liberal, independent republic.

As we hear by the end of the interview, Mexican medical practitioners were eventually successful in earning professional status, and in monopolizing medical knowledge, however, they did not oust their rivals, nor they managed to turn medicine into a priority for local and national governments.

This is particularly important in the context of the current global pandemic for as Hernández Sáenz tells us, many of the problems that preoccupied physicians and government officials in the nineteenth century, still accompany us today. Chief among them is the subordination of matters of public health to economic interests, an important consideration for listeners interested in thinking how the past informs our present.

Luz María Hernández Sáenz is associate professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Jul 15, 2020

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science.

Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself.

Elizabeth A. Williams is professor emerita of history at Oklahoma State University.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Fay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jul 14, 2020

Before the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, public health experts in the U.S. and U.K. were warning of the epidemic of loneliness.

Loneliness steals more years of life than obesity. Loneliness is as much of a risk as smoking. Loneliness shortens a lifespan as much as poverty. It is associated with addiction, depression, anxiety, paranoia, and even suicide. And more and more of us report feeling lonely.

Nevertheless, despite our 21st-century fears of an epidemic of loneliness, we know very little about it clinically, or historically. So Fay Bound Alberti’s new book, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2019) has appeared at just the right time.

Alberti offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist. And where loneliness is identified, it is not always bad, but a complex emotional state that differs according to class, gender, ethnicity and experience.

Looking at informative case studies such as Sylvia Plath, Queen Victoria, and Virginia Woolf, A Biography of Loneliness charts the emergence of loneliness as a modern and embodied emotional state.

Dr Fay Bound Alberti is a Reader in History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of York.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Matto Mildenberger, "Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics" (MIT Press, 2020) Jul 13, 2020

Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not?

In his new book Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Press, 2020), Matto Mildenberger (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) uses a comparative analysis of Norway, Australia, and the United States to explain differences in climate policy-making . Mildenberger concludes that despite variation in policy preferences and governmental systems, business and labor interests have infiltrated the policy-making process to prevent governments from combating climate change with legislation.

Mildenberger argues that carbon polluters capture governments through “double representation” because carbon polluters are represented regardless of what political coalition holds power. On the left, polluters are represented by labor unions who fear that increased regulations mean a decrease in jobs. On the right, polluters are represented by corporations who associate increased regulations with decreasing profits. Mildenberger asserts that the versatility of double representation makes it the most important factor in climate policy conflict across advanced economies. To support his theory, Mildenberger uses case studies of Australia, Norway, and the United States. Looking at these countries, Mildenberger describes two methods through which business and labor interests affect climate policy. One, where business or labor interests are part of a larger political coalition and use their position to participate in the writing of legislation. This results in weaker legislation. Alternatively, if business and labor interests are shut out of the political process, Mildenberger details how they mobilize the public against legislation making it less politically beneficial to take action.

Mildenberger’s comparative analysis of carbon polluters and their influence on climate policy sheds new light on policy discrepancies around the world. Additionally, Mildenberger offers a guide for future policy makers to combat the double representation of carbon polluters.

Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

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David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020) Jul 13, 2020

David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past and future of science.

As a historian, he studies mostly 20th-century physics, and in particular the history of quantum mechanics, Feynman diagrams, physics in the counterculture era, and much more. As a physicist, he studies particle physics and theories of cosmology, focused mostly on the early expansion of the universe.

In this New Books Network podcast, I speak to David Kaiser about his new book, Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World(University of Chicago Press, 2020). It’s a collection of essays, many of them adapted from magazine and newspaper articles he’s penned over the years.

The book paints intimate portraits of some incredible luminaries—Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Paul Dirac, among many others—explains how physics has changed as a discipline in the last century, and demonstrates how science is inseparable from its social context. David Kaiser is an incredible ambassador for physics and its history, and it was a delight to speak with him.

David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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Lizzie O’Shea, "Future Histories" (Verso, 2019) Jul 13, 2020

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 Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology(Verso), Lizzie O’Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O’Shea constructs a “usable past” that help us determine our digital future.

What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources—like the Internet—in common? Can debates over digital access be guided by Tom Paine’s theories of democratic economic redistribution? And how is Elon Musk not a visionary but a throwback to Victorian-era utopians?

In engaging, sparkling prose, O’Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and what potential exists for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our digital present. Future Histories is for all of us—makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites—who find ourselves in a brave new world.

Lizzie O’Shea is a lawyer, writer, and broadcaster. She is a founder and the chair of Digital Rights Watch, which advocates for human rights online, is a special advisor to the National Justice Project, and also sits on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech and the Alliance for Gambling Reform. At the National Justice Project, she worked with lawyers, journalists and activists to establish a Copwatch program, for which she received a Davis Projects for Peace Prize. In June 2019, she was named a Human Rights Hero by Access Now.

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Her research intersects intellectual history, digital humanities and cultural heritage studies. She can be reached at aortolja-baird@britishmuseum.org

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Philip M. Plotch, "Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City" (Cornell UP, 2020) Jul 13, 2020

Ever since New York City built one of the world’s great subway systems, no promise has been more tantalizing than the proposal to build a new subway line under Second Avenue in Manhattan. Yet the Second Avenue subway--although first envisioned in the 1920s, did not open until 2017—and even then in a truncated form. In the story of this long-awaited subway line, which Philip Mark Plotch explores in the context of the transit system around it, we learn how the subways knit York City together and how the system has staggered, revived and staggered again. In Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City (Cornell University Press, 2020), Plotch discusses the problems of uneven funding, high costs, and political machinations that hobble the subway system-- and how, on Second Avenue, they were finally overcome.

Robert W. Snyder, professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers-University-Newark and Manhattan Borough Historian, is the author of Transit Talk: New York’s Bus and Subway Workers Tell their Stories and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York. He can be reached at rwsnyder@newark.rutgers.edu.

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P. W. Singer and A. Cole, "Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution" (HMH, 2020) Jul 10, 2020

In P. W. Singer and August Cole's groundbreaking book, Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), an FBI agent hunts a new kind of terrorist through a Washington, DC, of the future - at once a gripping technothriller and a fact-based tour of tomorrow.

America is on the brink of a revolution, one both technological and political. The science fiction of AI and robotics has finally come true, but millions are angry and fearful that the future has left them behind.

After narrowly stopping a bombing at Washington’s Union Station, FBI Special Agent Lara Keegan receives a new assignment: to field-test an advanced police robot. As a series of shocking catastrophes unfolds, the two find themselves investigating a conspiracy whose mastermind is using cutting-edge tech to rip the nation apart. To stop this new breed of terrorist, their only hope is to forge a new type of partnership.

Burn-In is especially chilling because it is something more than a pulse-pounding read: every tech, trend, and scene is drawn from real world research on the ways that our politics, our economy, and even our family lives will soon be transformed. Blending a techno-thriller’s excitement with nonfiction’s insight, Singer and Cole illuminate the darkest corners of the world soon to come.

P.W. Singer is an expert on twenty-first-century warfare. His award-winning nonfiction books include the New York Times bestseller Wired for War.

August Cole is a writer and analyst specializing in national security issues and a former defense industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Sabine Hildebrandt, "The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich" (Berghahn, 2017) Jul 09, 2020

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As Sabine Hildebrandt reveals in The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich (Berghahn, 2017), however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the “future dead.”

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Rachel Mundy, "Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening" (Wesleyan UP, 2018) Jul 07, 2020

“What makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy?” So asks—and answers—Rachel Mundy, who is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University–Newark. In her book, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening(Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Mundy shows how the history of the humanities is intimately connected with the lives of animals.

Focusing on animal musicality, with a particular emphasis on birdsong, Mundy recounts dozens of twentieth-century encounters—in North America, Europe, and Africa—between animals and human researchers working in a variety of fields, work we now recognize as belonging to the disciplines of evolutionary biology, anthropology, ethology (the study of animal behavior), and ethnomusicology.

Carefully attending to the value that was assigned to animal life in the lab and in the field, Mundy relates the story of how lives that were figured as non-human or less-than-human shape the received accounts of human and animal behavior in these disciplines. Crucially, the moral calculus that this research enacted has had lasting consequences for how all kinds of critical differences are figured in the contemporary postmodern humanities, including those of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Not only a collection of diverse and deeply-researched vignettes into the ethics of research into animal musicality during the long twentieth century, Mundy’s book culminates in a powerful and timely call for a reappraisal of the “human” at the heart of humanities and the human sciences at large.

In this episode, we discuss the book and how it sketches the ambit of a notional field of the “animanities”: a new scholarly formation that problematises the long-standing reduction of life to a mere term in the exchange of animal vitality for human knowledge.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Greg Mitchell, "The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (The New Press, 2020) Jul 07, 2020

dSoon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (The New Press, 2020) chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military.

Greg Mitchell blogs at http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com and is on Twitter at @GregMitch.

Joel Tscherne can be followed on Twitter at @JoelTscherne.

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Allison Bigelow, "Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World" (UNC Press 2020) Jul 06, 2020

Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was created for and founded upon the mining and coining of silver ore from its colonies. Our knowledge about this vital industry, however, remains invariably tethered to the elite sources and perspectives that were preserved in the written record. In Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (UNC Press 2020), Allison Bigelow provides an important historiographical contribution by demonstrating how we can revisit these sources to trace the transmission of metallurgical knowledge from the colonized indigenous laborers who worked the ore to the metropolitan authors who codified practices and knowledge.

Rather than European science diffusing to colonial outposts, Bigelow’s studies of gold, silver, copper, and iron illustrate that the technologies that sustained Iberian imperialism were amalgamations like the ores themselves. From prospecting to refining, the making of imperial wealth required learning from indigenous ways of knowing and working the earth and its resources. Moreover, Mining Language goes beyond finding hybridity in the archive by teasing out how Europeans systematically (and sometimes not so systematically) erased the indigenous roots of knowledge and practices. Bigelow shows how as information traveled from American soils to European academies through translations and retranslations, identities became reified, fantasies were confirmed, meanings were lost and occasionally pure nonsense got into the mix.

Overall, Mining Language demonstrates the possibilities opened when we reconsider the history of technology to no longer center eye-popping inventions but instead the more quotidian practices that sustain life, create wealth, and enforce power. Seen thusly, the history of technology, power, and imperialism is not a story of implementation and adaptation, but rather one of syncretism and erasure. Scholars and readers interested in the social politics of knowledge production will find Mining Language a compelling and thought-provoking work that provides essential historical background to related issues in the 21st century.

Allison Bigelow is the Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Ruth Leys, "The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique" (University of Chicago Press, 2017) Jul 06, 2020

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Ruth Leys (she/hers), Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, on The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their basic nature or workings. Ruth Leys’s brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement.

The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning.

Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel.

We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Doron Galili, "Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939" (Duke UP, 2020) Jul 02, 2020

With the burst of new technologies in the 1870s, many inventors and visionaries believed that the transmission of moving images was just around the corner. As Doron Galili details in his book Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020), the half-century of speculations that followed did much to shape the development of broadcast television well before it emerged in the 1930s. Galili notes that much of this occurred within the context of contemporary technologies such as the cinema and the telephone, both of which pointed to the inherent possibilities of such an invention yet embodied very different ideas about image and communications. Seeking to conceptualize moving image technology, people often used the eye as a metaphor or model for how it might operate or the role that it would serve. Though the emergence of the cinema industry in the United States did much to shape the context in which television would develop in the United States, Galili shows how differing theories of visual media and society in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy offered alternate models that influenced how the new technology was received in their respective countries.

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He Bian, "Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China" (Princeton UP, 2020) Jul 02, 2020

He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China. This trans-dynastic book looks at how Chinese approaches to knowledge changed during the Ming and Qing as state-commissioned pharmacopeias dwindled, amateur investigations into the knowledge of things soared, and, ultimately, as natural history was de-medicalized, all while commercialization, monetization, long-distance trade, and empire flourished. This exceptionally rich and intimately text-based study introduces readers to a number of fascinating bencao (materia media), makes a compelling case for studying Chinese history through the lens of pharmacy, and demonstrates that Chinese pharmacy itself has a rich and vibrant history—all with stunning ease. This is both an essential and a joyful read for China historians, while still accessible for non-specialists interested in reading about the early modern world, medicine, the history of knowledge, and stories of strange drugs and the even stranger men who dispensed them.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. She is interested in book history, early modern translation, and anything involving a kesike.

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Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020) Jun 30, 2020

We sit at the beginning of what could be “both a truly terrifying and a golden era in humanity.” In The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (HarperOne, 2020), leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”–Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face.

This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed in the face of the coming calamities. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to reaffirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.

Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy.

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Ainissa Ramirez, "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another" (MIT Press, 2020) Jun 25, 2020

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)

Dr. Ramirez examines eight inventions―clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips―and reveals how they shaped the human experience. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies.

Ainissa Ramirez, Ph.D. is an award-winning scientist and science communicator

Najarian Peters is a new associate professor of law at the University of Kansas and a Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Klein Institute at Harvard University. Her research interests and teaching areas focus on privacy and emerging technology. Email her at: npeters@law.harvard.edu, najarian.peters@ku.edu

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Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019) Jun 24, 2020

What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it something more?

In The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019), Lee McIntyre addresses recent attacks on science in areas such as climate change, vaccination, and even belief that the world is flat by explaining why science is a culture built around a “scientific attitude” that embraces evidence and a willingness to change beliefs based on where evidence leads.

What does it mean for science education if the success of science derives as much from attitude as it does from methodology? And can science provide a model for other truth-seeking endeavors?

Join us for a conversation that draws together ideas from science, philosophy, and education and applies them to the most important issues we face as a society.

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School.

Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org.

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Alejandra Bronfman, "Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean" (UNC Press, 2016) Jun 23, 2020

The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas.

In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, 2016), Alejandra Bronfman offers a refreshing perspective to this well-trodden story. In this book, she traces the emergence and growth of telecommunications technologies in Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba during the first half of the twentieth century.

Bronfman examines the ways these new communication technologies often undermined rather than served as tools of domination for imperial forces—American or British.

Most importantly, this book has us reconsider the role of sound and, specifically, radio broadcasting as central to political mobilization in ridding the region from empire.

Alejandra Bronfman is Chair and Associate Professor, Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies, University of Albany.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.

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Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991" (V and R Unipress, 2017) Jun 23, 2020

In Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991 (V & R Unipress, 2017), Julia Obertreis explores the infrastructural, technical, and environmental aspects of the history of cotton agriculture and irrigation in Soviet Central Asia. Based on published sources and archival research conducted in Tashkent, Obertreis’ monograph offers new insights into the nature of Russian Imperial and Soviet statecraft, as well as the technical and ideological motivations behind the transformation of the Central Asian environment. This book is valuable reading for anyone interested in Russia and Central Asia, past or present.

Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at The Ohio State University.

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Ashley E. Kerr, "Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910)" (Vanderbilt UP, 2020) Jun 22, 2020

Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860-1910) (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020) argues that Argentine scientific projects of the era were not just racial encounters, but were also conditioned by sexual relationships in all their messy, physical reality.

The writers studied here (an eclectic group of scientists, anthropologists, and novelists, including Estanislao Zeballos, Lucio and Eduarda Mansilla, Ramón Lista, and Florence Dixie reflect on Indigenous sexual practices, analyze the advisability and effects of interracial sex, and use the language of desire to narrate encounters with Indigenous peoples as they try to scientifically pinpoint Argentina's racial identity and future potential.

Kerr's reach extends into history of science, literary studies, and history of anthropology, illuminating a scholarly time and place in which the lines betwixt were much blurrier, if they existed at all.

Ashley Kerr is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Idaho.

Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. You can tweet her and suggest books at @MariniCandela

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Mariann Hardey, "The Culture of Women in Tech: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman" (Emerald, 2019) Jun 22, 2020

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 Associate Professor in Marketing at Durham University, shows the ongoing inequalities faced by women in the IT industry. The book uses a range of case studies from across the world’s ‘tech cities’, drawing on interviews, focus groups, ethnography, and a feminist theoretical framework, to make clear the problem of the ‘women in tech’ label and the sexism in the tech industry. The book analyses the gendered spatial and career divisions of tech, making it an important addition to the literature, as well as essential reading for anyone interested in how this most essential modern industry works.

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Henry M. Cowles, "The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey" (Harvard UP, 2020) Jun 17, 2020

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking.

The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020) tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once taught as a natural process.

Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to John Dewey’s vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century—but their organic account was not to last.

Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful.

This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science’s power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

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Nathan G. Alexander, "Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914" (NYU Press, 2019) Jun 17, 2020

Is modern racism a product of secularization and the decline of Christian universalism? The debate has raged for decades, but up to now, the actual racial views of historical atheists and freethinkers have never been subjected to a systematic analysis.

In his new book, Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914, Nathan Alexander sets out to correct the oversight. The book centres on Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when popular atheist movements were emerging and skepticism about the truth of Christianity was becoming widespread.

This newly embraced secularization created a paradox. How could Western civilization represent the pinnacle of human progress, as most white atheists accepted, when the majority of these societies still believed in Christianity? The result of this tension was a profound ambivalence regarding issues of racial and civilizational superiority. At times, white atheists assented to scientific racism and hierarchical conceptions of civilization; at others, they denounced racial prejudice and spoke favorably of non-white, non-Western civilizations.

Covering racial and evolutionary science, imperialism, slavery, and racial prejudice in theory and practice, Alexander’s book provides a much-needed account of the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas espoused by the transatlantic community of atheists and freethinkers. It also reflects on the social dimension of irreligiousness, exploring how working-class atheists’ experiences of exclusion could make them sympathetic to other marginalized groups.

Nathan Alexander is a Canadian historian, researching the history of race and racism, and the history of atheism and secularization. He finished his PhD at the University of St Andrews in the UK and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies with the University of Erfurt, Germany.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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David R. Grimes, "The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) Jun 11, 2020

What are some of the prevalent ways in which we lie to ourselves and limit our flexibility?

Today I discussed this and other questions with David R. Grimes, the author of The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World (Simon & Schuster, 2019).

Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist, and writer. He contributes to media outlets such as PBS, the BBC, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the New York Times. This is his first book.

Topics covered in this episode include:

--What’s the origin of the term “snake oil” and how it illustrates the book’s larger points.

--Which emotions social media, especially Facebook, exploit most effectively and why. How are the “sins” of social media similar to different from how traditional mass media operates?

--In both work settings and in one’s private life, what kind of human foibles and illogical fallacies put us most at risk. What one emotion may help us grow and interact with others best.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Jonathan Gelber, "Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow" (Skyhorse, 2019) Jun 10, 2020

Today we are joined by Dr Jonathan Gelber, author of the book Tiger Woods’s Back and Tommy John’s Elbow: Injuries and Tragedies That Transformed Careers, Sports and Society (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019). Gelber is an orthopedic surgeon with the Olmstead Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. A long time athlete, Gelber examines several athletes through the prism of the “Cobra Effect, ”a phenomenon that occurs when an attempted solution to a problem results in an unintended consequence. And sometimes, that solution might even make the original problem worse. Drawing on his vast medical background, Gelber looks at athletes such as Len Bias, Hank Gathers, Magic Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Sr., Lyle Alzado and more. And, of course, Tiger Woods and Tommy John. The situation of every athlete Gelber examines, he asserts, usually has two effects: the obvious one, and a secondary outcome that was unexpected. The flawed evangelism of Alzado, who used steroids and later had brain cancer, or the death of Bias, which resulted in a change in drug laws in the United States, are two pieces of a fascinating narrative that is certain to provoke more discussion about athletes, sports and society.

Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reachedatbdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs.

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Kurt Braddock, "Weaponized Words" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Jun 09, 2020

Kurt Braddock's new book Weaponized Words: The Strategic Role of Persuasion in Violent Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020) applies existing theories of persuasion to domains unique to this digital era, such as social media, YouTube, websites, and message boards to name but a few. Terrorists deploy a range of communication methods and harness reliable communication theories to create strategic messages that persuade peaceful individuals to join their groups and engage in violence. While explaining how they accomplish this, the book lays out a blueprint for developing counter-messages perfectly designed to conquer such violent extremism and terrorism. Using this basis in persuasion theory, a socio-scientific approach is generated to fight terrorist propaganda and the damage it causes.

--Describes four key theories and perspectives related to persuasion and how they relate to radicalization and counter-radicalization.

--Identifies future challenges that security officials will face in trying to stop terrorist messaging from promoting violent radicalization.

--Suggests future directions that security officials, researchers, and policymakers can take persuasion theory to develop effective counter-messaging campaigns.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 1: Man into Wolf Jun 09, 2020

In this episode, we discuss how I discovered Robert Eisler’s Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy and unpack the book’s argument that modern humans are descended from primates who imitated the hunting practices and pack hierarchies of wolves during the scarcity of the ice age. We also hear from a crime novelist and a sociologist who were inspired by Man into Wolf in their own work and examine Eisler’s take on evolution. This episode contains brief descriptions of sexual violence.

Voice of Robert Eisler: Logan Crum.

Additional voices: Julie Ciotola and Logan Marshall.

Editing and engineering: Logan Marshall.

Music: “Shibbolet Baseda,” recorded by Elyakum Shapirra and his Israeli Orchestra.

Guests: David Dawson, H.C. Greisman, Marcello de Martino, Kristy Montee, Myrna Sheldon, Kristen Tobey, Steven Wasserstrom.

Funding provided by Ohio University Humanities Research Fund and Ohio University Honors Tutorial College Internship Program.

Special thanks to the Warburg Institute.

Bibliography and further reading:

Eisler, Robert. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erickson, Inc. Publishers, 1978 [1951].

Greisman, H. C. “Social Structure, Psychoanalysis, and Collective Aggression.” History of European Ideas Vol. 2, No. 1 (1981), pp. 35-48.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Dir, Gene Fowler, Jr. 1957.

Parrish, P. J. Island of Bones (Louis Kincaid Mysteries). Traverse City, MI: Our Noir Press, 2018 [2006].

Associate Professor Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He can be reached at collinb1@ohio,edu.

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Jay Timothy Dolmage, "Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race" (OSU Press, 2018) Jun 08, 2020

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Jay Timothy Dolmage of the University of Waterloo on the new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2018), a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century.

In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable.

Through careful archival research and consideration of the larger ideologies of racialization and xenophobia, Disabled Upon Arrival links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics—the flawed “science” of controlling human population based on racist and ableist ideas about bodily values. Dolmage casts an enlightening perspective on immigration restriction, showing how eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never really gone away and revealed how such ideas and attitudes continue to cast groups and individuals as disabled upon arrival.

Thanks to OSU Press for providing disabled Upon Arrival for free through the OSU Knowledge Bank (may require in Institutional subscription). Click here to access a PDF of disabled upon arrival. You can also find an open access version of Jay’s previous book, Academic Ableism, courtesy of the University of Waterloo Arts Research Office. Click here to access Academic Ableism. Connect with Jay on Twitter @jaydolmage Connect with your host,

Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Sam Han, "(Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty" (Routledge, 2020) Jun 04, 2020

In modern times, death is understood to have undergone a transformation not unlike religion. Whereas in the past it was out in the open, it now resides mostly in specialized spaces of sequestration—funeral homes, hospitals and other medical facilities. A mainstay in so-called traditional societies in the form of ritual practices, death was usually messy but meaningful, with the questions of what happens to the dead or where they go lying at the heart of traditional culture and religion. In modernity, however, we are said to have effectively sanitized it, embalmed it and packaged it—but it seems that death is back. In the current era marked by economic, political and social uncertainty, we see it on television, on the Internet; we see it almost everywhere.

In his new book, (Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty (Routledge, 2020), Sam Han analyzes the nexus of death and digital culture in the contemporary moment in the context of recent developments in social, cultural and political theory. It argues that death today can be thought of as "interfaced," that is mediated and expressed, in various aspects of contemporary life rather than put to the side or overcome, as many narratives of modernity have suggested. Employing concepts from anthropology, sociology, media studies and communications, (Inter)Facing Death examines diverse phenomena where death and digital culture meet, including art, online suicide pacts, the mourning of celebrity deaths, terrorist beheadings and selfies. Providing new lines of thinking about one of the oldest questions facing the human and social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, anthropology, sociology and cultural and media studies with interests in death.

Matt Coward-Gibbs is an Associate Lecturer and PhD student in Sociology at the University of York. He is the editor of the forthcoming collection Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead (Emerald, 2020). You can find his university page here.

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Donald Stevens, "Mexico in the Time of Cholera" (U New Mexico Press, 2019) Jun 02, 2020

Donald F. Stevens offers us a portrait of early republican life in his new book, Mexico in the Time of Cholera, published in 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press. Although Stevens uses the 1833 Cholera epidemic that devastated independent Mexico as his his point of departure, this is not primarily a medical history.

Beginning with the suggestion of a contemporary observer that the epidemic put Mexicans on their best, or at least most religiously fervent behavior, Stevens asks how we might be able to measure everyday piety during a time of transition and crisis. His answer comes from following archival trails within parish records, novels, and memoirs and offers readers a glimpse of intimate urban life. In so doing, his book brings to life the day to day practices of Mexicans from birth and naming practices to death and burial norms and shows a country coming to terms with its independence. Students and scholars alike will enjoy following vibrant historical figures like fifteen-year-old Concha, navigating potential suitors with the help of parents and priests as well as unraveling the mystery of why a US-born bootmaker was murdered in Mexico City during a religious progression.

Donald Stevens is an Associate Professor of History at Drexel University and an assistant editor for the journal the Americas. He is the author of Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico by Duke University Press and editor of, Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies.

Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady. She is a historian of 20th century Bolivia.

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) Jun 02, 2020

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 Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

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Anthony Valerio, "Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor" (Zantedeschi Books, 2019) Jun 01, 2020

Though his advice has saved the lives of millions of people, the name Ignaz Semmelweis is not one commonly known today. In his book Anthony Valerio’s Semmelweis: The Women's Doctor (Zantedeschi Books, 2019). Valerio details the many struggles Semmelweis faced in winning acceptance for his advice on antiseptic procedures. The son of a Buda spice merchant, Semmelweis started his studies in law before a chance attendance at a medical lecture sparked his interest in becoming a doctor. After earning his degree he decided to specialize in obstetrics, a choice that soon brought him to confront the problem of childbed fever. Deducing that exposure to cadavers was a factor, Semmelweis devised a regimen of hand washing that dramatically reduced the morality rate at the maternity clinic where he worked. Though Semmelweis’s treatment was simple, his ideas faced considerable resistance from leading figures in the Western medical community, with the stress from his campaigns to promote his ideas contributing to the institutionalization that led to his death in 1865.

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Elinor Carmi, "Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media" (Peter Lang, 2020) May 28, 2020

What is spam? In Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media, Dr Elinor Carmi, a postdoctoral research associate in digital culture and society at the University of Liverpool, takes this simple category that seems ever present in our online lives to explain corporate power, regulation, and the social world. Drawing on the work of Foucault, as well as the approaches of ‘processed listening’ and ‘rhythmedia’, the book analyses a whole range of case study material, ranging from telephones in New York, via digital advertising, cookies, and the EU, to the way Facebook orders and shapes our modern world. The book is open access, so you can download and read it for free here, and it is essential reading across humanities, social sciences, as well as for anyone online today. You can also learn more about Dr Carmi’s current project Me and my big datahere

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Govind Gopakumar, "Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities" (MIT Press, 2020) May 27, 2020

Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets, once crowded with pedestrians, pushcarts, vendors, and bicyclists, are now choked with motor vehicles, many of them private automobiles. In Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities (MIT Press, 2020), Govind Gopakumar examines this shift, analyzing the phenomenon of automobility in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore), a rapidly growing city of about ten million people in southern India. He finds that the advent of automobility in Bengaluru has privileged the mobility needs of the elite while marginalizing those of the rest of the population.

Gopakumar connects Bengaluru's burgeoning automobility to the city's history and to the spatial, technological, and social interventions of a variety of urban actors. Automobility becomes a juggernaut, threatening to reorder the city to enhance automotive travel. He discusses the evolution of congestion and urban change in Bengaluru; the “regimes of congestion” that emerge to address the issue; an “infrastructurescape” that shapes the mobile behavior of all residents but is largely governed by the privileged; and the enfranchisement of an “automotive citizenship” (and the disenfranchisement of non-automobile-using publics). Gopakumar also finds that automobility in Bengaluru faces ongoing challenges from such diverse sources as waste flows, popular religiosity, and political leadership. These challenges, however, introduce messiness without upsetting automobility. He therefore calls for efforts to displace automobility that are grounded in reordering the mobility regime, relandscaping the city and its infrastructures, and reclaiming streets for other uses.

Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

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Kory Olson, "The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris" (Liverpool UP, 2018) May 18, 2020

When is the last time you looked at/consulted a paper map? Perhaps you have one hanging on a wall at home or work, framed or not. Or maybe you have some old road maps in a stack somewhere, as I do, sitting untouched since various digital forms have made printed map reading and handling something most of us rarely (if ever) do. Reading Kory E. Olson’s The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris (Liverpool University Press, 2018) reminded me how much I used to, and still sort of love maps, especially maps of the French capital. Coming at the history of urbanism through the city’s official maps over several decades, the book examines an evolving map discourse and literacy in France that was caught up with the evolution of technologies for producing, printing, and distributing maps; the history of public education; and the massive changes to the city brought about by industrialization, population growth, and new forms of transportation and mobility.

Pursuing the period that followed Haussmannization’s massive overhaul of the city, including those plans and changes that continued to be implemented for decades after Haussmann’s own tenure as Prefect of the Seine, The Cartographic Capital situates the urban geography of Paris and the very material of maps of the city at the heart of the story of Republican national consolidation, from the initial stabilization of the Third Republic to the 1930s. A history of depictions of the capital over time, the book also charts (!) a shift in the temporal orientation of maps, from their use as a form of historical documentation, to an emphasis on maps as accurate representations of geographic space in the present, to the emergence of maps intended to plan and shape the future of the city and its environs. Maps were a means by which government at different levels attempted to organize and control urban space. They were also a changing medium that reflected and shaped the geographic imaginations of map makers and map readers over time. The Cartographic Capital will be of tremendous interest to readers captivated by the history of Paris per se, as well as those fascinated by the histories of urbanism and space more broadly.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca)

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Nick Prior, "Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society" (SAGE, 2018) May 18, 2020

Nick Prior—Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Edinburgh—discusses his new book, Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society (SAGE Publications, 2018). The book explores the social, cultural and industrial contexts for the changes that have taken place in popular music since the widespread adoption of digital technology by creators, distributors, and listeners from the early 1980s onward. Joining insights from the sociology of culture with key analytic categories from science and technology studies (STS), Prior examines a variety of contexts in which these changes have been felt, including the novel spaces and structures of both music production and consumption afforded by digitalization, the co-construction of vocal subjects and vocal sound-processing technologies, the tactical use of portable media by young urbanites to mediate their relationship to the city, and the conjunction of music and play in the ever-growing video game sector. In addition to an acute sense for their embeddedness in the social lives of their various users, Prior also demonstrates a notable fluency with the technologies he describes as well as a distinctively musical interest in the sounds that they have been used to produce.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Paul Harkins, "Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies" (Routledge, 2019) May 14, 2020

How does technology shape music? In Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies (Routledge, 2019), Paul Harkins, a lecturer in music at Edinburgh Napier University, looks at the relationship between the rise of digital sampling, technology, and music. The book draws inspiration from Science and Technology Studies to explore the impact of specific technologies, such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, programming languages, and studio practices, on artists and producers. The analysis also thinks through the evolution of digital sampling across a variety of genres, including pop, folk, and hop-hop. Drawing on a wealth of examples, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of music, the history of technology, and the history of contemporary culture.

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Robert Sroufe et al, "The Power of Existing Buildings" (Island Press, 2019) May 12, 2020

Your building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition of the significant contribution of buildings to climate change, the idea of building green has become increasingly popular. But is it enough? If an energy-efficient building is new construction, it may take 10 to 80 years to overcome the climate change impacts of the building process. New buildings are sexy, but few realize the value in existing buildings and how easy it is to get to “zero energy” or low-energy consumption through deep energy retrofits. Existing buildings can and should be retrofit to reduce environmental impacts that contribute to climate change, while improving human health and productivity for building occupants.

In The Power of Existing Buildings: Save Money, Improve Health, and Reduce Environmental Impacts (Island Press, 2019), academic sustainability expert Robert Sroufe, and construction and building experts Craig Stevenson and Beth Eckenrode, explain how to realize the potential of existing buildings and make them perform like new. This step-by-step guide will help readers to: understand where to start a project; develop financial models and realize costs savings; assemble an expert team; and align goals with numerous sustainability programs. The Power of Existing Buildings will challenge you to rethink spaces where people work and play, while determining how existing buildings can save the world.

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John R. Gallagher, "Update Culture and the Afterlife of Writing" (Utah State UP, 2020) May 11, 2020

On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they interviews John R. Gallagher of University of Illinois about Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing (Utah State University Press, 2020) a dynamic look at the life of a text in the 21st century. Looking at wealth of case studies among Amazon reviewers, redditors, and established journals, Update Culture is a deep diver into the many factors that contribute to the circulation of a digital text. The key three themes Gallagher explores include timing, attention, and management and they provide rhetorical points of access to understand the ever-evolving conditions of digital writing across genres and mediums.

I hope you enjoy listening as I much as I enjoyed chatting with John about this instructive book. I’d love to hear from you at rhetoriclee@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee and @rhetoricleespeaking. Share your thoughts about the interview with the hashtag #newbooksnerd. ~lee

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Ayala Fader, "Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age" (Princeton UP, 2020) May 05, 2020

What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known? Dr. Ayala Fader explores this question in Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in a Digital Age––her new book with Princeton University Press (2020). She tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead “double lives” in order to protect those they love. While they no longer believe that God gave the Torah to Jews at Mount Sinai, these hidden heretics continue to live in their families and religious communities, even as they surreptitiously break Jewish commandments and explore forbidden secular worlds in person and online. The internet, which some ultra-Orthodox rabbis call more threatening than the Holocaust, offers new possibilities for the age-old problem of religious uncertainty. Fader shows how digital media has become a lightning rod for contemporary struggles over authority and truth.

Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe.

Dr. Ayala Fader is professor of anthropology at Fordham University investigating contemporary North American Jewish identities and languages in urban centers. She is the author of another book from Princeton University Press: Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Laurence Monnais, "The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam" (Cambridge UP, 2019) May 04, 2020

Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health traces the life of pharmaceuticals in Vietnam under French rule. In The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Laurence Monnais examines the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, looking at both circulation and consumption, considering access to drugs and the existence of multiple therapeutic options in a colonial context. She argues that colonialism was crucial to the worldwide diffusion of modern medicines and speaks to contemporary concerns regarding over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, drug toxicity, self-medication, and the accessibility of effective medicines. Retracing the steps by which pharmaceuticals were produced and distributed, readers meet the many players in the process, from colonial doctors to private pharmacists, from consumers to various drug traders and healers. Yet this is not primarily a history of medicines as objects of colonial science, but rather a history of medicines as tools of social change.

Laurence Monnais is a Professor of History at the University of Montreal.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Andre Brock, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures" (NYU Press, 2020) May 01, 2020

Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram mediate culture, the affordances of each determining how aspects of culture translate on the sites. In his new book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures(NYU Press, 2020), Andre Brock, an associate professor at Georgia Tech, theorizes what it means to be Black online, particularly when the physical body can neither be understood nor constrained. Though considering topics like afro-pessimism and the digital divide, Brock particularly focuses on Black joy – “the embodied cognition where Black people express their relationship to the world through our joy in moving through it.”

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Lee Vinsel, "Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) Apr 30, 2020

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 much as they have been a vehicle for liberation and expression, historian Lee Vinsel argues that automobiles have been shaped by government regulation through and through.

In Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Vinsel combats the free market doctrine that auto regulation is fundamentally opposed to innovation. In part, he does this by historicizing the animus against regulation and the “innovation speak” that emerged in its wake. But the book itself makes a compelling argument for how the automobile has always been perceived by voluntary associations and governing bodies as a risk in need of taming. These shifting perceptions formed the basis for infrastructures that made the car into a more dependable, safer, and cleaner technology. Vinsel’s engaging narrative provides a model for studying technology and governance in the postwar U.S. in which policy instruments, built environments, and constructions of the human subject all share the road.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race.

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Jathan Sadowski, "Too Smart" (MIT Press, 2020) Apr 29, 2020

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 purpose(s) of this collection? What are the benefits? And, what are the impacts?

In his new book, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (MIT Press, 2020), Jathan Sadowski explores this question and those related in an investigation of the expansion of “smart” technologies – networked devices enabling automated data collection and use. In exploring the interests inherent in the design and deployment of smart technology, Sadowski, a Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Law at Monash University, investigates the political economy of digital capitalism, and the implications of continued reliance on and permeation of smart technology.

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Patrick M. Condon, "Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities" (Island Press, 2020) Apr 29, 2020

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global temperature from increasing. Since approximately 80% of greenhouse gases come from cities, it follows that in the design of cities lies the fate of the world.

As urban designers respond to the critical issue of climate change they must also address three cresting cultural waves: the worldwide rural-to-urban migration; the collapse of global fertility rates; and the disappearance of the middle class. In Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities: Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class (Island Press, 2020) planning and design expert Patrick Condon explains how urban designers can assimilate these interconnected changes into their work.

Condon shows how the very things that constrain cities—climate change, migration, financial stress, population change—could actually enable the emergence of a more equitable and resource-efficient city. He provides five rules for urban designers: (1) See the City as a System; (2) Recognize Patterns in the Urban Environment; (3) Apply Lighter, Greener, Smarter Infrastructure; (4) Strengthen Social and Economic Urban Resilience; and (5) Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages.

In Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities, Condon provides grounded and financially feasible design examples for tomorrow’s sustainable cities, and the design tools needed to achieve them.

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) Apr 28, 2020

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020) Apr 27, 2020

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 evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?

This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays out the problem in its historical and modern-day context and summarizes the latest thinking among astronomers and astrobiologists. He describes the long history of speculation about aliens (we've been debating the idea for thousands of years); the emergence of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) as a scientific discipline in the 1960s, and scientists' use of radio and optical techniques to scan for signals; and developments in astrobiology (the study of how life might arise in non-Earth like environments) and exoplanet research (the discovery of planets outside our solar system). Finally, he discusses possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox and suggests way to refocus SETI work that might increase the chances of resolving the paradox―and finding extraterrestrials.

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A. B. Chastain and T. W. Lorek, "Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020) Apr 23, 2020

Emerging out of a 2016 conference, Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek have brought together Environmental History, Latin American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies in a single volume that reshapes scholarly understandings of Latin America’s Long Cold War. Rather than emphasize diplomatic, social or cultural histories of conflict, this volume emphasizes the roles of “experts” who cast themselves as apolitical technocrats just working on the ground. Chastain and Lorek’s book argues that experts and the networks in which they traveled significantly shaped geopolitical agendas, local cultures, and were in fact central to the history of the Cold War.

The essays in Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) focus on Chile, Mexico, Cuba, and Peru, in order to explore how knowledge circulated regionally as well as locally and globally. Essay topics vary from the space race to the Green Revolution, and from the Santiago Metro to Ubre Blanca, Cuba’s most famous dairy cow. By focusing on itineraries rather than exchanges or knowledge transfers, the contributors emphasize the movement of technology, knowledge, and practice within the global south, and particularly decenter the United States from the Cold War narrative. With summative essays from such luminaries as Gil Joseph on Latin America’s Long Cold War, and Edin Medina and Mark Carey combining STS and Environmental Studies, this work will be of great use to graduate students, teachers, and scholars in all three fields. Other contributors include: Tore Olsson, Mary Roldán, Reinaldo Funes-Monzote, Steven Palmer, Thomas Rath, Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Hugo Palmarola, Mark Healey, Fernando Purcell, Emily Wakild, and Javiera Barandiarán.

Andra Chastain is an assistant professor of Latin American and world history at Washington State University Vancouver. Timothy Lorek is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan.

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Lloyd B. Minor, "Discovering Precision Health" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) Apr 22, 2020

Today's guest is scientist, surgeon, and dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Lloyd B. Minor. Previously he served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at The Johns Hopkins University. With more than 140 published articles and chapters, Dr. Minor is an expert in balance and inner ear disorders.

Our conversation covers innovative progress underway in replacing reactive medicine with precision and prevention. His new book, Discovering Precision Health: Predict, Prevent, and Cure to Advance Health and Well-Being(Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), takes us through this exciting and cutting edge work taking place at Stanford, and in Silicon Valley.

Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon.

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Jodi Hilty, "Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation" (Island Press, 2019) Apr 20, 2020

In Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscapes for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation, 2nd Edition (Island Press, 2019), Dr. Jodi Hilty and her co-authors expand on concepts and practices important to maintaining and restoring land connectivity. In the book and during the interview, Dr. Hilty discusses how the field as evolved over the last 15 years. She highlights a newer part of the field, Climate-wise connectivity. Climate-wise connectivity considers the effects of climate change on habitat and offers recommendations on designing effective corridors as landscapes change with shifting climate conditions

In this lively interview, Dr. Hilty describes the consequences of fragmented landscapes and defines corridors. We talk about the biological and human benefits of corridors as well as the design objectives of practitioners like herself. As she tasks listeners travelling through successful projects connecting landscapes, Dr. Hilty also speaks honestly about potential pitfalls or disadvantages of linking landscapes. As we wrap up the conversation, Dr. Hilty discusses the current tools and technologies available today that are helping the field continue to make advances and aid in science-based decision-making.

Chris Gambino is an Assistant Professor of Animal Science at Delaware Valley University.

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Wenfei Tong, "Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds" (Princeton UP, 2020) Apr 17, 2020

Wenfei Tong's Bird Love: The Family Life of Birds (Princeton University Press, 2020) looks at the extraordinary range of mating systems in the avian world, exploring all the stages from courtship and nest-building to protecting eggs and raising chicks. It delves into the reasons why some species, such as the wattled jacana, rely on males to do all the childcare, while others, such as cuckoos and honeyguides, dump their eggs in the nests of others to raise. For some birds, reciprocal promiscuity pays off: both male and female dunnocks will rear the most chicks by mating with as many partners as possible. For others, long-term monogamy is the only way to ensure their offspring survive.

The book explores the wide variety of ways birds make sure they find a mate in the first place, including how many male birds employ elaborate tactics to show how sexy they are. Gathering in leks to display to females, they dance, pose, or parade to sell their suitability as a mate. Other birds attract a partner with their building skills: female bowerbirds rate brains above beauty, so males construct elaborate bowers with twig avenues and cleared courtyards to impress them.

Looking at the differing levels of parenting skills across species around the world, we see why a tenth of bird species, including the fairy-wrens of Australia, have helpers at the nest who forgo their own reproduction to assist the breeding pair; how brood parasites and their hosts have engaged in evolutionary arms races; and how monogamous pairs share—or relinquish—their responsibilities.

Illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs, Bird Love is a celebration of the global diversity of avian reproductive strategies.

Lukas Rieppel is a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can find his personal website here, or on twitter here.

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Carlo Caduff, "The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger" (U California Press, 2015) Apr 16, 2020

Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger(University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry into pandemic anxieties in the mid-2000s when such an event was widely anticipated by experts. Examining how experts in the United States framed a catastrophe that has not happened yet, the book trains a lens on the many generative ways in which the absence of a disease made preparedness a permanent project. Drawing on fieldwork among scientists and public health professionals in New York City, the book investigates how experts, government actors and institutions co-produced pandemic prophecies that were made meaningful to communities on the ground through the framework of catastrophe. Centered on the question how to engage a disease such as influenza in anticipation of potential crisis, this monograph analyses the infelicities of failure and the limits of planning. The pandemic - past, present and future – is arguably always with us, even in its absence.

In this episode, we discuss the pandemic when it was a ‘perhaps’, unpack the blurring of reason and faith among expert interlocutors and draw out lessons on preparedness and its paradoxes for the present global coronavirus crisis.

Carlo Caduff is a Reader in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College, London.

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. Singapore. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien

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Thor Magnusson, "Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) Apr 15, 2020

In Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Thor Magnusson—musician, Professor of Future Music, and member of the Experimental Music Technologies Lab at the University of Sussex—provides a sweeping overview of the tools and techniques of music-making both before and after the dawn of computing as well a set of forward-looking strategies for thinking critically about our future relationship with new music technology. Importantly, Magnusson identifies many similarities between present and past sonic creative practices as he takes the reader through an impressive survey of music technologies spanning the analog–digital divide. Consistently thematising the act of writing throughout, Sonic Writing calls attention to the rich and continuous history of inscription practices such as staff notation, instrument building, phonographic sound recording, and programming digital synthesizer patches, practices that have been so intimately connected with the shared creation and enjoyment of music over its long and fruitful history.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi, "Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground" (Routledge, 2019) Apr 14, 2020

Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi's book Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (Routledge, 2019) paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development.

The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi- material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.

Theodora Vardouli is Assistant Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University, Canada.

Olga Touloumi is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Bard College, USA.

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Brian A. Stauffer, "Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion" (U New Mexico Press, 2019) Apr 09, 2020

In Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion (University of New Mexico Press, 2019), Brian A. Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. An essentially grassroots movement--organized by indigenous, Afro-Mexican, and mestizo parishioners in Mexico's central-western Catholic heartland--the Religionero rebellion erupted in response to a series of anticlerical measures raised to constitutional status by the Lerdo government. These "Laws of Reform" decreed the full independence of Church and state, secularized marriage and burial practices, prohibited acts of public worship, and severely curtailed the Church's ability to own and administer property. A comprehensive reconstruction of the revolt and a critical reappraisal of its significance, this book places ordinary Catholics at the center of the story of Mexico's fragmented nineteenth-century secularization and Catholic revival.

Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century.

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Amy Koerber, “From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History" (Penn State UP, 2018) Apr 07, 2020

On this episode of New Books in Language, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Amy Koerber (she/hers), Professor at Texas Tech University, on the groundbreaking book From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History (Penn State University Press, 2018). Filled with fresh takes on classical rhetorical theories, From Hysteria is an engaging exploration of the study of “women’s problems” (take the air quote seriously there). Dr. Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women’s bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect. From womb to brain to hormones, the book links our contemporary understanding of women’s bodies to antiquated roots, illuminating the ways in which the words we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren’t nearly as scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed.

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Owen Whooley, "On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Apr 03, 2020

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, peering deep into the human mind is, well, really hard.

On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing (University Chicago Press, 2019) begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the United States in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no anti-psychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results.

In this interview, Dr. Whooley and I discuss the sociology of knowledge and ignorance that guide this book. We then discuss the changing identity of the field of psychiatry, how the DSM affected the legitimacy and perception of the discipline, and ways of managing ignorance. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in sociology of knowledge, health and illness and medical sociology, historical sociology, and mental health.

Dr. Owen Whooley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and Senior Fellow, UNM Center for Health Policy.

Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.

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Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Princeton UP, 2020) Apr 03, 2020

Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020), by Paul Nahin, is a book that is meant for someone who is comfortable with calculus, but for those readers who are, it is a treat. It is a thorough study of the history and mathematics of the heat equation, which is not only important as an analysis of heat, its analysis marked the beginning of Fourier series. It came as a surprise to me that the heat equation was also instrumental in analyzing the problem of laying the transatlantic cable that was one of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century. Although it isn’t necessary to work through the math to appreciate this book, I think that students studying this material would not only find Paul’s treatments easy to follow, but would benefit greatly by learning something of the history that surrounds the development of the analysis and applications of the heat equation.

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Arthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019) Apr 03, 2020

Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. The study of a society divided between a dominant (European) settler minority and an Algerian Muslim majority, the book tracks the development and impact of new information technologies—the printing press, telegraph, cinema, radio (and later television)—in Algeria from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Throughout its chapters, readers are reminded to resist Eurocentric and teleological frameworks of “modernization” that do not apply to societies like Algeria’s where such technologies coexisted with other forms of news circulation including manuscripts, song, and rumor/word of mouth.

The book is grounded in an impressive range of sources in multiple languages. It challenges ideas about the relationship between print capitalism and nationalism over the course of this pivotal period in both Algerian and French history. Interrogating the history of colonial hegemony in and through the analysis of how Algerians accessed and interpreted the news in myriad ways often not anticipated by settler and state authorities, the book also has far-reaching implications for how we think about knowledge and power in imperial contexts more broadly. Its pages are rich with exciting and fascinating moments and stories—of surveillance, violence, and injustice, but also of the counterforces of the Algerian subversion of and resistance to colonial oppression.

*Special note in March 2020: I hope you are all keeping safe and healthy and that this conversation with Arthur might be helpful in some small way right now—with work, teaching and/or as a distraction in this period of global pandemic. Thanks so much to Arthur, who was SO much fun to speak with & to all the NBFS listeners out there!

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars(2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) Mar 30, 2020

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. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.

The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.

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Neil Selwyn, "What is Digital Sociology?" (Polity, 2019) Mar 27, 2020

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 this short book introduces readers to an approach that can deliver this: digital sociology.

In What is Digital Sociology (Polity, 2019), Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersections of the social and the digital. Blending theory and empirical examples, the five chapters highlight areas of inquiry where digital approaches are taking hold and shaping the discipline of sociology today. The book explores key topics such as digital race and digital labor, as well as the fast-changing nature of digital research methods and diversifying forms of digital scholarship.

In this interview, Dr. Selwyn and I discuss the overarching question guiding this book: what is digital sociology? We go on to discuss how the classical figures in sociology wrote about, and engaged with, technology, the distinctiveness of contemporary digital sociology, key methodologies, and the research ethics related to digital sociological research. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in digital humanities, big data and computational methods, or science and technology studies. This would be a great book for both undergraduate and graduate courses related to digital media and social science.

Dr. Neil Selwyn is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. His research and teaching focuses on the place of digital media in everyday life, and the sociology of technology (non)use in educational settings. Neil has written extensively on a number of issues, including digital exclusion, education technology policymaking and the student experience of technology-based learning. You can find him on Twitter @Neil_Selwyn.

Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.

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Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018) Mar 27, 2020

The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past?

In Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences (MIT Press, 2018), Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies and techniques at their disposal, and that this gives us every reason to be optimistic about their capacity to uncover truths about prehistory. Creative and opportunistic paleontologists, for example, discovered and described a new species of prehistoric duck-billed platypus from a single fossilized tooth. Examining the complex reasoning processes of historical science, Currie also considers philosophical and scientific reflection on the relationship between past and present, the nature of evidence, contingency, and scientific progress.

Currie draws on varied examples from across the historical sciences, from Mayan ritual sacrifice to giant Mesozoic fleas to Mars's mysterious watery past, to develop an account of the nature of, and resources available to, historical science. He presents two major case studies: the emerging explanation of sauropod size, and the “snowball earth” hypothesis that accounts for signs of glaciation in Neoproterozoic tropics. He develops the Ripple Model of Evidence to analyze “unlucky circumstances” in scientific investigation; examines and refutes arguments for pessimism about the capacity of the historical sciences, defending the role of analogy and arguing that simulations have an experiment-like function. Currie argues for a creative, open-ended approach, “empirically grounded” speculation.

Lukas Rieppel is a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can find his personal website here, or find him on twitter here.

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Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020) Mar 27, 2020

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.

She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access information); and flooding (publishing information to distract, confuse, or dilute). Roberts shows how China customizes repression by using friction and flooding (censorship that is porous) to deter the majority of citizens whose busy schedules and general lack of interest in politics make it difficult to spend extra time and money accessing information. Highly motivated elites (e.g. journalists, activists) who are willing to spend the extra time and money to overcome the boundaries of both friction and flooding meanwhile may face fear and punishment. The two groups end up with very different information – complicating political coordination between the majority and elites.

Roberts’s highly accessible book negotiates two extreme positions (the internet will bring government accountability v. extreme censorship) to provide a more nuanced understanding of digital politics, the politics of repression, and political communication. Even if there is better information available, governments can create friction on distribution or flood the internet with propaganda. Looking at how China manages censorship provides insights not only for other authoritarian governments but also democratic governments. Liberal democracies might not use fear but they can affect access and availability – and they may find themselves (as the United States did in the 2016 presidential election) subject to flooding from external sources. The podcast includes Roberts’ insights on how the Chinese censored information on COVID-19 and the effect that had on the public.

Foreign Affairs named Censored one of its Best Books of 2018 and it was also honored with the Goldsmith Award and the Best Book in Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

Susan Liebellis associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013).

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Joseph Reagle, "Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents" (MIT Press, 2019) Mar 26, 2020

Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool. They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents (MIT Press, 2019), Joseph Reagle examines these attempts to systematize living and finds that they are the latest in a long series of self-improvement methods. Life hacking, he writes, is self-help for the digital age's creative class.

Reagle chronicles the history of life hacking, from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack through Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek. He describes personal outsourcing, polyphasic sleep, the quantified self movement, and hacks for pickup artists. Life hacks can be useful, useless, and sometimes harmful (for example, if you treat others as cogs in your machine). Life hacks have strengths and weaknesses, which are sometimes like two sides of a coin: being efficient is not the same thing as being effective; being precious about minimalism does not mean you are living life unfettered; and compulsively checking your vital signs is its own sort of illness. With Hacking Life, Reagle sheds light on a question even non-hackers ponder: what does it mean to live a good life in the new millennium?

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Maurice Finocchiaro, "On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair" (Oxford UP, 2019) Mar 26, 2020

In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows that there were (and are) really two Galileo “affairs.” Galileo’s original trial and condemnation forms the first affair, the cultural history of controversies about the meaning of the original trial, forms the second. With scrupulous attention to evidence and the argumentation employed by various participants, Dr. Finocchiaro’s book is at once an accessible primer on a key event in the 16th- and 17th-century Scientific Revolution, and a thought provoking look at how the subsequent controversies resonate down to the present day.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Tweeting the Word of God: Evangelism from a "Digital Pulpit" Mar 25, 2020

Technological advancement through the 20th century has allowed religious leaders to broaden their reach, first through print, then televangelism, and now, social media.

In this podcast, Dr Ryan P. Burge, of the Eastern Illinois University, discusses how religious leaders use twitter today, whether successful tweeting means having conversations, and the extent to which evangelicals engage with politics on twitter. His discussion is an extension of his paper “Is Social Media a Digital Pulpit? How Evangelical Leaders Use Twitter to Encourage the Faithful and Publicize Their Work,” which is published in Brill’s Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture.

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Great Books: Julie Carlson on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" Mar 24, 2020

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus when she was nineteen years old on a bet. The novel spawned two centuries of creatures that turn against their makers. It examines the limits of scientific innovation, whether the quest for knowledge must be tempered by morality, and why human beings tend to ostracize, persecute and sometimes kill anything that does not look like them. I spoke with Julie Carlson, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of a gripping biography of Mary Shelley's family, England's First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (among other books). Shelley's mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the first modern feminist and a free thinker vilified for her ideas of equality. Her father was a philosopher. In some ways, Mary Shelley was an experiment herself. We also discussed what it means that a woman wrote the first science fiction novel, and why the book and the "daemon" Shelley imagined still proves so powerful today, 200 years after its first publication.

Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"

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Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "Übermensch: Plädoyer Für Einen Nietzscheanischen Transhumanismus" (Schwabe, 2019) Mar 19, 2020

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 Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), Research Fellow at the Ewha Institute for the Humanities at Ewha Woman's University in Seoul, and Visiting Fellow at the Ethics Centre of the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena. His main fields of research are Nietzsche, the philosophy of music, bioethics and meta-, post- and transhumanism. We talk about his book Übermensch: Plädoyer Für Einen Nietzscheanischen Transhumanismus (Schwabe, 2019)

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Melissa Kravetz, "Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity" (U Toronto Press, 2019) Mar 17, 2020

In her new book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Melissa Kravetz examines how German women physicians gained a foothold in the medical profession during the Weimar and Nazi periods, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany reveals the continuity in rhetoric, strategy, and tactics of female doctors who worked under both regimes. Additionally, she explains how and why women occupied particular fields within the medical profession, how they presented themselves in their professional writing, and how they reconciled their medical perspectives with their views of the Weimar and later the Nazi state.

Melissa Kravetz is an assistant professor of history at Longwood University.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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Nancy Appelbaum, "Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia" (UNC Press, 2016) Mar 13, 2020

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Chorographic Commission of Colombia, an ambitious geographical expedition, set out to define and map a nascent and still unstable republic. The commission’s purpose was to survey the land, its resources and people, and portray Colombia as a nation prone to the “wonders” of modernization.

In Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Nancy P. Appelbaum reconstructs how elites, through visual and textual methodologies, envisioned the nation and its component parts. In particular, the books focuses on a dilemma that has characterized modern nation formation in Latin America and the world: how is it possible to build and represent a unified nation while simultaneously showcasing regional diversity and particularity? In the case of Colombia, how did Commissioners solved the tension between aspirational homogeneity and the regional heterogeneity found on the ground? As this fascinating interview tells us, racial and gendered stereotypes were used to solve this paradox. Unsuccessful in their quest for unity, the commissioners represented the highland regions as white and civilized, while the lowlands were allegedly black, backward, and savage. This in turn created a dichotomy that still haunts the way in which we, Colombians, understand our country today.

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron.

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Jacob Turner, "Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Mar 12, 2020

In his new book Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Jacob Turner explains why AI is unique, what legal and ethical problems it could cause, and how we can address them. It argues that AI is unlike is any other previous technology, owing to its ability to take decisions independently and unpredictably. This gives rise to three issues: responsibility―who is liable if AI causes harm; rights―the disputed moral and pragmatic grounds for granting AI legal personality; and the ethics surrounding the decision-making of AI. The book suggests that in order to address these questions we need to develop new institutions and regulations on a cross-industry and international level. Incorporating clear explanations of complex topics, Robot Rules will appeal to a multi-disciplinary audience, from those with an interest in law, politics and philosophy, to computer programming, engineering and neuroscience.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Jerome Whitington, "Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower" (Cornell UP, 2018) Mar 06, 2020

Jerome Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the dynamics and discourses centered around the development of hydropower dams in the Mekong River Basin. Through deep and connected ethnographies, the book traces how such projects create ecologically uncertain environments and the surprising ways they offer new capacities for being human. Along the way, this study unpacks puzzles such as why corporate developers would engage with activists in environmental sustainability initiatives even in the absence of legal compulsion, the evasion strategies of rural peoples struggling with the currents of such developments and the managerial tactics as well as failures among hydrological experts. By viewing large-scale development projects as collaborations between infrastructural developers, financiers and activists, the book is able to interrogate “late industrialism” not as a high modernist project but in terms of uncharted temporalities.

In our conversation, we discuss how infrastructure like dams can lead to uncertainty, the limits of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a conceptual framework, how uncertainty was utilized and managed by various stakeholders who might not see themselves as environmental actors as well as the new positioning of white male experts in Asia.

Jerome Whitington is a visiting assistant professor at the Gallatin School in New York University.

Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien

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Adrian Wisnicki, "Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature" (Routledge, 2019) Mar 06, 2020

Adrian Wisnicki talks about the British expeditionary literature of the late 1800s. Reading between the lines of Victorian travel accounts, Wisnicki sees outlines of a bigger story — local peoples, landscapes, and ways of life. Wisnicki is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. For the past ten years he has served as the director (along with co-director Megan Ward) of Livingstone Online a digital museum and library devoted to the written, visual, and material legacies of British explorer David Livingstone. Wisnicki is the author of Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature (Routledge, 2019).

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Kate Devlin, "Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots" (Bloomsbury, 2018) Mar 05, 2020

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 in human form have captured our imagination, our hopes and our fears. But beyond the fantasies there are real and fundamental questions about our relationship with technology as it moves into the realm of robotics. Artificial intelligence raises very real concerns. Sexual activity is central to our very existence; it shapes how we think, how we act and how we live. With advances in technology come machines that may one day think independently. What will happen to us when we form close relationships with these intelligent systems?

In Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), Kate Devlin builds on the science and the philosophy surrounding our most intimate relationship with technology. The scene is set with the history of the artificial sexual companion, then goes on to explore the "modern" robot and the twentieth century sci-fi that promised us our own robot slaves. An explanation of artificial intelligence and the urge to create sentient machines delves into our own psychology: how does desire affect our own behavior, and can we become attached to an inanimate object? Can robots make society a better place? And what can go wrong?

Sex robots are here, and here to stay--and more are coming. This book explores how the emerging and future development of sexual companion robots might affect us, and our society. It explores the social changes arising from emerging technologies, and our relationships with the machines that may someday care for us and about us.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "Data Feminism" (MIT Press, 2020) Mar 03, 2020

The increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power surrounding and undergirding data. The impacts of the creation, use, collection, and aggregation of data are such that individuals from various communities face disparate, negative impacts.

In their new book, Data Feminism (MIT Press, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, call for changing the way we think about data and how it is communicated, particularly through visualization. D’Ignazio, an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT, and Klein, an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University, assert that the way forward is through a commitment to putting into action the ideas associated with intersectional feminism. This requires learning from an inclusive array of experts, many of whom have historically been neglected or ignored. They also assert the need for critical data literacy, which examines power asymmetries in and surrounding data, and challenges the myths and assumptions about data and in data science.

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Michael Rechtenwald, "Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom" (New English Review, 2019) Mar 02, 2020

In his book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Michael Rectenwald begins and ends his Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom(New English Review, 2019) with the political, in particular with the objectives of the Big Digital conglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-be-monopolies.

Google Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may represent elements of a new corporate state power.

In contrast to academics who study digital media and bemoan such supposed horrors as digital exploitation, in Google Archipelago, Michael Rectenwald argues that the real danger posed by Big Digital is not digital capitalism as such, but leftist authoritarianism, a political outlook shared by academic leftists, who thus cannot recognize it in their object of study. Thus, while imagining that they are radical critics of Big Digital, academic digital media scholars (whom Rectenwald terms the "digitalistas") actually serve as ideological smokescreens that obscure its real character.

Michael Rectenwald is a recently retired Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University, where he taught cultural and social history as well as academic writing.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

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David J. Gunkel, "Robot Rights" (MIT Press, 2018) Feb 27, 2020

We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality―self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various forms and functions. Although considerable attention has already been devoted to the subject of robots and responsibility, the question concerning the social status of these artifacts has been largely overlooked. In Robot Rights (MIT Press, 2018), David Gunkel offers a provocative attempt to think about what has been previously regarded as unthinkable: whether and to what extent robots and other technological artifacts of our own making can and should have any claim to moral and legal standing.

In his analysis, Gunkel invokes the philosophical distinction (developed by David Hume) between “is” and “ought” in order to evaluate and analyze the different arguments regarding the question of robot rights. In the course of his examination, Gunkel finds that none of the existing positions or proposals hold up under scrutiny. In response to this, he then offers an innovative alternative proposal that effectively flips the script on the is/ought problem by introducing another, altogether different way to conceptualize the social situation of robots and the opportunities and challenges they present to existing moral and legal systems.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) Feb 25, 2020

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery, "Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir" (Mad Creek Books, 2018) Feb 24, 2020

If you live in America, chances are good you’ve heard the term “mental health crisis” bandied about in the media. While true that anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders seem to be on the rise—especially among young people—resources for addressing them remain scarce and stigmatized, and the conditions themselves remain poorly understood. Even doctors and scientists don’t have all the answers. For example, is the development of a mood disorder the product of nature or nurture? Why are more women diagnosed with anxiety and depression than men? And in an industry that pathologizes everything from anger to arrogance, what actually constitutes “normal” human behavior?

In her debut book of nonfiction, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (Mad Creek Books, 2018), author Sarah Fawn Montgomery explores these questions using both her own experiences and research as dual lenses to understanding mental illness, especially generalized anxiety disorder. From the fraught history of mental illness, to the fascinating science of how anti-depressants work, to a sharp examination of dubious practices within the American pharmaceutical industry, Montgomery takes the reader on a journey into the reality of mental health in the United States from a patient’s perspective, shining a much-needed light on a topic so often shrouded in stigma.

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com.

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Amy Shira Teitel, "Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA" (Bloomsbury, 2016) Feb 21, 2020

Amy Shira Teitel talks about Apollo and the community of people who are deeply attached to space history. Teitel is a spaceflight historian and the creator of the YouTube Channel, Vintage Space. She is also the author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Apollo Pilot: The Memory of Astronaut Don Eisele (University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

NASA's history is a familiar story, culminating with the agency successfully landing men on the moon in 1969, but its prehistory is an important and rarely told tale. Breaking the Chains of Gravity looks at the evolving roots of America's space program--the scientific advances, the personalities, and the rivalries between the various arms of the United States military.

America's space agency drew together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the U.S. Air Force, meanwhile, brought rocket technology into the world of manned flight.

The road to NASA and successful spaceflight was paved by fascinating stories and characters. At the end of World War II, Wernher von Braun escaped Nazi Germany and came to America where he began developing missiles for the United States Army. Ten years after he created the V-2 missile, his Jupiter rocket was the only one capable of launching a satellite into orbit. NACA test pilots like Neil Armstrong flew cutting-edge aircraft in the thin upper atmosphere while Air Force pilots rode to the fringes of space in balloons to see how humans handled radiation at high altitude. After the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, getting a man in space suddenly became a national imperative, leading President Dwight D. Eisenhower to pull various pieces together to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Feb 14, 2020

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the author Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell. While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Angela Jones, "Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry" (NYU Press, 2020) Feb 14, 2020

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-methods study she conducted on the erotic webcam industry where she tells a pornographic story about the multibillion-dollar online sex industry that is colloquially known as “camming.”

Through camming, millions of people from all over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure. This interview is full of stories from a diverse sample of cam models from all over the world whom Jones interviewed and observed as part of her five-year mixed-methods study. Cam models, like all sex workers, must grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones was attentive to how the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ experiences in camming as a new global sex industry.

This thorough examination of the camming industry provides a unique vantage point from which to understand and theorize around gender, sexuality, race, and labor in a time when workers globally face increasing economic precariousness and worsened forms of alienation, and desperately desire to recapture pleasure in work. Despite the serious issues cam models face, Jones’s focus on pleasure will help people better understand the motivations for engaging in online sex work, as well as the complex social interactions between cam models and customers. In Camming, Jones pioneers an entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure. The sociology of pleasure can provide new insights into the motivation for social behavior and assist sociologists in analyzing social interactions in everyday life.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it presents in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Francesca Minerva, "The Ethics of Cryonics: Is It Immoral to be Immortal" (Palgrave, 2018) Feb 13, 2020

Cryonics―also known as cryopreservation or cryosuspension―is the preservation of legally dead individuals at ultra-low temperatures. Those who undergo this procedure hope that future technology will not only succeed in reviving them, but also cure them of the condition that led to their demise. In this sense, some hope that cryopreservation will allow people to continue living indefinitely.

Francesca Minerva's The Ethics of Cryonics: Is It Immoral to be Immortal (Palgrave Pivot, 2018) discusses the moral concerns of cryonics, both as a medical procedure and as an intermediate step toward life extension. In particular, Minerva analyses the moral issues surrounding cryonics-related techniques (including the hypothetical cryosuspension of fetuses as an alternative to abortion) by focusing on how they might impact the individuals who undergo cryosuspension, as well as society at large.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Germaine R. Halegoua, "The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place" (NYU Press, 2019) Feb 12, 2020

In her new book, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place (NYU Press, 2019), Germaine R. Halegoua rethinks everyday interactions that humans have with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Dr. Halegoua draws from five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of “re-placing." In this book, Dr. Halegoua shows have different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to create built environment into places with deep meaning and emotional attachments. She argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral in understanding the complex relationships humans have with digital media.

In this interview, Dr. Halegoua talks about the multidisciplinary nature of her work as well as the distinct contribution she sees film and media studies providing her in studying the digital, place, place making, and the concept of “re-placing”. Dr. Halegoua shares that her research could be considered multidisciplinary and we agreed that value is added to the body of research when a topic is studies across multiple disciplines. She also shared that film and media studies contributes some unique aspects that other disciplines do not provide.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Gil Eyal, "The Crisis of Expertise" (Polity, 2019) Feb 10, 2020

In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change, and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites?

In this new book, The Crisis of Expertise (Polity, 2019), Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided “mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased skepticism and dismissal of scientific findings and expert opinion, on the other. The current mistrust of experts is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture.

This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and to anyone concerned about the political uses of, and attacks on, scientific knowledge and expertise.

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Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006) Feb 07, 2020

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006). The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 turned the Arctic into an object of fascination. By the end of the century, it had become an ‘Arctic Fever.’ Fox is the host of the radio program Geographical Imaginations for RadioFabrik in Salzburg, which is also available on iTunes as a podcast.

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Shannon Vallor, "Technology and the Virtues" (Oxford UP, 2016) Feb 06, 2020

The 21st century offers a dizzying array of new technological developments: robots smart enough to take white collar jobs, social media tools that manage our most important relationships, ordinary objects that track, record, analyze and share every detail of our daily lives, and biomedical techniques with the potential to transform and enhance human minds and bodies to an unprecedented degree.

Emerging technologies are reshaping our habits, practices, institutions, cultures and environments in increasingly rapid, complex and unpredictable ways that create profound risks and opportunities for human flourishing on a global scale. How can our future be protected in such challenging and uncertain conditions? How can we possibly improve the chances that the human family will not only live, but live well, into the 21st century and beyond?

Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting(Oxford University Press, 2016) locates a key to that future in the distant past: specifically, in the philosophical traditions of virtue ethics developed by classical thinkers from Aristotle and Confucius to the Buddha. Each developed a way of seeking the good life that equips human beings with the moral and intellectual character to flourish even in the most unpredictable, complex and unstable situations--precisely where we find ourselves today.

Through an examination of the many risks and opportunities presented by rapidly changing technosocial conditions, Vallor makes the case that if we are to have any real hope of securing a future worth wanting, then we will need more than just better technologies. We will also need better humans.

Technology and the Virtues develops a practical framework for seeking that goal by means of the deliberate cultivation of technomoral virtues: specific skills and strengths of character, adapted to the unique challenges of 21st century life, that offer the human family our best chance of learning to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Kyle Devine, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music" (MIT Press, 2019) Feb 05, 2020

What is the human and environmental cost of music? In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019),Kyle Devine, an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, tells the material history of recorded music, counting the impact of music from the 78 to digital streaming. The book has a rich and detailed analysis of music’s contribution to our current environmental crisis, along with the human impact of making the materials that make our modern consumption of music possible. Offering a radically new perspective on music, the book is essential reading for everyone!

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Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019) Feb 03, 2020

Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting internet service providers from discriminating between content – by the Federal Communications Commission, a need to holistically understand the net neutrality debates still exists. How can we make sense of the intensification of controversy, the advocacy and protests, and the political and corporate wrangling? In his new book, The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities (MIT Press, 2019), Russell A. Newman, an assistant professor at Emerson College, sets out to provide an explication of the debates surrounding network neutrality. To do this, Newman critically examines the narratives put forth that erase elements foundational for interpreting the trajectory of open internet regulation, as well as comprehending the systems and impacts of internet advocacy, and the disparate rhetorics involved in this cause.

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Allison Ochs, "Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?" (Amsterdam UP, 2019) Jan 31, 2020

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 University Press, 2019), Allison Ochs combines experiences from her childhood with her research and expertise on teens and teen culture to write about experiences of teens and parents in navigating smartphones and increasing access to digital spaces. Ochs work examines social media, bullying, porn, gaming, sexting, and media usage, addressing some of the major questions and concerns of parents today. Ochs combines her stories of the past, talking about how being a teenager has in some ways changed, but in others continues to be a difficult space to navigate and fit in. Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s? gives suggestions on how to approach teens about emotional issues that all teens experience with the additional to the availability and usage of digital devices. Her works encourages readers to think about how they talk with teens learning to navigate the digital world.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Catherine Newell, "Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017) Jan 31, 2020

Catherine Newell talks about the religious roots of the final frontier, focusing on the collaboration of artist Chesley Bonestell, science writer Willy Ley, and the NASA rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Newell is an assistant professor of religion and science at the University of Miami. She’s the author of Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

Where did humanity get the idea that outer space is a frontier waiting to be explored? Destined for the Stars unravels the popularization of the science of space exploration in America between 1944 and 1955, arguing that the success of the US space program was due not to technological or economic superiority, but was sustained by a culture that had long believed it was called by God to settle new frontiers and prepare for the inevitable end of time and God’s final judgment. Religious forces, Newell finds, were in no small way responsible for the crescendo of support for and interest in space exploration in the early 1950s, well before Project Mercury—the United States’ first human spaceflight program—began in 1959.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Alexis Elder, "Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves" (Routledge, 2017) Jan 30, 2020

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies.

In Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves (Routledge, 2017), Alexis Elder develops a robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) Jan 30, 2020

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. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Christopher J. Phillips, "Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball" (Princeton UP, 2019) Jan 29, 2020

The so-called Sabermetrics revolution in baseball that began in the 1970s, popularized by the book—and later Hollywood film—Moneyball, was supposed to represent a triumph of observation over intuition. Cash-strapped clubs need not compete for hyped-up prospects when undervalued players provide better price per run scored. Q.E.D., right?

In Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball (Princeton University Press, 2019), historian of science Christopher J. Phillips rejects his titular dualism. He shows us that baseball can be, in the words of seminal anthropologist and noted Tampa Bay Rays fan* Claude Lévi-Strauss, “good to think with.” Both traditional amateur scouts and statistically-savvy scorers rely on metrics and bureaucracy to make their judgments count, as it were. Some like to say that baseball is quantitative at its core, but by tracing the co-evolution of the sport’s competing data sciences—with episodes that bear witness to the development of the modern press and digital computers—Phillips crafts a compelling narrative sure to delight baseball fans and historians of the human sciences alike.

*kidding

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race.

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Neil Maher, "Apollo in the Age of Aquarius" (Harvard UP, 2017) Jan 24, 2020

Neil Maher talks about the social forces that shaped NASA in the 1960s and 70s, connecting the space race with the radical upheavals of the counterculture. Maher is a professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He is the author of Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017).

The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock. This lively and original account of the space race makes the case that the conjunction of these two era-defining events was not entirely coincidental.

With its lavishly funded mandate to put a man on the moon, the Apollo mission promised to reinvigorate a country that had lost its way. But a new breed of activists denounced it as a colossal waste of resources needed to solve pressing problems at home. Neil Maher reveals that there were actually unexpected synergies between the space program and the budding environmental, feminist and civil rights movements as photos from space galvanized environmentalists, women challenged the astronauts’ boys club and NASA’s engineers helped tackle inner city housing problems. Against a backdrop of Saturn V moonshots and Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius brings the cultural politics of the space race back down to planet Earth.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020) Jan 24, 2020

For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys―an ugly death awaiting social deviants―neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020), Nancy D. Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned―and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and “reversal” after an overdose possible, became a tool for shifting law, policy, clinical medicine, and science toward harm reduction. Liberated from emergency room protocols and distributed in take-home kits to non-medical professionals, it also became a tool of empowerment.

After recounting the prehistory of naloxone―the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of “reanimatology”―Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists―whom she calls the “protagonists” of her story―Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster.

Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers.

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Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jan 23, 2020

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In Re-Engineering Humanity(Cambridge University Press, 2018), Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Safi Bahcall, "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries" (St. Martins, 2019) Jan 21, 2020

Safi Bahcall's Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries(St. Martin's Press, 2019) reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs.

Bahcall, a physicist and entrepreneur, shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing new ideas to rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.

Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how a new kind of science can help us become the initiators, rather than the victims, of innovative surprise.

Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of this new science―the science of phase transitions―to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. Loonshots is the first to apply this science to the spread of breakthrough ideas. Bahcall distills these insights into practical lessons creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries can use to change our world.

Along the way, readers will learn what James Bond and Lipitor have in common, what the movie Enigma Game got wrong about WWII, and what really killed Pan Am, Polaroid, and the Qing Dynasty.

Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer are the hosts of the excellent podcast Curiosity Daily. Subscribe to Curiosity Daily here.

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J. L. Anderson, "Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America" (West Virginia UP, 2019) Jan 21, 2020

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with J. L. Anderson about the 2019 book Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in Americapublished by West Virginia University Press. Anderson provides a history of pigs in America from the first arrival on the continent in the Columbian Exchange to the modern agribusiness of pork production, describing how we have “remade” the animal through breeding, feeding, medicating, legislating, and housing hogs. Despite the contemporary association between pork and the American South, Anderson describes how the centers of pork production and consumption have moved throughout American history in response to market changes, technological innovations, and transportation networks. The diet and housing of pigs has also evolved over time from seasonal free-range foraging in wooded areas (or even urban streets) to living in climate-controlled concrete pens and a non-seasonal diet. Similarly, Anderson describes how the place of pork in the hierarchy of edible meats changes over time. Colonial Americans largely adopted the English meat hierarchy of beef, mutton, and pork, with pork reserved for the working class and enslaved people. Though pork has replaced mutton in popularity, pork has always maintained its reputation as working people’s food. The later chapters of Capitalist Pigs argue that 20th-century Americans’ fear of fat resulted in a dramatic change in the body shape and biological make-up of the modern hog to invent a leaner “white meat.” Ironically, while the industry provided what it thought the market wanted, consumers didn’t change their pork eating habits that much, as the leaner pork was generally a much less desirable product. Trimming the fat from pork has led to the unexpected desirability of fattier cuts like bacon and pork belly in fine dining and the resurgence in “heritage breeds” of pigs with higher fat content. Anderson concludes by discouraging historians from interpreting the story of hogs in America as a success story of “transcending limits” in science, agriculture, and economics. “In short,” Anderson writes, “the success of pigs, pork, producers, and processors is not the whole story.”

Joe Anderson is Associate Dean of Research, Scholarship and Community Engagement and history professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Dr. Anderson teaches a variety of courses from food and diet to the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Joe’s professional experience as a museum educator and administrator has led to a continuing interest in public history, and his recent projects have focused on the history of rural America, particularly as it relates to technology and the environment in the midcontinent. Joe is the past president of the Agricultural History Society and a member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019) Jan 20, 2020

The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data? What important data is ignored when it is not easily translated into 1s and 0s? In his new book, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, critical data scientist Ben Green, an Affiliate and former Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics, critically examines what it means for a city to be smart enough to fulfill the promises of urbanism, while at the same time taking into account the very real drawbacks of constant data collection, and overreliance on digital technology. To do this, Green examines various case study examples, while offering philosophical and critical histories of the city-related technologies that have led us to this era.

Jasmine McNealy is a scholar of media and technology. She teaches at the University of Florida.

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Daniel Kennefick, "No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity" (Princeton UP, 2019) Jan 17, 2020

Daniel Kennefick talks about resistance to relativity theory in the early twentieth century and the huge challenges that faced British astronomers who wanted to test the theory during the solar eclipse of 1919. Kennefick is an associate professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He’s the author of No Shadow of Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse that Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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James Schwartz, "The Ethics of Space Exploration" (Springer, 2016) Jan 16, 2020

The Ethics of Space Exploration (Springer, 2016), edited by James S. J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan, aims to contribute significantly to the understanding of issues of value (including the ultimate value of space-related activities) which repeatedly emerge in interdisciplinary discussions on space and society. Although a recurring feature of discussions about space in the humanities, the treatment of value questions has tended to be patchy, of uneven quality and even, on occasion, idiosyncratic rather than drawing upon a close familiarity with state-of-the-art ethical theory. One of the volume's aims is to promote a more robust and theoretically informed approach to the ethical dimension of discussions on space and society. While the contributions are written in a manner which is accessible across disciplines, the book still withstands scrutiny by those whose work is primarily on ethics. At the same time it allows academics across a range of disciplines an insight into current approaches toward how the work of ethics gets done. The issues of value raised could be used to inform debates about regulation, space law and protocols for microbial discovery as well as longer-range policy debates about funding.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Jessica Lynne Pearson, "The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa" (Harvard UP, 2018) Jan 15, 2020

International organizations throw up several obstacles—their immense scale, their dry bureaucratic language—to the historian trying to piece together their past. In her book, The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa (Harvard University Press, 2018), Jessica Lynne Pearson steers clear of these obstacles and tells a captivating and consequential story about the relationship between global governance and empires. And that is no small feat.

The Colonial Politics of Global Health recounts France’s collision with the UN and World Health Organization in the immediate post-World War II years. She shows how French colonial administrators and doctors resisted organizations devoted to “global health,” fearing that they would would ramp up anticolonialism and eventually help detach colonial territories from the metropole. She also shows how that resistance has left legacies that continue to affect Sub-Saharan Africa to this day.

The book should interest historians of empire, health and medicine, and global governance.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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Rachel Louise Moran, "Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique" (U Penn Press, 2018) Jan 14, 2020

How did the modern, American body come into being? According to Rachel Louise Moran this is a story to be told through the lens of the advisory state. In her book, Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), she tracks the emergence of the American advisory state -- a key analytic introduced and developed by the author in this book -- and draws attention to polyvalence of bodies as both instruments and objects of public policy. Presenting a series of “body projects” which were pursued both formally and informally by the US federal state, Moran makes a case for the persistent political uses of physique throughout more than a century. In this manner, the author manages to tell a story not only of state expansion and citizenship, but also of gender roles, heteronormativity, standards of normality, and weight. This book, therefore, will be of great interest not only to US historians but also scholars interested in the medicalization of the body, gender and sexuality, childhood development, public health, and fat studies.

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Alice Hill, "Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jan 10, 2020

Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, further significant global climate change is now inevitable. Although we cannot tell with certainty how much average global temperatures will rise, we do know that the warming we have experienced to date has caused significant losses, and that the failure to prepare for the consequences of further warming may prove to be staggering.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption (Oxford University Press, 2019), edited by Alice C. Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz, does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects. While squarely confronting the scale of the risks we face, this pragmatic guide focuses on solutions-some gradual and some more revolutionary-currently being deployed around the globe. Each chapter presents a thematic lesson for decision-makers and engaged citizens to consider, outlining replicable successes and identifying provocative recommendations to strengthen climate resilience.

Between animated discussions of ideas as wide-ranging as managed retreat from coastal hot-zones to biological approaches for resurgent climate-related disease threats, Hill and Martinez-Diaz draw on their personal experiences as senior officials in the Obama Administration to tell behind-the-scenes stories of what it really takes to advance progress on these issues. The narrative is dotted with tales of on-the-ground citizenry, from small-town mayors and bankers to generals and engineers, who are chipping away at financial disincentives and bureaucratic hurdles to prepare for life on a warmer planet. For readers exhausted by today's paralyzing debates on yearly "fluke" storms or the existence of climate change, Building a Resilient Tomorrow offers better ways to manage the risks in a warming planet, even as we work to limit global temperature rise.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Neil McArthur, "Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications" (MIT Press, 2017) Jan 09, 2020

Sexbots are coming. Given the pace of technological advances, it is inevitable that realistic robots specifically designed for people's sexual gratification will be developed in the not-too-distant future. Despite popular culture's fascination with the topic, and the emergence of the much-publicized Campaign Against Sex Robots, there has been little academic research on the social, philosophical, moral, and legal implications of robot sex. Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press, 2017), edited by Neil McArthur and John Danaher, fills the gap, offering perspectives from philosophy, psychology, religious studies, economics, and law on the possible future of robot-human sexual relationships.

Contributors discuss what a sex robot is, if they exist, why we should take the issue seriously, and what it means to “have sex” with a robot. They make the case for developing sex robots, arguing for their beneficial nature, and the case against it, on religious and moral grounds; they consider the subject from the robot's perspective, addressing such issues as consent and agency; and they ask whether it is possible for a human to form a mutually satisfying, loving relationship with a robot. Finally, they speculate about the future of human-robot sexual interaction, considering the social acceptability of sex robots and the possible effect on society.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Lydia Barnett, "After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) Jan 08, 2020

Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature and humanity, and their intersecting histories.

Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in fostering new ways of thinking about the capacity of humans and nature to change each other on a planetary scale. In the hands of Protestant and Catholic writers from across Europe and its American colonies, the biblical story of Noah's Flood became a vehicle for imagining the power of sin to wreck the world, the dangers of overpopulation, the transformative effects of shifting landforms on the course of human history, and the impact of a changing climate on human bodies, health, and lives.

Following Noah's Flood as a popular topic of debate through long-distance networks of knowledge from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Barnett reveals how early modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by gender, evangelism, empire, race, and nation. After the Flood illuminates the hidden role and complicated legacy of religion in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness.

Interviewed by Lukas Rieppel. Visit my personal website here, or find me on twitter here.

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Robert Rozehnal, "Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience" (OneWorld, 2019) Jan 08, 2020

What happens when the digital world meets Sufism? This is the question raised in the exciting new book Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (OneWorld Academic, 2019) by Robert Rozehnal, a professor of Islamic Studies and South Asian Religions and the founding director of the Center for Global Islamic Studies at Lehigh University. This exhilarating new book explores how the Inayati Order, the oldest Sufi community in the west, under the current leadership of Zia Inayat Khan, utilizes cyber tools in their pedagogical practices, ritual performances, and social engagement. By investigating this one particular American Sufi community’s presence in the digital world (such as on Facebook, webpages, and etc.), Rozehnal highlights how “cyber Sufis” create complex identities both on- and offline, all the while evading any easy categorizations of Sufism, Islam, and new age spirituality. Some of the noted digital transformations unfolding within the Inayati Order are in many ways, not novel, but rather reflective of historical legacies, such as in the case of South Asian Sufism of the Chishtis that influences the Inayati Order. Methodologically, the book is deeply sensitive of and also models how to conduct digital ethnography and highlights the significance of studying digital religions, especially from an Islamic studies perspective. The book is accessible and thus is a great teaching resource for undergraduates, especially for courses on digital religions, ritual studies, media studies, American Islam, and Sufism.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca

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Joe Miller, "US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Alcoholism" (Chicago Review Press, 2019) Jan 07, 2020

In the aftermath of Prohibition, America’s top scientists joined forces with members of a new group, called Alcoholics Anonymous, and put their clout behind a campaign to convince the nation that alcoholism was a disease rather than a moral failing. Their campaign spanned decades, and from it grew a multimillion-dollar treatment industry that actively promoted AA groups and the Twelve Steps as the primary way to deal with problem drinking. In our conversation about his new book US of AA: How the Twelve Steps Hijacked the Science of Alcoholism (Chicago Review Press, 2019), author Joe Miller discusses the history of AA, the biggest names behind the group, and how alcoholism has been defined, and treated, over the decades.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

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Raj Patel, "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things" (U California Press, 2017) Jan 07, 2020

Award winning activist and researcher Raj Patel has teamed up with innovative environmental historian and historical geographer Jason W. Moore to produce an accessible book which provides historical explanations for the world ecological crises and the global crisis in capitalism. Using the framework of "cheapness," A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2017) takes the reader through the long history of the search for lower production costs, extending from European colonial conquests in the fifteenth century up to present agroindustrial systems. This quest for cheapness originated with European colonists' desire to separate Society—themselves—from Nature—everything else. All forms of "Nature" were categorized by colonist and capitalists so that they could be efficiently used for production. Human beings were often included in this contrived category of Nature. Colonized people, the indigenous, women, and brown people were considered akin to non-human nature. In the process of employing cheapness as a "strategy" across space and time, colonial and capitalist powers have devastated land, destroyed indigenous populations, and exploited workers. Resistance to cheapness is described in the book too, but in Moore and Patel's depiction of the modern world, this resistance seems insignificant compared to the power and momentum of the cheapness strategy. The refusal to pay the true costs of production eventually led to crises because nature was cheap, but never free; debts mounted. “The modern world happened” according to Patel and Moore, “because externalities struck back” (21). Global warming is the best example of these debts but the book exposes many others.

To engage as broad of an audience as possible, the book is structured in a simple way making it useful for researchers, a general audience, and as a teaching text. The introduction begins with the example of the chicken nugget, the production of which exemplifies all seven "cheap things." The chapter then gives an outline of the argument. After the introduction, the reader is walked through relatively self-contained chapters on each of the seven cheap things: cheap nature, cheap money, cheap work, cheap care, cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap lives. Any chapter can be read in isolation as an example of how the concept of cheapness works in different ecological and economic realms but together they give the reader an understanding of the encompassing and destructive power of "cheapness." As Patel explains in the interview, the book was designed to engage an "intersectional" activist audience. Those interested in indigenous rights, class, race, and ecological issues will all find something interesting, and likely infuriating, in this book.

Readers might be disappointed by the brevity of the conclusion however, which attempts to offer some solutions to current global crises. Here Patel and Moore lay out the basic structure for a "reparations ecology" that calls for profound changes, not simply in world economic and political relations, but in humans' attitude towards nature, both human and non-human forms. Hopefully Patel and Moore will elaborate further on the important concept of reparations ecology in their future works. In the meantime, anyone interested in the origins of the most pressing problems facing humanity today must give Patel and Moore's thesis serious consideration.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment.

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Leor Halevi, "Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935" (Columbia UP, 2019) Jan 07, 2020

How did Muslims respond to foreign goods in an age characterized by global exchange and European imperial expansion? What sort of legal reasoning did scholars apply in order to appropriate – or reject – items like the synthetic toothbrush, toilet paper, gramophones, photographs, railway lines, banknotes, hats, and other commodities? What role did laypeople play in shaping the contours of the scholarly debates around these items and projects? How did the entanglements of imperial power plays affect the decisions made by these scholars and laypersons?

In Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935 (Columbia University Press, 2019), Leor Halevi tackles these questions by exploring how Muslim reformers employed sophisticated legal reasoning rooted in textual sources as well as social context to account for the introduction of these new commodities, technologies, and laws in their rapidly changing societies. By focusing on the works of Rashid Rida – the Syrian-Egyptian publisher of Al-Manar – Halevi demonstrates how modern technological advancements also transformed the very processes of Islamic law, as lay inquirers became central actors in shaping the contours of the discussion. Thus, through his analysis, Halevi creates a space for reading the development of Islamic law in this period as an “Islamic law from below.” The portrait emerges of an enchanting global journey across time and space in the Muslim-majority world as we witness an Islamic tradition that was actively – and critically – engaged in modernity’s premises through the trials of modern things.

Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University.

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Matthew D. O'Hara, "The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico" (Yale UP, 2018) Jan 06, 2020

Latin America – especially colonial Latin America – is not particularly known for futurism. For popular audiences, the region’s history likely evokes images of book burning, the Inquisition, and other symbols of orthodoxy and fatalism. Specialists too tend to associate Latin America with a deep sense of historicism: the weight of memory – conquest, genocide, state violence – deeply marks the region’s politics and culture. On the other hand, in traditional historical narratives, a cognitive orientation towards the future is the province of northern Europe, the scientific revolution, liberalism, capitalism – in a word, modernity.

In The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018), however, Matthew O’Hara uncovers a vast array of social practices in colonial Mexico that force us to reconsider who owns the future. Noted intellectuals were not the only ones planning ahead; instead, common people managed overlapping temporalities as they negotiated personal finance, heavenly salvation, health, and the climate. In addition to detailing the subjectivities such structures and practices produced, O’Hara also traces a long arc of change over three centuries of Spanish rule. Improvised financial mechanisms, revised modes of discerning natural truths, and personalized notions of spiritual self-improvement transformed the colonial experience of time. But rather than tracking these to European philosophes, O’Hara finds them emerging from the fabric of colonial experience and developing into a unique temporality in which tradition and change were mutually constructive. For any readers interested in time and temporality, The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico will give you much to think with.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, "Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World" (Stanford UP, 2006) Jan 03, 2020

In the late 1500s, the mines of Potosí –a mountain in southern Bolivia — produced 60% of the world’s silver. It was a place of great wealth and terrible suffering. It is also a place, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra argues, that challenges the very idea of the Scientific Revolution. Canizares-Esguerra discusses Potosí and how its peoples and technologies shaped 16th century science. He is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been honored by awards from the American Historical Association and the History of Science Society. Canizares-Esguerra is the author of (among other books) of Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Susan Schulten, "A History of American in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press 2018) Jan 03, 2020

In her new book A History of American in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press 2018), historian Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. Schulten’s “visual tour of American history” considers the different purposes for which maps are created—maps as tools of statecraft and diplomacy, maps made to amuse and entertain, and maps made as instruments of social reform. Some of the maps she discusses document journeys, others strategize for war. Some trace the spread of disease, others the pathways of rivers or the decline of endangered species. Some are produced by trained cartographers, others by amateurs, one by a young schoolgirl. Together, they offer a compelling—and at times quite beautiful—case for the power of maps to shape our world and the ways we navigate through it.

You can preview some of the maps in the book here.

Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu.

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John Danaher, "Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work" (Harvard UP, 2019) Jan 02, 2020

The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to be performed by machines. These days, the stakes seem to be higher, as technology now seems poised to render nearly all human labor obsolete. What lies in store for us, and for the flourishing and meaning of our lives, once technology has relieved humans of the need to work?

In Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work (Harvard University Press, 2019), John Danaher explores the issues facing us as we confront our own obsolescence. He defends the idea that a workless future is not only possible, but possibly utopian.

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E. Wakild and M. K. Berry, "A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles" (Duke UP, 2018) Dec 31, 2019

Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry have written a practical, informative, and inspiring guide to teaching environmental history. It also happens to be fun. A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles (Duke University Press, 2018) offers strategies and approaches that educators can apply in a variety of settings: from high school classrooms to college courses, and from environmental history and environmental studies courses to US and world history surveys. Wakild and Berry draw on their years of experience in the classroom to describe not only the how, but also the why of effective teaching. They thereby empower readers to take these principles and make them their own. “Pedagogy is a process or shared endeavor,” write Wakild and Berry. With this book, they welcome educators from various backgrounds into this collaborative undertaking.

Emily Wakild is Professor of History and Director of Environmental Studies at Boise State University. Michelle K. Berry is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies and a lecturer in the History Department at the University of Arizona.

Josh Nygren is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. You can find him on Twitter @joshua_nygren. Thanks to Justin Dean and UCM’s Digital Media Production program for production assistance.

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Joshua Specht, "Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America" (Princeton UP, 2019) Dec 30, 2019

Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that shows how our diets and consumer choices remain rooted in nineteenth century enterprises. A century and half ago, he writes, the colonialism and appropriation of indigenous lands enabled the expansion of western ranch outfits. These corporate ranchers controlled loose commodity chains, until powerful corporate meat packers in Chicago seized the economic order through the tools of modern capitalism (scientific management, standardization, labor suppression). These capitalists expanded the supply chains to far-flung consumers in New York and around the globe. But as meat became a staple of the American diet, and measure of progress, consumers cared more about the price and taste than the violence to people, animals, and environment behind the scenes. “America made modern beef” Specht writes, “at the same time that beef made America modern.”

Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. @rydriskelltate

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M. Schneider-Mayerson and B. R. Bellamy, "An Ecotopian Lexicon" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) Dec 27, 2019

By choice or not, the catastrophes of global warming and mass extinction task young generations with reorienting human relationships with the earth’s systems, resources, and lifeforms. The extractavist mindset that promised prosperity in the 20th century now spells doom in the 21st and leaves us unprepared to live on a damaged planet. Into this space academics have birthed a dizzying number of tongue-twisting neologisms, but editors Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy provide us with the welcome reminder that human societies are already rich in intellectual resources for such transformation.

Accordingly, An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) explores dozens of possible loanwords from world cultures, activists subcultures, and speculative fiction that can inform novel quotidian practices, cosmological insights, and political orientations applicable to the age of the Anthropocene. With short readable and eloquent essays that elaborate each term and its possible uses without heavy-handed jargon, this book serves as an excellent bridge between the academic and non-academic thinkers seeking a new vocabulary for a reimagined world.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Latin America. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org

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Angelina Callahan, "NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Dec 27, 2019

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 “Space Race,” it also represented something more: a scientific platform for understanding the space environment as well as a test vehicle that would provide data for satellites of the future. Vanguard 1 is still flying. At 60 years, it is the oldest artificial satellite in space. Callahan is the Naval Research Laboratory Historian. She is also a co-author (with John Krige and Ashok Mahara) of NASA in the World: Fifty Years of International Collaboration in Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her work has also been featured in NASA Spaceflight: A History of Innovation, the Navy War College Review, Seapower Magazine, and Federal News Radio.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Ajantha Subramanian, "The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India" (Harvard UP, 2019) Dec 27, 2019

What is merit? How is it claimed? In her much-awaited book The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019), Ajantha Subramanian addresses the pertinent question of caste inheritance and privilege in the making of merit and meritocracies. Focusing her attention on the premier institutions of engineering education in India, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Subramanian provides an insightful account of their emergence is post-independence India as a set of distinct and “world class” institutions underwritten by the Indian state. As Subramanian traces the colonial career of technical knowledge as the prehistory of the formation of IITs as well as the global circulation of ‘Brand IIT’, she provides us an account of how the alibis of caste inheritance emerge against graded inequalities. Whether it is through the language of law that only names caste discrimination as the basis of non-achievement while leaving unnamed caste inheritances as the basis of achievement, or through the judicial monikers of ‘general category’ and ‘reserved category’ or better still the ‘middle classness’ of those who claim educational achievement as their only capital, Subramanian’s book unravels the claims to casteless-ness crucial to the discourse on meritocracy in India and in the United States.

Ajantha Subramanian is a Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Tune in to listen to the author talk about the dual value of technical education, the relationships between caste and mobility, the Indian diaspora in the Silicon Valley and the methodological repertoire and dilemmas of (not) talking about caste privilege.

Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.

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Evan Friss, "On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City" (Columbia UP, 2019) Dec 26, 2019

Evan Friss, an associate professor of history at James Madison University, historicizes the bicycle’s place in New York City’s social, economic, infrastructural and cultural politics.

On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City (Columbia UP, 2019) curates a history of the key moments and individuals who worked to integrate the bicycle and the bicyclist into the urban fabric. Friss explores the long-standing debate over what a bicycle is—cars and walkers, he contends, had specific places on city streets. The bicycle was a different story. New Yorkers strove to define and redefine the relationship among New York City, its people, and their bicycles. Beginning with the fad of velocipedes and the arrival of the first modern bicycles on city streets in the second half of the nineteenth century, On Bicycles highlights key moments in cycling history. With each era, a diverse cohort of cyclists and municipal officials tasked with integrating—or banning—bicycles from city streets. Cyclists turned to bikes as a form of exercise as recreation, as a liberating technology, and as transportation. In Friss’s capable telling, cycling is a window into the nature of transportation, streets, and urban life.

Kara Murphy Schlichting is an assistant professor of history at Queens College, CUNY and author of New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore.

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Benjamin Breen, "The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade" (U Penn Press, 2019) Dec 26, 2019

In Benjamin Breen's The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), we are transported back to a time when there was no such thing as "recreational" and "medicinal" drugs. People ate Egyptian mummies. Tobacco apparently cured cancer. And the book has many more fascinating stories. Focusing in on the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Angola and on the imperial capital of Lisbon, Breen deftly explores the process by which novel drugs were located, commodified, and consumed. And Breen demonstrates that drugs have been entwined with science and empire from the very beginning. Just like today.

Benjamin Breen is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Darius Sollohub, "Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession" (U Texas Press, 2019) Dec 24, 2019

Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosive population growth, climate change, and the density of cities, Darius Sollohub, Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession (University of Texas Press, 2019) embraces the digitally savvy disruptors who are joining the field at a crucial time as it grapples with the best ways to respond to a changing physical world.

Taking a clear-eyed look at the new generation in the context of the design professions, Sollohub begins by situating Millennials in a line of generations stretching back to early Modernism, exploring how each generation negotiates the ones before and after. He then considers the present moment, closely evaluating the significance of Millennial behaviors and characteristics (from civic-mindedness to collaboration, and time management in a 24/7 culture), all underpinned by fluency in the digital world. The book concludes with an assessment of the profound changes and opportunities that Millennial disruption will bring to education, licensure, and firm management. Encouraging new alliances, Millennials in Architecture is an essential resource for the architectural community and its stakeholders.

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Xiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) Dec 21, 2019

International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of course, in the US and Great Britain where the field initially began to coalesce. Now, Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) makes a massive contribution to the field by opening up a fascinating new vista for scholars of cybernetics, film studies, literature, media studies, science and technology studies, and beyond.

Liu’s meticulously researched and crisply written book takes us from the heady days of China’s “qi gong craze” and notions of the human body as a transparent medium through which “information waves” could pass, through investment and research into “a theory of metasynthetic wisdom” that could lead to a “global human-machine intelligent system,” the evolution of “expert systems” to provide knowledge and guidance in the absence of human experts, the novel deployment of Ross Ashby’s theory of “ultrastability” to describe China’s supposed resistance to modernization, information aesthetics within a new rising tide of advertising and market activity, and much, much more.

All of this combines to a reveal a China after Mao, vigorously employing the theoretical tools of cybernetics to, not only re-configure its socio-political image on a national scale, but to actually craft a new post-socialist subjectivity at the scale of the individual citizen. Illustrating the profound impacts of, and reactions to, these efforts through provocative samplings from Chinese literature, film, and popular culture writ large, Liu manages, in the words of Oxford’s Margaret Hillenbrand to “entirely reconfigure our understanding of the media landscape in 1980’s China."

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Steve Fuller, "The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Dec 19, 2019

Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska's The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) debates the concept of transforming human nature, including such thorny topics as humanity's privilege as a species, our capacity to 'play God', the idea that we might treat our genes as a capital investment, eugenics and what it might mean to be 'human' in the context of risky scientific and technological interventions.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) Dec 18, 2019

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji).

Ayo Wahlberg book Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (U California Press, 2018) explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it.

Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.

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Joshua Sperber, "Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace" (Lexington, 2019) Dec 16, 2019

In Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Lexington Books, 2019), Joshua Sperber analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and—sometimes unwittingly—discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Sperber uses case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors (RMP), to explore how online reviewing, a popular contemporary hobby, tells us much about the collapse of the barriers separating work and leisure as well as our need for collective purpose and community wherever we can find it. This book explores the economic implications of online reviews, as reviews provide both valuable free content for websites and surveillance of, respectively, restaurant servers and college instructors.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digitalin peoples lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Laura Cabrera, "Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Dec 12, 2019

In Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Laura Cabrera discusses three possible human enhancement paradigms and explores how each involves different values, uses of technology, and different degrees and kinds of ethical concerns. A new framework is advanced that promotes technological innovation that serves the improvement of the human condition in a respectful and sustainable way.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Thomas Yarrow, "Architects: Portraits of a Practice" (Cornell UP, 2019) Dec 12, 2019

What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity.

Architects: Portraits of a Practice (Cornell University Press, 2019) rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.

Prue Chiles is Professor of Architectural Design Research at Newcastle University

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E. Jones-Imhotep and T. Adcock, "Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History" (UBC Press, 2018) Dec 10, 2019

Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. The book I’m looking at today, Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) explores the complex interconnections between science, technology, and modernity in Canada. Edited by Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock, it draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. Organized around three key themes – bodies, technologies, and environments – the book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics as varied as colonial anthropology, scientific expeditions, electrotherapy, the occult sciences, industrial development, telephony, patents, neuroscience, aviation, space science, and infrastructure, the contributors explore Canadians’ modern engagements with science and technology and situate them within larger national and transnational contexts.

The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.

Edward Jones-Imhotep is a cultural historian of science and technology and an associate professor of history at York University. He is the recipient of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology for his book The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War.

Tina Adcock is a cultural and environmental historian of modern Canada and an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Audrey Kurth Cronin, "Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists" (Oxford UP, 2019) Dec 09, 2019

Never have so many possessed the means to be so lethal. The diffusion of modern technology (robotics, cyber weapons, 3-D printing, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence) to ordinary people has given them access to weapons of mass violence previously monopolized by the state. In recent years, states have attempted to stem the flow of such weapons to individuals and non-state groups, but their efforts are failing.

In Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists (Oxford University Press, 2019), Audrey Kurth Cronin...

Explains a fundamental shift in patterns of innovation for lethal technologies, and what it means;
Looks at individuals and private groups, not states, as the most significant trend redefining the future;
Presents contemporary case studies and discussion of paradigm-shifting technology from the late 19th century and mid-20th century;
Combines history, science and technology, political science, security and terrorism studies, with a deep understanding of US and international security policy;
Considers why certain lethal technologies spread, which ones to focus on, and how individuals and private groups might adapt the latest off-the-shelf technologies for malevolent ends; and
Recommends a broad array of tactics and policies to contain and combat violent rogue actors worldwide.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Jason Smith, "To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire" (UNC Press, 2018) Dec 06, 2019

Jason Smith discusses the US Navy’s role in exploring and charting the ocean world. Smith is an assistant professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University. He’s the author of To Master the Boundless Sea: The US Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (UNC Press, 2018).

As the United States grew into an empire in the late nineteenth century, notions like "sea power" derived not only from fleets, bases, and decisive battles but also from a scientific effort to understand and master the ocean environment. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and concluding in the first years of the twentieth, Jason W. Smith tells the story of the rise of the U.S. Navy and the emergence of American ocean empire through its struggle to control nature. In vividly told sketches of exploration, naval officers, war, and, most significantly, the ocean environment, Smith draws together insights from environmental, maritime, military, and naval history, and the history of science and cartography, placing the U.S. Navy's scientific efforts within a broader cultural context.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Chet Van Duzer, "Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends" (Springer, 2019) Dec 06, 2019

Chet Van Duzer's new book Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), presents the first detailed study of one of the most important masterpieces of Renaissance cartography. By transcribing, translating into English, and detailing the sources of all of the descriptive texts on the map, as well as the sources of many of the images, the book makes the map available to scholars in a wholly unprecedented way. In addition, the book provides revealing insights into how Waldseemüller went about making the map -- information that can’t be found in any other source. The Carta marina is the result of Waldseemüller’s radical re-evaluation of what a world map should be; he essentially started from scratch when he created it, rejecting the Ptolemaic model and other sources he had used in creating his 1507 map, and added more descriptive texts and a wealth of illustrations. Given its content, the book offers an essential reference work not only on this map, but also for anyone working in sixteenth-century European cartography.

This book is available open access here.

Steven Seegel is a professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado.

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Michael R. Boswell, "Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities" (Island Press, 2019) Dec 06, 2019

Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities (Island Press, 2019) is designed to help planners, municipal staff and officials, citizens and others working at local levels to develop and implement plans to mitigate a community's greenhouse gas emissions and increase the resilience of communities against climate change impacts. This fully revised and expanded edition goes well beyond climate action plans to examine the mix of policy and planning instruments available to every community. Michael R. Boswell, Adrienne I. Greve, and Tammy L. Seale also look at process and communication: How does a community bring diverse voices to the table? What do recent examples and research tell us about successful communication strategies?

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Deborah Lupton, "The Quantified Self" (Polity, 2016) Dec 05, 2019

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. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to promote 'self-knowledge through numbers'.

In The Quantified Self (Polity, 2016), Deborah Lupton critically analyses the social, cultural and political dimensions of contemporary self-tracking and identifies the concepts of selfhood and human embodiment and the value of the data that underpin them.

The book incorporates discussion of the consolations and frustrations of self-tracking, as well as about the proliferating ways in which people's personal data are now used beyond their private rationales. Lupton outlines how the information that is generated through self-tracking is taken up and repurposed for commercial, governmental, managerial and research purposes. In the relationship between personal data practices and big data politics, the implications of self-tracking are becoming ever more crucial.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

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Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018) Dec 04, 2019

They were throwing garbage in the streets.

Rosalind Fredericks makes sense of the garbage-scape of Dakar, Senegal in the wake of the 2007 trash “revolts” against the city and country’s uneven and failing garbage infrastructure—and puts into readers’ senses the smelly, sticky, full-sensory politics of waste management in the Global South.

Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) brings together studies of infrastructure with scholarship on labor to make a case for understanding, not infrastructure and labor, but laboring bodies as infrastructure. The book breaths fresh life into the moribund concept of neoliberalism to show how civic care, like household care, fell unevenly in Dakar on the bodies of women, youths, and economically precarious workers. Their bodies carried the scars, as well as the stigma, of governments’ piecemeal moves over three decades to keep the labor force that was managing waste both flexible and disposable—at times devolving responsibility onto individuals and informal sectors in the name of modernity, community, and Islamic piety.

Garbage Citizenship is based on Fredericks’ political ethnography of Senegal and the book includes vivid, beautiful photos of people, machines, and garbage laboring together—and, at times, collaborating in their refusal to be governed. (Just check out the cover image!) With workers always in mind, Fredericks makes space for hope, tells us where she is working now, and, in this generous interview, suggests how we can give breathing room to social justice, too.

Fredericks is Associate Professor of Geography and Development Studies at New York University. The interview was conducted collaboratively by Laura Stark and students in her Vanderbilt seminar, History of Global Health: Emma Dahill, Savannah Larkin, Andrew Medland, Hailey Silver, Jesse Pullen, Gavin Yuan and Claudia Vial.

For ideas and resources on how to include the New Books Network in your classroom, feel free to email Laura Stark at laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu or see Stark’s essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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Lundy Braun, "Breathing Race into the Machine" (U Minnesota Press, 2014) Dec 04, 2019

“We cannot get answers to questions that cannot be asked.” Lundy Braun’s influential book, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) documents the history and present-day use of an everyday medical instrument, the spirometer, which measures a person’s lung capacity. The instrument has a long history, but since the 1970s, this common medical device has been built with a switch that forces users to choose: are these the lungs of a person who is Black or a person who is White? In its materiality, the instrument forces racialized and individualized answers to the question: What explains human variation? In doing so, the people who have imagined, built, and refined the instrument have foreclosed structural, political explanations of human difference—and in doing so, foreclosed the possibility of holding governments and corporations accountable, including in recent workers’ compensation lawsuits.

Lundy Braun tells the long history of this instrument as it passed between “knowledge networks” in the United Kingdom, United States, and South Africa within the contexts of medicine, law, and education. Admirably, Braun documents how and in what terms experts (unsuccessfully) questioned the spirometer’s epistemic authority and its racialization, as well as how experts partnered with social justice groups to use the spirometer for liberatory ends. The book emphasizes the contexts of war and industrial labor, the importance of standardization, and, above all, the role of the spirometer in creating and maintaining the “white norm” in the body.

Lundy Braun is Professor of Medical Science in Pathology and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. The interview was conducted collaboratively by Laura Stark [insert www.laura-stark.com] and students in her Vanderbilt seminar, History of Global Health: Omar Amir, Maggie Cox, Bryce Bailey, Donald Fitzgerald, Ashley Hunter, Jillian Jackson, Rohit Kamath, Zoe Mulraine, Liu Lanxi, Madison Noall, Catie O’Reilly, Isabella Schaffer, Katie Swift, Charlotte Whitfield, and Allie Yan.

For ideas and resources to use NBN interviews in your classes, please email Laura Stark at laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu or see Stark’s essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) Dec 03, 2019

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, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

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John P. Davis, "Russia in the Time of Cholera" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) Nov 29, 2019

The idea of “backwardness” often plagues historical writing on Russia. In Russia in the Time of Cholera: Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Dr. John P. Davis counteracts this “backwardness” paradigm, arguing that from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, Russian medical researchers—along with their counterparts in France and Germany—were at the forefront of the struggle against cholera. Davis’ birds-eye view of this hundred-year period illustrates that the conditions allowing cholera to flourish were the same set of conditions that helped create the collapse of the tsarist regime during the First World War. Credit for elimination of cholera must go to the Bolsheviks, both for implementing tsarist-era medical theory, and especially for making war on cholera in a organized, systematic manner that the old regime was variously unable or unwilling to achieve.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018) Nov 26, 2019

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 project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2018). But this isn’t your typical historical monograph. One of the latest volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (with illustrations by Liz Clarke), explores the history of modernization, urbanization, and the spread of epidemic disease in the era of “New Imperialism” in an exciting and highly engaging format.

The remaking of Hanoi as a capital of French empire from the end of the nineteenth century had unintended consequences. In the state-of-the-art sewers of the French/white areas of the city, rats found the perfect home. Then came the Third plague pandemic, the disease that travelled with rats and moved from one site to another around the globe…on railroads, ships, the growing networks of trade and empire. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt mobilizes years of research about this episode in the city’s history, illustrating (literally!) the inherent contradictions of imperialism, and the complexities of domination and resistance in a colonial context. Framed as an undergraduate lecture that features the author as a character throughout the narrative, the book is set up with teaching in mind. In addition to the fascinating story of the rat hunt itself (and all the twists and turns involved), the volume includes a rich selection of primary sources and a series of contextual essays that will allow students to explore this history in a range of productive ways. An accessible book that is at once serious and fun, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt was such a pleasure to read and to talk about. I hope listeners will enjoy my conversation with Mike as much as I did!

*Mike is also a host on New Books in History! Be sure to check out his interviews here on the network.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Nir Eyal, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" (Bloomsbury, 2019) Nov 25, 2019

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 family life. He took a deep dive into research and literature on the subject, and emerged with this new book (with Julie Li), Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (Bloomsbury, 2019). The takes his expertise and applies it to consumers, to give us all a fighting chance to maintain control of our lives – online and off.

Based on research and punctuated with personal experience, Indistractable offers a theoretical framework for the powerful distractions each of us encounters every single day, and offers practical suggestions for managing our most valuable and truly limited resources, our time and attention.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom

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Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019) Nov 19, 2019

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

In Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019), Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

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Helen Rozwadowski, "Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans" (Reaktion Books, 2018) Nov 15, 2019

Helen Rozwadowski talks about the history of the oceans and how these oceans have shaped human history in profound ways. Rozwadowski is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point. She is the author of many books including Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (Reaktion Books, 2018).

Much of human experience can be distilled to saltwater: tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. In Vast Expanses, Rozwadowski weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical history of that relationship, a journey of tides and titanic forces reaching around the globe and across geological and evolutionary time.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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J. Yates and C. N. Murphy, "Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) Nov 14, 2019

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 allow your computer and smart phone to connect seamlessly with others. While it is clear that standards shape the material world we live in, someone decided that they should be that way. In a word, standards have a social life of their own. In Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy look at the pervasive practice of private, voluntary standard setting as it grew out of a social movement of engineers. From the International Organization for Standards (ISO) to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Yates and Murphy provide an engaging narrative about the people and processes responsible for making the technologies we have today work with one another.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race.

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Jonathan Rees, "Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) Nov 14, 2019

Frederic Tudor was the “Ice King” of early nineteenth-century America. It was Tudor who realized that ice, harvested from New England ponds and rivers could be shipped to the Caribbean. Shipping was cheap, because ships often went empty to pick up cargo; insulation could be made from sawdust, a waste product of the New England lumber industry. His first shipment was in 1806; after failure and adaptation, he was shipping ice throughout the Caribbean, and using leftover ice to bring back tropical fruit. In 1833, he began to ship ice to India, which would become his most lucrative market.

Tudor’s story is just one of those told by Jonathan Rees in his book Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). It’s the third book he’s written about what Rees calls “the modern cold chain.” That might not sound very exciting. But Rees is describing something very interesting indeed: how complex technological systems can develop without any central controlling force. There were no monopolies in refrigeration, no central government agencies. It just…happened. With a lot of work. How it did is the subject of our conversation.

Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.

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Margaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) Nov 14, 2019

Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasting impact on applied science.

In Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), a richly illustrated comparative study of this transformative period, Margaret E. Schotte charts more than two hundred years of navigational history as she investigates how mariners solved the challenges of navigating beyond sight of land. She begins by outlining the influential sixteenth-century Iberian model for training and certifying nautical practitioners. She takes us into a Dutch bookshop stocked with maritime manuals and a French trigonometry lesson devoted to the idea that "navigation is nothing more than a right triangle." The story culminates at the close of the eighteenth century with a young British naval officer who managed to keep his damaged vessel afloat for two long months, thanks largely to lessons he learned as a keen student.

This is the first study to trace the importance, for the navigator's art, of the world of print. Schotte interrogates a wide variety of archival records from six countries, including hundreds of published textbooks and never-before-studied manuscripts crafted by practitioners themselves. Ultimately, Sailing School helps us to rethink the relationship among maritime history, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of print culture during a period of unparalleled innovation and global expansion.

Lukas Rieppel teaches at Brown University. You can find more about him here, or find him on twitter here.

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Wendy Wickwire, "At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging" (UBC Press, 2019) Nov 13, 2019

The history of anthropology remembers James Teit as a field assistant and man-on-the spot for Franz Boas. But in At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging (University of British Columbia Press, 2019).Wendy Wickwire turns this picture upside down, revealing Teit to be a superb ethnographer in his own right and a tireless political activist who advocated for the rights of Indigenous people. Drawing on thirty years of exhaustive research, she shows us that Teit exemplified an 'anthropology of belonging': an anthropology deeply rooted in a place and community, even if it is carried out by a settler. But more than this, At The Bridge uses the thread of Teit's life to weave a truly synthetic story of the history of colonialism and dispossession in British Columbia as a whole.

In this podcast host Alex Golub talks with Wendy Wickwire about Teit, his his life, and the example he offers to anthropologists interested in an anthropology of belonging. They contrast Teit and Boas, and examine how Wickwire's book performs an anthropology of belonging itself, and discuss the how anthropologists can write for communities outside the academy.

Wendy Wickwire is professor emeritus of history and environmental studies at the University of Victoria. She is the author of Stein: The Way of the River (with Michael M’Gonigle), which won the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award at the 1989 BC Book Awards Ceremony, and Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (with Harry Robinson), which won the Roderick Haig-Brown Prize for best regional book at the 1993 BC Book Awards Ceremony

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles.

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Claire Edington, "Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2019) Nov 13, 2019

Both colonies and insane asylums are well known institutions of power. But what of asylums in Europe’s early 20th-century colonial empires? How did they operate? Who was confined in them? Who worked there? What was daily life like in such an institution? How did Western medical experts and the colonized population understand mental illness and its treatment? How did colonial racism impact mental illness? In this episode we chat with Claire Edington, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, about her new book of Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam (Cornell University Press, 2019).

Beyond the Asylum draws from extensive archival research in Vietnam and France. A gifted writer, Edington is particularly good at presenting the life stories of patients, doctors, and workers drawn into French Indochina’s mental health system. She also looks at the families of patients and the Vietnamese language popular press, as they tried to make sense of troubling issues around mental health, including how the French colonizers understood and treated psychological afflictions. More than a history of the asylum as an institution, Edington uses mental health care facilities as a prism to explore crucial transformations of Vietnamese society in the era of high imperialism. This wide-ranging conversation will be of interest to listeners interested in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, imperialism, French history, and the study and treatment of mental illness. The book is an excellent complement to the increasingly rich historiography of colonial Vietnam.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Michael E. Mann, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars : Dispatches from the Front Lines" (2012) Nov 11, 2019

We talk with Michael E. Mann, a Nobel Prize winner and Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, about his journey through the climate wars over the past two decades and the role that experts have to play in moving out of the lab and into the spotlight to defend the scientific process.

Doing so is more important now than ever, he says, as corporation-funded think tanks continue to churn out information that deliberately sows skepticism among the public about our role in climate change. But it does beg the question: How do you reconcile the fact that, in a democracy, everyone’s vote is equal but everyone’s opinion is not? Mann was part of the team that created the now-famous hockey stick graph that showed how quickly the rate of warming on the planet had accelerated during the latter half of the 20th century. In the 20 years since graph was published, he’s had his email hacked, been called to testify before Congress, and been hounded by Internet trolls long before social media existed.

He chronicled those experiences in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. Despite it all, he’s more passionate than ever about spreading the good word about science and cautiously optimistic that things might turn out ok after all.

Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.

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Cara New Daggett, "Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work" (Duke UP, 2019) Nov 04, 2019

In Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke UP, 2019), Cara New Daggett suggests that reassessing our relationships with fossil fuels in the face of climate change also requires that we rethink the concept of energy itself. Although a seemingly self-evident and natural scientific object, the idea of energy that informed the development of fossil fueled capitalism is a surprisingly modern invention. In the 19th century, as tinkerers sought to explain mystical steam power, they rehashed this ancient word to conceptualize limitless potential and ceaseless expansion. Daggett demonstrates that not only did this new abstraction explain and empower novel technologies and fields of physics, but also became an ideological fulcrum with which to describe and proscribe the emerging societies of industrial capitalism. The harnessing of energy and maximizing its efficiency became not only the principles of mechanical engineering, but also of workplace organization and worker discipline. At home, energy served as a measure of virtue, self-control, and good citizenship; and abroad agents of empire used it to inculcate colonized peoples with those values and habits of supposed modernity. The historical knotting together of virtue, labor, and fossil fuel power – argues Daggett – means that reimagining the role of energy in society requires a fuller transformation of the politics of work.

Cara New Daggett is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing Nov 03, 2019

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 trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.

How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

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Russell Potter, "Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-year Search" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016) Nov 01, 2019

In 1845, two British naval ships left England with 129 men in search of the Northwest Passage. They were never heard from again. The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition shocked the world. Dozens of expeditions set sail into the Arctic looking for the missing explorers.

Russell Potter talks about the Expedition and the reasons why it continues to fascinate people around the world. Potter is professor of English and Media studies at Rhode Island College. He is the author of Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-year Search (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017).

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Jamie L. Pietruska, "Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America" (U Chicago Press, 2017) Oct 30, 2019

A fortune teller, cotton prophet, and a weather forecaster walk into a bar—probably a more common occurrence than you might think in the Gilded Age United States! Jamie Pietruska’s Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017) assesses how different varieties of forecasting created an often-contradictory “culture of prediction” during the rise of modern bureaucracies. Looking to the countryside, her book engages histories of capitalism to think about how everyday rural Americans engaged with the rise of probability, and how private and state forecasters competed for authority and audiences for their figures.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race.

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Jeremy Black, "Maps of War: Mapping Conflict through the Centuries" (Conway, 2016) Oct 29, 2019

There is little documented mapping of conflict prior to the Renaissance period, but, from the 17th century onward, military commanders and strategists began to document the wars in which they were involved and, later, to use mapping to actually plan the progress of a conflict. Using contemporary maps, Jeremy Black's Maps of War: Mapping Conflict through the Centuries (Conway, 2016) covers the history of the mapping of land wars, and shows the way in which maps provide a guide to the history of war.

You might also be interested in Black's Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (Yale University Press, 2000)

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. You can reach him here.

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Andreas Bernard, "Theory of the Hashtag" (Polity, 2019) Oct 25, 2019

In his short book, Theory of the Hashtag (Polity, 2019), Andreas Bernard traces the origins and career of the hashtag. Following the history of the # sign through its origins in the Middle Ages and how it became a common symbol through its placement on American typewriters and touch tone phones. He examines the hashtag’s role in changing how we define and discuss keywords. Focusing on the use of the # on Twitter and Instagram, Bernard looks at how the sign is used in activism and marketing, addressing these different fields and how they apply the hashtag to meet their own needs. In this short volume, Bernard gives insight into the symbol that has changed how we bundle discourse and organize public discussion and debate. Although other texts have talked about the hashtag as a form of social media activism, with his analysis of the history of the symbol and it’s use by marketing and advertising corporation, Bernard forces readers to think about the hashtag’s complexities and the ways in which the use of the symbol is changing the public sphere.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Amy Carney, "Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS" (Toronto UP, 2018) Oct 25, 2019

From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich’s new aristocracy. They utilized the science of eugenics to convince SS men to marry suitable wives and have many children. In her new book entitled Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Amy Carney assesses the role of SS men as husbands and fathers during the Third Reich. The family community, and the place of men in this community, started with one simple order issued by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. He and other SS leaders continued to develop the family community throughout the 1930s, and not even the Second World War deterred them from pursuing their racial ambitions. Carney’s insight into the eugenic-based measures used to encourage SS men to marry and to establish families sheds new light on their responsibilities not only as soldiers, but as husbands and fathers as well.

Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) Oct 24, 2019

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers(West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Ann Elias, "Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity" (Duke UP, 2019) Oct 24, 2019

With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility of a world without coral. In this cogent and timely work, Ann Elias interrogates how we came to know coral reefs in the way we do and the complicity of this knowing with the forms of modernity that now threaten to destroy them. Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Duke UP, 2019) traces the work and lives of two iconic coral photographers of the interwar period – Frank Hurley and J.E. Williamson – who introduced Western audiences to (respectively) the Great Barrier Reef off Australia and the reefs off the Bahamas. Both self-fashioned men of science and entertainers with an eye for spectacle, Hurley and Williamson not only brought the “flowers of the sea” into consumer life, but also tethered them to the tropical exoticism that underpinned colonialism, racism, and the domination of nature. For audiences in Australia, Europe, and the US, their photographs primed postwar consumption of tropical nature through tourism and entertainment. By unweaving how these images were produced, Elias illustrates that how we know the sea is deeply entwined with the values, ethics, and logics of human politics.

Ann Elias is Associate Professor of the History and Theory of Contemporary Global Art at the University of Sydney.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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Binyamin Appelbaum, "The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society" (Little Brown, 2019) Oct 22, 2019

Think economics is the "dismal science" with abstract formulas that have no impact on life as it is actually lived? Think again. In The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (Little Brown, 2019), Binyamin Appelbaum--former correspondent and now an editorial board member of the New York Times--brings to life how academic economists rose "from the basement" of banks and universities in the post-war period to have a direct impact on almost every aspect of our lives. The end of the draft, unemployment levels, inflation, deregulation, air transport, phone service, patent law, monopolies and anti-trust activity, even the value of human lives--all of these have been directly affected by the activity of economists who emerged on the scene after World War II. Appelbaum traces the transition from the first school of these economists--the Keynesians who advocated a bigger role for government in addressing economic and social problems--to the second school, the Chicago "market" crowd that held sway from the 1970s until the financial crisis or 2008-9. The latter school held that the market had the answer to problems in the economy and society and that government should stay out of the way. Regardless of which side of the debate you find yourself on, you will want to be familiar with the lives and ideas of the individuals who have had such an impact on your life.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com.

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Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) Oct 18, 2019

Valerie Olson talks about why the idea of outer space as a “frontier” is giving way to one that frames it as a cosmic ecosystem. Olson is an associate professor of anthropology at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme, revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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David Lindsay Roberts, "Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) Oct 17, 2019

The institutional history of mathematics in the United States comprises several entangled traditions—military, civil, academic, industrial—each of which merits its own treatment. David Lindsay Roberts, adjunct professor of mathematics at Prince George's Community College, takes a very different approach. His unique book, Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), anchors 20 biographical chapters to a decadal series of events, whose mathematical significance could not often have been anticipated. These short biographies range from the inauguration of military and civil engineering (Sylvanus Thayer) and the textbook industry (Catharine Beecher and Joseph Ray) to the influence of geopolitics during and after the Cold War (Joaquin Basilio Diaz, John F. Nash Jr.), and over the course of the book the subjects witness the professionalization of the research community (Charles H. Davis), radical expansions of educational access (Kelly Miller, Edgar L. Edwards Jr.), and contentious, transgenerational debates over curriculum design (Izaak Wirzsup, Frank B. Allen), among many other themes. Through their professional and institutional connections, the subjects of the chapters form a connected component, providing intriguing narrative hooks across time, geography, and status while evidencing the tightly bound community of American mathematics scholarship. The book can be read as professional history or as a collection of biographical essays, and i expect it to become a charming entry point for mathematical, historical, or not-yet-hooked readers into the forces that have shaped the discipline.

Suggested companion work: David E. Zitarelli, A History of Mathematics in the United States and Canada: Volume 1: 1492–1900.

Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Quantitative Medicine at UConn Health.

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Theodore Dalrymple, "False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine" (Encounter Books, 2019) Oct 17, 2019

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired physician in Great Britain, who has written an account of his year’s-worth of reading the New England Journal of Medicine. In his new book False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in the New England Journal of Medicine (Encounter Books, 2019), he recounts each week’s new edition of the Journal with an eye toward analytical errors and a culture of political correctness in regard to the handling of medical and public health issues. Dalrymple notes how the medical community must put a significant degree of faith in the reliability of such publications, especially due to the scarcity of time that most practicing physicians have to dedicate to scrutinizing articles. But he warns that some publications often contain basic mistakes, such as the failure to understand that correlation is not causation. He is also concerned with the prevalence of political correctness concerning health issues and how they can affect the public’s understanding of these issues.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Elizabeth DeLoughrey, "Allegories of the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019) Oct 15, 2019

While the mainstream discourses on global warming characterize it as an unprecedented catastrophe that unites the globe in a common challenge, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that this apparently cosmopolitan position is in truth a provincial one limited to privileged circles in the Global North. In Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019), she instead elucidates how among post-colonial peoples of the Pacific and Caribbean, who are among the first to suffer the uncompromising rise of sea levels, global warming is not so much a rupture of stability as an impending cataclysm that follows a long history of others. With an eclectic array of allegorical artworks -- including sculptures by Dominican artist Tony Capellán, novels by Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber, and poems from Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Kamau Brathwaite -- DeLoughrey traces how island artists make sense of anthropogenic climate change while continuing to critique the legacies of militarism, capitalism, and imperialism. DeLoughrey also highlights subjectivities of relatedness with the earth and its non-human beings that may provide antidotes to the extractive logics that have clogged the skies with CO2. Stressing the ways that global warming and empire are mutually constitutive, DeLoughrey confirms the critical importance of allegorical art and literature from the Global South in interpreting our unfolding crisis.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org.

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David D. Vail, "Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945" (U Alabama Press, 2019) Oct 15, 2019

Over fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) scolded the agricultural industry for its profligate spread of “poison” and pesticides “indiscriminately from the skies.” Now, in Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 (University of Alabama Press, 2018), David D. Vail re-examines aerial spraying in the North American Grasslands and the political and environmental controversies it provoked. He reveals how aircraft sprayers and practices emerged within the context of local environments and scientific experiments by regional universities and chemical companies. His pragmatic assessment of application technologies provides a nuanced perspective of pesticide use and environmental change.

Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate

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Thomas Hager, "Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine" (Abrams Press, 2019) Oct 14, 2019

Behind every landmark drug is a story. It could be a researcher’s genius insight, a catalyzing moment in geopolitical history, a new breakthrough technology, or an unexpected but welcome side effect discovered during clinical trials. In his new book, Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine (Harry N. Abrams, 2019), Thomas Hager traces the “mini-biographies” of ten drugs and drug treatments that have shaped the course of human history, showing how serendipity and sheer luck have transformed drug development. In our conversation, Hager discusses the astounding number of prescriptions Americans take, why the profit motive is dangerous for drug development, and the unexpected historical twists that have changed medicine, often for the better.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

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Oren Harman, "Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World" (FSG, 2018) Oct 14, 2019

“There are only two ways to live your life,” said Albert Einstein, “One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Oren Harman clearly agrees with Einstein’s sentiments. In Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), Harman takes scientific facts, as we know them today, and weaves them into narratives that have the tone, grace and drama of myth. Harman recognizes that despite the astounding achievements of science we are as humbled as the ancients by the existential mysteries of life. Has science revealed the secrets of fate or immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy insight into love?

Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe, and the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Here are the earth and the moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, and the loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies.

Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Lucas Richert, “Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs” (McGill-Queens UP, 2018) Oct 11, 2019

Strange Trips isn’t only the title of Dr. Lucas Richert’s new book; it’s also a good description of the journey substances take from the black market to the doctor’s black bag—and, sometimes, back to the black market again. In Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs (McGill-Queens UP, 2019), Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals, as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace. Focusing primarily on the United States and Canada, Richert shows how perceptions of products can swiftly change, and incorporates analyses of popular culture, science, politics and history to trace the strange trips drugs consistently go on as their uses evolve.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

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Michitake Aso, "Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975" (UNC Press, 2018) Oct 11, 2019

How can the history of rubber be used as a way to understand the history of 20th-century Vietnam? In this episode of New Books in History, Michael G. Vann talks about Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), with Michitake Aso, an Associate Professor of history at SUNY Albany. This extremely well-researched study of Vietnamese rubber plantations from the colonial origins to their near destruction during the American war opens new insights into the development of contemporary Vietnam. Dr. Aso explains such things as the difference between environmental and ecological history, how rubber plantations symbolized a type of French colonial modernization, the changing nature of French science, and the role of plantations in the First and Second Indochina Wars.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018).

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Jennifer L. Derr, "The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2019) Oct 10, 2019

In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation canals that flowed from the river, the perennial Nile not only reshaped agriculture and the environment, but also Egypt's colonial economy and forms of subjectivity.

Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The river helped to shape the future of technocratic knowledge, and the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies of their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt(Stanford University Press, 2019) recounts the history and centrality of the environment to questions of politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of the human body itself.

You can learn more about Lukas Rieppel here, or find him on twitter here

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Erika Milam, "Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America" (Princeton UP, 2019) Oct 04, 2019

Erika Milam talks about the scientific search for human nature, a project that captured the attention of paleontologists, anthropologists, and primatologists in the years after World War II. Milam is a professor of history at Princeton University. She is the author of Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (Princeton University Press, 2019).

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. Creatures of Cain charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man’s evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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David Sinclair, "LifeSpan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) Oct 04, 2019

Today's guest is David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul Glenn Center Biological Mechanisms of Aging. He is widely considered on the world's foremost experts on longevity research. A co-founder of the journal Aging and several biotech companies, he also hold 35 patents. Dr. Sinclair is a recipient of more than 25 awards and honors, including being knighted in the Order of Australia. His work is featured in five books, two documentary movies, “60 Minutes,” Morgan Freeman’s “Through the Wormhole,” and other media. His newest book, LifeSpan. Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To, was released in September 2019 by Simon and Schuster.

Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon.

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Timothy LeCain, "The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2017) Sep 30, 2019

Timothy LeCain is an award-winning environmental historian whose past work has focused on the connections between open-pit copper mines, technology, and the natural world. LeCain's newest book The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2017) presents a path-breaking approach to the study of the environment and history. In it LeCain argues that humans are inseparable from the material world around them. Living and non-living "things" not only deserve their own histories, according to LeCain, but the history of humans cannot be told without recognition of the autonomy of material things. LeCain’s neo-materialist agenda merges S.T.S. and environmental history, and calls for scholars to consider writing histories of the world in toto.

More than just explaining his approach, LeCain employs it in three case studies, one on longhorn cattle in the American west, another on Japanese silkworms, and finally a history of the copper atom. Viewing the material world as inseparable from humans leads LeCain to challenge the idea of the Anthropocene, suggesting that the term gives humans too much credit. People, according to LeCain can do little without the material things that surround them. Current climatic changes were not solely caused by "anthropo," or humans, but the cause lies with humans working with material things like carbon. Moreover humans cannot solve the problem of climate change without utilizing the unique material properties of the living and non-living world in which they are completely and perpetually embedded within. The Matter of History is an important work for the present moment and is sure to shape future discourse on humans and the environment.

Jason L. Newton is a visiting assistant professor of history at Cornell University. His book manuscript, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950," is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on labor and the environment and tweets @Jason_L_Newton.

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Mark Monmonier, "Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography" (ESRI Press, 2019) Sep 27, 2019

In Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography (ESRI Press, 2019), cartographic cogitator Mark Monmonier shares his insights about the relationships between networks and maps through a collection of essays. Using historical maps, he explores: triangulation networks used to establish the baselines of a map’s scale; astronomical observations, ellipsoids, geodetic arcs, telegraph networks, and GPS constellations that establish latitude and longitude at control stations; cartographic symbols that portray network features on a map; survey networks used to situate and construct canals, railways, roads, and power lines; Postal and electronic networks that created and disseminated weather maps, and; topological networks that underlie modern census enumeration and satellite navigation systems.

Connecting the past to the present via maps and reflection, Monmonier continues his contribution to cartographic scholarship by demonstrating the network as a unifying concept for understanding and using maps.

Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado

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Nora Jaffary, "Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905" (UNC Press, 2016) Sep 26, 2019

Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (University of North Carolina Press. 2016), tracks how medical ideas, practices, and policies surrounding reproduction changed between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in Mexico. Perhaps the most important change analyzed in the book, and discussed extensively in the interview, is the increased interest of the state in controlling childbirth and contraception. Whereas the colonial state was mostly interested in controlling reproduction primarily of Spanish women of the elite, in the republican era—specially in the late nineteenth century—the state expanded its scope in order to reach broader and more popular sectors of women. Abortion and infanticide, treated jointly in the book for people did not draw a distinction between them, came under the purview of communities and the state. We learn that family members, lovers and neighbors started denouncing women more frequently, and that criminal trials rose.

According to Jaffary such change is explained by the emergence of a discourse of sexual honor and virtue that became imperative for a wider sector of women, one that linked reproduction and the creation of a healthy citizenry to the construction of the national state. However, and in spite of the state’s claim in controlling reproduction, this is not a story of an all-powerful state that defined the life and choices of women, nor is this a history of the march of modern medicine (whether that is a good thing or a bad one) in which the state endorsed learned medicine and banished midwives and popular practitioners. As we will learn, this is a much more convoluted story; in spite of the growing interest of the state in reproduction, cases of abortion and infanticide were widely tolerated as were popular healing practitioners, and criminal trials rarely ended in conviction. Judges treated women cautiously and with justice. Moreover, as Jaffary convincingly demonstrates, this unknown history of childbirth and contraception reveals a world of medical pluralism and medical mestizaje—concepts that refer to the somewhat peaceful co-existence, or even collaboration, between a wide range of medical practitioners. In this wonderful book, Jaffary invites us to think about Latin American history in its own terms, to question histories that posit a lineal or teleological progress, and to see that the past, as much as the present, builds its own concepts and ideas that shape how the body is seen, lived, and experienced.

Lisette Varon-Carvajal is a graduate student in history at Rutger’s University.

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Joy McCann, "Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean" (U New South Wales Press, 2018) Sep 13, 2019

Joy McCann discusses the great circumpolar ocean that surrounds Antarctica. McCann is the author of Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean (University of New South Wales Press, 2018). She is a historian at the Centre for Environmental History at Australian National University.

Flowing completely around the Earth and unimpeded by any landmass, the wild and elusive Southern Ocean reaches from the seasonally-shifting icy continent of Antarctica to the southern coastlines and islands of Australia, New Zealand, South America and South Africa. In Wild Sea, Joy McCann interweaves the fascinating environmental and cultural histories of the Southern Ocean—long neglected by writers and historians—drawing from sea captains’ journals, whalers’ log books, explorers’ letters, scientific reports, ancient beliefs, and her own voyage of discovery. In a hybrid space where science, technology, culture, imagination and myth converge, Wild Sea explores a little-known ocean and its emerging importance as a barometer of planetary climate change.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Aaron Hale-Dorrell, "Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2018) Sep 11, 2019

In Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2018), Aaron Hale-Dorrell re-evaluates Khrushchev’s corn campaign as the cornerstone of his reformation programs. Corn was key to Khrushchev’s promises of providing everyone with the abundance required for achieving communism, which included the introduction of a varied diet rich in meat and dairy (which would be corn fed) following decades of austerity during collectivization and WWII. Khrushchev touted corn as crucial to building a society equal to the US in material abundance. Hale-Dorrell discusses Khrushchev’s plan to implement industrial farming in the collective and state farm system through increased mechanization, adoption of American techniques, a rejection of Lysenkoism, and mass mobilization of the Komsomol and other youth. But still the corn crusade failed to achieve the transformation that Khrushchev promised.

Unlike other historians who have focused on Khrushchev being at fault for this failure, Hale-Dorrell examines the bureaucratic attitudes, lack of resources, and the widespread Soviet campaign mentality frustrated the implementation of Khrushchev’s policies. Regional and local officials interpreted central directives to suit their own needs. Their policies took on a life of their own and a local flavor that often resulted in policies substantially different from and less transformative than Khrushchev had intended. In some places, local and regional officials relied on outright fraud or deception to meet quotas or avoid planting corn. What emerges through all this is a portrait of the Soviet Union that is chaotic, progressive if only slowly and deeply interconnected with other countries through the exchange of trade goods and scientific knowledge, all of which flies in the face of the traditional view of the USSR as isolated, backwards and governed by top down, command style party and state bureaucracy. Listen in!

Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here.

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Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, "Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019) Sep 10, 2019

This is the third of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my individual interviews with Howe and Boyer about their separate volumes, Ecologics and Energopolitics. In this interview, I talk to both authors together about their experiences with collaborative research and writing, and about the wider significance of their scholarship.

Ecologics and Energopolitics follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced. Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.

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E. H. Ecklund and D. R. Johnson, "Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think of Religion" (Oxford UP, 2019) Sep 05, 2019

It is common to see science and religion portrayed as mutually exclusive and warring ways of viewing the world, but is that how actual scientists see it? For that matter, which cultural factors shape the attitudes of scientists toward religion? Could scientists help show us a way to build collaboration between scientific and religious communities, if such collaborations are even possible?

The book we’re looking at today, Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019), aims to answer these questions and more. Scholars Elaine Howard Ecklund, David Johnson, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Kirstin Matthews, Steven Lewis, Robert Thomson Jr, and Di Di collaborated to complete the most comprehensive international study of scientists' attitudes toward religion ever undertaken, surveying more than 20,000 scientists and conducting in-depth interviews with over 600 of them. From this wealth of data, the authors extract the real story of the relationship between science and religion in the lives of scientists around the world. The book makes four key claims: there are more religious scientists then we might think; religion and science overlap in scientific work; scientists––even atheist scientists––see spirituality in science; and finally, the idea that religion and science must conflict is primarily an invention of the West. Throughout, the book couples nationally representative survey data with captivating stories of individual scientists, whose experiences highlight these important themes in the data. Secularity and Science leaves inaccurate assumptions about science and religion behind, offering a new, more nuanced understanding of how science and religion interact and how they can be integrated for the common good.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Rice University, as well as founding director of the Religion and Public Life Program there. David Johnson is an assistant professor of higher education leadership at the University of Nevada Reno in the College of Education.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Dominic Boyer, "Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019) Sep 03, 2019

This is the second of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Also listen to my interview with Howe about her volume, Ecologics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.

Dominic Boyer’s Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019) and its partner volume, Ecologics, by Cymene Howe, follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.

In Energopolitics, Boyer examines the politics of wind development in Mexico to think through how the energy and environmental crises of global warming require new approaches to political theory. Following the windmills upstream from farmers’ fields to regional and national capitals and overseas to international investors and green energy corporations, Boyer provides a unique, full picture of the participants, negotiations, and conflicts involved. In doing so, he arrives at a compelling description of how new energic infrastructures are reshaping political experience.

Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.

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Emily Lakdawalla, "The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job" (Springer, 2018) Aug 30, 2019

Emily Lakdawalla talks about the design and construction of Curiosity, formally known as the Mars Science Laboratory, one of the most sophisticated machines ever built. Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 where it has been conducting research within the ancient Gale Crater.

This book describes the most complex machine ever sent to another planet: Curiosity. It is a one-ton robot with two brains, seventeen cameras, six wheels, nuclear power, and a laser beam on its head. No one human understands how all of its systems and instruments work. This essential reference to the Curiosity mission explains the engineering behind every system on the rover, from its rocket-powered jetpack to its radioisotope thermoelectric generator to its fiendishly complex sample handling system. Its lavishly illustrated text explains how all the instruments work -- its cameras, spectrometers, sample-cooking oven, and weather station -- and describes the instruments' abilities and limitations. It tells you how the systems have functioned on Mars, and how scientists and engineers have worked around problems developed on a faraway planet: holey wheels and broken focus lasers. And it explains the grueling mission operations schedule that keeps the rover working day in and day out.

Lakdawalla is a senior editor at the Planetary Society where she writes and blogs about planetary exploration. She is a frequent guest on Planetary Radio. She is also the author of The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job (Springer, 2018).

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Cymene Howe, "Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene" (Duke UP, 2019) Aug 27, 2019

This is the first of three interviews with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer about their duo-graph, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2019). Also listen to my interview with Boyer about his volume, Energopolitics, as well as my interview with both authors together about collaborative research and the wider implications of their work.

Cymene Howe’s Ecologics and its partner volume, Energopoltics by Dominic Boyer follow the development of wind power in southern Mexico and the social, political, and environmental ramifications of moving towards renewable sources of energy. Jointly, anthropologists Boyer and Howe conducted fieldwork among the many stakeholders -- including farmers and fishers, indigenous activists, bureaucrats, investors, and non-human animals – as the state of Oaxaca became the site of the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Through three case studies – La Ventosa, a traditional and successful public-private partnership; Yansa-Ixtepec, an innovative but perpetually stymied attempt at community-owned wind power; and Mareña Renovables, a monumental but failed mega-project – Boyer and Howe demonstrate that while wind power is a necessary and positive antidote to global warming, how it is implemented and with whose participation matters. The transition to renewable energy technologies could be an opportunity to counteract the inequalities and injustices underwritten by fossil fuels; or the transition could leave those structures of power intact and reinforced.

In Ecologics, Howe examines the aborted Mareña Renovables wind park to understand the resistance of indigenous residents to renewable energy development and to analyze the consequences of their exclusion from the decisions that impact their lives. Howe further argues that a full accounting for the dynamics of energy development and its consequences cannot be achieved without including the nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and geophysical forces that shape and are shaped by wind power.

Together, Ecologics and Energopolitics make a bold intervention in how we understand the changing relationship between political power and energy generation and are required reading for anyone interested in how humanity will make the infrastructural transformations that global warming demands.

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.

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Michael Kodas, "Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) Aug 23, 2019

In the 1980s, fires burned an average of two million acres per year. Today the average is eight million acres and growing. Scientists believe that we could see years with twenty million acres burned, an area larger than country of Ireland. Today I talked to Michael Kodas about the phenomenon of megafires, forest fires that burn over 100,000 acres, and why the number of these fires is increasing every year.

Kodas is the deputy director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is also an award winning photojournalist and reporter. His book Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) recently won the Colorado Book Award.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Matthew James, "Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin" (Oxford UP, 2017) Aug 16, 2019

Matthew James talks about the 1905 Galapagos Expedition organized by the California Academy of Sciences. James is a professor of geology at Sonoma State University. He is the author of Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin (Oxford University Press, 2017).

In 1905, eight men from the California Academy of Sciences set sail from San Francisco for a scientific collection expedition in the Galapagos Islands, and by the time they were finished in 1906, they had completed one of the most important expeditions in the history of both evolutionary and conservation science. These scientists collected over 78,000 specimens during their time on the islands, validating the work of Charles Darwin and laying the groundwork for foundational evolution texts like Darwin's Finches. Despite its significance, almost nothing has been written on this voyage, lost amongst discussion of Darwin's trip on the Beagle and the writing of David Lack.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Daniel Veidlinger, "From Indra’s Net to Internet: Communication, Technology, and the Evolution of Buddhist Ideas" (U Hawaii Press, 2018) Aug 15, 2019

In this episode of New Books in Buddhist Studies, I am joined by Daniel Veidlinger to discuss his exciting new book From Indra’s Net to Internet: Communication, Technology, and the Evolution of Buddhist Ideas (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), which offers a theoretically compelling exploration of the types communicative “ecosystems” in which Buddhist ideas have flourished throughout history. Drawing inspiration from evolutionary biology and media theory, Veidlinger’s book begins by isolating some particular traits that were unique to (or at least most well-developed in) early Buddhism, and then tracing how these traits were particular well-suited for transmission in two specific historical, cultural, and communicative contexts: namely, communities in early India and along the Silk Road in the first centuries of the Common Era. His book concludes with a lengthy exploration of the ways that the Internet Age represents a third such epoch, and propounds the provocative theory that the technological, discursive and affective aspects of internet use can make frequent users more receptive to Buddhist ideas. Given this contemporary focus, we conclude our interview by considering the way(s) that Veidlinger’s theory can accommodate, and even respond to, the fact that the internet has also been used to foment hatred and divisiveness in the last three years of American history.

Christopher Jensen teaches Buddhism and Chinese Religions at Carleton University. He can be reached at: christopher.jensen@carleton.ca

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Lindsey Green-Simms, "Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) Aug 15, 2019

Cars promise freedom, autonomy, and above all, movement but leave whole cities stuck in traffic, breathing polluted air, exposed of deadly crashes, and dependent on vast the vast infrastructures of road networks, and oil production. Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) examines the paradoxes and ambivalences of automobility through the lens of West African films, novels, plays, and poems. From the melodramas of Nollywood to the socialist realism of Ousmane Semebene, African artists have delved into the pleasures and anxieties of the road to theorize capitalist development, globalization, patriarchy, and the ethics of accumulation. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, Lindsey Green-Simms joins host Jacob Doherty to discuss how West African entrepreneurs appropriated colonial technologies, how stalled cars embodied the crises of structural adjustment, and what new, feminist, mobilities and imaginaries emerge from the pages, screens, and stages of West African popular and literary culture.

Lindsey Green-Simms is an associate professor of Literature at American University with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. She specializes in post-colonial film and literature with particular emphasis on issues of gender, sexuality, globalization, and mobility. Her work has appeared in Transition, Journal of African Cinemas, Camera Obscura, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She is currently working on a project on African queer cinema.

Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History.

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David Philip Miller, "The Life and Legend of James Watt" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) Aug 13, 2019

For all of his fame as one of the seminal figures of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt is a person around whom many misconceptions congregate. In The Life and Legend of James Watt: Collaboration, Natural Philosophy, and the Improvement of the Steam Engine (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), David Philip Miller separates the man from the myth by detailing his numerous accomplishments and showing how the misconceptions formed. The son of a Scottish ships’ chandler, Watt demonstrated interest in both mathematics and technology at an early age. Trained in London as an instrument maker, Watt progressed into civil engineering after his return to Glasgow before turning his attention to improving the efficiency of the steam engines then in existence. His famous innovations proved enormously successful, and Watt’s development of the enhanced engines in partnership with Matthew Boulton made him wealthy enough to devote more time to scientific experimentation. As Miller demonstrates, many of Watt’s achievements were the product of collaboration rather than of a lone genius, a fact that was overshadowed by Watt’s growing reputation in his later years and the veneration of his memory after his death in 1819.

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Shai Lavi, "Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2019) Aug 12, 2019

Once upon a time, or so we’ve been told, medical ethics were confined to the patient-doctor relationship. As long as doctors were true to their Hippocratic oaths, as long as they acted with compassion and wisdom, then all expectations were met.

Life is more complicated today, and so is healthcare: an undertaking, like all others, that is influenced by social, political, legal and cultural factors.

Nothing is value-free.

In Bioethics and Biopolitics in Israel: Socio-legal, Political and Empirical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Professor Shai Lavi and his colleagues have produced a groundbreaking work that offers a novel understanding of Israeli bioethics. It is a milestone in the comparative literature of bioethics.

Bringing together a range of experts, the book's interdisciplinary structure employs a contemporary, sociopolitical-oriented approach to bioethics issues, with an emphasis on empirical analysis, that will appeal not only to scholars of bioethics, but also to students of law, medicine, humanities, and social sciences around the world. Its focus on the development of bioethics in Israel serves as a template for cross-cultural and transcultural research into the moral, ethical, political and social aspects of bioethics.

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Andrew Wright Hurley, "Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth" (Camden House, 2018) Aug 09, 2019

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose reputation has shifted to reflect the changing cultures of Australia and Germany over the past 160 years. Hurley is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He’s the author of Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth (Camden House, 2018).

After the renowned Prussian scientist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt left the Australian frontier in 1848 on an expedition to cross the continent, he disappeared without a trace. Andrew Hurley's book complicates that view by undertaking an afterlife biography of "the Humboldt of Australia." Although Leichhardt's remains were never located, he has been sought and textually "found" many times over, particularly in Australia and Germany. He remains a significant presence, a highly productive ghost who continues to "haunt" culture.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Michael Zakim, "Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Aug 08, 2019

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (U Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust.

This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.”

Lukas Rieppel teaches history at Brown University. His new book, Assembling the Dinosaur, has recently been published by Harvard University press. You can find him online at https://sites.google.com/view/lukasrieppel/ or on twitter @lrieppel.

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William Gibbons, "Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music" (Oxford UP, 2018) Aug 06, 2019

Video games are a significant part of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century. From Words with Friends to Grand Theft Auto, most people spend at least some of their leisure time with video games. In his book, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), William Gibbons examines the intersection between video games and classical music. From close readings of the scores of specific games to an analysis of games with characters related to classical music, Gibbons asks what happens when highbrow art meets lowbrow entertainment. Often classical music enhances the visual and storytelling elements of a game by sonically marking characters or situations as wealthy or sophisticated, as also happens in film and TV scores. Gibbons finds unexpected connections and layering of signification as video game scores exploit musical references from sources as far flung as Stanley Kubrick’s films to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He ends the book with an account of how orchestras are trying to use the immense popularity of gaming to raise money and attract new audiences by playing concerts of video game music.

William Gibbons is an associate professor of musicology and Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Texas Christian University. His research centers on how canonical classical music repertoires function outside their initial time of compositions. In addition to his first book, Building the Operatic Music (University of Rochester Press), he has published numerous journal articles including in American Music, 19th-Century Music Review, and Opera Quarterly, and has co-edited a volume on video game music published in 2014 and another forthcoming later this year both from Routledge Press.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Stefan Al, "Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies" (Island Press, 2018) Aug 05, 2019

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania.

Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies(Island Press, 2018) is a tool kit for adapting and managing sea level rise and storm events for metropolitan cities and smaller communities. It’s a “how to” guide to create better comprehensive strategies and ideas for implementation. The beautiful and simple diagrams illustrate the difference responses possible for cities and the pros and cons of each. The book makes the argument that collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions for all stakeholders.

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Lukas Rieppel, "Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle" (Harvard UP, 2019) Aug 02, 2019

After the discoveries of dinosaur fossils in the American West in the late nineteenth century, the United States became world renown for vertebrate paleontology. In his new book Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle(Harvard University Press, 2019), Lukas Rieppel explains how the discoveries projected American exceptionalism and, at the height of the Gilded Age, became symbols of industrial capitalism. As Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan funded paleontology fieldwork and philanthropic museums, they bolstered their own reputations within the scientific community, and popularized creatures like the Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. These American business magnates and tycoons soon counted on the eye-catching displays of ferocious dinosaurs, not to justify the cut-throat nature of capitalism in their own times, but to symbolize man’s progress and ascent from the depths of the prehistoric past.

Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate

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Sharra L. Vostral, "Toxic Shock: A Social History" (NYU Press, 2018) Aug 02, 2019

In 1978, doctors in Denver, Colorado observed several healthy children who suddenly and mysteriously developed a serious, life-threatening illness with no visible source. Their condition, which doctors dubbed ‘toxic shock syndrome’ (TSS) was rare, but observed with increasing frequency over the next few years in young women, and was soon learned to be associated with a bacterium and the use of high-absorbency tampons that had only recently gone on the market. In 1980, the Centers for Disease Control identified Rely tampons, produced by Procter & Gamble, as having the greatest association with TSS over every other tampon, and the company withdrew them from the market. To this day, however, women are frequently warned about contracting TSS through tampon use, even though very few cases are diagnosed each year.

Historian Sharra Vostral’s Toxic Shock: A Social History (NYU Press, 2018) is the first and definitive history of TSS. Vostral shows how commercial interests negatively affected women’s health outcomes; the insufficient testing of the first super-absorbency tampon; how TSS became a ‘women’s disease,’ for which women must constantly monitor their own bodies. Further, Vostral discusses the awkward, veiled and vague ways public health officials and the media discussed the risks of contracting TSS through tampon use because of social taboos around discussing menstruation, and how this has hampered regulatory actions and health communication around TSS, tampon use, and product safety.

A study at the intersection of public health and social history, Toxic Shock brings to light the complexities behind a stigmatized and under-discussed issue in women’s reproductive health. Importantly, Vostral warns that as we move forward with more and more joint replacements, implants, and internal medical devices, we must understand the relationship of technology to bacteria and recognize that both can be active agents within the human body. In other words, unexpected consequences and risks of bacteria and technology interacting with each other remain.

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Sarah Seo, "Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom" (Harvard UP, 2019) Aug 01, 2019

How the rise of the car, the symbol of American personal freedom, inadvertently led to ever more intrusive policing-with disastrous consequences for racial equality in our criminal justice system. When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept-and expect-pervasive police power.

As Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2019) makes clear, this radical transformation in the nature and meaning of American freedom has had far-reaching political and legal consequences. Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the wheel, police departments rapidly expanded their forces and increased officers' authority to stop citizens who violated traffic laws. The Fourth Amendment-the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures-did not effectively shield individuals from government intrusion while driving. Instead, jurists interpreted the amendment narrowly. In a society dependent on cars, everyone-the law-breaking and law-abiding alike-would be subject to discretionary policing. Seo overturns prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court's due process revolution. The justices' efforts to protect Americans did more to accommodate than to limit police intervention, and the new criminal procedures inadvertently sanctioned discrimination by officers of the law. Constitutional challenges to traffic stops largely failed, and motorists "driving while black" had little recourse to question police demands. Seo shows how procedures designed to safeguard us on the road ultimately undermined the nation's commitment to equal protection before the law.

Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and New Jersey. Stephen can be contacted at stephencolbrook@gmail.com.

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Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019) Jul 31, 2019

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Okezi Otovo, "Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945" (U Texas Press, 2016) Jul 30, 2019

Okezi Otovo’s Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945 (U Texas Press, 2016) explores the intersecting histories of race, gender, and class in modern Brazil. Between 1850 and 1945, the period covered in the book, Brazil experienced a range of profound socio-political transformations: from the end of the transatlantic slave trade (1850), to the wholesale abolition of slavery (1988), the demise of the monarchy followed by the rise of a republican system of government, and the ultimate inauguration of the Vargas dictatorship. Set in Bahia, the book considers the impact of these changes in the lives of black mothers and their children by following the rise of the maternalist movement in Brazil and its relationship to international discourses on race, public health reform, and national modernity. In addition to tracking changes to medical ideas about motherhood and children, Okezi Otovo gives agency to these black and brown mothers and considers both how they acted and were acted upon by physicians, public health reformers, and newly-formed welfare institutions. Progressive Mothers, Better Babies provides an important contribution to scholarship working at the intersections of race, class, gender, public health, and medical thought. It will be an important read to anyone seeking to grapple with the essential role assigned to mothers – specifically to black and brown, poor women – by physicians and public health reformers in a deeply patriarchal society.

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David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life" (W. W. Norton, 2018) Jul 26, 2019

In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that for centuries, agricultural practices have eroded the soil that farming depends on, stripping it of the organic matter vital to its productivity. Once a self-proclaimed dark green eco-pessimist, Dr. Montgomery finds this new hope as he travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health. Readers join him driving passed no-till, precision agriculture fields in Kansas to walking around The Centre for No-Till Agriculture in Kumasi, Ghana. Each step of the way we are reminded that adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution to align agricultural production and environmental outcomes. Throughout the book, evidence mounts -- maybe farmers and ranchers can feed the world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return profitability to the farm.

What’s unique and refreshing, Dr. Montgomery cuts through the typical debates about conventional versus organic farming. Instead, Montgomery explores why practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture help restore soil health and fertility – naturally reducing the reliance on herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making.

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Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good" (Columbia UP, 2016) Jul 26, 2019

Personalized healthcare―or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"―is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-fits-all" model. Technologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, pharmacogenetically developed therapies in cancer care, private umbilical cord blood banking, and neurocognitive enhancement claim to cater to an individual's specific biological character, and, in some cases, these technologies have shown powerful potential. Yet in others they have produced negligible or even negative results. Whatever is behind the rise of Me Medicine, it isn't just science. So why is Me Medicine rapidly edging out We Medicine, and how has our commitment to our collective health suffered as a result?

In her cogent, provocative book Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good(Columbia University Press, 2016), Dickenson examines the economic and political factors fueling the Me Medicine phenomenon and explores how, over time, this paradigm shift in how we approach our health might damage our individual and collective well-being. Historically, the measures of "We Medicine," such as vaccination and investment in public-health infrastructure, have radically extended our life spans, and Dickenson argues we've lost sight of that truth in our enthusiasm for "Me Medicine."

Dickenson explores how personalized medicine illustrates capitalism's protean capacity for creating new products and markets where none existed before―and how this, rather than scientific plausibility, goes a long way toward explaining private umbilical cord blood banks and retail genetics. Drawing on the latest findings from leading scientists, social scientists, and political analysts, she critically examines four possible hypotheses driving our Me Medicine moment: a growing sense of threat; a wave of patient narcissism; corporate interests driving new niche markets; and the dominance of personal choice as a cultural value. She concludes with insights from political theory that emphasize a conception of the commons and the steps we can take to restore its value to modern biotechnology.

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Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Jul 26, 2019

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019).

During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking.

Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Tita Chico, "The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment" (Stanford UP, 2018) Jul 22, 2019

Can science be seductive? According to Tita Chico, the answer is a resounding yes. In her new book, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment(Stanford University Press, 2018), Dr. Chico’s new book upends the traditional, modern dichotomies which enforce strict separations between literature and science. Rather than solely bound to rigorous, self-effacing protocols, scientific practice is instead revealed to be deeply tethered to imaginative, figurative, and aesthetic epistemologies. Much like science, literature produces its own forms of knowledge about the world – for, as Dr. Chico puts it, they are epistemological siblings. This is a book that will interest anyone seeking to question, historicize, and expand the meaning of scientific knowledge by way of recovering its early modern capaciousness. Not only did natural philosophers also write poetry, but natural philosophy could be poetic as well. Readers interested in exploring the possibilities of metaphor, figuration, the imagination, and aesthetics in science will find fertile ground in this book; whilst those seeking to engage in generative conversations about problems like objectivity, truth, and fact will not walk away disappointed either. The Experimental Imagination is, in sum, not only a very rich book, but a book that will surely generate many enriching conversations in e.g. the fields of literary studies, history of science, feminist STS, and eighteenth-century studies.

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Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, “Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets” (Cambridge UP, 2019) Jul 22, 2019

How are markets made? In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an assistant professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores the history of the finance industry to understand the role of markets and technologies in contemporary capitalism. The book offers a detailed theoretical engagement with the personalities and technological changes underpinning the modern system of automated finance. It uses the case study of the development of the London Stock Exchange, looking at the social relations embedded in financial markets, before moving to look at the global, American system. Charting the move from trading floors to trading screens, the book considers individuals and broader social systems shaping enabling and constraining behaviour in the world of finance. Overall the book offers a rethinking of the meaning of markets, and is essential reading across social science, history, and management studies.

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John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017) Jul 19, 2019

John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological science’s relationship with indigenous peoples and the general public. Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author (with Lee Berger) of Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story (National Geographic, 2017).

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Ekaterina Svetlova, "Financial Models and Society: Villains or Scapegoats" (Elgar, 2018) Jul 16, 2019

The machines have taken over.... For many operating in investment management, it can certainly seem that way: factor investing, algorithmic investing, dynamic hedging instruments, risk management derivatives driven by changes in market prices, etc. dominate much of the investment narrative. And now and again these supposedly superior investment approaches get blamed for causing big blow ups. If portfolio insurance led to a wave of computer selling in 1987, then the chaos generated by the models in 2008-2009 was incomparably larger. So say the critics. But in Financial Models and Society: Villains or Scapegoats (Elgar, 2018), Ekaterina Svetlova begs to differ. She looks at how quantitative models are actually used by investors and finds a whole space where human judgment, intuition and non-model based factors come into play as to when and how and to what degree financial models are actually implemented. This social social of finance is well known in academia; it needs to be better known among practitioners. Listen to her interview here.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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Anthony Ryan Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) Jul 12, 2019

Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs. In this interview, Anthony Ryan Hatch discusses the need to think deeply about mass incarceration, pharmaceuticals, and psychiatry. He talks about the role of pharmacies and drug experiments in prison settings, and he underlines the ways that institutions themselves can be addicted to drugs. These are just a few of the topics that he examines in his recent book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America(University of Minnesota Press, 2019). And, importantly, he also offers thoughts about recovery from this addiction.

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

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Lina del Castillo, "Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) Jul 09, 2019

Lina del Castillo’s book explores scientific, geographic, and historiographic inventions in nineteenth-century Colombia. In this fascinating book, well-known figures of Colombia’s history (such as Francisco José de Caldas, and José María Samper) are cast under new light, while unexplored institutions such as the Instituto Caldas and the Colegio Militar are analyzed in-depth and with striking clarity. By bring such wide array of historical actors and institutions, del Castillo provides a nuanced historical narrative were liberal and conservative elites are not portrayed as ideological rivals, but as allies in the collective enterprise of republicanism, a project unrivaled at the time. But Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia (University of Nebraska, 2018) is more timely and original is in its analysis of colonial legacies. How, and to what purposes, were colonial legacies invented in Colombia during the nineteenth century? For del Castillo, ‘colonial legacies’ have been a powerful lens to interpret not just Colombian history, but Latin American history more generally. This way of understanding Latin America has portrayed the region as a static place shackled to the past by the pervasive legacies of Spanish colonialism. Ultimately, del Castillo invites us to reconsider not only the way we interpret Latin American history, but also how we understand the history of the United States, its relationship with British colonialism, and its ties with the history of Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Diana Pasulka, "American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jul 08, 2019

More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. In American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology (Oxford University Press, 2019), professor Diana Pasulka examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system she asserts is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.

Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media such as The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the believability lent to that media by the search for planets that might support life. American Cosmic explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences and argues that the media is replacing religion as a cultural authority that offers believers answers about non-human intelligent life.

Diana Walsh Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Her research focuses on religion and technology, including supernatural belief and its connections to digital technologies and environments. She is also a history and religion consultant for movies and television, including The Conjuring (from 2013).

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Jul 04, 2019

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Human Genome Project. In his first book, MIT historian of science Robin Wolfe Scheffler takes readers through the twists and turns of the American effort to identify human cancer viruses— a search which made fundamental contributions to molecular biology. In this podcast, we discuss how this was an effort which raises fundamental questions regarding how we think about disease in the laboratory and the legislature.

Dr. Robin Scheffler’s book is called A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine(University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers.

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Greta LaFleur, "The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) Jul 04, 2019

In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Greta LaFleur invites readers to consider a different body. The book effectively historicizes categories that are often take for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but by inviting the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies. Prof. LaFleur ultimately crafts a space of possibility for different futures as well. These are futures of greater intersectional solidarity in which we are invited to think about the collective, and move past the dominance of the individual, the subjective and modern biopoliticized body.

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Anna Rose Alexander, "City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2016) Jul 03, 2019

Dr. Anna Rose Alexander’s City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks at fire as an active agent of change in the urban environment (a catalyst for change). She examines the approaches to dealing with the ever-present threat of fire in Mexico City in an era in which technology and modernity were transforming the city in fundamental ways. Using a methodology borrowed from “hazard studies,” Alexander looks not at the major disasters as agents of fundamental change, but the everyday conflagrations as creating a kind of “culture of disaster” in the porfirian city. Alexander highlights the efforts of fire inspectors and other officials in the realm of public safety to approach fire risk reduction from a perspective that ensured all capitalinos access to fire safety, as a matter of public safety.

Julian Dodson is a Post-doctoral Teaching Fellow at Washington State University. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century Mexican history, specifically the period of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940. Other interests include the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S.-Mexico diplomatic relations, environmental, transnational, gender, and cultural history. Julian is the author of Fanáticos, Exiles, and Spies: Revolutionary Failures on the U.S-Mexico Border, 1923-1930 (Texas A&M University Press, 2019). Follow Julian on Twitter @JulianDodson4.

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David Beer, “The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception“ (Sage, 2019) Jul 02, 2019

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 University of York, considers this question by introducing the concept of the data gaze. The book is the third in Beer’s loose trilogy of work on data. It draws on Foucault’s work in The Birth of the Clinic to think through various theoretical and empirical examples of how the data gaze functions. The book considers theories of temporality and acceleration, along with the practices of analysts, engineers, and organisations in data capitalism, with the aim of questioning the objectivity assumed to be inherent in ‘data’. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand contemporary, data, society.

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Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) Jun 28, 2019

Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition, is now out with University of Pittsburgh Press (2018).

Part I, originally posted in November 2017, focuses on the goals and events of the expedition. Part II offers new material from the interview in which Clements discusses the expedition party’s scientific findings and treatment of local Sherpas. It also discusses the expedition’s broader relevance to the study of environmental history and climate change.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Daniel Nemser, "Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2017) Jun 28, 2019

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, race as well became naturalized. Infrastructures of Race provides essential historical background for present-day interrogations of how infrastructures – from aged water pipes to search engine algorithms – reinforce persistent racial inequalities. The challenges of de-racializing these often unnoticed foundations require a deep understanding of how race became so imbricated with technological environments. Through Nemser’s case studies, we can better apprehend the hundreds of years of oppression that have been built into our material lives.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Amy Lippert, "Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco" (Oxford UP, 2018) Jun 25, 2019

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbanization. Amy K. Defalco Lippert, Assistant Professor of American History and the College at the University of Chicago, argues that images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but as representations of people, they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance.

Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that divided diverse groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader cultural transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city's inhabitants and sojourners, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.

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Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Matthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its History" (U Chicago Press, 2019) Jun 25, 2019

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include.

In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.

Matthew Edney is the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, 2019) he is the author of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Since 2005, Matthew has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-editor with Mary S. Pedley of Cartography in the European Enlightenment, a massive compilation (at 1,920 pages!) now in press as Volume Four of Chicago’s The History of Cartography series. (Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 6 are already available on open access. Matthew also run a personal blog, Mapping as Process, which features his commentary on the study of map production, circulation, and consumption.

Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado

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David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017) Jun 24, 2019

“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but also connected to the Cold War, commercial agriculture, and long-duration space flight. Today I speak with David Munns, professor of history at John Jay College, about his new book, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), but we also talk about Matt Damon, shitting in space, and growing pot in your dorm room.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Paul Ramírez, "Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason" (Stanford UP, 2018) Jun 24, 2019

Paul Ramírez’s first book explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico. More than a scholarly intervention, Ramírez seeks to answer a very pragmatic and timely question: how and why do successful public health measures succeed? Through his surprising, nuanced, and complicated answer, Ramírez broadens our understanding of who counts as a vital actor in public health programs. Whereas historians have long thought of enlightened reform in the terms of absolutist monarchical power, Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018)cracks the nut to find within a effervescent world of competitive and cooperative medical cultures. Through careful analyses of the Royal Vaccination Campaign of the early 19th century as well as prior public methods of responding to epidemic disease, Ramírez demonstrates a consistent pattern of mutual exchange and influence between professional communities and lay populations, both indigenous and not. Refreshingly, he also reassesses the role of the Catholic Church: despite common assumptions of an inherent antipathy between science and religion (especially Catholicism), we see here the integral role of religious ideas, practices, rituals, personnel, and political power in the implementation of modern public health initiatives. The resulting picture of negotiation, conciliation, and experimentation is essential reading for both historians of public health, science, and Latin America, as well as readers in the medical humanities generally.

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Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality" (Vintage, 2008) Jun 21, 2019

Too often keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping them as they approach death. Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped the way she practices medicine.

Chen is the author of Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality (Vintage, 2008) and the New York Times column “Doctor and Patient.” Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. Her work has been nominated for a National Magazine Award.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Camisha Russell, "The Assisted Reproduction of Race" (Indiana UP, 2018) Jun 20, 2019

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have been critically examined within philosophy, particularly by feminists and bioethicists, but the role of race—both in how the technologies are used and in the effects that they are having—has received less attention. In The Assisted Reproduction of Race (Indiana University Press, 2018), Camisha Russell undertakes this critical analysis. While there is a robust scientific consensus that there is no meaningful genetic basis for race, Russell’s analysis of the role of race in ARTs reveals that when it comes to producing kinship, race is still doing a great deal of work. Further, by arguing that race itself is a technology, Russell shows how race is both produced and productive, historically, as well as in everyday practices, techniques, and choices. While this analysis focuses on what race does in the contemporary realm of ARTS, it illuminates the role of race, in the past and now, in constructing social reality.

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Heidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945" (Harvard UP, 2019) Jun 17, 2019

In our current moment marred by media monopolies and disinformation campaigns, it is easy to get caught up in the dizzying temporality of the news cycle and think these are new phenomena. Heidi Tworek’s impressive new book, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2019), is a necessary reminder that they have a longer history.

News from Germany explores how elites in academia, business, and government fought over the regulation of news at home and sought to use communications to extend German power abroad. Readers learn that “false news” was a political strategy used by far-right media moguls in the 1920s and 1930s. Readers also learn that people have long debated the fraught relationship between communications and democracy.

Based on a gob-smacking amount of archival research, News from Germany helps explain everything from the Nazis’ adept use of media to German domination of communications scholarship at mid-century. Readers from across specializations and disciplines need to read this remarkable book.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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Terence Keel, "Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science" (Stanford UP, 2018) Jun 17, 2019

We often think of scientific racism as a pseudo-science of a bygone age, yet in both academic population genetics and popular ancestry testing, the specter of race continues to inflect our senses of biology and being. In Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford University Press, 2018), Professor Terence Keel explains this persistence with a new account of the origins of race science, one that illustrates the continuities through four centuries of research into human variation. With trenchant analyses of Christian intellectual history and the founding figures of ethnology, Keel documents an infrastructure of thought – about universalism, the supercession of knowledge, creation, and human dispersion – that shaped and still shapes the science of race. And through case studies of 20th century public health and genomics, Divine Variations shows how these intellectual patterns reemerge time and again. Rather than exclusive spheres, Keel’s book illuminates modern science’s intellectual debts to theology and in doing so presents new ways understand science as historically and socially situated.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Jeannette Eileen Jones, "Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936" (U Georgia Press, 2011) Jun 17, 2019

When President Trump talked of Africa as a continent of “shithole countries” where people lived in huts, he was drawing on a set of ideas made popular in the 19th century. “Darkest Africa” became a favorite trope of explorers like Henry Morton Stanley who promoted his books and lectures by pushing the idea of Africa as a dark place – a phrase that had all kinds of meanings – racial, intellectual, geographical.

Today I speak with Jeannette Eileen Jones, author of In Search of Brightest Africa, Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936 (University of Georgia Press, 2011). Jones talks about the many different groups, from naturalists and conservationists to African American artists and intellectuals, who begin to recast Africa in the America imagination in the early 20th century. Jones is associate professor of history and ethnic studies at University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Thomas Dodman, "What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Jun 12, 2019

Feelings have a history and nostalgia has its own. In What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion(University of Chicago Press, 2018) Thomas Dodman explores the history of nostalgia from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Beginning with the coining of the term by a young Swiss medical student in 1688, the book tracks the development of nostalgia as a diagnosis with a specific military medical history. Never exclusive to the French context, the disease garnered more attention there than elsewhere in Europe for various reasons, including the existence of a powerful military force through the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and the specificities of French political, cultural, and medical fields during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rooted at first in the experiences, displacements, and alienation of soldiers far from home, the diagnosis morphed eventually from an illness to a broader set of cultural phenomena and “feels,” acquiring the character of the temporal, memorial sentimentality we think of today.

Bringing together intellectual, military, and medical history with the history of emotions, What Nostalgia Was stays close throughout to the lived experience of those whose pained and/or pleasurable longings for spaces/times distant or lost preoccupied the expert observers and practitioners who sought to help and understand them. Dodman’s examination of historical shifts in understandings of nostalgia is compelling as it builds on both the author’s commitment to archival evidence and sources, and his openness to the insights and approaches of political and cultural theory, philosophy and literary studies. His carefully researched analysis of what nostalgia was and became between Algeria and France is particularly fascinating. The book will give readers (and listeners!) much to think on in terms of why and how nostalgia has moved and affected individuals and cultures for centuries up to and including the present.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019) Jun 11, 2019

Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biological fact but as a socially-constructed role that has evolved over time. Historically, given assumed paternal uncertainty, fathers were defined in terms of their behavior (acting like a father) or their relationship to a child’s mother (being married to a woman made a man the father of her offspring). In the twentieth century, paternity testing developed as a way to scientifically determine male progenitors, although these new methods never replaced older ways of reckoning paternity. Milanich describes blood tests and other early techniques proffered by doctors and scrutinized by courts as a way to know the “true” father. Paternity testing, she points out, has been used to different ends in different societies: it could identify an errant progenitor or reveal a mother’s liaison. A certain paternity test result could mean economic security for a child or put a person’s life in jeopardy. Moreover, Milanich reveals the uneven application of paternity testing that has tended to protect the most privileged groups in different societies. Paternity is a transatlantic study that moves from South America to Europe and the United States, and its chapters touch upon the histories of science and medicine, gender and the family, and immigration. The podcast features fascinating case studies set in Brazil and Argentina. This book’s reflections on the making of modern paternity speak to our own time, when, for example, the U.S. government is using DNA testing at the border to separate “real” kin from “fictitious” families, as Milanich explains to podcast listeners. The stakes of knowing the father go far beyond determining biological progenitors, and this book vividly reconstructs the political uses and cultural implications of the paternity test.

Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew).

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Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, "#Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation" (U Michigan Press, 2019) Jun 05, 2019

In the new book #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019), Abigail De Kosnik and Keith Feldman bring together a broad array of chapters that dive into multiple perspectives on social media engagement, especially around hashtag activism and the ways that individuals think about and interact with others via Twitter in regard to social movements and political involvement. As the authors note, “#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world.” This text came out of The Color of New Media working group at the University of California at Berkeley and the contributors come from a variety of academic backgrounds and disciplines, making this a particularly interdisciplinary approach to considering and understanding a wide variety of social movements, social engagement, political discourse, and active use of hashtagging and Twitter. The chapters include examinations of the global use of Twitter in India and Africa; the rise of and then subsequent response/backlash to black Twitter; and the way that Twitter has been used to target minoritarian groups who have established connections and communities via Twitter and social media. This is a fascinating and diverse book, bringing together different voices, studies, and analysis, all examining how Twitter and #hashtagging has grown up, evolved, and essentially provided a platform for political rhetoric, engagement, and also silencing. #identity will appeal to scholars in many different disciplines including sociology, political science, media studies, gender and women’s studies, Queer studies, postcolonial studies, African-American Studies, American Studies, global studies, and more.

This book is available open access here.

Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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Scott Wallace, "The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes" (Broadway Books, 2012) Jun 03, 2019

Journalist Scott Wallace talks about a 2002 FUNAI expedition to find the Arrow People, one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world. Wallace is a writer and photojournalist who covered the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s for CBS and The Guardian. Since then he has written extensively for National Geographic. His book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes (Broadway Books, 2012), tells the story of this expedition. Wallace’s work about the Amazon has also recently appeared in The New York Times.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Kerim Yasar, "Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945" (Columbia UP, 2018) May 28, 2019

Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that modern technologies of sound reproduction and transmission have had profound—and often underappreciated—social, economic, and political effects. Observing that the “materialities of media transform people, institutions, and societies,” Yasar traces the early histories of sound reproduction in modern Japan and their consequences. Electrified Voices examines the development of media technologies—including the telegraph and telephone, phonograph, broadcast radio, and film—and their attendant oralities, auralities, and effects on language, nation, the performing arts, and even intellectual property law. As Yasar shows, sound reproduction changed language and attitudes about language, collapsed time and space, and shaped both individual and collective identities and practices. The impact of these technologies is indispensable to a clear understanding of modernity, and Yasar’s book is a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on not just Japan, but histories of media and modernity as well.

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Gökçe Günel, "Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi" (Duke UP, 2019) May 24, 2019

Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science fiction, but in Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), Gökçe Günel explores the United Arab Emirates’s planned Masdar City, an experimental attempt at designing an emissions-free society. The first parts of Masdar City opened beside the Abu Dhabi airport in 2010 as an oil-wealth funded initiative to establish the UAE as a leader in the renewable energy sector and to begin to prepare the emirates for a low or post-oil economy. Masdar attracted students and researchers from around the world to test, and be test subjects, for innovations including personal rapid transit, energy currencies, carbon capture and storage, and closed-loop resource circuits. Quickly, however, the master plan was abandoned as unworkable; but Masdar City has also not been a failure. Rather, Günel explores the interconnected social, technical, and political ramifications and adaptations involved in this attempt to design a potential fossil fuel-free future. She shrewdly criticizes the limitations of climate change strategies intended to protect the political economic status quo. Yet also, through deep ethnographic fieldwork with participants, Günel demonstrates the valuable role of anthropological insight in social and technological adaptations to a changing climate.

Gökçe Günel is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Heike Bauer, "The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture" (Temple UP, 2017) May 23, 2019

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, “Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture?” In her new book, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Temple University Press, 2017), Heike Bauer answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century. Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence-including persecution, death and suicide-shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism. The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.

Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.

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Martin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) May 23, 2019

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 been a mere dream. Martin Collins’ A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) explores how Motorola tried—and eventually failed—to turn this dream into a reality. Collins, curator of the civilian applications satellite collection at the Smithsonian Institution, tells a remarkable story, one that is deeply relevant to our interconnected present.

Using Motorola as a case study, A Telephone for the World tracks how U.S. businesses navigated the end of the twentieth century, a moment marked by the rise of neoliberalism, the economic challenge of Japan, and the end of the Cold War. Most significantly, the book shows how businesspeople at Motorola responded to global conditions, sought to create a global firm, and even constructed “the global as a way of life.” The book is therefore a deep dive into the mechanics of globalization, as seen from the inside of a global company. A Telephone for the World will interest historians of technology, communications scholars, business historians, and anyone who wants to know more about globalization.

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F. Grillo and R. Nanetti, "Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) May 22, 2019

Today I spoke with Francesco Grillo (co-authored with Raffaella Nanetti) about his latest book, Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Despite the title, it is not strictly a book on China or Italy. It is a visionary contribution to both economics and political theory that reflects on the crisis of the West and the paradoxical success of China.

Is democracy still the best political regime for countries to adapt to economic and technological pressures and increase their level of prosperity? While the West seems to have stagnated in an environment of political mistrust, increasing inequality and low growth, the rise of the East has shown that it may not be liberal democracy that is best at accommodating the social mutations that technologies have triggered.

The cases of China and Italy form the research focus as two extremes in growth performance. China is the star of globalisation in the East, while Italy is the laggard of globalisation in the West and a laboratory of creeping political meltdown now shared by other major Western economies. But is this forever? Introducing the ‘innovation paradox’ as the main challenge to the West and the notion of ‘knowledge democracy’ as key to sustainable growth, this book presents a new side to the debate on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or fifth as the authors argue). It is a vital reading for all those questioning what kind of democracy positively impacts innovation as the force whose speed and direction transforms societies and economies.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

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Matthew Hersch, "Inventing the American Astronaut" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) May 22, 2019

It seems logical that would NASA select military test pilots to be the first astronauts, right? They were used to risk. They were good with machines. They already explored extreme environments. But these skills were not unique to test pilots. There were also mountaineers, scuba divers, and explorers. They too were considered. So why did NASA choose test pilots?

Matthew Hersch, assistant professor of history at Harvard University and author of Inventing the American Astronaut (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), talks about this and other aspects of the astronaut program.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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David Bissell, "Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities" (MIT Press, 2018) May 20, 2019

What kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (MIT Press, 2018), geographer David Bissell contends that to commute is to enter a highly eventful domain, an atmosphere in which new “capsular collectives” form and reform, opening onto new political and ethical possibilities for being in public. With Sydney, Australia, as its setting, Transit Life develops a non-representational geography on the move, attentive to the blockages and flows that give infrastructural life its contours. Dwelling on embodiment, temporality, sound and other senses, and a broadly Deleuzian vision of micropolitics, Bissell makes the case that the commute should be understood as anything but an empty interval of time, passively submitted to and upheld only through the force of habit. Rather, he contends, out of its repetition emerges a richly differentiated palette of urban encounters, subjectivities, and agencies. If urban life is increasingly spent in transit, Bissell suggests, geographers’ interventions should begin with an interest in its rhythms.

Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. He can be reached at psrekman@berkeley.edu.

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Jennifer Thomson, "The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health" (UNC Press, 2019) May 17, 2019

The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental movement in the United States and finds everywhere talk of health. At its best, viewing the environment through the lens of health encouraged decentralized organizing and a sense of collective responsibility. At its worst it supported technocracy and uninspired paeans to green consumerism. With shrewd analysis, Thomson gives the movement its own check-up as she reassess the careers and political imaginations of many of the its luminaries, including David Brower, Wendell Berry, Dave Foreman, and Bill McKibben. Dispensing with the habit of thinking of environmentalism as responding only and ever to itself, Thomson sets its history within the larger context of American political development. So the book is full of unexpected historical crossovers, such as Love Canal residents responding to the Mariel boatlife or the OPEC embargo-era U.S. oil industry championing the Gaia hypothesis. Few books on environmentalism’s past are a better guide for envisioning its future.

Jennifer Thomson is Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell History. She also hosts the radio program Bucknell: Occupied, which airs Thursday at 6:00 pm on WVBU.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Diane Tober, "Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families" (Rutgers UP, 2019) May 15, 2019

The development of a whole suite of new reproductive technologies in recent decades has contributed to broad cultural conversations and controversies over the meaning of family in the United States. In Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Diane Tober analyzes how sperm donation fits into this larger landscape of reproductive choices, politics, and policies. Drawing on a rich body of interviews conducted in the 1990’s with people who worked at sperm banks, people who donated sperm, and people who sought to become pregnant by using donated sperm, she illuminates the many motivations that lead people to become involved in alternative processes of family formation. She also demonstrates that a certain kind of “romance” – that is, the imaginative creation of a romantic ideal – can still permeate people’s ideas and experiences of creating children with donor sperm, despite the medicalization of the process. This book will be useful not only for those who are interested in medical anthropology and the anthropology of reproduction, but also anyone who wants to rethink traditional notions of family formation.

Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist who studies citizenship, nationalism, and social media, primarily in Nepal. You can find her work at her website and her random musings on Twitter.

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Raul Espejo, "Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions" (Routledge, 2019) May 10, 2019

Regular listeners of this podcast will, no doubt, be familiar with the name of Raul Espejo, former Director of Operations of Stafford Beer’s famed Cybersyn Project under the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970’s. This episode, the esteemed Dr. Espejo joins us in his role as co-editor of the volume, Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions out from Routledge in 2019. By extension, this work is also a reflection of Espejo’s role as former Director-General and now President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) as this book is, essentially, a collection of extended abstracts and mini-papers encapsulating the vast spectrum of cyber-systemic investigations on offer at that organization’s 2017 Congress in Rome focused largely on policy options across the domains of what contributor Elias G. Carayannis, extending the work of Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, has dubbed the “quadruple helix” of innovation; namely, education, industry, government and the media. Grouping the contributions within nine thematic streams including Human Aspects of Managing Systems, Sustainability and the Anthropocene, Smartness and Big Data, and Democracy, Transparency and Social Dynamics, the 600 plus pages of this volume provide a panorama of the field of cyber-systemics composed of vivid snapshots of rigorous case studies and bold theoretical advances that will surely do much to fire the imaginations and ambitions of researchers and practitioners around the world as they develop their own boundary defying research agendas.

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Karin Rosemblatt, "The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950" (UNC Press, 2018) May 09, 2019

Karin Rosemblatt’s new book, The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), traces how U.S.- and Mexican-trained intellectuals, social and human scientists, and anthropologists applied their ethnographic field work on indigenous and Native American peoples on both sides of the Rio Grande to debates over race, national culture, and economic development. The book’s backdrop—the rise of populist movements and governments in both countries in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the onset of the Great Depression, and the instabilities of the interwar period in both countries—provides an excellent opportunity to explore how scientific thought inflected the social construction of race and influenced policy in the Americas. Rosemblatt’s transnational methodology moves beyond accepting race in terms of comparison by tackling the longstanding notion that race and racial categories tended to be more fluid in Latin America and more rigid in the U.S. She shows how figures such as Manuel Gamio, John Collier, and Laura Thompson participated in transnational scholarly networks where the relationship between indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities to culture and nationalism was questioned and debated. In highlighting these collaborations, she shows how Latin American expertise on indigenous peoples bestowed political capital to social scientists for developing indigenous policies in Mexico, and unexpectedly, the United States in the case of Collier and the “Indian New Deal.” The books firm commitment to taking seriously these scholars’ ideas and social contexts allows it to see the limitations of seemingly pseudoscientific or racist paradigms and the ways fieldwork forced them to rethink their own notions of backwardness and civilization.

Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Clayton Whisnant, "Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945" (Harrington Park Press, 2016) May 08, 2019

Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magazines, as well as an influential community of German sexologists and psychoanalysts. In his new book, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945 (Harrington Park Press, 2016), Clayton Whisnant describes these events in detail, from vibrant gay social scenes to the Nazi persecution that sent many LGBT people to concentration camps. This study recounts the emergence of various queer identities in Germany from 1880 to 1945 and the political strategies pursued by early activists. Drawing on recent English and German-language scholarship, Whisnant enriches the debate over whether science contributed to social progress or persecution during this period, and he offers new information on the Nazis' preoccupation with homosexuality. The book's epilogue locates remnants of the pre-1945 era in Germany today.

Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.

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Eric Topol, "Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again" (Basic Books, 2019) May 07, 2019

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 Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (Basic Books, 2019), Eric Topol explores how AI can help to fix many of the issues medicine is facing today. AI has the potential to transform almost everything doctors do, allowing them more time to make the human connection with patients.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Peter Daou, "Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace" (Melville House, 2019) May 06, 2019

Democratic political adviser Peter Daou has long toggled between the world of presidential campaigns and online activism. He worked for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008, and he has built a large social media presence with which he wages battles for progressive causes. Now he has channeled his experiences into Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace (Melville House, 2019), in which he analyzes the daily political skirmishing that rages online, urges progressives to engage on the “digital battlefield.” While acknowledging the deepening polarization of American politics, he argues that the polarization is “asymmetric,” with Republicans becoming more “extreme” than Democrats. And he warns against characterizing conservative “red America” as more reflective of the “real America” than the liberal “blue.”

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Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019) May 02, 2019

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, but most of it is accessible to anyone who survived high school algebra. Even a math-phobic can read the book, skip the math, and then more than hold his or her own in any but the highest-level discussion of quantum computing. For those of us who love math, the underlying math is elegantly simple and beautifully presented – and the same can be said of the non-mathematical material. as well.

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Nikolai Krementsov, "With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia" (Open Book Publishers, 2018) May 02, 2019

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Open Book Publishers, 2018), Professor Nikolai Krementsov’s recent history of Russian eugenics, reflects on a broad problem: How to acknowledge what eugenics movements worldwide have had in common, while doing justice to local differences that, for example, make the late Victorian eugenics of Francis Galton comparatively quite different from Russian eugenicists of the same period. Krementsov takes this story from the 1860’s to the present day, and in so doing, provides a fascinating analysis of the vicissitudes of Russian attempts to improve the human species. This history is of the utmost relevance for the present day. Eugenics is neither gone nor forgotten, and Krementsov’s account does much to explain why that is the case.

Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.

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Crystal Abidin, "Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online" (Emerald Publishing, 2018) Apr 29, 2019

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 Abidin offers anthropological insight into these questions in her book Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018). Drawing on case studies from around the world, Dr. Abidin identifies the qualities that contribute to the making of internet celebrity. She explains how some internet celebrities become professional influencers and explores the global implications of the influencer industry. This accessibly written book is aimed at popular audiences and will be indispensable for undergraduate courses about digital culture, for academics who want a clear and cogent introduction to internet celebrity, and for anyone who wants to understand the online worlds in which we increasingly live.

Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis.

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James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016) Apr 24, 2019

It is estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million people every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in Africa. In The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa (Reprint edition; Cambridge University Press, 2016), James L. A. Webb explains the disproportionate impact that malaria has on the African continent by examining the evolution of parasites, vectors, and human hosts and the different attempts at controlling and eradicating the disease. The author investigates these histories in the context of colonialism, independence, population movement, demographic growth, economic development, urbanization and violent conflict. This book is a contribution to the emerging field of historical epidemiology and makes use of archival sources previously unavailable to historians. It offers important insights to historians of Africa, as well as to students of medicine and public health.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

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Christof Spieler, "Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit" (Island Press, 2018) Apr 22, 2019

Christof Spieler, PE, LEED AP, is a Vice President and Director of Planning at Huitt-Zollars and a lecturer in Architecture and Engineering at Rice University. He was a member of the board of directors of Houston METRO from 2010-2018, where he oversaw a complete redesign of the bus network that has resulted in Houston being one of the few US cities that are increasing transit ridership.

His Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit (Island Press, 2018) is a fascinating book about “How To” develop better transportation modes for US cities and urban areas. Christof has put assembled a dense amount of research with maps, diagrams, and images to demonstrate the successes and lessons learned from US transit. This is a must read book for anyone interested in urban planning, landscape architecture, and the design of our cities.

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Kate Brown, "Manuel for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019) Apr 19, 2019

We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk.

Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018) Apr 18, 2019

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene -- our period in time where there are no longer places on Earth untouched by humans -- is not only how much impact humans have had, but how much deliberate shaping humans will do. To help us understand the Synthetic Age, Dr. Preston details the emerging fields of study and accompanying technologies that may allow for a world designed by humans. He walks us through the advent of nano-scale technologies to the possibilities of deliberate marco-level ecosystem and atmospheric management.

What’s more, we’re not only faced with a plethora of possibility, but journey through historical and ongoing debates regarding the ethics of it all. In fact, The Synthetic Age, is part history of emerging technologies, part mini-biography of all the key persons involved, and part window into the continued ethical debate among enthusiasts and precautionary voices. By the end, the reader is well informed on what lies ahead and is left with a charge – become engaged. After all, as Dr. Preston offers, the thing that should scare us the most about the Synthetic Age, is not the technologies themselves, but prospect of these world-shaping decisions not being made democratically. The questions that arise are too important to be left to the engineers.

Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making.

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Emily Dawson, "Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups" (Routledge, 2019) Apr 18, 2019

Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Dawson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, introduces the idea of everyday science learning to critically engage with our understandings of science and the role of institutions in that understanding. The book challenges science centres and museums to move from participation policies and schemes, which have failed to significantly change the institution and its audience, to offer recognition and respect to diverse social groups. The need for change is grounded in detailed empirical work across a range of communities and organisations in London, with lessons that go well beyond science education and debates over the role of the museum. The book is essential reading for all social science and humanities scholars, as well as offering important insights for scientists too.

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Lukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Apr 17, 2019

What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge UP, 2018), Lukas Engelmann uses AIDS atlases to show how different kinds of visualization mapped on to different ideas of how to control the disease. By retelling the history of the most important epidemic of the twentieth century—which persists to this day—through clinical photographs, epidemiological maps, and the icon of the HIV virus, Engelmann reminds us that what often gets referred to in a monolithic sense as “knowledge production” is leveraged in local epistemic, cultural, and political contexts with major consequences.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Apr 04, 2019

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreens. In his excellent new book The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Robert A. Voeks explains that while rainforests may indeed have much to offer in the way of medically useful compounds, the fanfare for tropical miracle medicines and superfoods has been largely in err, counterproductive, and at times prejudicial.

The jungle medicine narrative – the idea that indigenous shamans of the virgin rainforst hold the antidotes to many of humankind’s most pernicious woes – grew widespread in the 1970s after childhood leukemia was all but cured with the Madagascar periwinkle. But the subsequent efforts of pharmaceutical companies to accelerate innovation through bioprospecting had a much deeper historical precedent. Christopher Columbus earmarked West Indian medicinal plants on his first voyage and European imperialists attempted to more systematically appropriate native medical knowledge though the Enlightenment. By tracing this long colonial history, Voeks emphasizes that the hype of the last 50 years has been mostly just that; rather than reflecting the advancement of science, the jungle medicine narrative derives instead from racial ideologies in which indigenous peoples are associated with wild, virgin nature. It is little surprise, then, that blockbuster drugs have proven allusive. If the profits of appropriating medical knowledge have been overblown, so too, writes Voeks, has been the criticism. Examples of exploitative biopiracy can be found, but these are exceptions in what are mostly more complex and dynamic interactions between researchers and healers.

We have much to gain from abandoning the jungle medicine narrative. Without its simplicities, stereotypes, and essentialisms perhaps we can come to a better appreciation the variety of ways that humans make knowledge about the natural world and without its promises of panaceas perhaps we can better understand how this knowledge has and can yet sustain communities in the face of environmental and political changes.

Robert A. Voeks is Professor of Geography and the Environment at California State University, Fullerton.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Tom Wheeler, "From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future" (Brookings, 2019) Mar 27, 2019

It's easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of communication networks when President Obama appointed him to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 2013. Wheeler went from writing history to participating in it, making consequential decisions about net neutrality, cybersecurity, privacy, and the 5G mobile network.

Wheeler is a former President of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and former CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. He was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame in 2003 and the Cable Television Hall of Fame in 2009. After leaving the FCC at the end of President Obama's second term, Wheeler finished his book, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future (Brookings Institution Press, 2019). He is currently a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Wheeler’s previous books include Leadership Lessons from the Civil War: Winning Strategies for Today's Managers (Doubleday Business, 1999) and Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (HarperBusiness, 2006).

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Tina Sikka, "Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable" (Springer, 2019) Mar 21, 2019

How can feminist theory help address the climate crisis? In Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (Springer Verlag, 2019), Tina Sikka, a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Newcastle, considers the limitations of our current approach to climate change, and the means through which we can respond in more open, and thus more effective, ways. The book uses the example of geoengineering as a case study in responses to climate change, highlighting the closed nature of the discussions and decision making processes associated with the methods, modelling, and policy for this approach. Drawing on Longino’s Feminist Contextual Empiricist theory, the book offers both a critique of current practice and points to ways in which this could be reorientated towards a wider and more inclusive range of human needs and capabilities. Given the nature of the climate crisis the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the species survives.

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Michael C. Desch, "Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security" (Princeton UP, 2019) Mar 19, 2019

Many have read and debated “How Political Science became Irrelevant” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of that piece is Michael C. Desch and much it comes from his recent book Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton University Press, 2019). Desch is the Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations at University of Notre Dame.

In Cult of the Irrelevant, Desch traces the history of the relationship between the Washington and the academy across the 20th century. He shows that social science research became most oriented toward national security problem-solving during times of war and that scholars shifted to other topics during peacetime. This pattern has caused tension between national security planners and university-based researchers over independence, resources, and rewards.

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing Mar 19, 2019

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Gregory Dawes, "Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science" (Routledge, 2016) Mar 18, 2019

Open conflict between religion and science may not be inevitable, but a germ of discord resides in some of the fundamental commitments of both; in this sense, war is always, potentially, just around the corner. In Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science(Routledge, 2016), Gregory Dawes uses the famous Galileo affair as a case study in the profoundly different attitudes to knowledge exhibited by religious and scientific communities—differences that will make conflict highly likely whenever scientific claims contradict the revealed truths of scripturally-based faiths. Dawes argues that these faiths postulate a divine source of knowledge distinct from human reason; hold that the knowledge derivable from this source is certain, not merely probable; and because of this, allow apparent conflicts between science and religion to be resolved in science’s favor only when conclusive justification for scientific claims is available—a condition that science does not, and arguably cannot, ever satisfy. The implications are clear: insofar as Christians hold to the traditional epistemic commitments of their faith, they will brook no criticism of their revealed truths, and under certain conditions may even seek to suppress science on God’s authority.

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Kartik Hosanagar, "A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives" (Viking, 2019) Mar 12, 2019

Our guest today is Kartik Hosanagar, the author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control(Viking, 2019). This is one of those rare books that I think everyone can read and I think everyone should read. In fact, knowledge of algorithms can in some sense be considered to be the literacy of the 21st century, and the author has written a book which can greatly held advance this type of literacy. If you want to become 21st-century literate, you should read this instructive and immensely enjoyable book.

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Kate Ervine, "Carbon" (Polity, 2018) Mar 12, 2019

The crisis of global warming overwhelms the imagination with its urgency, yet more than ever we need patient, clear-sighted. and careful assessments of the possibilities for transforming the global political economy. Carbon(Polity, 2018) is an excellent addition to our evolving efforts to understand clearly where we are and where we need to go. Here, Kate Ervine provides an accessible and trenchant introduction to the severity of our situation and the international climate politics of the past 30 years. With critical insight and deep experience in the field, she describes how and why politics as usual has so far failed to prevent disaster as oil, gas, and coal interests continue to win the better ears of political leaders. Ervine delves deep into the technological fixes that will and must be part of the human response to climate change, but argues that ultimately preventing full-scale disaster will require more fundamental changes to global politics and economy. In this way, we can aspire not only to meet this challenge, also to achieve greater environmental justice and stronger democratic practices.

Kate Ervine is Associate Professor of International Development Studies and Faculty Associate of the School of the Environment at Saint Mary’s University.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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David Colander and Craig Freedman, "Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2018) Mar 11, 2019

If you are reading this, you have probably run into the "Chicago" model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finance, macro or micro economics, or any other arena where theoretical abstractions about human behavior (generally but not exclusively about or derived from economics) have been turned into specific and often highly rigid and mechanistic policy guidelines. That's the Chicago model. In Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism(Princeton University Press, 2018), David Colander and Craig Freedman track the transition from the great Classical economists, who went to great lengths to make clear that their abstractions had little direct relevance to policy or would-be policy, to the 20th-century giants at the University of Chicago (Friedman, Stigler, Director), who found themselves responding to aggressive claims from other economists engaged in policy and politics, as well the broader context of ideological challenges to the free market system championed in the West. Their answer was a robust defense of the market and rejection of government involvement in almost all human affairs.

Colander and Freedman stay more or less neutral on the ideology; their topic is the methodology. Is abstract economic thought fit for specific policy application or not? John Stuart Mill thought not. David Ricardo and Adam Smith engaged the issue. The Chicago School said sure to policy prescriptions, especially if they countered government involvement championed by economists of different leanings. Whether or not you are an admirer of the Chicago model, you will want to make sure you understand the methodological transition that brought their Ivory Tower views into your everyday affairs.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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Rick Van Noy, "Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South" (U Georgia Press, 2019) Mar 08, 2019

As climate change politics abound, Dr. Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (University of Georgia Press, 2019) cuts through it all to get to the core. What matters? People’s experiences with climate forces and how they are managing them now and planning to do so in the future. In his newest book, Van Noy decided not to follow the well-trodden path of trying to prove climate change science, nor did he bark about an irreversible tipping point. Instead, he provides us with a much-needed focus on communities and their responses, even if those communities dare not utter the words “climate change.” Van Noy treks across the beautiful southern landscape encountering unique culture and ecosystems, even coming face-to-face with an alligator. The best part, we get to go along with him.

Throughout the book, we hear people talk about technology in different ways. For example, Van Noy discovers that creating oyster reefs off the Outer Banks of North Carolina may be more effective in slowing the rate of shoreline erosion than traditional technologies like dredging and installing hard structures like bulkheads, jetties, and groins. It’s hearing these experiences and stories that will help to shape the solutions of the future. Just as Van Noy ends with his son taking the wheel, soon another generation will come face-to-face with their own treacherous monsters. Thankfully, Van Noy makes a compelling case for learning and adapting. We can all find beauty—and perhaps new hope—in this wonderfully documented journey of adaptation to a changing climate.

Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making.

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Emily Baum, "The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Mar 08, 2019

Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 as part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series, is a genealogy of “psychiatric modernity,” of the invention and reinvention of modern mental illness in Beijing, 1901-1937. Focusing on the pivotal roles of the city’s police-run municipal asylum and the Peking Union Medical College, Baum chronicles the transition from eclectic but largely family-centered premodern apprehensions and treatments of “mad behaviors” to a more unified, biomedical, institutionalized view of madness that was intimately linked to questions of social control, political legitimacy, and the rubric of “mental hygiene.” Along the way, this history of neuropsychiatry’s penetration of the administrative and social fabric of modern China examines topics including disjunctures between state and civil actors concerning new understandings and practices around mental illness, as well as the “psychiatric entrepreneurs” who profited from—and sometimes helped to invent or define—new psychiatric conditions. Baum’s careful unearthing of these tensions and innovations sheds informative light on the ways in which madness was invented not just as a top-down administrative or biomedical-neuropsychiatric project but in negotiation with a wide range of actors.

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James Schwoch, "Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier" (U Illinois Press, 2018) Mar 06, 2019

It's been called the first Internet. In the nineteenth century, the telegraph spun a world wide web of cables and poles, carrying electronic signals with unprecedented speed. In order to connect the entire American continent, however, the telegraph had to cross western territory, which brought a host of challenges, conflicts, and uncertainties. What happened when the telegraph crossed the Mississippi River? What natural obstacles had to be overcome? What role did the telegraph play in the displacement of native tribes? James Schwoch answers these questions in Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier (University of Illinois Press, 2018). Schwoch is a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. He is also the author of The American Radio Industry and Its Latin American Activities, 1900-1939 and Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69, both also published by University of Illinois Press.

Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nathanbierma.com.

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Michael Ruse, "The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2018) Mar 05, 2019

What accounts for the antagonism between Christianity and Darwinism? For Michael Ruse, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, the answer is simple: Darwinism is not just a robust empirical science, but also a secular religious perspective—hence, a clear rival to Christianity. In The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict(Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruse provides a concise intellectual history of that rivalry as it played out in their multifaceted and conflicting responses to war. With wide-ranging erudition, analytical acuity, and passionate moral engagement, Ruse surveys Christian thinking about war from Augustine to Barth and beyond, and Darwinian views from Darwin himself to Steven Pinker and Franz de Waal. Highlighting the ways in these which these traditions have evolved over the course of the 20th century, Ruse shows how their interaction has become increasingly complicated, making any simple narrative of straightforward antagonism inadequate. With the problem of war as pressing as ever, The Problem of War helps us better understand how both secular and religious attitudes towards war fundamentally reflect our conceptions of human nature and value, and offers a way for Christian and Darwinian perspectives to potentially find common ground.

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Thomas F. Gieryn, "Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe" (U Chicago, 2018) Mar 05, 2019

Is the existence of truth coming to a screeching halt? Does truth still exist? In Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. Thomas F. Gieryn takes time to explain how place informs truth. During this interview Dr. Gieryn offers an in-depth explanation of how history and biography have fed the narratives told about truth-spots. Dr. Gieryn presents us with the beliefs and claims that have developed Mount Parnassus, Delphi, Walden Pond, Seneca, Selma, Stonewall, courthouses, laboratories, and several other places across the globe as truth-spots.

The advancement of technology has improved human travel and allows humans access to almost anywhere around the globe. An improvement in human mobility allows more people to access truth-spots that would otherwise be unavailable. This access paired with mass media has heightened human awareness to claims humans make about their accounts of truth-spots. Dr. Gieryn provides an account of how he views the automobile and other modes of transportation contributing to the creation and conservation of truth-spots.

Dr. Tom Gieryn is Rudy Professor of Sociology Emeritis at Indiana University.

Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the continuous process that occurs with placemaking at farmers’ market.

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Trent MacNamara, "Birth Control and American Modernity: A History of Popular Ideas" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Mar 04, 2019

Birth control, and the access to it, has continued to be a divisive issue in American political and social life. While birth control has almost become shorthand for “the pill,” a wide range of birth control methods have been in the American lexicon for the better part of its history. In his new book, Birth Control and American Modernity: A History of Popular Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Trent MacNamara explores the ways in which birth control was talked about, debated, and eventually accepted in the 20th century. Rather than having one centralized movement and leadership structure, MacNamara traces the multiple avenues in which birth control entered the lives of everyday Americans and gained social acceptance. Talking in conjunction with established historiography while also adding important perspectives, MacNamara’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in the birth control movement, social change, and large historical change.

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Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Feb 26, 2019

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.

Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.

Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.

A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

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Joy Lisi Rankin, "A People’s History of Computing in the United States" (Harvard UP, 2018). Feb 19, 2019

We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers from the get-go; rather, earlier efforts to expand mainframe computing as a public utility made elite information technology accessible to a wide audience. In A People's History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2018), Joy Lisi Rankin seeks to restore this broader perspective by situating the history of educational computing within the arc of U.S. social politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The result is a new perspective that challenges the business-dominated historiography of computing by explaining the convergence between the technical and social through efforts that began locally. As these projects expanded in scope, their advocates articulated a vision of "computing citizenship" throughout the rise of what we now call the "information age." Through a series of cases, beginning with timesharing at Dartmouth and the development of the BASIC programming language, through efforts by the state of Minnesota to make the fruits of its high-tech industry available to all, and ending with perhaps the most successful early computing network, the University of Illinois's PLATO project, Rankin makes a compelling case for a social history of computing. Historians of technology, education, and U.S. social history will all find a new resource—and perhaps a new timeline—in this beautifully researched and written book.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Jieun Baek, "North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society" (Yale UP, 2016) Feb 12, 2019

With recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a considerable period of time. Among the most important dimensions of this are the changes that have occurred in the kind of information North Koreans have access to, and this is the subject of Jieun Baek's excellent North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press, 2016).

Based on interviews with North Koreans who have settled in the South, Baek shows how everything from television programs to foreign affairs coverage and fashion has made its way into the country from the outside world. DPRK citizens today live in a much more informationally open society than the all-too-common ‘hermit kingdom’ label would imply. As well as getting a rich sense of the very personal stories that often underlie the movement of information, goods and cash into the country, we also come from Baek's work to understand the elaborate networks of smugglers, traders and intermediaries who facilitate its passage. Appreciating all of the complexity around North Korea's involvement in global flows, and how the Pyongyang government is responding to this, will surely be crucial whatever course this state and its people take over the coming months and years.

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Peter Hotez, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) Feb 07, 2019

Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has long been disproven, but it is still a belief held onto by the anti-vaccine movement. This puts Dr. Hotez in a particularly powerful position to speak out.

As the anti-vaccine movement grows and vaccine-preventable diseases continue to spread due to the misinformation spread by the movement, Dr. Hotez is on a mission to spread the truth. In the book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Dr. Hotez uses his knowledge of vaccine science and experiences as a parent of a child with autism to dispel the dangerous myths the ani-vaccine movement spread.

This deeply personal and passionate book is a must read for any parent who is vaccine hesitant, parents of a child with autism, as well as health and science policy experts.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Adrienne Mayor, "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology" (Princeton UP, 2018) Feb 06, 2019

The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life―and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, “life through craft.” Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley.

In Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Dr. Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life and reveals how some of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth.

Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar in Classics and History and Philosophy of Science and Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is a folklorist and historian of ancient science who investigates natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions. Her research looks at ancient "folk science" precursors, alternatives, and parallels to modern scientific methods. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, the History Channel, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and National Geographic.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Matthew Longo, "The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11" (Cambridge UP, 2017) Feb 04, 2019

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is not simply about the border because, as the book makes clear, borders are in no way simple, and what Longo has pursued in his work is the complexity that encompasses the theoretical idea of the border but also how and why borders are more diverse in understanding than we often ascribe to them. Longo interrogates what a border actually is, noting that the space itself is not quite the thin line between states that we often assume it to be, but a physical area that is co-administered by bordering nations, often collaboratively, thus blurring the line or space of sovereignty. Threaded throughout the book is the ongoing question of what constitutes citizenship, since borders and citizenship are braided together though the structures of the state, and the considerations of who is and is not permitted membership within a state. Longo has also included a substantial exploration of the role of technology and data in the actual understanding of how border security works in practice. This section of the analysis is particularly important to consider because, according to Longo, the focus on the individual and their data profile, shifts the understanding of state sovereignty and the responsibility for definitions of citizenship. This book is incredibly topical in a variety of areas, not least in the way that it contributes to our thinking about the border itself as a space and as a concept, the role of the state, and the growing domain of data and technology and how they are shaping ideas of citizenship.

This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj.

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John Torpey, "The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental" (Rutgers UP, 2017) Jan 30, 2019

Since its initial postulation by Karl Jaspers, the concept of an “axial age” in the development of human thought and religion has exerted enormous influence in the fields of history and sociology. In The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (Rutgers University Press, 2017), John Torpey develops the concept further by identifying two additional axial points in human history following upon the first, “moral” age. Torpey identifies the second of these ages the “material” age, which lasted from approximately 1750 until 1970. Characterized by unprecedented advances in economic development, it fueled enormous population growth and fostered a hedonistic attitude towards the very idea of consuming material goods. This was subsequently superseded by the final axial age, one in which the focus shifted towards thinking about thinking, and a greater emphasis upon sustainability rather than just consumption. As Torpey concludes, whether this age will address successfully the problems of our time remains to be seen, though success will be defined by drawing upon the achievements of the axial ages that preceded our current one.

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Jan English-Lueck, "Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition" (Stanford UP, 2017) Jan 28, 2019

Silicon Valley is understood to be one of the most fast-paced regions on earth, where innovation and upheaval are part and parcel of daily life. Imagine the challenge, then, when it’s your job to document and analyze the complex, intersecting, ever-changing cultures that comprise this famous region. In 2002, Dr. Jan English-Lueck tackled that very task in her book Cultures@SiliconValley. Now, fifteen years later, she has released a new edition that traces the decade and a half since that book came out, documenting what has changed in Silicon Valley and what has remained the same. In this episode I speak with Dr. English-Lueck about the revised Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition (Stanford University Press, 2017) discussing the original project as well and why and how she went about updating this important work.

Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press, 2011). Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To suggest a recent title or to contact her, please send an email to clane@fullerton.edu.

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Is Social Media Killing Democracy? with Regina Rini Jan 22, 2019

Regia Rini is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at the York University. Her research resides at the intersections of moral philosophy, psychology, and political epistemology. She also publishes popular work on topics concerning the social and political impacts of technology. She is currently working on a book about social media and democracy.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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Nicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017) Jan 11, 2019

While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise (University of California Press, 2017), Nicholas Bauch explores the digestive system as a sociomaterial landscape developed from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as run by Dr. John Kellogg. Bauch wants to focus less on Kellogg the man, but rather on Kellogg’s ability to enroll actants (a la Latour) in his geographical digestive network. Kellogg’s religious background as a Seventh-Day Adventist, and his scientific and medical training, made purity and cleanliness his central goals at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Responding to the social and personal problems of indigestion and stagnation, Kellogg instituted a regime of tests, procedures and strict dieting (amongst other restrictions) to cure such prevalent ills. Kellogg thought that natural food was too impure a diet, so instead he turned to highly processed foods as developed in his experimental kitchen, which incidentally was how the first cereal flakes were made. Even with such plain and processed dieting, Kellogg found the human digestive system unable to process substances efficiently on its own. This problem led Kellogg to conceptualize an extended digestive system by developing a sewage system. Eventually, Kellogg became reliant upon industrial farming in rural Michigan. New developments in industrial equipment, such as grain-threshing machines, and industrial chemicals, to enrich the soil, provided a relatively clean and efficient food production process to fulfill the sanitarium’s needs. Before his death, Kellogg thus purified the nature/culture binary of food in favor of scientific approach, and engineered a collective digestive system across Battle Creek and nearby areas.

While some of Kellogg’s ideas seem antiquarian to today’s standards, Bauch makes a compelling argument for why we can see Kellogg’s paradoxical influence on today’s US food production and consumption. While Kellogg railed against the dominant “natural” cuisine of his day in favor of a new approach to processed foods, the new food movements of today are decidedly critical of processed foods; while Kellogg wanted zero bacteria in the gut, today there are numerous products that are probiotics. What the new food movements gain from Kellogg is not his precise views, but rather his focus on the gut and the potential medicinal properties of food.

A Geography of Digestion presents not only a geographical history, but a methodology for exploring sociomaterial processes as landscapes for future researchers to use in other contexts. As such, scholars interested in the relation between science and space, food studies, and materialist approaches to the body will find much use of this recently published work.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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Julian Gill-Peterson, "Histories of the Transgender Child" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) Jan 08, 2019

With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.

Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ‘70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies.

Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.

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Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, "The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms" (MIT Press, 2017) Jan 08, 2019

Our evolutionary success, according to co-authors Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, lies in our ability to acquire cultural wisdom and teach it to the next generation. Today, we follow social media bots as much as we learn from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves.

In The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (MIT Press, 2017), Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an internet of people and devices, after millennia of local, ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children learn more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution.

Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could help solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast milieu of digitally stored information.

Professor Alex Bentley is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. Follow him on Twitter @ralexbentley.

Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.com or on Twitter @degreenot.

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Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters" (MIT Press, 2018) Jan 08, 2019

Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how information infrastructures shape the ways that survivors and observers know and learn about disasters. Finn uses three historical case studies – major earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989 – to reflect upon the development of private and public information services and how these succeed and fail to inform local and distant audiences about disaster realities. Infrastructure breakdowns make visible the material bases of information systems, from telegraph to newsprint to internet, and how this materiality shapes access relative to social and geographical boundaries. Documenting Aftermath is a very timely book, for as global warming promises more frequent catastrophes, large-scale social media and government information systems increasingly dictate how information moves. More than ever it is necessary to question this arrangement and the oversights, inequalities, and possibilities for abuse of power therein.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Lindsey Fitzharris, "The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine" (Scientific American, 2017) Jan 07, 2019

Joseph Lister changed the world of medicine. In her book The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Scientific American, 2017), Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris explores the gruesome world of surgery in the 19th century. At this time even a successful surgeries had extremely high mortality rates due to persistent infections. Hospitals were terrifying places filled with death and anyone who could afford it opted to have surgeries in their own home.

It is in this world that a Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister changed medicine forever. Lister bought into germ theory and claimed that they were the source of infection. At the time, this claim was considered ludicrous. He fought infection through the use and evangelization of antiseptics. Although everyone initially bought into his claims, Joseph Lister left the world of medicine a much different place than the one he entered.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Paul A. Offit, "Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural" (Harper, 2014) Dec 28, 2018

Is alternative medicine quackery? In the book Do You Believe in Magic? Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural: A Look Behind the Curtain (Harper, 2014) (Harper Paperbacks, 2014),Paul A. Offit explores the legitimacy of the alternative medicine industry. In this book exposes some of the most popular therapies and how ineffective, expensive, and even deadly they are.

Dr. Offit investigates why this industry is unregulated and why so many people buy into alternative therapies that have no concrete evidence of working. He also explains the placebo effect and how some non-traditional methods can provide some good for patients. In the book Dr. Offit advises “There is no such thing as alternative medicine. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t.”

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) Dec 27, 2018

Audra J. Wolfe, is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor and historian. Her book Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) examines the post-World War II origins of the relationship between science and politics. Science’s self-concept as politically neutral and dedicated to empirical observation free of bias has often been at odds with its collaboration with the purposes of the Cold War state. Wolfe demonstrates how an understanding of the differences between Western and Marxist science obscured the hidden political objectives. Scientists holding an apolitical view of science became unwitting agents of the U.S. war against the spread of communism led by the Central Intelligence Agency. Multiple scientific and cultural institutions engage in formal and informal cultural diplomacy, espionage, ideological laden science education in underdeveloped nations, and became activists for the human rights of scientists across the globe. Thus, they expanded U.S. influence abroad. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the utopian belief of science as operating in the service of intellectual freedom and internationalism continues even as it depends heavily on government funding for its existence.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, (Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Pamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Dec 24, 2018

At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Pamela E. Klassen retalls Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment in her newest book, The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Following Du Vernet’s journey westward across Canada, Klassen examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—reveal the spiritual work of colonial settlement.

Pamela Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.

Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Perrin Selcer, "The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment" (Columbia UP, 2018) Dec 24, 2018

Having been born into a world in which people knew about anthropogenic global warming, I grew up in the “global environment.” Although the category “global environment” seems normal, if not natural, Perrin Selcer shows just how recent its origins actually are. In his innovative new book, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth(Columbia University Press, 2018), Selcer investigates how cosmopolitan scientists in the post-WWII era attempted and failed to build a social-democratic world community, but, in the process, constructed the category of the “global environment.” Also in that process, they cobbled together a transnational community of experts and a global knowledge infrastructure in specialized UN bodies, such as Unesco and the Food and Agriculture Organization, that helped make the global environment knowable. The book will interest a broad range of scholars, including historians of global institutions, environmental studies scholars, historians of science, and anyone that wants to historicize the categories that are closest to us.

Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th-century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) Dec 19, 2018

Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire. While scholars have often addressed this phenomenon through the lenses of academic anatomy and natural history, Seth suggests that medical care and theories of pathology were central to how Britons began to see their bodies as fundamentally distinct from other peoples. After the Seven Years War, medical thinkers started contributing to British imperial ambitions by interpreting the distinct disease environments of the empire’s disparate parts. Initially, a “seasoning sickness” was thought unavoidable as colonists entered a new clime, for the body’s complexion had to adapt to the qualities of the new environment. Through numerous iterations and variations, this Hippocratic sense of a porous and variable body was abandoned as illness and vulnerability became ever more tightly tied to inherited somatic traits and behaviors. This figured strongly in debates over abolition and the legitimacy of slavery and provided the precedent for nineteenth-century scientific racism.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of bringing colonial peripheries and non-Western spaces into the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018) Dec 17, 2018

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex change” in the press from the 1920s to the 1940s, and a famous case of the “first” Chinese transsexual in 1950s Taiwan. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality in China, and will be of special interest for readers who are interested in bringing Foucault-inspired analyses to the craft of history.

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Mark Rice, "Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru" (UNC Press, 2018) Dec 11, 2018

Speaking at a 1913 National Geographic Society gala, Hiram Bingham III, the American explorer celebrated for finding the “lost city” of the Andes two years earlier, suggested that Machu Picchu “is an awful name, but it is well worth remembering.” Millions of travelers have since followed Bingham’s advice. When Bingham first encountered Machu Picchu, the site was an obscure ruin. Now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Machu Picchu is the focus of Peru’s tourism economy. In Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Mark Rice, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York, presents a history of Machu Picchu in the twentieth century—from its “discovery” to today’s travel boom—that reveals how Machu Picchu was transformed into both a global travel destination and a powerful symbol of the Peruvian nation. Rice shows how the growth of tourism at Machu Picchu swayed Peruvian leaders to celebrate Andean culture as compatible with their vision of a modernizing nation. Encompassing debates about nationalism, Indigenous peoples' experiences, and cultural policy—as well as development and globalization—the book explores the contradictions and ironies of Machu Picchu's transformation. On a broader level, it calls attention to the importance of tourism in the creation of national identity in Peru and Latin America as a whole.

Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.

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Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France" (Yale UP, 2018) Dec 06, 2018

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment. As savants attempted to appropriate leadership of the mechanical arts while deriding artisans as mere laborers, some of these refashioned themselves as artistes, capable of blending craft knowledge with intellectual esprit. Through the little studied and understood Société des Arts, these advertised their service and utility to the state and French economic and imperia expansion. As they fought for official appointments and academic recognition, they help solidify key the Enlightenment concept of technological progress. Through the eyes and experiences of artistes, the Enlightenment appears much less the product of intellectual breakthroughs, and instead, a reflection of the political economic strategies of artisans as they defined their role within the French empire.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) Dec 06, 2018

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with!

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Alireza Doostdar, "The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny" (Princeton UP, 2018) Dec 05, 2018

Winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, Alireza Doostdar’s The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a mesmerizing study of discourses and practices surrounding the Occult sciences or ‘metaphysicals’ in contemporary Iran. Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors. Through a pulsating interrogation that moves seamlessly between narrative and analysis, Doostdar demonstrates that the landscape of the Occult sciences in Iran cannot be explained through the confining binary or opposition between state orthodoxy/paternalism and popular religion. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues including the rationality of enchantment, geomancy, Iranian spiritists, the coalescence of pre-modern Muslim intellectual traditions with modern scientific notions of empiricism, and the negotiation of secrecy and revelation in hagiographies. The Iranian Metaphysicals is an incredible scholarly achievement that will be debated and discussed for many years, and will make a great text to wrestle with in the classroom as well.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (stareen@fandm.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018) Dec 03, 2018

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global warming. Lynch and Veland examine how the ostensible state of constant urgency we live in is identified and addressed in political discourse. With detailed analyses of major climate accords and theories of geo-engineering, they demonstrate how this discourse limits our imagined possibilities for sustainability. Instead, they propose an ethos of co-existence that is receptive to how different societies and cultures interpret catastrophe. A pluralistic approach to the Anthropocene, they suggest, may allow us to achieve environmental sustainability while honoring human dignity and justice.

Amanda Lynch is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University and the director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

Siri Veland is Senior Researcher at Nordland Research Institute in Bodø, Norway.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018) Nov 28, 2018

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American physiologist Walter Cannon first asked in 1926: “Why don’t we die daily?” In the erudite chapters that follow, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers explore how practitioners and theorists working during and after World War I tried to answer that very thorny problem in light of the challenges of wound shock. This functional disorder demanded that doctors, surgeons, and physiologists account for two medical realities: first, that wound shock was a whole-body, multi-systemic response to trauma; and second, that a fairly homogenous group—namely the young, male soldier-patient—responded to wound shock in highly variable and individuals ways. Whereas the historiography of World War I and trauma has largely focused on psychopathological models, Geroulanos and Meyers illuminate how the work of Henry Head, Réné Leriche, Kurt Goldstein and others enacted a wholesale transformation of the concept of the individual, one that would define medico-physiological individuality as an integrated and indivisible body, but one constantly on “the verge of collapse.”

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Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve” (UNC Press, 2018) Nov 21, 2018

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Michael E. Staub, Professor of English and American Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York, investigates neuropsychological studies published between Brown and the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. In doing so, he illuminates how we came to view race and intelligence today.

In tracing how research and experiments around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gratification, hyperactivity, and emotional intelligence migrated into popular culture and government policy, Staub reveals long-standing and widespread dissatisfaction—not least among middle-class whites—with the metric of IQ. He also documents the devastating consequences—above all for disadvantaged children of color—as efforts to undo discrimination and create enriched learning environments were recurrently repudiated and defunded. By connecting psychology, race, and public policy in a single narrative, Staub charts the paradoxes that have emerged and that continue to structure investigations of racism even into the era of contemporary neuroscientific research.

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Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017) Nov 21, 2018

In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy takes us through a thirty year history of the legal debates around patents. This is an understudied area of STS that Parthasarathy carefully navigates in order to understand how knowledge production interacts with law. The reader learns the differences in values, law and objects between US and European patent politics. This comparison brings into focus the role that law, biotechnology corporations, scientists, activists, and more play in deciding what knowledge deserves legal protection. Patent Politics is a fascinating read that will continue to be relevant for many years to come.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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Steven Shaviro, “Discognition” (Repeater Books, 2016) Nov 20, 2018

Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to be a bat, or a dog, a robot, a tree, a human being, a rock, a star, a neutrino? Discognition looks at a series of fascinating science fiction narratives – in some cases reading philosophical or scientific literature as speculative fiction – to raise important questions about consciousness and sentience and to help readers understand the significance of those questions for how we live with ourselves and each other. In addition to opening up some wonderfully thoughtful and provocative works of science fiction, the book also models a transdisciplinary mode of scholarship that is as inspiring as it is effective.

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, “A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos” (Cambridge UP, 2016) Nov 13, 2018

If the universe was even slightly different in some of its fundamental physical properties, life could not exist – such is the claim of ‘fine tuning’ of the universe for life. The topic of fine tuning has received attention from physicists, philosophers and the popular press. In A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Geraint Lewis (Professor of Astrophysics, Sydney Institute of Astronomy, the University of Sydney) and Luke Barnes (John Templeton Fellow, Astronomy, University of Western Sydney) explain clearly what fine tuning is and give examples from across physics based on recent research, with many memorable analogies and pictures. They respond to many common objections to the scientific claim of fine tuning, and helpfully discuss what it might mean for physics and our concept of the world more broadly, comparing possible solutions to the issues raised by fine tuning, including a naturalistic multiverse hypothesis and theism. The book is technically precise in both the science and philosophy of fine tuning, and written in an accessible entertaining way, guaranteeing that it will be of interest to a wide audience. Check out the book’s website here, and Twitter feed here.

For more, discussions between the authors relating to the book and similar topics can be found at ‘Alas Lewis & Barnes’.

Zachary Ardern is a postdoctoral researcher in microbial evolution, with additional interests in the philosophy of biology and the science-religion discussion.

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David P. Barash, “Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are” (Oxford UP, 2018) Nov 13, 2018

Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. Barash calls this viewpoint a persistent paradigm of our own unique self-importance and argues that it is as dangerous as it is false. In his recent book, Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Barash explores the process by which science has, throughout time, cut humanity “down to size,” and how we have responded. A good paradigm is a tough thing to lose, especially when its replacement leaves us feeling vulnerable and less important.

Barash models his argument around a set of “old” and “new” paradigms that define humanity’s place in the universe. The new emerge from provocative revelations about whether human beings are well designed, whether the universe has somehow been established with our species in mind (the so-called anthropic principle), whether life itself is inherently fragile, whether Homo sapiens might someday be genetically combined with other species, and what this means for our self-image. Rather than seeing ourselves through a glass darkly, as he puts it, science enables us to perceive our strengths and weaknesses brightly and accurately at last, so that paradigms lost become wisdom gained. The result is a bracing, remarkably hopeful view of who we really are.

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Washington. He has written more than 280 peer-reviewed articles and nearly 40 books in addition to penning numerous op-eds in the LA Times, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other highly recognizable titles. He’s joined me today to talk about his latest book …

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Andrew C. A. Elliott, “Is That a Big Number?” (Oxford UP, 2018) Nov 09, 2018

Andrew C. A. Elliott‘s Is That a Big Number? (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a book that those of us who feast on numbers will absolutely adore, but will also tease the palates of those for whom numbers have previously been somewhat distasteful. This book helps us not only to realize the relative magnitudes of many of the numbers which surround us, but also helps us understand precisely how and why our understanding of the universe often comes down to the numbers which describe it. It’s just a shame that Pythagoras, who was reputed to say that “All is number,” isn’t around to appreciate it.

By the way, the Elliot maintains a great website called “Is That a Big Number.” Well worth visiting!

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Anindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader” (Academic Studies Press, 2018) Nov 08, 2018

Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2018) offers a compelling investigation of the genre whose development was significantly reshaped in the second half of the 20th century. In her introduction to this volume, Anindita Banerjee outlines the specificity of Russian science fiction literature and cinema and emphasizes transformative effects produced and trigged by the launch of Sputnik in 1957: “Sputnik’s impact—crossing the boundaries of private life and public culture, domestic enthusiasm and international curiosity, technological spectacle and participatory entertainment, contemporary aspirations and historical visions, and, last but not least, the diverse media of print, film, radio, and television—played an instrumental role in transforming science fiction from Russia into a serious object of study” (xii). Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema presents science fiction not only in terms of aesthetic inspirations and experimentations, but also in terms of political contestations and existential crises. When developing in the context of the Soviet supervision, science fiction acquired an ambiguous status: on the one hand, this genre was maintained and encouraged through state decisions; on the other hand, it was controlled and suppressed. As Anindita Banerjee argues, in the Soviet Union science fiction was some kind of an outlet for ideological and political discontents: keeping this genre under supervision was strategic for maintaining some visibility of otherness. The critical reader edited by Anindita Banerjee attempts to embrace multiple ambiguities of science fiction literature and cinema and to outline ethic and aesthetic proliferations that invite the reconsideration of the relationships of self and other.

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Raymond Boyle, “The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways” (Palgrave, 2018) Nov 06, 2018

What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cultural Policy Research, explores this question by focusing on the idea of talent. The book offers a rich theoretical and empirical engagement with the contemporary television landscape, giving detailed analysis of the history of talent development, as well as the impact of digital and new platforms. The shifting landscape of talent, television, and the infrastructure of cultural intermediaries is illustrated with key case studies, ultimately showing how the winners and losers of the talent industry map onto existing inequalities. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary media.

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Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Nov 05, 2018

Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the story of Ottoman Egypt and astronomy, looking at how astronomy tied together the state and religious practice. We talk about how religious authority was negotiated through astronomy, the zij (the genre of astronomic handbooks used by astronomers), translation, and how print affected the distribution of astronomic knowledge. Stolz also contends with the specter of the nahda, or the Arabic language intellectual renaissance, and he tells us how he deals with it in his work. As always, we check in with the field of Middle Eastern history and ask what one should do with increasingly limited access to archives.

Daniel Stolz is an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was previously a visiting assistant professor of history at Northwestern University, where he was also affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. He received his PhD from Princeton University in Near Eastern Studies. He is a historian of the modern Middle East, specializing in Egypt and the late Ottoman Empire. He is the author of many articles on science and religion in Egypt and the monograph discussed in this interview.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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Mike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear” (MIT Press, 2018) Nov 05, 2018

In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time of significant change within the industry. Drawing on a variety of disciplines from journalism studies, political theory and technological studies, Ananny argues press freedom is a result of an interplay of duty, autonomy, social, and institutional forces.

Focusing on the public right to hear, Ananny explores the competing values and publics journalists must negotiate to provide objective news and to build trust. Exploring the complexities of ‘doing journalism’ in the 21st century with competing technological platforms he attempts to answer the question: what is the role of journalism and freedom of the press in the modern era?

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J. Obert, A. Poe, A. Sarat, eds., “The Lives of Guns” (Oxford UP, 2018) Nov 01, 2018

What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert‘s and Andrew Poe‘s, and Austin Sarat‘s unique collection of essays, The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press, 2018). In it, contributors discuss the political, social and personal “lives” of guns from a variety of perspectives. Join us to hear editors Obert and Poe help us consider new ways of thinking about American narratives of ballistic weapons.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians(New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, “Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics” (Naval Institute Press, 2018) Oct 31, 2018

Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining military professionalism and ethics in light of major changes to modern warfare. Contributors examine philosophical and legal questions about what constitutes a profession, the requirements of a military professional, and military education. Additionally, the authors tackle questions of ethics related to new technological advancements, such as unmanned aircraft. Finally, an interesting discussion of the military’s relationship with society, and vice versa, is discussed as an important component of oversight of the profession. Today I spoke with Finney and one of the contributors, Brian Laslie.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management” (Harvard UP, 2018) Oct 31, 2018

The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turnover by providing housing and fulfilling community needs. Many of these firms were, of course, dependent on the availability of cotton from the South where, as Caitlin C. Rosenthal argues, modern management practices were expanded and refined through experimentation with enslaved workers. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, 2018) resituates the development of scientific record-keeping and labor optimization practices within the Atlantic slave trade. The book pays close attention to how sophisticated reporting practices, emerging from the standard record books that circulated throughout the Atlantic world, allowed planters to rate and categorize enslaved people in a generalizable way. The book is an invitation to rethink the genealogy of business management, to disabuse professionals of a claim to moral distance from a time when unfettered legal control over a labor force—as capital—created hitherto unknown opportunities for knowledge production and experimentation with efficiency.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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N. M. Sambaluk, “The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security” (Naval Institute Press, 2015) Oct 29, 2018

Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put first a satellite, then later, human beings, into space. The primary motivating factor for all this, was the fear of missiles being the primary delivery system for nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War. Our guest in this episode –Nicholas Michael Sambaluk – makes the case for another perspective on the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to engage in space exploration. In his book The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security (Naval Institute Press, 2015), Sambaluk describes the checkered history of the Dynamic Soarer Space Glider Bomber – a.k.a. “Dyna-Soar,” a heat-resistant single seat-space shuttle that was intended to guarantee American aerospace superiority. Though ultimately canceled, the Dyna-Soar program’s legacy continues to this day in the form of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance Aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and future orbiting space vehicles. Sambaluk is an associate professor of strategy at the Air University, at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama.

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Hugh Cagle, “Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Oct 22, 2018

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and as a dimension of imperialism through the development of the Portuguese empire. The global connections forged by seafaring empires demanded new ways of conceiving a unified world. As the Portuguese were first to discover, the ancient canon provided little guidance, and far-flung colonies all seemed unique and defied coherent categorization. Through efforts to interpret, control, and economize a their outposts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the Portuguese developed novel and creative methods of producing knowledge within a globalizing world. Late in the 17th century, some of these efforts would coalesce around the idea of the tropics as physicians attempted to consolidate their authority over the health of the empire. A space of prodigious nature and profuse disease, the tropics soon became an orienting notion of modern race theory and empires.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Lee Humphreys, “The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life” (MIT Press, 2018) Oct 19, 2018

Physical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike social media posting, this analog memorializing of life happenings is not encumbered with the negative theorizing about why people choose to record experiences. In her new book, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2018), Cornell University associate professor Lee Humphreys argues that selfies and other social media life logging, like traditional journaling, is media accounting, which offers us a deeper understanding of ourselves.

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Wade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018) Oct 18, 2018

Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future.

Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.

The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. The series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction.

It’s the first time Roush, who hosts the podcast Soonish and specializes in writing about science and technology, has edited fiction. “The mission of Twelve Tomorrows is to highlight stories that are totally plausible from an engineering point of view,” Roush says.

In “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafur explores how suspicion of new technology can have real life consequences. In this case, plotters against the reformist president of Nigeria try to muster support for a coup by manipulating fears about the president’s new artificial heart, claiming that the organ—which was grown in a Chinese laboratory from plant cells—is powered by witchcraft.

In “The Woman Who Destroyed Us,” SL Huang describes the plight of a mother who wants to exact revenge on a doctor who used deep brain stimulation to treat her son’s behavioral and mental health issues. The changes in her son are so dramatic that the mother feels she’s lost her child, and yet the son is happy with the result, feeling that the treatment has revealed his true self.

If there’s one message Roush hopes readers take from the collection, it’s that people are in the driver’s seat when it comes to building and using new technologies. He hopes the book reminds people “that we do have the power to adopt or shun technology, that we can decide how to bring it into our lives, to what extent we want to use it or not use it. We can even influence the way innovation happens. We can tell scientists and engineers, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough’ or ‘We’re worried about this. We want you to build in more safeguards.’… We have that power.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe.

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Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018) Oct 17, 2018

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2018) charts a “profound shift in attitude toward foreign technology” between the 16th century (when European devices arrived in Japan) and reforms to the traditional temporal system in 1873. While it provides an exceptionally rich and focused case study grounded in careful research with Japanese documents and material objects, Frumer’s book also offers a critical analysis of what it is that we’re doing when we study the relationship between societies and technologies that has potentially far-reaching consequences well beyond the history of Japan.

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017) Oct 15, 2018

For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view is incorrect: even in California, for example, sterilization of those deemed mentally defective was performed up to 1977. In The Eugenic Mind Project (MIT Press, 2017), Robert A. Wilson critically considers the type of thinking — which he calls eugenic thinking — that drives eugenic sterilization practices: the quest for human improvement that derives from negatively marked differences between “better” and “worse” kinds of humans. Wilson, who is a professor of philosophy at La Trobe University, also recounts his research with living survivors of these practices. The book is an eye-opening philosophically informed discussion of how eugenic thinking is found in prenatal genetic testing, selective abortion, discrimination of those with disabilities, and immigration policy, and why eugenic thinking is so persistent.

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Rachel Z. Arndt, “Beyond Measure” (Sarabande Books, 2018) Oct 12, 2018

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize every conceivable human activity, from keeping track of personal bests at the gym to getting a good night’s sleep—all from the comfort of our homes. But what do these measurements actually tell us about ourselves? What happens when the data sets for these functions are subjective? And how do we know whether we’re measuring ourselves accurately?

In her debut collection of essays, nonfiction writer Rachel Z. Arndt explores the answers to these questions, interrogating the methods through which we measure our lives in the modern world. Through a series of 19 researched personal essays, Arndt speaks from her own experiences managing her narcolepsy, participating in judo tournaments, analyzing the rituals of online dating and more in order to answer the question of what can be measured—or, more accurately, what cannot.

Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Rachel Z. Arndt to hear more about Beyond Measure available now from Sarabande Books (2018).

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com.

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Dániel Margócsy, et al., “The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions” (Brill, 2018) Oct 11, 2018

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of anyone working on the history of anatomy, early modern medicine, and/or the history of the book. This volume pays special attention to the Fabrica as material object, tracing how owners used and reacted to it by carefully tracing 475 years of its reading history through annotations, hand-coloring, binding, circulation, and other evidence left from the global movement of copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions. Dániel Margócsy and I talked about the process by which he and his co-authors (Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe) accomplished this massive task, and what the resulting volume can help us understand about the reception history of the Fabrica and its larger consequences for how we work with books as objects.

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Theodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018) Oct 11, 2018

In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and North America. Rather than beginning his story with Gregor Mendel or 1909, the date when Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term “gene,” Porter takes us back to King George III. After a political and medical crisis, doctors and researchers began to record and collect data on the causes of mental illness. In so doing, they increasingly investigated and theorized phenotypic heredity. Using paper technologies and demographic research, from asylum admissions records to census cards, largely unknown individuals helped establish the study of human inheritance. Excavating these figures’ contributions to the history of heredity, Porter sheds new light on the work of Karl Pearson and Charles Davenport.

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Hervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018) Oct 09, 2018

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry “from below.” Using vast archival resources and ample patient files, Hervé Guillemain demonstrates convincingly how schizophrenia in France was a socially constructed category—one that circumscribed and further stigmatized individuals who were already marginalized and left behind in a changing political, economic, and social landscape. Guillemain follows the surprising twists and turns proffered by his sources, and in so doing, reveals to us an untold and unexpected history of those youth and young adults who tried to take “a leap forward, but failed.” While focusing primarily on France, this book nevertheless surpasses its geographic boundaries and will undoubtedly be engaging for all those interested in the schizophrenia diagnosis.

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Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Oct 05, 2018

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel explores independent India’s attempts to feed itself between the 1940s and 1970s. Following the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, hunger and malnutrition remained key issues for India’s politicians, planners and citizens as a new nation sought to become self-sufficient in food production. Siegel’s book follows debates on land reform, technology and native diets to understand how the food question became an entry point into larger questions of citizenship, rights and welfare, debates that continue to loom large in the battle against agrarian distress and widespread food insecurity in present-day India.

Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.

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Peter Harries-Jones, “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference” (Fordham UP, 2016) Oct 04, 2018

The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the humanities. Fortunately for devotees of Bateson’s expansive vision, Peter Harries-Jones has continued the expert analysis that gave us 1995’s A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson, with his 2016 offering, Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference (Fordham University Press, 2016). Harries-Jones has clearly thought deeply about the totality of Bateson’s corpus while drawing upon a wide variety of sources including personal correspondence. The result is an illuminating study that, amongst other accomplishments, productively positions Bateson’s work as a foundation of today’s burgeoning field of biosemiotics. In our wide-ranging conversation, Harries-Jones warns us of the perils of a strictly algorithmic “world without mind,” details Bateson’s intellectual tussle with Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Logical Types, and amplifies Bateson’s bold challenges to the social sciences to let go of the centrality of power and control and replace them with an appreciation of aesthetics and form, to heal the “epistemic cut” between the human and the animal, and even dare to recuperate selected elements of the thought of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in a challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy. All of this makes for a conversation that is as incisive and articulate as his highly readable monograph asking us to carefully consider the intellectual and ecological benefits of Bateson’s “upside down” ontology with “mind” as foundation rather than emergent phenomenon.

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Byron Reese, “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity” (Simon & Schuster, 2018) Oct 04, 2018

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language; 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare; and 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state. He tells us that we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. His book provides an essential background on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing, such as machine consciousness, automation, changes in employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity.

By asking questions like “Are you a machine?” and “Could a computer feel anything?”, Reese cultivates discussion at the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age and how they’ll transform humanity.

Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the industry-leading technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. He has spent the better part of his life exploring the interplay of technology with human history. Reese has patents, obtained and pending, in disciplines as varied as crowdsourcing, content creation, and psychographics. The websites he has launched, which cover the intersection of technology, business, science, and history, have together received over a billion visitors and he is author of the acclaimed book, Infinite Progress: How Technology and the Internet Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty, and War. He joins me today to talk about his new book, The Fourth Age.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

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Cameron B. Strang, “Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850” (UNC Press, 2018) Oct 03, 2018

Cameron Strang’s Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) examines how colonists, soldiers, explorers, and American Indians created and circulated knowledge about the natural world and the inhabitants of the Gulf South. Covering 350 years of imperialism, Frontiers of Science demonstrates both how critical the creation of knowledge about imperial borderlands was to expansion and competition, but also to how diffuse, contested, and unstable these networks were. Not only explorers, but slave owners and their slaves, American Indians, soldiers, bureaucrats, and merchants all participated in the production of knowledge and shaped the way that the Gulf South was known.

Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. In July of 2018 he defended his dissertation, titled ‘The Making and Taking of “Indian Medicine”: Race, Empire, and Bioprospecting in Colonial Mexico.’ This work examines how native and low-caste healers and communities became newly integrated into imperial and global networks of science as colonists developed newfound enthusiasm for indigenous medical knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) Oct 02, 2018

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, outlines the history of social media platforms and their use in popular culture and modern conflict. The authors make comparisons to previous technological advancements (such as telegraph and radio) and connect the use of social media to a Clausewitzian view of war. The use of social media by insurgents, criminal organizations, and nation-states raises questions about whether the medium is the message or if new communication channels are propaganda in another form.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017) Sep 25, 2018

Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However, at its heart Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine (Stanford University Press, 2017) isn’t so much about the history of foot qi and its associated constellation of disease concepts, as it is about the larger questions of how we approach the pre-modern history of disease and understand historical disease concepts more generally. As a result, while readers looking for accounts that form part of a global history of beriberi and of athlete’s foot will find much of interest here, Smith’s book is of much wider interest as a pointed methodological intervention into how we might approach a history of disease in local contexts “on their own terms.”

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Megan Raby, “American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science” (UNC Press, 2017) Sep 18, 2018

American science and empire have a long mutual history. In American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Megan Raby takes us to Caribbean sites that expanded the reach of American ecology and tropical biology. Research stations in Cuba, British Guiana, Panama and Jamaica served as laboratories for Americans in search of knowledge from “the tropics.” Here, often at the expense of local populations and resident scientists, U.S. scientists developed the concept of biodiversity as they worked to make sense of the species and ecosystems at their doorstep.

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Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) Sep 13, 2018

How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process described by scholars of biomedicine as “molecularization” took place gradually and unevenly as genetic tools became applied to prenatal diagnosis. Hogan follows the notion of a “one mutation, one disease” perspective that provided the rhetorical and epistemic scaffolding for the Human Genome Project’s imaginary of genetic medicine as it emerged and developed within the clinic. His deft analysis of visual practices and careful unpacking of the scientific literature make for an engaging read. This fresh alternative to the well-worn heroic narratives of gene sequencing and molecular genetics should be of particular interest to scholars of disability.

If you’re interested in learning more about the history and politics of genetic counseling, check out my interviews with Alexandra Minna Stern and Stefan Timmermans.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Rebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018) Sep 10, 2018

In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narratives to counter state-sanctioned psychiatric diagnoses of insanity. Reich discusses the interesting literary preoccupations of Soviet psychiatrists and psychiatric discourse in the post-Stalin era to help readers understand the context of these diagnoses of madness. Her book mines the works and experiences of dissidents, including Joseph Brodsky, Aleksandr Vol’pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and others, to weave a narrative that shows how Soviet writers contended with false accusations of mania and madness. She also shows how these writers sought to use their works to illustrate the pathology of post-Stalinist Soviet society.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College.

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Megan Ward, “Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character” (OSU Press, 2018) Sep 07, 2018

Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of lengthy novels, to the world of the written word. In spite of seeming incongruity the AI and Victorian literature evoke, the two notions do establish a contact zone: the mind. AI and characters created by Victorian writers are connected by the individual’s attempt and desire to project their imaginative creations into the space outside the mind. In Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), Megan Ward takes into consideration the development of technologies and outlines methods for the analysis of Victorian realist characters that can be presented as constructs that establish connections between the mind and technologies. Ward invites her readers to approach novels as information systems generating multiple meanings, which can be re-organized and re-assembled. Seeming Human challenges the chronological presentation of literature and searches for the ways to further develop textual interpretation, surpassing spatial and temporal limitations.

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N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs, eds., “Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War” (Routledge, 2017) Sep 05, 2018

N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical Military Studies organized on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Taylor and Jacobs have gathered a subtly interwoven set of papers that together offer a distinctly post-Cold War perspective Hiroshima and Nagasaki—not just the bombings, but their long, continuing aftermaths. At various levels of granularity and expansiveness, the contributors present a diverse set of approaches and findings in what the editors describe as the “exciting new field of Nuclear Humanities.” The contributions to this volume are arrayed along five “pathways” laid out by the editors in their introduction: “testimony from lived experience;” “memorialization and commemoration;” “ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, and forgiveness;” the long-term and universal effects of nuclear weapons; and the transdisciplinary exchanges that characterize Nuclear Humanities.

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G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018) Aug 29, 2018

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a painting of a goanna, the contributions to this edited collection invite curiosity, care and wonder in their meditations on these objects of the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans.

Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Marco Armiero is the Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Robert S. Emmett is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Roanoke College Environmental Studies program.

Ruth A. Morgan is a Senior Research Fellow in the History Program at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

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Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) Aug 23, 2018

Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic boxes. She has spent years treating and disentangling why chronic (and particularly auto-inflammatory) conditions seem to be on the rise in kids. She argues that toxicants in our food supply (from pesticides to genetically modified crops) is a major culprit. In What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017), Dr. Perro teams up with medical anthropologist Vincanne Adams, PhD, to explore the complex history of the agrochemical industry and the challenges in studying and regulating the human and health impacts of pesticides, herbicides and agricultural biotechnology. Together, they link case studies of Dr. Perro’s patients to the bigger story of how our foods have potentially also become poisons.

Michelle Perro, MD is a pediatrician with over thirty-five years of experience in acute and integrative medicine. Previously, she attended at New York’s Metropolitan Hospital and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, as well as managing her own practice, Down to Earth Pediatrics. She is currently lecturing and consulting as well as working with Gordon Medical Associates, an integrative health center in Northern California.

Vincanne Adams, PhD is professor and vice-chair of Medical Anthropology, in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has published six books on the social dynamics and politics of health and scientific knowledge including, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (2013), and Metrics: What Counts in Global Health (2016). She is currently editor for Medical Anthropology Quarterly, the flagship journal for the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield.

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Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018) Aug 17, 2018

You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm or evoking emotion. Science is complex and often cannot provide the easy “soundbite” worthy answers that celebrities and politicians truly comprehend. Americans are flooded with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In his book Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information (Columbia University Press, 2018), Dr. Paul Offit sets the record straight.

In this book, Dr. Offit shares his advice from his years of experience battling misinformation in science and public health. He has often found himself in the crosshairs of the anti-vaccine movement and other pseudoscience groups. He has received a significant amount of hate mail and even death threats for speaking out in the name of good science and the health of mankind. Bad science isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous. Luckily. Dr Offit offers his guide for taking on the quacks. This book is especially important due to the increased amounts of politicized attacks on science in the United States.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” (MIT Press, 2017) Aug 15, 2018

Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to ensure the technological security of this important infrastructure. Consumers want to find alternative ways of powering their homes and businesses. Whatever the deliberation, the grid is topic of great concern in this era of both innovation in power and technological terrorism. But to grasp the current significance of the grid, it is important to understand its history. In her book, The Grid: Biography of an American Technology (MIT Press, 2017), Julie A. Cohn, a research historian at the Center for Public History at the University of Houston, offers an examination of the development of historical context of the grid’s development. In so doing she details the characteristics that make the grid a uniquely American technological creation.

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Yves Citton, “The Ecology of Attention” (Polity Press, 2017) Aug 13, 2018

We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a result. But how is this happening, what are the consequences, and is “economy” necessarily the most productive frame in which to understand these transformations in attention and distraction? Yves Citton’s new book explores these questions in a fascinating study of attention as economy, ecology, and “echology” (with the last taking on resonances of the notion of the echo). The Ecology of Attention (tr. Barnaby Norman) (Polity Press, 2017) looks carefully at attention-related phenomena emergent at a number of scales and argues throughout that there are high stakes for how we understand and work with these phenomena: for teaching, performance, the environment, and liberty itself. It’s a clear and compelling book about an important topic, and it will be of interest to a wide readership. Enjoy the conversation!

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018) Aug 09, 2018

The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infection, disease, and pandemic they have helped shape human culture and civilization.

In her book Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History (Oxford University Press, 2018), Dorothy H. Crawford details how changes in the way humans lived, spanning from hunter-gatherer to modern crowding and air travel, have been affected and shaped by the microbes that infect them. She discusses how microbes such as smallpox, flu, and malaria evolved to be so effective. She explores the cause and effect of some of the major epidemics in history such as the Plague of Athens, the Justinian Plague, the Black Death, and even SARS.

Listen to this interview to learn about the history of microbes and their impact on mankind.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Casey Walsh, “Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico” (U California Press, 2018). Aug 02, 2018

Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how everyday people think about and use the waters in the daily lives. Casey Walsh‘s Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) fills this hole by with a compelling history of bathing, the use of mineral and hot springs, and water politics in central Mexico from Aztec rule to the 21st century. Through Spanish colonialism, state efforts to police bathing, and capitalist initiatives to appropriate aqueous commons, healing waters have become increasingly commodified and entrapped in infrastructure. However, as Walsh demonstrates with close attention to popular understandings of health and water, and the efforts of subaltern communities to maintain access and rights to local resources, water continues to be open to alternative, intimate interpretations of its value, powers, and uses. Rather than a uniform, abstract resource, water is also a plural, heterogeneous substance; appreciating this heterogeneity may help address the water crises of the 21st century.

Virtuous Waters is freely available in electronic format here.

Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico.

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Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017) Jul 31, 2018

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, rural America transformed into the familiar arrangement of large scale, mechanized mono-cropping for distant markets. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Midwest, where the prairie, plowed into “Amber Waves of Grain,” came to signify all the promises of settler colonialism. The Profit of the Earth explains the creation of this arrangement by excavating the ways that farmers, settlers, and, bureaucrats learned about the earth and its possibilities as they sought a living, a profit, tax income, or national progress. In this way, Fullilove demonstrates that the advent of the American style of agriculture grew out of the co-optation and reworking of local forms of rural knowledge.

Courtney Fullilove is an Associate Professor of History and affiliated faculty in the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University.

Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico.

Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book and any book at University Press Books, Berkeley.

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Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016) Jul 27, 2018

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sense data what astronomers had done for the movements of heavenly bodies, they appeal to a general consensus that the acceleration of data collection through computing technologies requires a parallel shift toward computational thinking. This raises the question, however, of how computational practices have changed over the last few decades. Sabina Leonelli’s Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (U of Chicago Press, 2016) is the first book-length treatment of how large-scale data collection impacts the work of the life sciences. The book offers a historically and socially informed epistemology of data, situating its production, consumption, and regulation within laboratory practices.

In fact, while much work in the history and sociology of biotechnology has attended to the kind of scalar changes associated with visible endeavors like the Human Genome Project, Leonelli’s account bucks this trend by looking at how plant biologists have made use of new tools and adopted different norms of sharing. The political economy of data she describes is biopolitical in a more pervasive sense, and the book offers support for the Open Science movement while subjecting it to keen philosophical scrutiny.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic” (UNC Press, 2017). Jul 24, 2018

Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritual practitioners in the Caribbean claimed knowledge about the natural world during the 17th century. With penetrating research and analysis, Gomez illustrates how these specialists of African descent devised localized ways of knowing health, nature, and the body, while working within cosmopolitan Caribbean societies in which ritual traditions from around the Atlantic intersected. In a region that was of majority African descent, these practitioners rose to become the intellectual leaders, devising epistemological innovations that spoke to, engaged with and were parallel with European scientific developments, but have hitherto never been included in intellectual history.

Pablo Gomez is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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David Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social Change” (Chelsea Green, 2015) Jul 20, 2018

While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also true that the vast majority of the popular literature on the systems view has taken place within a business context and, as such, often avoids placing the “first principles” of market capitalism on the list of “mental models” to be unpacked and interrogated within a systemic process of inquiry.

A refreshing antidote to this state of affairs is provided by David Peter Stroh’s Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results out in 2015 from Chelsea Green Publishers. Drawing on his rich experience in the non-profit, educational, and municipal sectors, Stroh’s focus is squarely on “wicked problems” of social development uncoupled from the profit imperative as he guides us through highly accessible descriptions of common system archetypes and the strategies that can be employed to address them. In my conversation with David Peter Stroh we encounter his powerful challenge to all would-be change agents to honestly confront the ways in which they may, in fact, be part of the problem and to take stock of the payoffs provided by the “status quo” that, unless they are brought out into the open and honestly interrogated, might actually be surreptitiously sapping the will of systemic agents to change. If we have the courage to engage in these difficult conversations, Stroh shows us that we can begin to build roadmaps to lasting and beneficial systemic change.

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Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018) Jul 18, 2018

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of these potent chemicals from a basement filled with jarred nineteenth-century brains to a twenty-first-century hormone clinic in Los Angeles.

Brimming with fascinating anecdotes, illuminating new medical research, and humorous details, Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything (W.W. Norton & Company, 2018) introduces the leading scientists who made life-changing discoveries about the hormone imbalances that ail us, as well as the charlatans who used those discoveries to peddle false remedies. Epstein exposes the humanity at the heart of hormone science with her rich cast of characters, including a 1920s doctor promoting vasectomies as a way to boost libido, a female medical student who discovered a pregnancy hormone in the 1940s, and a mother who collected pituitaries, a brain gland, from cadavers as a source of growth hormone to treat her son. Along the way, Epstein explores the functions of hormones such as leptin, oxytocin, estrogen, and testosterone, demystifying the science of endocrinology.

A fascinating look at the history and science of some of medicine’s most important discoveries, Aroused reveals the shocking history of hormones through the back rooms, basements, and labs where endocrinology began.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg” (Princeton UP, 2018) Jul 18, 2018

Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 2018) is THE book that explains what that connection is, and how both math and music connect to both physics and biology. There are wonderful anecdotes detailing the lives and creations of many of the great musicians, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers who have contributed to creating music and our understanding of it. If you love music – and who doesn’t – you’ll enjoy reading this book, even if you don’t love math. And maybe, even if you don’t love math, you’ll have a greater appreciation of it after you finish the book.

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Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Jul 16, 2018

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). But how do climate scientists reach these conclusions? In Philosophy and Climate Science (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Eric Winsberg presents the elements of climate science in an accessible but rigorous framework that emphasizes their relation to a variety of key debates in the philosophy of science: the relation between evidence and theory, the nature and uses of models and simulations, the types of probability involved, the role of values in science, and others. Winsberg, who is professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, both explains how climate scientists try to understand the chaotic and complex system that is the earth’s atmosphere, and uses climate science as an extended case study of how scientific knowledge is created and debated before it is used to inform public policy.

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Ari Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body” (Duke UP, 2018) Jul 10, 2018

Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology. How are bodies reproduced, broken apart, and circulated? And how do the representations of these processes help us understand transnational biopolitics? Heinrich takes up these questions and others in this pathbreaking work, one that will change how readers think about the body in contemporary art and media.

Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at nheller@virginia.edu.

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Gary Bruce, “Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo” (Oxford UP, 2017) Jul 09, 2018

In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the University of Waterloo, provides the first English-language history of the Berlin Zoo from its inception in 1844 until German reunification in 1990. Bruce demonstrates how the Berlin Zoo was a critical facet of Berlin’s social and cultural life. The zoo was also used by those in political power throughout German history to communicate messages to the larger public. According to Bruce the zoo remained popular throughout its history, even in Berlin’s darkest times. It allowed ordinary Germans to escape the difficulties of modern urban life for an afternoon, letting them dream of far flung places.

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Christopher G. White, “Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions” (Harvard UP, 2018) Jul 04, 2018

In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose epistemologies are so divergent that they espouse radically diverse ways of perceiving reality. However, this a rather reductive approach to what is ultimately a complex and nuanced intellectual relationship. Indeed, throughout human history the technological and supernatural, the scientific and the spiritual have repeatedly interacted, informing each other’s respective discourses and reinventing themselves based on encounters with new ideas. In the nineteenth century, when a period of sustained and rapid scientific advancement transformed the human understanding of the universe, new discoveries about the invisible forces that shaped our lives – from the electromagnetic spectrum to soundwaves and the subatomic universe – encouraged many to believe that the invisible realm of the supernatural could be similarly understood through recourse to scientific principles and methodologies.

It is this intersection of the scientific and the supernatural that forms the basis of Christopher G. White’s exciting new publication, Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions. Published in 2018 by Harvard University Press, Other Worlds offers a unique insight into the relationship between religion and scientific thought at a time of rapid social, cultural and intellectual change. In the book, White focuses primarily on the imaginative power and pervasive influence of one key scientific concept: the possibly that the universe might hold within it unseen, higher dimensions. Over the course of his study, White analyses how a host of diverse individuals and groups – from scientists and mathematicians to writers, artists and even televangelists – have appropriated the notion of higher dimensions in order to explore, rationalise and explain supernatural phenomena. White maintains that rather than undermining religious beliefs, new scientific ideas, particularly those derived from physics, provided the faithful with a new framework for conceptualising the divine. Undertaking a comprehensive survey of various scientific, spiritual and literary discourses on higher dimensions, White moves from nineteenth-century treatises by Edwin Abbott and C. Howard Hinton to late twentieth-century science-fiction texts like A Wrinkle in Time and The Twilight Zone. In doing so, White shows how rather than opposing intellectual factions, science and spirituality have long been intertwined, with the scientific often providing individuals with new and engaging ways to imagine religious spaces and concepts.

Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture. She blogs about literature and popular culture HERE and can also be found on Twitter.

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Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017) Jul 04, 2018

Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Joanna Radin explores the conjuncture of time and temperature in Cold War “salvage biology” projects.

Cryobiology, genetic epidemiology, and freezer anthropology constructed a dense and tangled global infrastructure of blood circulation. By following these circuits, Radin weaves a narrative about the Cold War human sciences that takes readers up to present ethical debates about the insufficiency of informed consent and the need to better involve communities whose vital materials have been taken for the sake of biomedical research. This book will be of interest to all historians of science, technology, and medicine, as well as to anthropologists and scholars working in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India” (Harvard UP, 2018) Jun 29, 2018

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India (Harvard University Press, 2018), Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey discuss the genealogy of garbage and how it grew in quantity and changed in consistency in liberalising India. The book also provides us with an exhaustive birds eye view of the technological, socio-political and administrative challenges faced by those who work for a cleaner India.

Ian Cook is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University, Budapest and also the host of Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Cultures.

Juli Perczel is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Manchester.

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Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records” (Beacon Press, 2017) Jun 28, 2018

Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals. But as Adam Tanner argues in his latest book, Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (Beacon Press, 2017), our medical information is anything but static. He describes a vast and growing industry of trade in patient data, emanating from EHRs to pharmacy and drug company sales records. These data – ostensibly stripped of identifying information – are sold and bought largely to help medical and pharmaceutical companies better market their products (as well as for some research). Tanner asks, are these data completely safe? Could they be re-identified and threaten patient privacy? How might this trade in data impact patient care and physician practice? While consumer data breaches plague other industries, Tanner urges us as consumers, medical practitioners and society to have a much-needed and informed conversation about this largely hidden circulation of health information. His book is a great start.

Adam Tanner is a journalist, former foreign correspondent and leading expert on privacy and commercialization of personal data. His first book is entitled What Stays in Vegas: the World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Businesses – and the End of Privacy as We Know It (Public Affairs, 2014). Currently, he is an associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Learn more about his work on his website Adamtanner.news and follow him on Twitter @DataCurtain

Dana Greenfield, MD PhD is a resident physician in Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She completed her PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF/UC Berkeley in 2015 and MD at UCSF in 2018. Reach her at dana.greenfield@ucsf.edu or on Twitter @DanaGfield.

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Joy Rohde, “Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2013) Jun 27, 2018

In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions. Through an examination of the use of military research during the Cold War, Dr. Rohde raises questions about the ethics of scholarship, the military industrial complex, and the role of expertise in the national security arena. This book is a thought provoking read on the implications of military-funded social science.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch

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Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World” (Stanford UP, 2017) Jun 27, 2018

Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the contexts, programs, and ethics of medical experimentation in the British and French West Indies from the 1760s to the early 19th century. Physicians were enlisted into the plantation systems to ensure the greatest profitability of the enslaved workforces. European practices, however, were ill-equipped for the tropics, and so many looked towards the knowledge of enslaved populations for effective remedies. Schiebinger analyses the circuits and structures of this knowledge exchange within the sugar plantation complex and between these islands and Europe. She brilliantly illuminates how and why some practices were adopted and appropriated, why others were prohibited, and how the colonial crucible so often resulted in the loss of vibrant medical traditions and knowledge.

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Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in France” (Zone Books, 2017) Jun 19, 2018

Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France. Focusing on the years in and around 1668, Sahlins shows how deeply the king, the court, and the anatomists, artists and writers around it thought with and through animals as Louis XIV redefined royal authority along the lines of absolutism. Through brilliant analyses of the Royal Menagerie and artistic and scientific studies of domestic and exotic fauna, Sahlins demonstrates how absolutism constituted a radical shift in worldview, not only regarding human animals, but the natural world as well.

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Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art” (Penn State UP, 2018) Jun 14, 2018

When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press, 2018) will change the way you think about the contents, forms, and significance of the palette of this critical moment in the history of modernity. Examining the impact of emergent color technologies on French visual culture and landscapes, Color in the Age of Impressionism includes, but moves beyond, a discussion of the works and colors of Impressionist artists to consider color theory, dye manufacture, flower cultivation and gardening culture, fireworks, chromolithographic reproduction and collecting, autochromes and neo-Impressionism. Along the way, this is a history of aesthetics, art, fashion, technical innovation, and the modern markets of hue, tone, contrast, harmony, and shade during the “color revolution” of the decades Kalba explores.

Approaching the history of color in the period with the archival passion and conceptual tools of the historian of visual culture, the book pushes past the discussion and prescription of taste to delve deeper into the social, economic, technological, political, and cultural history of color in a France in the throes of the emergence of a consumer and capitalist society divided by class and other differences. A “bottom-up” history of color, Color in the Age of Impressionism takes seriously the question: How did ordinary French men and women understand realism, abstraction, and fantasy during the decades of the emergence of a modernity that included a spectrum of visuality, imagination, and techniques of representation? A winner of The College Art Association’s 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, the study will be of great interest to anyone fascinated by the histories of art, looking, spectacle, culture, and everyday life in France in the decades before and after the fin-de-siècle.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Jun 12, 2018

As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time. In Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Lisa Walters offers a very different interpretation of Cavendish’s thought, revealing the nuance and complexity of Cavendish’s thinking on a variety of subjects. As an aristocrat, Cavendish served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria and her family served the Royalist cause during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Yet as Walters demonstrates, Cavendish’s writings contain many radical ideas about women and gender relations, about the makeup of matter, and of political systems. Through an analysis of Cavendish’s writings that draws out commonalities between her fictional works and her nonfiction treatises, Walters provides a very different understanding of this under-appreciated contributor to Western thought.

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Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” (Princeton UP, 2018) Jun 07, 2018

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, takes a data-based approach to examine how actions can affect violence in asymmetric conflicts. Using data sets from Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, the authors evaluate several variables, including the role of civilians, mobile communications, and foreign aid projects. The book is data-rich and accessible, with findings presented at a tactical level and a policy level.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Larry Cuban, “The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning” (Harvard Education Press, 2018) Jun 06, 2018

In The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital technologies in K–12 classrooms, exploring if and how technology has transformed teaching and learning. In particular, he examines forty-one classrooms across six districts in Silicon Valley that have devoted special attention and resources to integrating digital technologies into their education practices. Ultimately, Cuban asks if the use of digital technologies has resulted in transformed teaching and learning in these classrooms. His unexpected findings address not only edtech and its uses, but also the complex interrelations of policy and practice, and the many—often unintended—consequences of reforms and initiatives in the education world.

Larry Cuban, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. He blogs about education at larrycuban.wordpress.com.

Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.com or on Twitter @degreenot.

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Hala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut” (Brill, 2016) Jun 05, 2018

In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016) is not only a history of the American Protestant mission’s Arabic press in Beirut, which printed books for Ottoman readers during the 19th century, but a window into the world of Arabic printing at large. Auji uses art history to chart the transition between manuscripts and printed books, using a deep appreciation for Islamic art and book-production to highlight rupture and continuity. Text and non-textual elements are used to tell a story that was not local simply to Beirut, but had connections to the entire region and the development of printing in Arabic-language script at large. Part book-history, part art history, part intellectual history, Printing Arab Modernity ebbs between lithography and typography to tell an essential narrative of modern Middle Eastern history.

Hala Auji is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She holds a PhD in art history from Binghamton University, State University of New York, an MA in Art Criticism & Theory from Art Center College of Design, and a BFA in graphic design from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests include: Arabic book and print culture, 19th-century Islamic art and architecture and the| history of modern science in the Islamic world, amongst many more. She can also be found at https://www.halaauji.net/

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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Kyla Schuller, “The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century” (Duke UP, 2017) Jun 01, 2018

Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. However, by contrasting Black lives with White feelings, Kyla Schuller sets up the central conflict of her book. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke University Press, 2017) interrogates the role of sexual difference in the management of racialized populations, making this book a necessary read for understanding the history of such current social movements as Black Lives Matter and the trans* exclusionary “Pussy hat” feminism.

From the very beginning of the book, our conceptions of nineteenth-century science are challenged. For much of the century, many US scientists championed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck over Charles Darwin as their most prominent influence. In their quest to refute determinist theories of heredity, the neo-Lamarckians of the American School of Evolution advocated for a self-directed version of evolution. These scientists argued that Anglo-Saxons have the most adaptable features and impressionable heredity. This impressionability was what made Whites more sentimental and civilized than other races, who were not as impressionable and seen as largely stuck in a prior stage of progressivist evolution, according to E.D. Cope and the American School of Evolution. Whites were also seen as having greater sexual dimorphism than other races, while women of color were not seen as achieving true womanhood. Kyla therefore finds the origin of binary sex enveloped in racialized difference.

Beyond the subject of evolutionary science, this book introduces us to the Black uplift project of Frances Harper, the vagina politics of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Mary Walker, the biophilanthropy of Charles Loring Brace, and the assemblage theories of W.E.B. DuBois. The Biopolitics of Feeling is packed with interesting, and sometimes shocking, historical anecdotes, such as Walker’s sex advice book to men in 1878, E.D. Cope’s sometimes destructive and violent rivalry with O.C. Marsh, and the “orphan trains” that took two hundred thousand kids out West for educational and labor purposes. The breadth of this book shouldd be of interest to a number of scholars interested in the history of science, literature, and medicine. Meanwhile, Kyla’s engagement and challenge to New Materialist theories is likely to be canonical for future Feminist STS scholars.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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Eden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” (MIT Press, 2011) Jun 01, 2018

It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics. In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist president, Salvador Allende, the “father of management cybernetics” (as Norbert Wiener christened Beer) attempted nothing less than the development and implementation of a cybernetic governance system for Chile’s nationalized economy. For decades, we have relied solely on the writings of Beer and his associates for accounts of this amazing techno-political adventure but, thanks to Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, from the MIT press (originally published in 2011 and out in softcover in 2014), we now have a deeply researched scholarly investigation of this extraordinary historical moment in which Beer’s cybernetic Viable System Model was positioned as a tool to enable radical socialist transformation while remaining within Chile’s constitutional democratic framework. Medina deftly guides us through this astonishing odyssey as the utopian visionary Beer and his brilliant and inspired team of local collaborators, facing an invisible US led economic and technological blockade, craft a real-time communications network stretching the entire length of Chile out of two mainframe computers and a warehouse full of unused telex machines and which proves its mettle in response to a wildly disruptive US funded national truck drivers strike. Along the way, we meet a colorful cast of characters including doctor turned Marxist lightning rod, Salvador Allende, wily young political operator and future Silicon valley innovator, Fernando Flores, and of course, the wildly charismatic business guru turned leftist, new age quasi-mystic, Stafford Beer; all wrestling with the struggle to keep their emancipatory egalitarian project of distributed decision making and control from tipping over into centralized technocracy as the entire Chilean socialist project teeters towards its brutal and tragic ending. Seamlessly blending compelling storytelling and astute technological, political, and cultural analysis, Medina’s book stands as a penetrating look at an under-theorized political experiment and a detailed summary of its still hotly debated legacy.

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Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) May 29, 2018

French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. While not diminishing the epistemological and aesthetic importance of “the image” to Charcot, Jonathan W. Marshall argues in Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) that the work of the French neurologist is best understood through the lens of dramaturgy. He demonstrates the spatial and temporal implications of Charcot’s neurological practice as steeped in neo-classical aesthetics and deeply attuned to scenography, showmanship, and stage production. Using convincing evidence drawn from critiques of Charcot, Marshall demonstrates in Performing Neurology that the power and danger of mixing medicine and theatrics was not lost on Charcot’s contemporaries.

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Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala” (U Arizona Press, 2015) May 18, 2018

Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways that indigenous communities engaged and resisted these programs. Contrary to expectations, colonists were often ahead of administrators in Spain in adopting new medical methods, such as inoculating patients against smallpox. But bringing these to rural communities, some with a significant degree of autonomy, required adaptation and compromise; and if resistance was stiff, medical officers reacted with the persecution of indigenous practices in ways that mirrored the church’s anti-idolatry purges. By bringing Guatemala and its native residents into the networks of Atlantic medicine in the eighteenth century, For All Humanity illuminates the plurality of medical cultures that interacted in the production of the Enlightenment.

Martha Few is Professor of Latin American History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University.

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Jörg Matthias Determann, “Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories, and Nationalism in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2018) May 11, 2018

Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating insight into fundamental issues shaping the contemporary Middle East, including efforts to turn Arab societies into twenty first-century knowledge-based economies and the role of the religion and its relationship to science. Assistant Professor Jörg Matthias Determann takes the reader on a highly readable and well-documented tour of the struggle of Arab scientists to contribute to the development on space studies and how scientific research contributes to reform and change in the Arab world. It is a process that often meant that scientists were forced to pursue their studies and explorations outside of the region and in doing so contributed to concepts of cosmopolitanism in the region.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

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Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017) May 09, 2018

The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I.

In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind’s vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted–and often permanently altered–global politics, race relations and family structures, while spurring innovation in medicine, religion and the arts. It was partly responsible, Spinney argues, for pushing India to independence, South Africa to apartheid and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It also created the true “lost generation.” Drawing on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology and economics, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (PublicAffairs, 2017) masterfully recounts the little-known catastrophe that forever changed humanity.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Mark A. McCutcheon, “The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology” (Athabasca UP, 2018) May 03, 2018

What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology, published in 2018 by Athabasca University Press. In this unique and penetrating analysis, McCutcheon argues that Shelley’s 1818 novel essentially reinvented the word “technology” for the modern age, establishing its connections with ominous notions of manmade monstrosity. In the twentieth century, this monstrous, Frankensteinian conception of technology was globalized and popularized largely through Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and its numerous, diverse adaptations in Canadian popular culture. The Medium is the Monster establishes Frankenstein, and its various adaptations, as the originating intertext for a modern conceptualisation of technology that has manifested with a unique potency in Canadian pop culture, informing works as disparate as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the fiction of Margaret Atwood, and even electronic dance music. Furthermore, McCutcheon undertakes an incisive of analysis of how Frankensteinian constructions of technology have shaped real-world discussions of science and industry, an intertextual discourse which he sees as most powerfully encapsulated in the rhetoric associated with the Alberta tar sands industry.

Over the course of the interview, McCutcheon provides some fascinating insights into changing cultural attitudes towards technology, the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the novel’s relationship to McLuhan’s media theory, and the surprising scope of Shelley’s cultural impact.

Miranda Corcoran received her Ph.D. in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture.

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B.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Back” (Curious Reads, 2017) May 03, 2018

The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Governments, advocacy groups and individual citizens are demanding that action be taken to protect their valuable data. But what does this sporadic noise amount to? B.J. Mendelson in his book Privacy: And How to Get It Back (Curious Reads, 2017) argues that a complacent citizenry and the overly-intimate relationship that corporations have with government has led to massive breaches of people’s privacy. Mendelson humorously explains the way people’s data is used and abused as he tracks the long history of government surveillance leading to an explanation of, what he believes, could be the solution to the abuse of people’s privacy.

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Sam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” (Little, Brown and Co., 2015) Apr 26, 2018

Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim coped. In many cases survival was miraculous, and observers could only marvel at the transformations that took place afterward, altering victims’ personalities. An injury to one section can leave a person unable to recognize loved ones; some brain trauma can even make you a pathological gambler, pedophile, or liar. But the book The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (Back Bay Books, 2015) explains how a few scientists realized that these injuries were an opportunity for studying brain function at its extremes. With lucid explanations and incisive wit, Sam Kean explains the brain’s secret passageways while recounting forgotten stories of common people whose struggles, resiliency, and deep humanity made modern neuroscience possible.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Aimi Hamraie, “Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) Apr 25, 2018

The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. In their new book, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Aimi Hamraie takes a “sledgehammer to history” in the spirit of one guerrilla activist group that they track in the archives—among many other people, objects, and historical contexts. Hamraie focuses on work around “access-knowledge”—that is, the forms of expertise that were considered legitimate ways of knowing and responding to disability through design. What has counted as legitimate access-knowledge, Hamraie argues, indicates designers’ goals: Was the aim of design to make productive workers, liberal consumers, or structures that materialized a commitment to spacial belonging? Who were the imagined users and how could new political priorities materialize in worlds already built? Answers to these questions made—and continue to remake—our material world and its frictions. Hamraie brings their training in feminist epistemology to never-before-accessed archival materials, along with an array of historical images and documents. The result is a persuasive, beautiful, and intrepidly researched book. Building Access torques received wisdom in disability studies, history of science, and architectural design, and models how to attend to research, writing, and publishing as a material practice.

Hamraie is Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health & Society, and Director of Vanderbilt’s Critical Design Lab.

This interview was a collective effort among Vanderbilt faculty and graduate students in the course New Approaches to STS. For more information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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David J. Silverman, “Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America” (Harvard UP, 2016) Apr 24, 2018

In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), David J. Silverman argues that Indian societies adopted firearm technology not because they were visually impressive or culturally significant (though they were both), but simply because they killed more efficiently. Using his concept of the “gun frontier,” Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University, shows how contact between Natives and those Europeans willing to trade weapons for furs and other goods fundamentally altered the politics and power dynamics of a given region. Thundersticks draws on case studies from a broad sweep of time from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, including the consolidation of Iroquois power, King Philip’s War, the otter fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, and the ascendency of the Blackfeet in the mountain west. Each story underscores the point that guns could both undermine colonial power as well as cause catastrophic conflict between Indian societies. Firearms changed Indian societies in innumerable ways, but when the gun trade lagged, so too did an individual polity’s power. Silverman’s book is a complicated, nuanced, look at how post-contact North America has long been a wildly interconnected place, and how it became a continent filled with blood and smoke.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (UMass Press, 2018) Apr 23, 2018

“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put their skills at the service of the people and against the oppressors.” (Zimmerman, et al. 1972).

Following the 2014 conference, “Science for the People: The 1970s and Today,” Sigrid Schmalze r, Daniel Chard, and Alyssa Botelho, edited a volume of the Science for the People (SftP) movement, curating numerous documents from the group that are as relevant today as when they were published several decades ago. Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) encapsulates the diverse themes, research, and actions of the movement, which included chapters across the US at one time. Emerging from the radical political culture of the 1960s, and predecessor group, Scientists for Social and Political Action, SftP challenged the value-neutrality of science and technology, and instead sought to democratize science by engaging with other political movements and conducting research with non-experts. While much scientific research continues to be funded by the state or by corporations, SftP provided grassroots scientific and technological assistance and education in a multitude of settings. Just to take a few examples from the volume, these efforts included research for social movements, providing electrical power for a Black Panther free medical clinic, promoting the farming technique of intercropping, as well as distributing resources, literature and education to countries such as Vietnam and Nicaragua. The direction of assistance between SftP and other groups was rarely one-sided, as SftP members absorbed knowledge from other movements and places, as documented in the China: Science Walks on Two Legs selection, wherein several SftP members visited China and learned about some of the traditional science and peasant research conducted in the nation. In addition, through working groups and publications, SftP critiqued racist and sexist science, reductionist biology, nuclear power, weapons research, commercial agriculture, US imperialism, and much more. As their many articles and actions show, SftP did more than just critique mainstream science, they attempted to provide alternatives. Finally, SftP had a formative and lasting effect on Science and Technology Studies through its various studies on the social embeddedness of science and its political uses.

Since the 2014 conference, Science for the People has been revitalized through new efforts. Check out https://scienceforthepeople.org/ to see continued and original projects.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. Follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome” (U Chicago Press, 2017) Apr 20, 2018

How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Drawing upon nearly a hundred interviews including with genetic scientists, social scientists, activists, lawyers and policy makers, Reardon constructs an engaging story detailing accounts of genomic projects from several field sites around the globe. Beyond her ethnographic accounts, Reardon engages with historical antecedents, such as the infamous Tuskegee study and the following Belmont Report, as well as philosophical discussions and insights from the likes of Hannah Arendt and Jean François Lyotard. The result is a reconsideration of genomics in a society vexed by inequality, and a push toward matters of science and justice.

Following the completion of the Human Genome Project, many subsequent genomic related projects (such as the Human Genome Diversity Project, Generation Scotland, and personal genomic projects like 23andMe) had to quibble with issues over labor, interpretation, cost, consent, and diversity. While many well-intentioned scientists hoped to be more inclusive and rebuke activist claims of “genetic colonialism”, these attempts fell through, due in part to problems of consent, structural inequalities, and conflicting points of view between scientists and potential DNA donors regarding the meaning and value of the genome. Other projects, such as Generation Scotland, had to deal with rising cost, and industry push toward more computerized, automated sequencing. For genomic researchers and investors, automation means reduced labor and reduced human error; however, citing Arendt, Reardon argues that such automation could jeopardize the very acts of meaningful speech that bring matters of concern, like the genome, into being. Instead, we should engage with a plurality of stories and gatherings around such matters of care and justice as they may come to constitute a new common world, including a transformed genomic science.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, “Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies” (Georgetown UP, 2017) Apr 18, 2018

Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies (Georgetown University Press, 2017), edited by George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, uses analogies to conventional warfare and previous technological innovations to explain the complexities of cyber capabilities and threats. The essays examine cyber weapons, cyber warfare, and cyber defense using case studies that include the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the use of drones. This book is a worthwhile thought exercise to better understand how cyber conflict fits into existing frameworks of international relations and how cyber capabilities may affect existing norms of war.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Susan M. Squier, “Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor” (Duke UP, 2017) Apr 17, 2018

Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017) is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, graphics) that experts have created to understand development and to communicate without verbal language has shaped—and continues to affect—the worlds in which we live.

Squier’s book takes its title from a set of images from the embryologist C.H. Waddington, all meant to demonstrate his theory of how life developed—as a dynamic process emerging within multiple scales of time and space. The first Epigenetic Landscape was, literally, a landscape painting—thick and confounding—that Waddington commissioned from the artist John Piper. Over the next twenty years, Waddington created two additional images that suggested a less contextual, more individually focused conception of development.

In her creative and persuasive book, Susan Squier follows iterations of the Epigenetic Landscape to spotlight moments of contingency in the new field of epigenetics in the 1960s and 1970s, when scientists had opportunities to follow interdisciplinary approaches, to emphasize multiple scales of time and space, and to take seriously process-oriented knowledge that defied orthodoxies of molecular genetics. Squier argues that attending to visual rhetoric of scientific fields, especially development, is an inroad both to understanding the history of those fields, and to imagining possible, more feminist, futures. In doing so, Squier shows that ways of knowing that have been separated as either “art” or “science” interact more often than is appreciated, and those lines of connection serve as important creative resources. Heeding her own call for transdisciplinary approaches, three chapters document how the Epigenetic Landscape has been used not only into embryology but also landscape design and bioArt.

Squier is Brill Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her previous books include Liminal Lives and The Graphic Medicine Manifesto.

This interview was a collaborative effort among participants in the Vanderbilt graduate seminar, Social Studies of Science & Medicine. For information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015).

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Thomas Morris, “The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations” (Thomas Dunne, 2018) Apr 11, 2018

For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before. The following decades saw the mysteries of the heart exposed, thanks to pioneering surgeons, brave patients and even sacrificial dogs. In eleven landmark operations, Thomas Morris tells us stories of triumph, reckless bravery, swaggering arrogance, jealousy and rivalry, and incredible ingenuity: the trail-blazing blue baby procedure that transformed wheezing infants into pink, healthy children; the first human heart transplant, which made headline news around the globe. And yet the heart still feels sacred: just before the operation to fit one of the first artificial hearts, the patients wife asked the surgeon if he would still be able to love her.

The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018) gives us a view over the surgeon’s shoulder, showing us the hearts inner workings and failings. It describes both a human story and a history of risk-taking that has ultimately saved millions of lives.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s” (Columbia UP, 2018) Apr 09, 2018

What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018), is a fine-grained examination of the local reaction to the most serious accident in the history of U.S. nuclear energy. It is also a sweeping study of the construction of arguments for and against nuclear energy and atomic weapons from the end of the World War II to the present. Zaretsky follows that debate through a transformative six-year debate in central Pennsylvania, where conservative activists launched protests that drew heavily from the examples of environmentalism, the antiwar movement, second-wave feminism, the black freedom struggle, and black and women’s health activism. Yet rather than pushing them to the left, their fight with pronuclear forces in industry and government made them more conservative. They articulated an ethnonationalist argument about a threatened nation betrayed by its leaders and illustrated it with ecological images of the damaged bodies of mothers, babies, and the unborn. This “biotic nationalism” helped conservatives paint a convincing picture of the America of the 1970s and 1980s and remains potent today, as visible in the “Crippled America” described by Donald Trump.

Natasha Zaretsky is associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University. She is the author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of American Decline, 1968-1980 (UNC Press, 2007) and co-editor of Major Problems in U.S. History Since 1945 (4th ed., Cengage, 2013). Her articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Women’s History, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Stephen Monteiro, “The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender” (MIT Press, 2017) Apr 06, 2018

Sewing, knitting, quilting, the crafts related to fabric making, are usually not what we think about when we consider our digital communications devices. Yet, many of the activities that we find ourselves doing with our devices touching the screen, scrolling, swiping, etc. and some of the language that we use to describe our actions, draw from textile culture. In his book The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender (MIT Press, 2017), Stephen Montiero, at Concordia University, explores the connection between the fabric arts and computing. In it he investigates the relationship between gender and the construction of media technologies. A particular focus of his is an examination of how, as in former years sewing was dismissed as women’s work, social aspects of digital technologies are gendered and dismissed as inconsequential. Montiero also details the eraser of the contributions of many women to the evolution of the technology that is now ubiquitous.

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Hanna Engelmeier, “Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900” (Bohlau, 2016) Apr 02, 2018

The relationship between humans and apes has been discussed for centuries. That discussion took a new turn with the publication and reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). In her book, Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900 (Bohlau, 2016) (Der Mensch, der Affe: Anthropologie und Darwin-Rezeption in Deutschland 1850-1900), Hanna Engelmeier analyzes several historical positions concerning the human-ape-relationship. By tracing back how the reception of Darwin changed thinking about apes, she concludes that there is not only an anthropology relating to humans, but also an anthropology concerning apes. Interestingly, Engelmeier discusses a wide range of thinkers from 1850-1900, including Ernst Haeckel, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gustav Klimt and also literary authors such as Wilhelm Raabe and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

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Alex Wade, “Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) Mar 23, 2018

In his book Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Alex Wade examines the culture of bedroom coding, arcades, and format wars in 1980s Britain. Wade interviews gamers, developers and journalists to better understand the cultural habitus of early gaming. Wade expertly explores the bedroom culture of early coders, examining the ways in which games were copied and distributed among players. He situates gaming in the underground subcultures of arcades, connecting early arcade cultures to present-day gambling and gaming. Wade analyzes the ways that 1980s gaming gave rise to today’s gaming industry. Through his in-depth research into 1980s British gaming culture, Wade argues that video games give insight into social, political, and cultural landscapes in ways that deserve exploration and recognition. Wade’s work on gaming and gaming culture is essential reading in games studies and media and his focus on sociology of gaming makes for an appeal to a wide audience.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) Mar 22, 2018

As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of second-order systems theory to the analysis of literature and media more broadly. The staggering scope of Clarke’s multidisciplinary erudition is on full display in the monograph, Neocybernetics and Narrative, out from University of Minnesota Press in 2014. In picking up Niklas Luhmann’s neologism “neocybernetics” in place of a more standard second-order cybernetic label, Clarke carves out a theoretical continuum for his thinking that runs along a trajectory from Heinz von Foerster’s notions of the observer, through George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition, and right up to, and including, Niklas Luhmann’s controversial extension of autopoiesis theory to metabiotic social systems; a theoretical move most often excluded from more orthodox second-order cybernetic thinking. The formidable theoretical apparatus he has assembled allows Clarke to frame the reader of literary texts as an observer of semantic structures facilitating the psychic construction of possible worlds of meaning, and to examine literary texts themselves as forms of communicative action that continue the autopoiesis of meaning-constituted social systems along the lines of Luhmann’s tripartite process of information, utterance, and understanding. From this launch-pad, Clarke takes us on a stratospheric ride with stops on a variety of fascinating landscapes including the media theory of Friedrich Kittler, the socio-technical explorations of Bruno Latour, and encounters with artistic works as diverse as Virgina Woolf’s iconic modernist novel, Mrs. Dalloway and James Cameron’s quasi-Gaian special effects blockbuster motion picture, Avatar. As a result, Clarke has given arts and humanities scholars an entirely new set of tools with which to think about artistic production, reception, and mediation.

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Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 ) Mar 15, 2018

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religious conversion experience rather than a reasoned shift from one theory to another based on the best evidence. But even if one disagrees with Kuhn, how can this change be shown to be rational? More generally, how can transitions from one set of normative standards to another be rational, given that there is no neutral position from which to criticize one’s own normative standards? In Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Menachem Fisch takes up this challenge, defending an account of framework change which accepts that we cannot be self-critical of our own standards, but we can be destabilized by external criticism. Some of those who are “ambivalated” in this way creatively attempt to tackle their ambivalence by developing hybrid theories that provide others in a scientific community with a means to critically assess their frameworks and develop new ones. Fisch, who is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, draws on work from Korsgaard, Friedman, Galison, McDowell and others in a rich discussion of the dynamics of normativity in science, illustrated with a case study of debates on the foundations of algebra in the 1830s.

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Anthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Mar 06, 2018

On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, to distance cybernetics from military research and application, as well as the ethical stances of some of the field’s later leading lights such as Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Herbert Brun, Ranulph Glanville and Larry Richards, it should not be surprising if some contemporary cyberneticians might find the particular combination of words in the books title somewhat disconcerting. However, far from producing a strictly first-order technological study or strategic “how to” manual, Greek military officer Tsirigotis has carried out a decidedly second-order examination of the subject that supplants the mainstream assumption of cyberspace as a set of technologies with a notion of cyberspace as a set of social practices produced, and reproduced, autopoietically through what he calls “cyber discourse.” Grounded in notions of emergence and complexity and employing digital tools of corpus linguistics on policy documents from over the past seven decades, Tsirigotis traces the transformation of such notions as “security” and “threat” in British military circles. The result is a conception of the state, not as a particular bounded geographical region, but as a network of autopoietic social practices; and of a world in which such states do not seek to extinguish external threats through the deployment of hard military power but rather seek to use their networks to adapt to the constant presence of threats in their environment. Along the way, Tsirigotis provides a striking example of what a truly second-order social science, capable of engaging with all manner of social practices beyond the military sphere, might look like.

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Christopher J. Lee, “Jet Lag” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) Feb 27, 2018

My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the local time. For him, it’s always whatever time it is in Cincinnati, Ohio, even if all the clocks around him flash the fact that it isn’t, even if he’s taking my mother, for example, on their once-in-a-lifetime dream vacation to Hawaii and the sun is setting in perfect postcard colors. “No wonder I’m sleepy,” he’ll say, glancing at his watch. “It’s two in the morning.” I don’t know quite why it drives me so crazy. Maybe it’s his small refusal to accept where he is at that moment or maybe its his small insistence that, at any moment, he’s always home. I just know that, with a wristwatch and a strong will, my father has decided to ignore the laws of time.

It turns out that he’s not so different from most of us who fly frequently from one time zone to another. In his new book, Jet Lag (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Chris Lee illuminates what happens to us when, thousands of feet in the air, trapped in an uncomfortable seat in coach or luxuriously sprawled out in first-class, we race ahead of the clock or fall behind it. Suddenly the sun shines when it shouldn’t or the night comes to soon, and were out of synch, not only with time but, it can seem, with the world around us, even with ourselves. We’re jet-lagged, and, as Lee cleverly shows, were experiencing much more than an inconvenience. We’re experiencing something like modernity itself, where time, technology, and our global condition are not only made evident but also, as we stagger off our flights, exhausting.

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Molly Wright Steenson, “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape” (MIT Press, 2017) Feb 27, 2018

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT, 2017), Carnegie Mellon associate professor Molly Wright Steenson, considers four of these designers: Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, to examine how they included elements of interactivity in their projects. In so doing she illuminates how their work influences today’s technology.

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Jennifer Hart, “Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation” (Indiana UP, 2016) Feb 23, 2018

Our guest today was Dr. Jennifer Hart who talked to us about her recently published book Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press, 2016). In this book, Dr. Hart traces the history of automotive transportation in Ghana from the introduction of the first motor vehicles during the early colonial period through the beginnings of the twenty-first century. Ghana on the Go focuses on the emergence and growth of commercial transportation which became the most prevalent way for Ghanaians to experience automotive mobility. Dr. Hart centers her narrative in the personal stories of drivers and passengers to examine how automotive mobility allowed for social and economic mobility building from an existing entrepreneurial culture. She threads these stories with a larger history of political contestation, economic development and state regulation to examine the long-term impact of automotive technology in the evolution of Ghanaian state, society and culture.

Dr. Jennifer Hart is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University. Her research interests include African history and Urban History.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

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Michael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018) Feb 20, 2018

For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to report what it is really like—or that it even exists—today science and technology are being used to try to make it happen in our lifetime. In the book we are looking at today, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia (Henry Holt, 2018), Dr. Michael Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans’ belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality along with utopian attempts to create heaven on earth. From radical life extension, to cryonic suspension to mind uploading, Shermer considers how realistic these attempts are from a proper skeptical perspective and concludes with an uplifting tribute to purpose and progress and a word on how we can live well in the here-and-now, whether or not there is a hereafter.

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City.

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Howard I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) Feb 14, 2018

In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso, left-handed individuals were more likely to be criminals. Hertz disagreed. For him, to restrict left-handedness was to suppress individual expression. In his book, On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Howard I. Kushner explores the fascinating and circuitous history of left-handedness. By looking at a wide variety of scientific research, as well as the cultural meanings attached to left-handedness, Kushner breaks down the binary between nature and nurture that has characterized most explanations of what some researchers have called non-right-handedness. Ultimately Kushner argues that discrimination against left-handers can be read as a barometer for a given society’s toleration of diversity.

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James Delbourgo, “Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane” (Allen Lane, 2017) Feb 09, 2018

James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose collection and last will laid the foundation for the British Museum, the first national, free, public museum.

For Delbourgo, Sloane was for far too long an overlooked figure, who knitted together the interests of a rising empire through methods of botany, natural history and medicine. Overshadowed in part by his counterpart Isaac Newton, Sloane’s life synchronizes with the changes from seventeenth-century England to eighteenth-century Britain. His life and the time are deeply interwoven with slavery and a new world of commerce. It was thanks to this interconnected world and the many intermediaries that Sloane managed to accumulate so many weird and wonderful objects from different places. He collected, catalogued, and exhibited them according to his own belief system, which centered around binaries of enlightenment versus superstition and sober empiricism versus magic.

More than anything, Delbourgo’s book reveals the complex lives and stories around Hans Sloane’s collection and the many different peoples, places and stories that are attached to the silent objects, even today. It raises important historical questions about ownership and authorship of public museums, collections and curatorial practices and makes them relevant for us today.

Ricarda Brosch is a museum assistant (trainee) at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. Her research focuses on Ming and Qing Chinese art & material culture, transcultural interchanges, especially with Timurid and Safavid Iran, as well as provenance research & digital humanities. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com.

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Andrew Keen, “How To Fix The Future” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018) Feb 06, 2018

As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on going “Digital Revolution,” you would certainly get the impression that a Brave New World is emerging, one nothing like anything that we’ve seen before. And, in a way, this is true: we—meaning humans—have never lived in an environment with smartphones, social media, and the firehose of “information” that is the Internet. We’re always on and always connected in a way we have never been before.

But, as Andrew Keen points out in his smart new book How To Fix The Future (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018), there is also a sense in which we have been here before, namely, in the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century. Then, too, technology and new forms of organization upended the way almost everyone in the industrializing world lived. (For more, see Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim, unless you like poets, in which case you should just read the British Romantics.) Some made dire predictions, others said heaven was around the corner. There was lots of suffering and, well, lots of progress. What we did, Keen points out, is essentially tame the Industrial Revolution such that it served humanity rather than humanity serving it. He says we can do the same with the Digital Revolution, and he tells us how. Listen in.

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Nick Montfort, “The Future” (MIT, 2017) Jan 29, 2018

Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. In his new book for the MIT Essential Knowledge Series, The Future (MIT Press, 2017), Nick Montfort examines the writings of previous futurist writers, thinkers, and designers to provide an understanding of how the future can be constructed. In so doing, Montfort argues that the future is something we can shape instead of only predict.

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Leo Coleman, “A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi” (Cornell UP, 2017) Jan 19, 2018

We take electricity for granted. But the material grids and wires that bring light to homes and connect places are also objects of moral concern, political freedoms and national advancement, suggests Leo Coleman in his new book A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi (Cornell University Press 2017). The book is structured around three historical and ethnographic case studies—the pomp and show at Viceroy Curzon’s 1903 Imperial Durbar that ultimately left no trace on Delhi’s physical landscape; Constituent Assembly debates on nationwide electrification legislation; and anti-privatization consumer activism pursued by New Delhi’s neighborhood associations in the mid 2000s. Coleman argues that technological infrastructures are never a purely technical matter and always already entangled in political, legal and moral processes. Electrification in each historical moment—colonial enclave, fledgling nation and global city—generates meaningful, moral reflection on what constitutes the public sphere, self-determination and collective wellbeing.

Leo Coleman is an associate professor of anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.

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Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017) Jan 09, 2018

Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from the origins of telegraphy in the early 1800s to the advent of computing in the 1950s – the book explores the at times fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity. It covers some of the earliest and varied attempts to make the Chinese script fit for Western communication systems, taking the reader on a journey through Chinese telegraphy, Morse code, typewriters and early computing. In addition, Mullaney includes reference to the many failed attempts, ideas and approaches in the history of Chinese information technology through a series of lively and insightful stories and people. Perhaps most interestingly, Mullaney covers how various inbuilt linguistic inequalities in turn eventually led to the evolution of innovative strategies and technologies, including input method and predictive text.

Ricarda Brosch is a museum assistant (trainee) at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin – Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. Her research focuses on Ming and Qing Chinese art & material culture, transcultural interchanges, especially with Timurid and Safavid Iran, as well as provenance research & digital humanities. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com.

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Liss C. Werner, “Cybernetics: State of the Art” (Tech Uni of Berlin Press, 2017) Jan 09, 2018

It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible not only Smart Homes, but Smart Cities. As with all technological revolutions, the road ahead is equally dotted with possibilities and pitfalls. Liss C. Werner and her colleagues brought together a collection of thinkers and practitioners in the realms of architecture, design, and urban planning to wrestle with questions around ways we might utilize today’s digital design tools to enable more responsive, resilient, and ultimately, inclusive and democratic forms of urban design and governance without tipping the balance over to a technocratic project that might imprison us within its algorithmic logics. All of the contributors to this discussion share the hope that the insights of second-order cybernetics might provide valuable guidance as we attempt to find that particular “sweet-spot” of human/machine interaction. Their insights are gathered together in Cybernetics: State of the Art edited by our guest, Liss C. Werner, and available free online from the Technical University of Berlin. As editor, Werner has skillfully crafted a dialectic arc that allows the productive tensions between digital utopianism and skepticism enabling a provocative investigation of the revolution that is happening whether we like it or not, and might help us find the means to steer its emergence in ways that are most beneficial for all of us and our environment.

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Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015) Dec 29, 2017

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015), Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs chronicles the medical researcher whose success in developing a successful polio vaccine in the 1950s made him an international celebrity. Born to immigrant parents, Salk studied hard to graduate for college and earn his medical degree. His interest in helping all of humanity led Salk to pass on a career as a clinician in favor of one as a researcher in the burgeoning field of virology. After work during World War II on the first successful influenza vaccine Salk moved to Pittsburgh, where he soon found himself involved in a coordinated effort to defeat the disease. Salk’s vaccine became the first to achieve this. Yet as Jacobs demonstrates, the fame Salk won for his achievement came at a price. Though lionized the world over he found himself engaged in a lifelong campaign to prove the superiority of his vaccine, while his efforts to develop vaccines against other diseases never achieved the same degree of success.

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Chelsea Schelly, “Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America” (Rutgers UP, 2017) Dec 28, 2017

Technology is a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use social processes of interpretation and negotiation. The mundane rituals that humans carry out when interacting with technology are loaded with emotional overtones. The interaction with technology in most cases become habit. The dependence and isolation that result from technology use is invisible and seems natural to membership groups that use it. Chelsea Schelly, the author of Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America (Rutgers University Press, 2017) and my guest for this episode, studied technology and the way in which people of four alternative lifestyles live without such dependency on technology. In our interview, we discuss the way in which people at The Farm, Twin Oaks, Dancing Rabbits, and Earthship Biotecture lived their daily lives by sharing some technology and living without most of it.

Chelsea Schelly, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. Dr. Schelly is also the author of Crafting Collectivity: American Rainbow Gatherings and Alternative Forms of Community. She is currently developing a project to further research the economy of these four communities.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston’s work here.

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Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017) Dec 21, 2017

When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial transactions, and social interactions, among other things, have roots in technological advances from other countries. In particular, 15 years before most Americans were online, the French government backed a communications technology, the Minitel, that revolutionized social, political, and financial interactions. In Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (MIT Press, 2017), Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll discuss the creation and spread of the Minitel and the particular influence it had on France, and ultimately what we call the Internet. In so doing the authors offer lessons for current regulatory debates.

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Jason Josephson-Storm, “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” (U. Chicago, 2017) Dec 21, 2017

We tend to think of ourselves—our modern selves–as disenchanted. We have traded magic, myth, and spirits for science, reason, and logic. But this is false. Jason Josephson-Storm, in his exciting new book titled The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017) challenges this classical story of modernity. Josephson-Storm, associate professor in and chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College, argues that modernity is riddled with magic, and that attempts to curtail it have often failed. Adding a twist to a well-known expression, he writes that we have never been disenchanted. Josephson-Storm investigates the human sciences—philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and folklore studies, to name a few—which were critical to the creation and spread of the myth of a mythless society. But the human sciences were themselves also deeply entangled with magic. They often, Josephson-Storm reveals, emerged from occult origins, flirted with the paranormal, or even produced new enchantments. As can be surmised from this brief description, the audience of The Myth of Disenchantment will be a broad and eclectic one. The book will be of interest to scholars in religious studies, science and technology studies, and historians of philosophy, science, ideas, culture, and Europe.

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Alfie Bown, “The Playstation Dreamworld” (Polity, 2017) Dec 20, 2017

How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong, explores this and many other questions of the modern condition. The book offers an accessible overview of key psychoanalytic theories to understand the video game, in particular the video game experience and its impact on the social world. The book uses a plethora of gaming examples, drawing out the ambivalences and potentials in even the most seemingly un-revolutionary games. These range from the transformation of space and urban experience in Pokemon Go, through the more corporate or reactionary experiences of Uncharted, through to the subversive elements of Papers Please. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how we live, through video games, now.

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Zek Valkyrie, “Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline” (Praeger, 2017) Dec 15, 2017

Zek Valkyrie teaches at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. His new book, Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline (Praeger, 2017), takes readers into the world of electronic games and the complex social relationships that they create. With the mainstream reader in mind, it serves as a primer for anyone interested in the how and why of gaming, as well as a solid introduction to social science concepts generally. The book does not presume apologetics for video games—to be sure, the author takes a direct approach to discussing the myriad social problems inherent in the medium. Along with the many positives to collaborative and competitive online play, major topics include sexism, masculinity, various gamer stigmas, identity formation, and consumption, among others. In this conversation we touch of all of these, as well as the books origins, how the author was able to include student work in the final publication, and his award-winning teaching methods.

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Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Personal Stereo” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) Dec 12, 2017

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman, taking into account the device’s controversial origin story, the seismic cultural impact on society in the 1980s, the worries of diminishing social interactions, and the philosophical implications of listening to music within one’s own private bubble. All this is channeled through a personal nostalgic affection for the device.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Dissent, where she is a contributing editor. She was previously a contributing writer for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, a columnist for the urban affairs website Next City, and a Journalism and Media Fellow at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Stephen Lee Naish is a writer and author of several books on the subjects of film and popular culture. He lives in Ontario, Canada. Follow him on Twitter @riffsandmeaning.

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Andrew S. Tompkins, “Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany” (Oxford UP, 2016) Nov 28, 2017

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of this discontent? Nuclear power. Not weapons. Electricity.

How did anti-nuclear protest become a debate about the future of society? What united farmers, housewives, hippies, and anarchists against the state? Find out in our conversation with Andrew S. Tompkins about his new book Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2016). By weaving government documents and police records with activist newspapers and oral history interviews, Andrew explains how a transnational network of activists emerged around the issue of nuclear power despite social divides and diverse interests inside the movement.

Andrew S. Tompkins is a historian specializing in modern Europe. He is a lecturer at University of Sheffield, a former Humbolt Fellow, and current research associate of the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin.

Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.

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Michelle Murphy, “The Economization of Life” (Duke University Press, 2017) Nov 27, 2017

In The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle Murphy pulls apart the late modern concept of “population” to show the lives this concept has produced and continues to produce, and, importantly, the lives it has failed to allow under the banner of postwar development projects. In the post-WWII period of decolonization, experts and state planners in the Global North tested in the real-world the hypotheses of Demographic Transition Theory (industrialization leads to few births which leads to “better” lives). In doing so, they repackaged the racist logic of earlier eugenicist definitions of population in the postwar period by harnessing the concept of population, not to environmental limits, but to economic optimization. Murphy show how this postwar “regime of valuation” played out on the ground through an extended study of population management and family planning projects in Bangladesh. Murphy’s work—which combines a new history of the population concept with an original study of lives lived (and not lived) in Bangladesh—demonstrates her broader point: namely that seemingly abstract, large scale elements of late-capitalist infrastructures of industrial production depend upon emotional, affective sensibilities about sex and reproduction.

By telling a history of expert concepts of population, the infrastructures that perform it, the affects that pulse through it, and forms of life it continues to produce and prevent, Michelle Murphy invites readers to speculate towards other worlds—and other words. Murphy teaches us why population is an “intolerable concept” and she does the work of imagining other, more just, more apt words we might use in place of “population.” She suggests that her term “distributed reproduction” might help shift our attention, our thinking, and our practices towards more emancipatory collective responses and responsibilities—given our own existence as part of infrastructures of racism and violence.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University and is Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. Laura’s first book, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research, was published in 2012 by University of Chicago Press. Her current research explores how a market for healthy civilian “human subjects” emerged in law, science, and popular imagination in the post-World War Two period. It is based on a vernacular archive she created with more than 100 “normal control” research subjects and scientists who took part in postwar experiments at the US National Institutes of Health, now archived at Countway Library for the History of Medicine. Overall, Stark’s work uses social theory to map the intersections of science, morality and the modern state in a global context.

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Douglas Hunter, “The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (UNC, 2017) Oct 30, 2017

In The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Douglas Hunter examines the history of meanings, affinities, and petroglyph studies of Dighton Rock. First noticed by colonists in 1680, by the nineteenth century Massachusetts’ Dighton Rock was one of the most famous and contested artifacts of American antiquity. This forty-two ton boulder covered in petroglyphs has been the subject of endless speculation denying its Native American origins. Interpretations have included Vikings, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Lost Tribes of Israel, visitors from Atlantis, ancient Freemasons, and (today) the lost Portuguese explorer, Miguel Corte-Real. Hunter dissects almost four centuries of Dighton Rock’s misinterpretations to reveal its larger role in the colonization and the conceptualization of Native Americans. This sprawling study brings a fresh perspective to scientific racism, the rise of American archaeology and anthropology, the intellectual weaponry of colonialism, and the construction of migration theories for the peopling of the Americas. By disenfranchising Native Americans from their own past in interpretations of Dighton Rock and related archaeological puzzles such as the Mound Builders, colonizers have sought to answer to their own advantage two fundamental questions: to whom does America belong, and who belongs in America?

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.

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Michael Wintroub, “The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World” (Cambridge UP, 2017) Oct 04, 2017

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a must read. Simply put, this is a book that will lead you down a path of wonder, and possibly, saddle you with a good head scratch. However, no one ever said that an itch near the cranium translates to feeling lousy; in this instance, what we have here is a richly researched and thought-provoking (no pun intended) piece of scholarship.

Wintroub, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, is interested in how ideas that are commonplace today (like information-gathering, expertise, confidence, scale, and replication) originated over four centuries ago. This is the story of two brothers who were tasked with a monumental, trail-blazing journey from their home in Dieppe, France all the way to Sumatra. How did two humanist ship captains prepare? What did they find along the way in their search for pepper, glory, and God? Part science, part poetry, part architecture, part mind job, this book probes the notion that physical and mental spaces can be traversed if we ask the right questions.

Furthermore, through a connected history that cleverly interprets a letter from an eighty-year-old sailor, snatches the magnifying glass to reconstruct events on a beach in the Indian Ocean, focuses the microscope on a frieze in France, and backs the telescope off from the inner workings of the astrolabe, in this installment of New Books in Science you are in for a tour that will enliven the senses and tug on the heart.

J.N. Campbell is an independent scholar and writer in Houston, Texas. He is the co-author with Steven M. Rooney of How Aspirin Entered Our Medicine Cabinet (Springer, 2017). They have a second book entitled, Numb: A Chemical History of Opioid Epidemic, which is due out in 2018. He has written for the International Journal of the History of Sport, Reviews in History, and is a featured writer for Good Grit Magazine. After receiving an M.A. in History from the University of Kentucky, he fashions himself as a life-long student of history.

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Vincent J. Intondi, “African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement” (Stanford UP, 2015) Oct 03, 2017

For the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press, 2015) tells the compelling story of those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament by connecting the nuclear issue with the fight for racial equality. Early on, blacks in America saw the use of atomic bombs as a racial issue, asking why such enormous resources were being spent building nuclear arms instead of being used to improve impoverished communities. Black activists’ fears that race played a role in the decision to deploy atomic bombs only increased when the U.S. threatened to use nuclear weapons in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam a decade later. For some, the nuclear issue was connected to colonialism the U.S. obtained uranium ore used to produce fissile material from the Belgian controlled Congo and the French tested their nuclear weapons in the Sahara.

By expanding traditional research in the history of the nuclear disarmament movement the author reveals the links between the black freedom movement in America and issues of global peace. From Langston Hughes through Lorraine Hansberry to President Obama, African Americans Against the Bomb offers an eye-opening account of the continuous involvement of African Americans who recognized that the rise of nuclear weapons was a threat to the civil rights of all people.

Author Vincent Intondi is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Race, Justice, and Community Engagement at Montgomery College, and formerly the Director of Research for American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute. His academic research focuses on the intersection of race and nuclear weapons. In 2016, Intondi began working with the Union of Concerned Scientists exploring new efforts to expand the nuclear disarmament movement to include more diverse voices, specifically from the black community. Beyond African Americans Against the Bomb, Intondi is currently working on a new book project, which will examine the famous June 12, 1982 nuclear disarmament march in New York City.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Brian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives” (Icon Books, 2017) Sep 19, 2017

Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly becoming a significant force in the evolution of society. Most of us have heard the term “big data,” but many of us erroneously assume that its just a lot of little data. It’s considerably more than that, and Big Data, which is an easy and fun read, serves as a terrific introduction to a topic which has an ever-increasing impact on many aspects of our lives.

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Allison Perlman, “Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television” (Rutgers UP, 2016) Sep 11, 2017

Since its infancy, television has played an important role in shaping U.S. values and the American sense of self. Social activists recognized this power immediately and, consequently, set about trying to influence television’s portrayal of those values by securing access to and a voice in the medium. Allison Perlman‘s Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television (Rutgers University Press, 2016) examines some these efforts, including those among African Americans, women, and parents among others, between the 1940s and the early 2000s. Perlman, an associate professor of film and media students and history at the University of California, Irvine, thus, shows that media law and regulation was an important site of debate and activism. Social activists recognized television’s power and that ensuring their own views, voices, and identities were represented on the screen could be influential in promoting their cause. Both conservative and liberal activists worked hard to use existing laws to shape television ownership and programing. In the process, activists also worked to shape the definition of the public and weighed in on questions surrounding how to define and promote the “public interest,” as required by law. By the 1980s, deregulation reshaped the landscape, but did not end the importance of the arena for activists.

In this episode of New Books in History, Perlman discusses Public Interests and this history of media advocacy. She tells listeners about some of these social activists’ campaigns to influence FCC policies nationally as well as about more localized efforts to shape television programing. She also explains why these battles were important in shaping the broadcasting environment even if they did not always achieve their stated goal. She discusses the importance of deregulation in later media regulation advocacy. Perlman makes clear that a simple declension story is inaccurate even in this later period and discusses these battles’ continued relevance today.

Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Iwan Rhys Morus, ed.,”The Oxford Illustrated History of Science” (Oxford UP, 2017) Sep 07, 2017

What is science?

A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilliant scholar of Victorian science, Iwan Rhys Morris, they were tapping the right man for the job on the shoulder. He designed, contributed, and edited The Oxford Illustrated History of Science (Oxford University Press, 2017) which was published earlier this year. He assembled an all-star team of specialists with backgrounds in a variety fields in this history of science. His simple yet complex answer to the question I just posed is: science is humanity. Without humanity, there would be no science. No Newton, no Darwin, and no Dr. Who. This book is both conventional and not, sweeping yet focused, and really fun to read as both a reference source and as a piece of world history. Join me, J.N. Campbell and for podcasts to come, my colleague Steve Rooney, as we host new segments for New Books in Science. We will ask probing questions, and of course, we hope you enjoy our rapid fire installment at the end! Here is the first installment with my guest, Iwan Morris. Enjoy!

J. N. Campbell is an independent scholar and writer in Houston, Texas. He is the co-author with Steven M. Rooney of Ho w Aspirin Entered Our Medicine Cabinet (Springer, 2017), which can be found on Amazon. They have a second book entitled, Numb: A Chemical History of Opioid Epidemic, which is due out in 2018. He has written for the International Journal of the History of Sport, Reviews in History, and is a featured writer for Good Grit Magazine. After receiving an M.A. in History from the University of Kentucky, he fashions himself as a life-long student of history.

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Nicholas C. Kawa, “Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, and Forests” (U. Texas Press, 2016) Sep 05, 2017

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas C. Kawa‘s Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests (University of Texas Press, 2016) examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, Kawa highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control–a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future.

Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree from Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods.

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Ron Edwards, “The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau” (Oxford UP, 2016) Aug 25, 2017

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven. I was watching a film adaptation of H.G. Well’s classic work of science fiction, The Island of Doctor Moreau. It’s about a doctor who takes animals and tries to make them human by surgically alerting them. I don’t remember much about the movie–I think Burt Lancaster played Moreau–but what I remember is that the story really creeped me out. It stayed with me for a long time. And, even now, as I remember those half-man, half-beasts that populate Dr. Moreau’s island, I’m creeped out. The feeling is something like a primordial shiver. Now you may attribute that feeling to the sensitivity of a seven-year-old, and that’s probably right: what were my parents thinking letting me watch a horror movie at that age? Edwards, however, has a different answer, one based on Well’s original story. It’s that these man-beasts that Wells imagines force us to realize us that we are, in our essence, animals. This realization is something that, as a culture and as individuals, we don’t like to contemplate. It unnerves us. It creeps us out. And that’s what Edward’s book explores: it is, among other things, a case against human exceptionalism, one that asks us not only to rethink our animal selves, but also our relationship to those other creatures who share our animality.

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Eric Ash, “The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England” (Johns Hopkins, 2017) Aug 02, 2017

Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know it as today. As Ash explains, the marshes supported a population that took advantage of the lush grasses produced by the regular flooding to engage in animal husbandry, with flood control managed locally through appointed commissions of sewers. In the late 16th century, however, a combination of environmental change and political shifts led the royal government to support proposals for large-scale drainage projects that would turn the wetlands into farmlands. Though the plans’ advocates argued that drainage would improve the value of the lands in the region, the locals resisted such efforts to disrupt their ways of life through a variety of legal and extralegal means. In response the crown moved from efforts to develop consensus for the plans to asserting royal authority in environmental management in order to start the projects, beginning by the 1620s the first of a series of efforts that over the course of the next half-century drained many of the fens in the region.

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David Beer, “Metric Power” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Aug 02, 2017

How do metrics rule the social world? In Metric Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) David Beer, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, outlines the rise of the metric and the role of metrics in shaping everyday life. The book outlines the core theoretical concepts, such as neo-liberalism, bio-power, and bio-politics, alongside the characteristics themes of metric power, including practices of making (in)visible, the social life of methods and data, and questions of agency. These theoretical discussions are set against the broad backdrop of the rise of big data, corporate power, social media, and algorithm based decision making. Metric Power is located within the study of broader social inequalities, meaning the book makes important reading for anyone concerned with how our daily experiences of technologies, organisations, and social institutions, are shaped, unequally, by the power of metrics.

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Claire D. Clark, “The Recovery Revolution” (Columbia UP, 2017) Jul 28, 2017

Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had something that looked a lot like a disease or mental illness. The trouble was that doctors had no effective way to treat drug addiction. Their best idea–Federal “narcotics farms,” one in Kentucky and one in Texas–kept junkies clean, but only by keeping them away from the drugs those junkies craved. In that sense, they were no more effective than prisons, though in fairness drug farms offered various treatment regimens that enabled some addicts to get and stay clean. Other than locking them up, the medical establishment had no good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?” Essentially, then, junkies (who could not spontaneously “kick,” and a lot do) usually ended up in one of three places: on the street, behind bars, or dead.

Enter Charles Dederich. In 1958, Dederich, a veteran of AA and ex-drug addict, decided that addicts should take their treatment into their own hands, much like Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had done with AA in the late 1930s. He took what he learned in AA, adapted it, and created a long-term residential “therapeutic community” expressly for addicts and run by addicts. He called it Synanon, and with it he started what Claire D. Clark calls “the recovery revolution.”

In her terrific book, The Recovery Revolution: The Battle Over Addiction Treatment in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2017), Clark tells the story of Dederich and those who followed him (literally and chronologically) in trying to find a way to treat narcotics addiction. It’s a tale of ebbs and flows, successes and failures, enthusiasm and exhaustion lasting sixty years. Clark makes clear that the “recovery revolution” is not over by any means–we are still groping toward a good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?”

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Simone Muller, “Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks” (Columbia UP, 2016) Jul 10, 2017

Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb account of the laying of submarine telegraph cables in the nineteenth century and the battles over them in the subsequent decades. Her book shows how expanding telegraph networks were instrumental in processes of capitalism, nation-building, and globalization. To track these grand developments, however, Muller reconstructs the network of people who built, managed, and fought over telegraph networks. She calls this eclectic collection of financiers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and politicians “actors of globalization.”

Muller’s book is an historical kaleidoscope that shows the multi-faceted meaning of telegraphy. Her actors imbued telegraphy with hopes of world peace, of Weltcommunication (a predecessor of the global village idea), of a global electric union, and of bolstering the civilizing mission. Even if submarine telegraphy never achieved these aspirations, her book demonstrates just how culturally and socially significant this technology and these networks were to the pre-WWI world.

Her book should be of interest to historians of capitalism, technology, international relations, Europe and the United States, along with anyone curious about the longer duree of globalization. Simone Muller is a principal investigator at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017.

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Melvin R. Adams, “Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation” (Washington State University Press, 2016) Jul 10, 2017

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cleaning up this deactivated nuclear facility, once America’s largest producer of plutonium for atomic weapons, including the Nagasaki bomb. The U.S. government spends around $2 billion a year on cleanup efforts at Hanford, which have been the sole focus at the site since its reactors were shut down at the end of the Cold War. Melvin R. Adams was one of the first environmental engineers hired at Hanford as part of a small team focused on environmental issues. Beginning in 1979, his 24-year career at Hanford progressed alongside increasing government investment in more responsible management of nuclear waste and its disposal. In Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (Washington State University Press, 2016) Adams recounts engineering efforts to mitigate and control radioactive contamination and offers amusing anecdotes of the characters tasked with cleaning up the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the U.S. He also captures the paradox of Hanford, an artifact of the atomic age surrounded (and sometimes invaded by) wild terrain, natural beauty, and flourishing biodiversity. Atomic Geography offers personal and poetic insight into a complex, contested landscape.

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Thomas Hazlett, “The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology” (Yale UP, 2017) Jun 30, 2017

What better way to explore the history of media regulation than to go on a journey with the former chief economist of the FCC? Prior to introduction of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, the radio spectrum was in chaos. Broadcasters were attempting to drown out their rivals with powerful signals and the detrimental effect on the public interest was profound. Or was it?

In The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone (Yale University Press, 2017), distinguished legal and economic scholar Thomas Hazlett challenges the notion that U.S. government intervention was vital to protect and save the industry. Hazlett argues that, for nearly a century, disruptive technologies, competition and alternative viewpoints have been quashed, by special interest groups claiming to know better. Hazlett blends his discussion on legislation with the rise of new technologies in a way that in accessible to everyone, even if you have no prior knowledge of media policy and the current landscape. This entertaining and fascinating read argues that, if you really want to achieve what is best for the public, you need to open the market to more competition.

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Brian Clegg, “The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe” (Icon Books, 2017) Jun 29, 2017

Brian Clegg is one of England’s most prolific and popular writers on science. His latest work, The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe (Icon Books, 2017), covers Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and a whole lot more. Simply as an exposition of Einstein’s theories, the book is excellent its beautifully organized and delivered, with Clegg’s usual clarity and insight. But what makes the book transcend the usual work on this subject is that Clegg looks at relativity as a concept that can help us understand what distinguishes humanity as a species, and where our species fits into the Universe. Einstein himself would have enjoyed participating in a discussion of this fascinating topic, and may well have shared some of Clegg’s points of view.

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Neil M. Maher, “Apollo in the Age of Aquarius” (Harvard UP, 2017) Jun 20, 2017

In the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. At first glance, these two events might appear to have little to do with one another. But in his new book, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017), Neil Maher examines the often contentious relationship between the NASA-led space program and the social movements of the era.

Maher shows that civil rights activists questioned why the U.S. federal government spent billions on space exploration while many African Americans suffered in poverty and lived in dilapidated housing in the nation’s cities. He explains why New Left activists and environmentalists opposed NASA’s emphasis on big technology and the agency’s involvement with the military in Vietnam. And he describes how hippies with the counterculture rejected NASA’s techno-optimism and moved to communes to practice simpler living using smaller, appropriate technology.

Neil Maher is associate professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of a previous book, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Rise of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press).

Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and how to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books.

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Beau Lotto, “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently” (Hatchette Books, 2017) May 30, 2017

We may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. In his new book Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hatchette Books, 2017), Lotto explains the mechanisms underlying our difficulty apprehending the world accurately, their implications for our relationships with one another and the world, and the creative potential that is unleashed when we embrace uncertainty and doubt. These issues come to life in our interview, as we discuss his discoveries in and out of the lab and their application to everyday experiences.

Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist specializing in the biology and psychology of perception with more than 25 years experience conducting research on human perception and behavior and over 60 publications. He is Professor at University of London (Goldsmiths) and visiting scholar at New York University, as well as founder and CEO of the Lab of Misfits, a creative agency grounded in principles of perception. Follow Beau on Twitter.

Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here.

Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

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Britt Rusert, “Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture” (NYU Press, 2017) May 26, 2017

Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017), uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. The author chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims.

Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields–from astronomy to physiology–to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture.

Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on African American literature, American literatures to 1900, speculative fiction, the history of race and science, U.S. print cultures, and critical theory. She is currently working on a book-length research study of William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. She is also editing W.E.B. Du Bois short genre fiction with scholar Adrienne Brown. Their edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ fantasy story, “The Princess Steel,” was recently published in PMLA, the journal of Modern Language Association of America. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture is her first book.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Sharrona Pearl, “Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other” (U. Chicago Press, 2017) May 18, 2017

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations (FAT), commonly known as face transplants, in order to offer a careful and fascinating study of the stakes for changing the face, and the changing stakes for the face. Troubling the indexical relationship between the face and character and reminding us that “[t]he self has always been a set of choices,” Pearl explores face transplantation as it relates to cosmetic surgery and whole-organ transplants, the cinema of the 1960s, television shows, and more. She carefully and sensitively takes us into the debates among surgeons, bioethicists, and journalists that circled the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005, and offers a way toward a philosophical approach that brings together Levinas with the kind of (Deleuzian) subjectivity that allows for individuality through constant change and understands the self to be constantly in a process of becoming. The final chapter of the book also situates the analysis within larger contexts of online subjectivities and work with facial and bodily manipulation by artists and performers. It’s sparklingly written and well worth a read!

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Different Medias with Eric Alterman May 18, 2017

How can we as consumers distinguish between the many different political medias? Eric Alterman is CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College. Eric is also a columnist for The Nation, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and the World Policy Institute in New York. He is the author of several books, including When Presidents Lie(Penguin 2004), Kabuki Democracy (Nation Books 2011), and most recently, Inequality and One City(Nation Books 2015).

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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Willliam Rankin, “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) May 17, 2017

Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, interest in maps waned while electronic coordinate systems emerged. But this was not solely a shift in technology, as William Rankin writes in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). The shift from maps to coordinate systems, and then eventually to GPS produced novel geographical subjectivities, navigational experiences and geopolitical arrangements. It was a shift in the meaning of territory itself.

By day, William Rankin is an assistant professor of history at Yale; by night, he is an award-winning cartographer, whose work you can find here. Rankin has also set up a website to accompany the book, at which readers can see the books images, data, and bibliography.

Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017.

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Kate Daloz, “We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America” (PublicAffairs, 2016) May 14, 2017

Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in the 1960s across the country who, like her parents, wanted to return to the land. Her subjects are Judy and Larry (her parents), the place they moved to, and the community they helped found.

One of many interesting discoveries in this book is the fact that the back to the land movement took place around the country, within the same demographic, and during the same two-to three-year period in the 1970s.

The causes? One was the growing concern with pollution described in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Another, which deserves fuller examination, is the apocalyptic mood stemming from the atomic threat of the 1960s. Baby boomers remember, with no small amount of incredulity, schoolroom bomb practice (“How would going under my desk protect me?”).

The answers that adults had were not reassuring, or they were naive. The younger generation felt imperiled, and adults were responsible. Cities weren’t safe either. By returning to the land, a person could face an uncertain future in a community of like-minded people, in home they had built themselves and that expressed their values.

So move this group did, but not all to become hippies. Some formed communes that rejected middle class baggage (monogamy, capitalism, child rearing). Others had advanced degrees, found professional work, and considered themselves “square.” Live in a rural setting and you adopt rural culture: community barn raising (even if it is a geodesic dome), self-generated work (Christmas trees farms, organic produce), shared resources.

The author shows that the effects of these communities since the 1970s have permeated throughout American culture. A new kind of fresh food market like Whole Foods and community food co-ops got their starts in such settings. So did recycling (a mainstay of farming culture). Whatever the circumstances that brought them into being, the results have reached far beyond their boundaries and continue to expand our lives.

Kate Daloz’s essays have been published in periodicals such as American Scholar. She is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Manhattanville College and a consultant at the College Writing Center, Baruch College, CUNY.

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Sophia Roosth, “Synthetic: How Life Got Made” (U Chicago Press, 2017) May 13, 2017

Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on many years of ethnographic work, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a fascinating account of the changing relationship between making and understanding in the life sciences, and of the metamorphoses of life itself as an analytic object. The chapters of the book consider traditional ethnographic conventions as they manifest in the case of synthetic biology and reflect the forms of life being built by the synthetic biologists: religion, kinship, economy and property, labor, household, origin tales. Interludes between the chapters function as keyword entries, each probing earlier articulations of what it meant to be synthetic in different contexts, from the synthetic fabrics industry to Soviet synthetic dance to music, chemistry, and much more. It is a beautifully written and totally absorbing study.

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Tara H. Abraham, “Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science” (MIT Press, 2016) May 11, 2017

Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his foundational contributions to cybernetics but led a career that spanned psychiatry, philosophy, neurophysiology, and engineering. Tara H. Abraham‘s new book Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (MIT Press, 2016) is the first scholarly biography of this towering figure of twentieth century American science. Abrahams careful tracing of McCulloch’s broad disciplinary traverses is grounded in explication of heady theories and mathematical models of the brain. The growing historical scholarship on cybernetics rests on a curious threshold: its subject matter, rife with outsized personalities and uncannily forward-looking ideas, is ever poised to remain more ineluctably fascinating than scholarly analysis can render. Rather than attempting to beat the cyberneticians at their own game–self-consciously or not becoming participant observers in the reflexive system described by “second-order” cybernetics–this rich portrait offers pointed and entertaining insight into the role of style, sociability, and mentorship in twentieth century scientific life.

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Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) May 08, 2017

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee, of the Burpee Seed Company, who sought to use radiation and chemical mutagens to accelerate the generation of new plant varieties, a process otherwise requiring painstaking, slow, and resource-intensive artificial selection. Helen Anne Curry‘s Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a fascinating history of biotechnology that documents the interplay between genetic research and agricultural production; genetic engineering avant la lettre, one is tempted to say, although botanist A. F. Blakeslee, who figures prominently in the narrative, made a failed attempt to promote the designation “genetics engineer” to describe his work. Through the lens of three different technologies–x-rays, the chemical colchicine, and atomic radiation–Curry shows how chromosomes and genetic mutations became sites of speculation for industrial agriculture and of experimentation for amateur plant breeders. She deftly restores the experimental station, the marketplace, and the garden to their proper place as sites of knowledge production, showing that landscape and lab were perhaps never so separable as our modern conceit might make them appear.

This is part one of a series of new work on twentieth-century biotechnology–look out for further interviews featuring some great new work published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Lisa Messeri, “Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds” (Duke UP, 2016) May 04, 2017

What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps us understand why that matters not just for how we understand outer space, but also for how we understand the Earth and ourselves. Based on 15 months of participant observation in 2009 and 2010 that included interviews, involvement in research projects, conferences, email exchanges, informal chats, and more, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016) guides readers through four different field sites in order to analyze the significance of four different activities of place-making therein: narrating, mapping, visualizing, and inhabiting. As we move from the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah (where Earth itself is transformed into a Martian place) to the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, to exoplanetary research at MIT, to Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, and more, we come to see how geological, digital, pedagogical, observational, and other tools help shape how we understand Mars, exoplanets, and the earth itself. It’s a fascinating study that will be of wide interest!

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J. C. McKeown, “A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome” (Oxford UP, 2017) Apr 29, 2017

The back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather the discordant voices of the medical writers he excerpts. Speaking of Galen, Photius of Constantinople notes that the author tends to overload his writings with irrelevancies and digressions. Aristotle offers a characteristic caution, urging no one can become a doctor by reading books. These statements intimate the overall style and aims of this entertaining book: to approach the culture of antiquity through medical practice and belief. Though McKeown deliberately goes after the uncanny in selecting his excerpts to translate, one gets an overall impression of medicines remarkable continuity. Class, gender, and race were battlegrounds of medical legitimacy as much as they are now, and contemporary suspicion of medical advances was potent as ever. McKeown opts for evocation rather than scholarly interpretation of the medical cultures of antiquity, making this book entertaining reading for anyone interested in medicine’s long history.

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Tania Munz, “The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language” (U of Chicago Press, 2016) Apr 25, 2017

Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language (University of Chicago Press, 2016) alternates between chapters that take us into the work and life of a fascinating scientist amid the Nazi rise to power, and bee vignettes that chart the transformations of bees in the popular and scientific imagination over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readers follow von Frisch from his early intimate connection with a small Brazilian parakeet that lived with the family while von Frisch was a boy, to his work on the sensory powers of fish and bees, to his work on bee communication and beyond. Munz introduces us not just to von Frisch’s texts, lectures, and experiments, but also to his work making films and his struggles to live and work under Nazi power. Munz’s book is both compellingly argued and a pleasure to read!

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Democracy and Dialogue Online with Joshua Cohen Apr 20, 2017

Joshua Cohen is a faculty member of Apple University, and is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the School of Law, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Political Science at Berkeley. He is the author of several influential academic articles, many of which are collected in Philosophy, Politics, Democracy(Harvard 2009), and The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays(Harvard, 2011). Since 1991, Cohen has edited the Boston Review.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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Grace Davie, “Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005” (Cambridge UP, 2015) Apr 19, 2017

Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century earlier. In the new book, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Grace Davie shows that the poverty question was up for grabs even into the twenty-first century because of ongoing disagreements about how to measure poverty and to manage the racists assumptions that underwrote it. The book uses the idiom of co-production to show how scientists, activists and other knowledge-makers made and remade poverty in dynamic interaction with the people they sought to know. The book documents the thwarted efforts of scientists to accomplish their political goals as their expert knowledge was variously invoked, reinterpreted, and dismissed not only by white-supremacist governments, but also by social activists, black communities, and labor unions, which all used experts poverty knowledge for their own political ends. At issue was the question of what constituted credible evidence, and over more than a century debates continued to toggle between quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence, between statistics and stories. Through this analysis, Davie pushes back against the familiar claim that the technocratic state was on a steady march towards quantitative objectivity. Poverty Knowledge in South Africa is a serious, thorough book and it is indispensable for thinking through questions of social justice not only among historical actors but among scholars in the present day.

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Donna Freitas, “The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost” (Oxford UP, 2017) Apr 18, 2017

In The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford University Press, 2017), Donna Freitas investigates the darker side of social media use and explains how pressure to appear happy and successful online can actually make people less happy in the real world. Using the stories of college students she interviewed as a framework, Freitas builds a dynamic argument and offers concrete tools for how teachers, parents, and society as a whole can help young people take control of their smartphones and of their own happiness. Donna Freitas is a Nonresident Research Associate at the University of Notre Dames Center for the Study of Religion and Society, and when she is not traveling for research she teaches in the Honors Colleges at Hofstra University. She is the author of Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as several novels for young adults. A regular contributor to Publisher’s Weekly, she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT, 2014) Apr 18, 2017

Amit Prasad is widely admired for using Postcolonial Studies to explore questions about science, technology and medicine. In Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT, 2014), Prasad looks at the linked histories of MRI research and development in India, UK, the USA to show how the patterns of exclusions created by imperialism continue to shape the topography of high-tech medicine. Pushing back against diffusion of science narratives, Prasad shows how the current story of the West (read: USA) as the center of MRI research and development was far from inevitable. The story was retrospectively, collectively created and has had the effect of obscuring the importance of transnational networks, idiosyncratic federal laws, corporate investments, and everyday habits of imagination in the production of medical technology. Prasad himself resists simple dichotomies because, as he writes, “The issue here is not simply the elision of the history of science in the non-West or its entrapment in within Eurocentric temporarily, but the very categories that the history of science takes as its objects of inquiry (80).”

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Rebecca Scales, “Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2016) Apr 13, 2017

What did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the nature and significance of French auditory culture in the years between the two world wars? These are two of the central questions that Rebecca Scales pursues in her new book, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). This is not a book focused on the institutional history or content of French radio during this period, however. Rather, Scales examines closely a range of ideas about sound and the development of what she calls the “radio nation,” a space of listening, cultural identity, and citizenship. Access to the airwaves, the “right to listen,” and the question of whether radio did or did not reflect the nation and its different members became vital areas of discussion and debate in the 1920 and 30s.

Radio and the Politics…explores the dynamic history of radio at a critical juncture in modern French political and cultural history. Its chapters explore the perspectives of sound producers and consumers, including broadcasters, politicians, educators, medical professionals, radio amateurs, disabled veterans, and a variety of other listeners throughout France. The book considers the broad space of the radio soundscape from Paris to the provinces, and the movement of sound waves beyond/across the borders of “metropolitan” France, in Algeria, and to and from other nations. Along the way, the book delves into a range of themes: postwar recovery, class and political differences, the relationship of individual bodies to the national body, tensions between public and private spaces and interests, and state control and surveillance. At once a history of the senses and technology, of French politics, culture and everyday life, this compelling book will be of great interest to readers (and listeners!) across multiple fields.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/

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Eugene Raikhel, “Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic” (Cornell UP, 2016) Apr 11, 2017

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answers to these questions depend, apparently, on where you are, which is to say what culture you were born and raise in. Alcoholism and treatments for it in Country A might be very different from alcoholism and treatments for it in countries B, C, and D. Alcoholism is, well, relative.

This is one of the many thing I learned from reading Eugene Raikhel‘s fascinating book Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic (Cornell University Press, 2016). An anthropologist, Raikhel tells us the tale of how the Soviet discipline of “narcology”–the diagnosis and treatment of addiction– evolved during Soviet times and how it adapted after the USSR fell. I won’t spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say that Russians treated and continue to treat alcoholism quite differently that we do in the U.S., though that’s changing (AA has arrived in Russia, something we also discuss). Listen in.

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Democracy and Social Media with Michael Lynch Apr 05, 2017

Social Media rewards snap judgments and blind conviction. Michael Lynch finds this troubling. Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Humanities Institute a University of Connecticut. His research concerns truth, public discourse, and the impact of technology on democratic society.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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Raz Chen-Morris, “Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility” (Penn State UP, 2016) Mar 29, 2017

Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produced shadows and reflections. Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) beautifully places Kepler’s optics into conversation with the art and literature of the period. It looks carefully at the crucial ways that changing notions of visibility set Kepler’s optics up as the cornerstone to his radical Copernican astronomy as Kepler made three moves that helped him bridge the visual gap between the heavens and its observers: (1) He defined light as a mathematical body, (2) He showed how instruments of observation could be manipulated mathematically to achieve exact representation of distant and almost invisible heavenly occurrences, and (3) He helped develop a new language for scientific observation by reformulating the relationship of mathematics to phenomena. In the course of his elegant analysis of how and why this all played out, Chen-Morris also guides readers through the relationships between Kepler’s ideas, Shakespeare’s writings, Renaissance painting, and more. Its a fascinating book.

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Colleen Derkatch, “Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine” (U of Chicago Press, 2016) Mar 29, 2017

What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the criteria of the sciences amenable to healing practices that are touted for their focus on singularity, rather than uniformity? Colleen Derkatch‘s Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016) investigates how boundaries between traditional and novel are erected at the level of medical rhetoric.

Derkatch analyzes both expert and popular literature on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), an umbrella term designed to encompass homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine, among other things. Demand for alternative treatments by patients has produced an uncertain situation in which clinical frameworks are used for practices traditionally seen as being outside the realm of biomedicine. Through concerted engagement with different genres of medical communication, Derkatch’s rhetorical cultural approach allows the reader to see the extent to which the boundaries of what counts as biomedicine or not rest on conceptions of evidence and categorization schemes promoted by allopathic medical professionals. With a keen eye turned to communication strategies and assumptions, Derkatch shows the subtle ways in which the norms of biomedicine are challenged and strengthened by attempts to reduce other treatments to processes that can be evaluated on the basis of standards of evidence and efficacy.

This is the second of a pair of interviews on alternative medicine: for a historical consideration of naturopathy as an alternative to allopathic medicine, look out for my interview with Susan Cayleff on her book, Nature’s Path.

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Marie Hicks, “Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing” (MIT Press, 2017) Mar 28, 2017

How did gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry by the 1970s? In Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Marie Hicks, an Assistant Professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology, offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of this radical social change. Based on rich and detailed archival and interview sources, packed with illustrations and individual narratives of the 1940s to the 1970s, the book demonstrates how the rigid class and gender hierarchies of British society were recreated and reproduced in attempts to modernise the state through technology. As the book’s conclusion notes, “all history of computing is gendered history,” meaning the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how we have the computing and technology industries we have today. The first chapter of the book can be read here, and you can learn more about the book and Dr. Hick’s work on her twitter and on the book’s twitter feed.

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Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, “Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible” (Fordham UP, 2015) Mar 28, 2017

One of the most interesting, but largely overlooked silent films, is Haxan, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Using documentary methods as well as reenactments, he presented a study of witchcraft hysteria, particularly as it compared to post-World War I scientific and psychological studies. In their book, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (Fordham University Press, 2015), anthropologists Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers examine the film and its importance to the understanding of the concept of the witch.

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Susan E. Cayleff, “Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) Mar 28, 2017

Susan Cayleff’s Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers a fascinating alternative to the development of allopathic orthodoxy in the twentieth-century United States. By following Naturopathy from its nineteenth-century origins in the popular health movement through debates in the 1970s, Cayleff sheds light on an enduring critique of the vision of medicine institutionalized by Progressive public health reformers. The holistic medicine proffered by naturopaths drew from a variety of sources and lacked a common theoretical basis; it required closer collaboration between practitioner and patient for gradual cures in the face of medical complexity, a scenario reminiscent of an increasing portion of today’s medical practice, as Robert Aronowitz points out in Risky Medicine.

However, Cayleff shows not merely a transhistorical struggle of self-determination, but rather shifting cultural and political grounds on which such different ideological battles were waged and heterodox practices staged. Notably, she highlights how naturopathy empowered female practitioners to work in line with their politics, and gave them access to medical power precluded by the medical establishment. This book is a great read for historians of medicine, countercultural movements, and professionalization.

This is the first of a pair of interviews on alternative medicine: for a rhetorical approach to how notions of evidence are invoked to demarcate between alternative and mainstream medical practice, look out for my forthcoming interview with Colleen Derkatch on her book, Bounding Biomedicine.

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Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco, “The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture” (Routledge, 2016) Mar 27, 2017

The wish to transcend one’s mortality, and the anxiety associated with being unable to do so, are universal human experiences. People deal with these in their idiosyncratic ways, often by transgressing rules and boundaries that serve as the parameters of civilized human coexistence. Technological advances expand our capacities for transcending our limitations, especially when they allow us to objectify other humans and humanize our objects. Such forms of perversion are the subject of Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco’s new book, The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2016). In my interview with Knafo, we explore her redefinition of perversion and her view on its current and future manifestations and what it implies for the survival of humanity.

Danielle Knafo is a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University and faculty member and supervisor in New York University’s postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She has lectured internationally and published extensively, including her prior book, Dancing with the Unconscious, published in 2012 also by Routledge.

Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here.

Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

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Kathleen McAuliffe, “This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society” (Mariner Books, 2017) Mar 21, 2017

Kathleen McAuliffe‘s This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society (Mariner Books, 2017) unveils the world of parasites. From the influence of parasites on the ability to transform rats brains to be easily susceptible to cat predation to altering web formation structures in spiders, parasites hold the power to control an animals behavior. McAuliffe illustrates the ways in which parasites have had influence in human cognition and behavior, as well, with examples of impulsivity and reckless driving. Parasites may have compounded influence in the greater dimensions of culture, where strong scientific research suggests the interplay between parasites and prejudice, political affiliation, sexual attraction, gender bias, and morality. The forgotten emotion of disgust and the avoidance of disease may be at the heart of this interplay as our innate mechanisms drive the impulse for survival. This book illuminates the role of parasites and challenges our behavioral responses to critically think and question social norms. Most importantly, McAuliffe offers the vantage point from a parasite-centric view, a voice that has been previously unheard-until now.

Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree for Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods.

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Meredith K. Ray, “Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in 17th-Century Italy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) Mar 13, 2017

Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively offer a fascinating window into the correspondence of two brilliant early modern writers and intellectuals. Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) traces the relationship between Sarrocchi, a Naples-born writer, famous for her salons and for writing an epic poem that emphasized the significance of women as knowers of the natural world, with Galileo. The letters feature three major themes: Sarrocchi consulting Galileo for writerly advice as she revised her epic poem, Sarrocchi’s efforts to defend Galileo’s discoveries to the scientific community in Italy, and Sarrocchi and Galileo’s shared interest in judicial astrology and natal charts or nativities. The slim volume will be a resource not just for readers and researchers but also for classroom discussion, where the letters could serve as great primary sources to feature in a number of course contexts. Enjoy!

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Ericka Johnson, ed. “Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Feb 24, 2017

On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies. From an Alzheimers disease study that relied on the process of sexing flies, to the pharamceuticalized prostate, to the medical experiences of transgender children, Part 1 uses the body as subject to disrupt the binaries of male/female, human/non-human and healthy/unhealthy. In Part 2, titled Creating Subjectivities for Patients in Advertising, the book expands its analysis to the commercial images and discourses used in marketing and prescribing relational subjectivities. Observing the way pharmaceuticals insert themselves into familial and romantic relationships, the HPV vaccine is used as an example of drugs as non-human participants in the parent-child partnership. Through an international lens, Part 3 provides three comparative case studies of the way that knowledge about HPV is produced in Columbia, the U.K. and Austria.

In perhaps the most poignant contribution to feminist research agendas, across disciplines, Johnson concludes our interview by explaining her unique metaphor of refraction. Noting the notorious difficulty of seeing and articulating discursive power structures, Johnson recognises that the ability to articulate what is being said to us or about us, and identifying who is doing that saying, is a cornerstone to feminist scholarship as it allows us to identify against whom can we protest, deny, and challenge. Her metaphor of refraction is thus a way of thinking about material objects, once they have become tropes, such as the HPV vaccine across national contexts, and being able to see it as a prism that refracts the discourses within which it was originally entangled. This image of refraction forces us to think of a material object like the HPV vaccine as creating a spectrum of visible actors, concerns and values. And it is these visible things that help us to articulate discourses – which then allow us to protest and possibly erase their problematic power structures.

Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture.

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Matthew James Crawford, “The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2016) Feb 23, 2017

Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century to control the cinchona tree and its bark, and traces the history of quina as a product of local, imperial, and commercial networks in [the] eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Science and empire were deeply intertwined in the Spanish Atlantic, and Crawford offers a window into the epistemic culture produced by Spanish colonial governance and resulting encounters across and within the Andean and Atlantic contexts. Part One of the book looks carefully at what it meant to know nature in the early modern Atlantic World. It traces the transformations of quina from a local Andean remedy into a botanical commodity and an imperial natural resource from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, showing how these transformations resulted from the bark’s integration into Andean, Atlantic, and imperial networks of circulation of people, texts, objects, and images. Part Two of the book explores several key conflicts in the late eighteenth century that emerged as the Spanish Crown tried to assert greater control over the tree and its bark. It’s a story that will be of interest to the histories of science, medicine, natural history, and early modernity!

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Stacy Alaimo, “Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016) Feb 21, 2017

Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. Through a range of examples as broad as the theoretical scope of the book, Alaimo analyzes political responses to climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, and plastic pollution, as well as the epistemologies that have shaped our understanding of these crises. Simultaneously, this series of essays also explores the intimacies and entanglements of human and non-human subjectivities in the Anthropocene, arguing for a new materialist engagement with the world. Despite the gravity of her subject matter, Alaimo’s examples and writing are often playful. This not only echoes the complexity and occasional contradictions of environmental politics but also makes Exposed a very enjoyable read.

Drawing on examples from film, fiction, poetry, scientific writing, art, and activism, Alaimo considers the role pleasure has played and could play in various environmentalisms and environmental engagements. Though it bridges and contributes to scholarly work in the fields of environmental studies, feminism, materialism, and posthumanism, this book is much more than a theoretical exploration; it calls on us to rethink what it means to be human and act accordingly. Alaimo demonstrates interconnections between queer animals, naked protesters, melting glaciers, and interested scholars while providing thoughtful guidance on how to understand and respond to the environmental predicaments to which we are all, to varying degrees, exposed.

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Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, eds “Digital Sociologies” (Policy Press, 2016) Feb 09, 2017

How do we do sociology in the digital era? In Digital Sociologies (Policy Press, 2016) Jessie Daniels, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, Karen Gregory a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, have brought together a wealth of scholarship to explore the challenge of digital. The book engages with a range of theoretical questions, including challenging the digital/traditional sociology binary, the role of institutions, digital’s impact on eduction, the racialized practices of Twitch, the meaning of motherhood, the quantified self, the question of the body, and the digital sociological imagination. The eclectic range of scholars, offering perspectives from across the academic life course and deploying examples from across the world, create an important intervention into our understanding of this emerging, and perhaps as a result of this book, established, field of study. Ultimately the book is a call for a new community of scholars to engage with this most important element of contemporary life.

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John Hadley, “Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals” (Lexington Books, 2015) Feb 09, 2017

John Hadley’s Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals (Lexington Books, 2015) presents a novel approach to addressing habitat and biodiversity loss: extending liberal property rights to wildlife. Hadley argues that a guardianship system could effectively protect the rights of wild animals to resources in the territories they inhabit. In turn, the guardians of particular animals or a particular species could challenge land use plans that might threaten the ability of these animals to meet their basic needs.

Though grounded in philosophical theory, Hadley’s focus is pragmatic. He is interested in producing an institutional design that could be effectively incorporated into policy and practice. His proposal also aims to solve some key problems in wildlife conservation. It bridges the seemingly divergent interests of environmentalists focused on the protection of the collective (e.g., ecosystems) and those of animal rights proponents focused on the survival of individuals. Here, common ground is found in habitat protection, a shared value that reconciles the differences between these groups. Hadley’s proposal also ensures animals become vocal stakeholders in land use and conservation initiatives, able to compete with agendas that might be incompatible with animal or habitat protection. It also begins to overcome the anthropocentrism that (perhaps inevitably) pervades conservation practice. By determining animal property rights boundaries on the basis of territorial behavior, Hadley’s proposal privileges animal actions and interactions over human-centric interests. Although their rights would be advocated by a human guardian in a person-centered legal system, if implemented, this theory would ensure the interests of wild animals are taken seriously. This is a book of critical relevance to those interested in issues of human-wildlife conflict, biodiversity protection, and human/nonhuman relationships.

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Randy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015) Feb 04, 2017

Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured professor who resigned from his academic post to earn a degree from the world-renowned University of Southern California film school. As a documentary filmmaker, Olson has sought to fuse critical thinking and Hollywood storytelling. And as the author or co-author of three books, Olson has shown how scientists and academics in general can improve their communication skills and harness the power of narrative to improve their writing and presentations. Narrative is an indispensable tool that geographers and others can use to communicate with our students and the general public. Yet Olson also shows how we can hone our narrative intuition and use our story sense to write better abstracts, articles, and grant applications. Houston, We Have a Narrative has gems of wisdom for physical geographers, human geographers, and academics of all stripes.

Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and ways to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books.

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Matthew L. Jones, “Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) Jan 23, 2017

Matthew L. Jones’s wonderful new book traces a history of failed efforts to make calculating machines, from Blaise Pascal’s work in the 1640s through the efforts of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, incorporating an account of both the work and relationships of scholars and artisans, and their reflections on the nature of invention. Innovative in its approach and its form, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers a thoughtful and beautifully-written history of technology that offers an important perspective on a division between two poles of writing the history of technology: “the collective, deterministic account of inventive activity and the individualistic, heroic, creative account (7).” In Jones’s hands, we are offered a third way of understanding cultural production in early modernity, one that did not bifurcate between imitation and originality, social and individual making, or design and production. Central to the story is the history of efforts to mechanize the process of carrying ones in addition, and this fascinating problem persists as a thread through many of the projects discussed in the book. On the pages of Reckoning with Matter, readers will not only enjoy a compelling account of machine calculation through the nineteenth century, but will also find the story of a frog that tears out the eyes of a fish, a man who designed machines for making breakfast, and discussions of the significance of credit and intellectual property, modern programming, sketching, imitation, and debates over the nature of thinking. Highly recommended!

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Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science: (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Jan 16, 2017

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-1930, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is structured around five case studies that each describe the incorporation of a particular technology into Ayurvedic practice, resulting in a braiding together of strands of sciences and the production of a new body image. Mukharji develops and engages a number of key concepts in the work, significantly introducing a notion of physiograms (materialized physiologies or materialized body metaphors, a development of John Tresch’s notion of cosmograms) and a way of thinking about the braiding of strands of science and medicine. It’s a beautifully written and compellingly argued work that will be of interest to a wide range of readers of the history of science and medicine!

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Joshua Howe, “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming” (U. Washington Press, 2016) Jan 10, 2017

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especially among Republican lawmakers. But why?

In his recent book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (University of Washington Press, 2016), historian Joshua Howe seeks to answer this question. Howe traces the history of climate change from a scientific oddity in the late 1950s to a topic of fierce debate among politicians and environmental activists who fear that failure to tackle global warming will lead to stronger storms, fiercer wildfires, and rising seas. Scientists knew the most about the nuances of climate change, yet seemed unable to convince policy makers or the public to tackle the problem. Howe sees the climatologists narrow focus on the science of global warming as a partial reason for the inaction. Part history of science, part history of environmentalism, Behind the Curve is a provocative book exploring one of the most vexing issues of our time.

Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson is also a former visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.

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Dave Karpf, “Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy” (Oxford UP, 2016) Jan 09, 2017

For the start of 2017, Dave Karpf is back on the podcast with his new book, Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Karpf is associate professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University and author of The MoveOn Effect also published by Oxford. Much of the attention paid to digital politics is about speech. What did Donald Trump say on Twitter today? And who responded? Karpf’s book suggest that that attention has overlooked the other side of digital politics: listening. In Analytic Activism, Karpf focuses on how organizations use the digital footprints we all leave online to inform strategy. A/B testing and digital petitions allow political groups to hear what constituents care about and then later to use that information to mobilize and drive action.

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Nicholas A. John, “The Age of Sharing” (Polity Press, 2016) Jan 06, 2017

In his new book The Age of Sharing (Polity Press, 2016), the sociologist and media scholar Nicholas A. John documents the history and current meanings of the word sharing, which he argues, is a central keyword of contemporary media discourse. John interrogates the rhetorical work that sharing does as a practice, a form of communication and a business model. He argues that in the last decade, sharing has come to dominate the way we think about our online activities, and indeed, the way we live. He demonstrates, how the therapeutic culture that defined the twentieth century, now shapes how we perceive and discuss our personal and economic interactions both online and offline. Moreover, it was the therapeutic discourse that informed and energized the shift from sharing as a distributive practice of material objects to the ethos of sharing as caring. John combines a close analysis of social media sites such as Facebook and businesses such Airbnb with a linguistic analysis of the genealogy of the concept of sharing, the unknown history of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the subculture of hackers to explain the ascent of sharing as a daily practice and coveted social currency. Nicholas A. John is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and the impact its activists had on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at tal.zalmanovich@mail.huji.ac.il.

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Scott Selisker, “Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016) Dec 18, 2016

In Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Scott Selisker offers readers a fascinating new history of American anxieties along the borderland between the machine and the human mind. Demonstrating the way that a variety of fields influence and coproduce one another, Human Programming follows the metaphor of the automaton through news media, fiction, psychology, cybernetics, film, law and back again. Along the way, Selisker engages academic work on labor automation, posthumanism, affect and emotion, and techno-Orientalism.

Through careful interpretation of books on American soldiers returning from the Korean War, the trial of Patty Hearst, the narrative logic of Snow Crash and Blade Runner, the central conflicts of Homeland and the Manchurian Candidate, and the baffled news reports on John Walker Lindh, Human Programming “offers a new literary and cultural context for understanding the human automaton figure” as it has appeared and reappeared over the half century, and explores how the metaphor of the automaton has “shaped American conversations about the self and other, the free and unfree, and democracy and its enemies, since World War II” (7, 8). Beginning with a prehistory in WWII propaganda, this timely study comes up to a present in which we replace our employees with touchscreens, rely on machine learning to translate our conversations, use proprietary software to plot our routes, and deny the human freedom of our fellow citizens.

Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carls work at carlnellis.wordpress.com.

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Robert Aronowitz, “Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty” (U. Chicago Press, 2015) Dec 09, 2016

Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though they were misled by numbers intended to lend a modicum of certainty to the complex calculus of modern life. But while election predictions come and go, the “empire of chance” lays siege to more and more aspects of daily life, alongside increasing possibilities for technological intervention–nowhere, perhaps, is this more clear than in medicine. Robert Aronowitz’s Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is both a nuanced and accessible exploration of the historical transformation of risk in modern biomedicine. Through a series of case studies and broader reflections on the ways in which modern medicine has become “risky,” Aronowitz teases out salient features of an increasingly complex system of interventions and indicators.

In the book, Aronowitz defines three key aspects of our modern “risky medicine.” The first one discussed is a converged experience of risk and disease, exemplified in cancer screening in which bodies-at-risk can be subject to similar treatment and prevention regimes as those marked by a chronic condition or trying to prevent remission. Another aspect is the notion of risk reduction standing in place of efficacy for the psychological and social work it performs, which provides some explanation for the costliness of American medicine relative to the outcomes it achieves. Finally, Aronowitz argues that risk interventions have been driven by expansion of the medical market, and calls upon policymakers to become aware of the control pharmaceutical companies have in the generation of new health risks and the data to support them.

One way of understanding Aronowitz’s contribution is to contextualize it within the trajectory of sociological work on risk in modern society. Originally published in 1986 (in German), Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity was a watershed book for the understanding of modernity and technological change. Much of Beck’s account is concerned with environmental risks; the book came out on the heels of the Three Mile Island and Bhopal disasters. However, Beck’s take on medicine is somewhat lacking. Beck presciently calls attention to the “reflexive market strategy” of pharmaceutical companies, in which they profit from self-produced risks–echoing the third aspect of “risky medicine’–but misses its more immediate social and psychological dimensions, stating merely that the rise of chronic disease is evidence of a divergence of diagnosis and therapy. Aronowitz’s case studies suggest even more immediate consequences at hand. The importance of Risky Medicine is evident in how it disaggregates the changing landscape of health and medicine from an inexorable creep of modernity, spelling out the logic subjecting more bodies to greater interventions and recovering the relationship between experience and an ambivalent, anticipatory social order.

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Ruth Rogaski, “Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China” (U. California Press, 2014 reprint) Dec 07, 2016

Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fields ranging from history of medicine to East Asian history. It is easy to see why. Set in the Chinese treaty port of Tianjin, the book follows Chinese elites over the tumultuous decades that spanned the middle of the nineteenth century to World War Two. Chinese elites in Tianjin engaged British, French, and, importantly, Japanese imperialists and traders in their midst, creating what Rogaski thinks is best called a “hypercolony.” Simultaneously, Chinese elites pressed their own nation-building projects, working to distinguish themselves both from the foreigners and also from the masses they ruled. To do so, they adopted, adapted, and cultivated particular ways of building a modern nation in the final years of the Qing dynasty, which hung, importantly, on practices of hygiene. These ideal ways of being hygienic, thus modern, fundamentally rearranged the urban landscape of Tianjin and the practice of everyday life.

Rogaski writes wonderfully and leads the way through tricky historical evidence, pointing out how Chinese elites modernizing projects were apparent in the changed meaning of weisheng. In the early nineteenth century, the term referred to individual ways of guarding health and a century later had come explicitly to refer to government-directed public hygiene measures–“hygienic modernity”–without ever shedding its earlier inflections. The book shows that modernity is not so much a time period, but an aspiration and a process–always incomplete, seemingly right around the washroom corner. Creatively designed and insightfully analyzed, this study defies any simple binaries of colonizer and colonized, or of indigenous and scientific medicine. Rogaski wears her theory lightly and has plenty new to show–not least to historians of medicine who may be most familiar with the stories of colonial medicine from Africa and India.

Ruth Rogaski is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and generously agreed to a live faculty-student interview as part of a collaborative final project for Laura Starks course History of Global Health.

To learn more about using the New Books Network for classroom projects, see Laura Stark’s essay “Can new media save the book?” in the Fall 2015 issue of Contexts.

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Carol Upadhya, “Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy” (Oxford UP, 2016) Nov 23, 2016

How is India’s burgeoning IT industry reshaping the country? What types of capital is IT attracting and what formations does it take? How are software engineers managed? What are their goals and aspirations? How are they perceived by their foreign clients? In her new book, Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016), Carol Upadhya tackles these questions and many more. Based on extensive research in Bangalore – the large southern Indian metropolis that has led the IT buzz – the book explores the way capital, work and class are remade within the “new India.” Combining deep, rich and detailed accounts of life within “software factories” with a theoretical eclecticism and clear writing style, the book is a truly wonderful anthropological account of an offshore economy.

Carol Upadhya is Professor in the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, India.

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Robert Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (U. of Washington Press, 2015) Nov 12, 2016

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.” Robert Brain’s The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Washington Press, 2015) unveils a fascinating world of exchange between artistic studios and physiology laboratories concealed by such pithy aphorisms. Brain argues that the influence and stature of physiological aesthetics have been overlooked in accounts of modernism in science and art, and seeks to recover experimental systems that were incredibly influential and fertile in their cultural situation.

Brain first sets himself to chart the development of physiological recording in the sciences, first as experimental technique, then as ontology, in a fascinating chapter on the protoplasm theory of life and on to its application to the human qua human problems of linguistic analysis. He then describes the experimentalization of visual art (Georges Seurat, Edvard Munch) and poetry (Gustave Kahn, F. T. Marinetti). The influence of Charles Henry, who inhabited both artists’ circles and physiology laboratories in his work as a preparateur, becomes a key pivot in Brain’s narrative through his creation a scientific aesthetic that could be deployed as a kind of productive black-box. The Pulse of Modernism is a rich portrait of fin-de-siecle material and intellectual culture, and challenges the pride of place given to Victorian sensibilities in the fashioning of the late modern (early modernist) scientific subject.

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Sally Engle Merry, “The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016) Nov 07, 2016

Quantification is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when hearing or reading about the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR). Yet in the 21st century, a wide range of policy and advocacy agendas begin with numbers. Those numbers become indicators, composites, standards, and measurement tools, which then get adopted in advocacy rhetoric or policy practice.

In The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Sally Engle Merry combines ethnography, human rights, and science and technology studies to explore how people living in vulnerable situations across the globe are represented by the numbers designed to both name and support them. While numbers do not have agency, and cannot help or hurt on their own, Merry dedicates most of the book to untangling the politics and practice of developing standards and indicators, and interpreting the realities that come with “governance by numbers.” The genealogy of these indicators and standards are given as much space as their application, as Merry describes their highly political origins and a process of their subtle acceptance as normalover time.

With roots in colonial authority and population management, indicators have been developed and used for a range of purposes in governance: to manage people, resources, planning, dissent, and reputations among others. Merry explores indicators and indices from legal, anthropological, historical, and genealogical perspectives, describing a range of unexpected stewards from short-term United Nations consultants to U.S. State Department officials to computer algorithms. While the book focuses on the globalization of definitions, measurements, and management techniques, it simultaneously explores the widely varied phenomena of gender violence, human rights, and human trafficking. On a set of topics that have been broadly fetishized, the overlay of quantified assessments and accompanying responses to them raises many questions about voice, politics, and international policy-making among many other topics.

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Robert Peckham, “Epidemics in Modern Asia” (Cambridge UP, 2016) Nov 06, 2016

Robert Peckham’s Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores the crucial yet under-explored role that epidemics have played in both colonial and postcolonial Asia. At once broad in sweep and nuanced in analysis, Peckham’s work explores a series of world-changing disease outbreaks across from the eighteenth century through the present.

Organized around five themes (Mobility, Cities, Environment, War, and Globalization), the book looks at the interrelationship between disease and human society at both the particular and hemispheric level. In doing so, the book challenges old assumptions about Asia as a pre-modern hotspot and site of contamination, as well as the narrative of triumphant progress of western medicine east. Instead, Peckham examines how disease, infection, and epidemic are translated across divides of culture and power in both the colonial and postcolonial periods. This innovative study is an essential read for a number of audiences. Whether readers are interested in the lasting impacts of intersections between colonial and indigenous peoples, the history of world capitalism and trade, the development of bureaucratic structures and government power, and/or the demographic and environmental impacts of the rise of the modern world, Epidemics in Modern Asia presents a powerful revisionist interpretation, bringing the history of epidemics to the center of the frame.

Robert Peckham is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. He had edited two previous volumes, Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (Hong Kong: University Press, 2014) and Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (New York: Routledge: 2014). He also is co-editer, with David M. Pomfret, of Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2014), as well as the author of a rich body of articles on Asian history and the history of medicine.

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J.D. Trout, “Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science” (Oxford UP, 2016) Oct 15, 2016

The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the 17th century. While advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not unique to Europe, it was there that Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and others came up with theories that got modern physics and chemistry off the ground. In his latest book, Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science (Oxford University Press, 2016), J.D. Trout mounts a spirited defense of the claim that the best explanation of the rise of science in 17th Century Europe is that Newton and others got lucky; among other serendipitous factors, they happened to come up with versions of preexisting ideas that were just right enough to explain just enough of the world, and that was enough to get the ball rolling.

Trout, who is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, defends the scientific realist view that scientific theories are successful because they are by and large true, not just predictively accurate. He also sharply distinguishes the psychology of explanation–the Aha! feeling of understanding–from the truth of an explanation. On his ontic view of explanation, we can experience being satisfied with bad (false) explanations, and there are true theories we may never understand.

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McKenzie Wark, “Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene” (Verso, 2015) Oct 10, 2016

McKenzie Wark’s new book begins and ends with a playful call: “Workings of the world untie! You have a win to world!” Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015) creates a conversation between work from two very different Soviet and American contexts. After guiding readers through the work and theories of Alexander Bogdanov, whose focus on the importance of labor in organizing knowledge forms a central thread through the book as a whole, Wark traces some of those notions in the writing of novelist and utopian Andrey Platonov. The second half of the book extends the conversation into science studies, beginning in a chapter that considers the work of Feyerabend, Haraway, Barad, and Edwards in light of Bogdanov and Platonov’s approaches to labor and knowledge, and continuing into a chapter devoted to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. The result is a fascinating treatment of the centrality of labor and the importance of the not-necessarily-human to understanding and theorizing the Anthropocene. (As Wark reminds us, Labor is the mingling of many things, most of them not human.) The entire book is highly recommended, and for the STS-minded among us the third chapter of the book would make an especially useful assignment in a discussion group or seminar devoted to contemporary theory and/in STS.

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Asif A. Siddiqi, “The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957” (Cambridge UP, 2013) Sep 30, 2016

In The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Asif Siddiqi approaches the history of the Soviet space program as a combination of engineering and imagination, both necessary to achieve the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Beginning in the late 19th century, Siddiqi demonstrates that a popular fascination with space travel and amateurs engaged popular science were the driving forces behind the development of technologies that led to the Soviet space program. From the writings of Konstatin Tsiolkovsky to space exhibitions in the 1920s to Sergei Korolev’s pioneering work, Siddiqi challenges established Soviet narratives of the space program’s history.

Asif Siddiqi is Professor of History at Fordham University. The Red Rockets Glare was first published in 2010 and came out in paperback in 2013.

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Marc Raboy, “Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World” (Oxford UP, 2016) Sep 21, 2016

Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), it was he who pioneered the concept of wireless global communications. As a teenager he was fascinated by the recent discovery of radio waves, and by the time he was in his early twenties he had developed an apparatus that used these waves to transmit and receive messages. Traveling to London, he demonstrated a gift for publicity as he established himself as a technological pioneer in an age of rapidly emerging wonders. Thanks to his unassailable patents, Marconi soon created a global communications empire, one that made his name synonymous with radio and was so dominant that it brought the nations of the world together in an unprecedented international agreement to regulate the field of wireless telegraphy. Raboy recounts Marconi’s roving life as a celebrated figure, the development of his multinational business concerns, and his later relationship with the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and the shadow it cast over his posthumous reputation.

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E.R. Truitt, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) Sep 21, 2016

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Clarke’s third law, coined in 1973, expresses the difficulty that people of any era have in reconciling the bounds of current knowledge with our experiences in a world full of marvels. In a fascinating investigation of role of automata in the culture of the medieval Latin west, E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the story of automata from their early appearance in the Latin west as gifts of foreign courts, to the literary manifestations of these objects, to the eventual creation of elaborate mechanical automata in the middle of the thirteenth century. Along the way, this history examines the nature of marvels, the constitution of natural knowledge, the text-based transformation of Latin intellectual culture, definitions of life and death, the spectacle of court, and the mechanics of the universe (8, 9). The cast of characters, both fictional and factual, embraces writers, travelers, and natural philosophers ranging from Liudprand of Cremona (c. 920 972), Pope Sylvester II (c. 946 1003) and Fr. William of Rubruck (c. 1220 1293), to Sir John Mandeville, witness of marvels mechanical and divine, and a Charlemagne whose stay in Constantinople brings him face to face with a pagan rulers powers of astral science that test the potentials of Charlemagne’s piety.

Our conversation about Truitt’s comprehensively researched and highly readable book ranges over C-3PO’s medieval forebears in the alabaster chamber, the religious rehabilitation of disembodied talking heads, the role of clocks and clockwork in the discourse shift from natural philosophy to mechanical engineering, and the political significance of lewd mechanical monkeys covered in rotting badger pelts.

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Mary Chayko, “Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life” (SAGE, 2016) Sep 13, 2016

New technology has made us more connected than ever before. This has its advantages: instantaneous communication, expanded circles of influence, access to more information. And, of course, our connectedness has concomitant drawbacks including issues with privacy and safety. In Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life (Sage, 2016), Mary Chayko, a professor at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, examines the influence technology is having on society and the ways that members of society are shaping the uses of new technology. Using scholarship from communications, information studies, sociology and other fields, Chayko weaves together an interdisciplinary analysis of what our myriad connections mean for the present and for the future.

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George Couros, “The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity” (Dave Burgess Consulting, 2015) Sep 13, 2016

One of the most commonly used words right now in education is “innovation.” It seems to be part of any response to our collective anxiety over the fact that the way we educate children does not seem to have changed as quickly as the ways we access information, communicate with each other, or travel from place to place. Of course, before innovation was an education buzzword, it was a buzzword in Silicon Valley. It is easy to list examples of companies that are innovative — Google, Apple, Uber, etc. — but it is much harder to define. This leaves us to wonder, is innovation in schools just integrating more apps and touchscreens? If not, what is it? And if we want innovation in schools, how do we get there? In The Innovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity (Dave Burgess Consulting, 2015), George Couros, provides a framework evaluating whether school practices are truly innovative as well as a guide for leaders interested in fostering changes in their schools that are both original and positive.

Couros joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @gcouros.

Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea.

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Caroline Ford, “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France” (Harvard UP, 2016) Sep 12, 2016

Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Far from being a product of the postwar environmental movement, Ford shows how French society began to understand how humans adversely affected their surroundings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Popular writers like Francois-Antoine Rauch demonstrated how deforestation altered the climate and damaged the habitability of the nation. War, revolution, and a series of devastating floods brought the questions of deforestation, urbanization, and industrial capitalism into conflict with the finite resources of nature. Public worries over resource depletion and climate change mingled with a new bourgeois consciousness developing in the nineteenth century. France’s countryside became a place of romantic longing for families, a source of inspiration for artists, and an important symbol of national pride. Historical landmarks became sites of a unique French heritage to be preserved and protected for future generations. Empire also became a site of environmental sensitivity, where the conflicting interests of Europeans and colonized peoples played out through discourses of conservation and ecological change in French Algeria.

James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_

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Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, “The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line” (Prometheus Books, 2016) Sep 11, 2016

Alfred S. Posamentier and Robert Geretschlager, The Circle: A Mathematical Exploration Beyond the Line (Prometheus Books, 2016) goes considerably beyond what its modest title would suggest. The circle has played a pivotal role–that’s “role” with an ‘e,’ but its ability to “roll” with an ‘l’–has helped produce our industrial civilization. Moreover, the circle appears in our art, our literature, and our culture as well. This delightful book will not only reacquaint readers with the pleasures of the geometry they once knew, but will show how the circle continues to enchant mathematicians today, who continue to discover new and surprising properties about this most fundamental of shapes.

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Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) Sep 07, 2016

Is the scientific value of objectivity in conflict with the social justice commitment to diversity? In her latest book, Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Sandra Harding (Education and Gender Studies, UCLA) argues not only that objectivity and diversity need not be in conflict, but that good research ought to be committed to both values at the same time. The book draws on a rich array of scholarship, spanning from 20th century philosophy of science to contemporary studies in indigenous and postcolonial philosophy and activism. It is an intricate study of the ways in which objectivity, positivism, and secularism are all deeply intertwined with their social contexts and historical moments. The book ultimately advocates a science that is both responsive to a methodological requirement for strong objectivity, and originates in local communities.

Emily Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a current fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast.

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William Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016) Aug 29, 2016

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly turned to coal to heat their homes and power their businesses. As the amount of smoke produced by burning coal grew it prompted a variety of responses, from crown-directed efforts to prevent it from contaminating the royal space to its adoption in poems and plays as a symbol of modern urban life. As Cavert reveals, these efforts to grapple with the problem of coal smoke presaged the reaction to the much larger issue of industrial pollution throughout England during the Industrial Revolution and, in the process, framed many of these issues in ways with which people are familiar today.

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James Rodger Fleming, “Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology” (MIT Press, 2016) Aug 26, 2016

This is a book about the future – the historical future as three interconnected generations of atmospheric researchers experienced it and envisioned it in the first part of the twentieth century.

James Rodger Fleming’s new book is a big picture history of atmospheric science that follows the lives and careers of three men who worked at the center of meteorological research in roughly the first half of the 20th century: Vilhelm Bjerknes, Carl-Gustav Rossby, and Harry Wexler. Though it takes these three figures as orienting tools, Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology (MIT Press, 2016) this is not a biography of three lone geniuses: Fleming is careful to show that the emergence of atmospheric science was a team effort and the result of work by many people in different disciplines and areas. Fleming’s use of archival materials allows readers to appreciate the significance and roles of otherwise-overlooked or ignored historical figures, including Anne Louise Beck (who we discuss in the course of the podcast). Inventing Atmospheric Science weaves together the histories of technology, mathematics, hydrodynamics, the aerospace industry, global pollution, climatology, chaos theory, the US Weather Bureau, and much more into a clear and engaging story thats also a pleasure to read.

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Simanti Dasgupta, “BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India” (Temple UP, 2015) Aug 17, 2016

What links a water privatization scheme and a prominent software company in India’s silicon city, Bangalore? Simanti Dasgupta’s new book, BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water, and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press, 2015), explores the was in which the corporate governance of IT is seen as a model for urban development in contemporary India. Through ethnographic research into both a water privatization scheme and the practices of an IT company, Dasgupta reveals the similarities that cross-cut both domains as new and old inequalities are produced. Rich in detail and fascinating in its analytical drive the book opens up new avenues for thinking about citizenship and belonging.

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Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015) Aug 02, 2016

Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2015), Lisa Bjorkman, Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, moves from slums to elite enclaves in analyzing the processesof mapping and politics in the city’s watery infrastructures. Exploring the workings of secondary markets, water brokers, and planning offices she reveals how power, knowledge and authority over how when and why water flows are being reconfigured as Mumbai makes itself a “world class”city. Winner of the 2014 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences the book is both profoundly intimate in its ethnographic depth and wonderfully ambitious with its theoretical reach.

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Peter Wade, et. al. “Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke UP, 2014) Aug 02, 2016

Over the past quarter-century, scientists have been mapping and exploring the human genome to locate the genetic basis of disease and track the histories of populations across time and space. As part of this work, geneticists have formulated markers to calculate percentages of European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry in populations presumed to originate or inhabit particular geographic regions. The work done by geneticists in recent years has been received with a mixture of excitement and concern. Genomics is simultaneously viewed as the key to diagnosing and curing inherited disease, while also posing a threat to individual privacy and raising concerns over the reappearance of racialized thinking in scientific research.

In Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2014), editors Peter Wade, Carlos Lopez Beltran, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos ask how ideas of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender enter into the work of genetic scientists? Conducting ethnographic research in genetics laboratories located in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, the authors question the perceived divide between the scientific community and society at large in the production of knowledge. This important work illuminates how the concepts of race, nation, and gender are continually reproduced, challenged, and reformulated in both scientific and public discourse.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latino Identity & Politics. DJs dissertation examines the influence of Mexican American civic engagement and political activism on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA from 1930 to 1965.

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Benjamin Peters, “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” (MIT Press, 2016) Jul 16, 2016

Something we might think of as the Soviet internet once existed, according to Benjamin Peters‘ new book, and its failure was neither natural nor inevitable. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016) traces the history of early efforts to network the Soviet state, from the global spread of cybernetics in the middle of the 20th century (paying careful attention to the different ways that cybernetic thought was articulated in different international settings) to the undoing of the All-State Automated System (OGAS) between 1970-1989. The book argues that the primary reason that the Soviets struggled to network their nation rests on the institutional conditions supporting the scientific knowledge base and the command economy. In developing this argument, Peters guides readers through a story about economic cybernetics, the relationships between military and civilian sectors of Soviet society, computer networks as metaphors for brains or bodies, saxophone-playing robots, fake passports to fake countries, computer chess, and much more. The conclusion of the book also considers some of the implications of the Soviet experience for rethinking our current networked world.

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Vanessa Ogle, “The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950” (Harvard UP, 2015) Jul 13, 2016

From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism, Beirut’s plurality of time was less an exception than it was a quandary to later advocates who aimed to organize time along geographical lines.

In The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), Vanessa Ogle excavates 19th century movements to reform and standardize time: summer time, calendar time, time zones, religious time, and national time among others. Ogle questions the inevitability of 21st century time, demonstrating that it was the object of active creation for nearly two centuries prior. The rise of nationalism, the consolidation of colonial practice, along with autonomous religious reform movements simultaneously gave rise to, and were in turn, molded by advocacy focused on time. New communications technologies, such as the telegraph, and time-keeping devices, such as city clock towers, similarly served as the infrastructure around which time-keeping debates became organized.

Written as a historical account, time becomes a central character in this book: casting a common lens over otherwise disconnected places and people, raising controversy, and shifting between the center and the periphery of a broader story of 19th century transformation.

Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science and technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan.

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Phaedra Daipha, “Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) Jul 09, 2016

Phaedra Daipha’s thoughtful new book uses a careful sociological study of a particular community of weather forecasters to develop a sociology of decision making. Based on fieldwork conducted over five years at a local office of the National Weather Service, Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth (University of Chicago Press, 2015) develops a theory of decision making as a habitual, practical, social activity shaped by particular contexts of action. In addition to working closely with (and contributing substantively to) pragmatist philosophy and theoretical STS, Masters of Uncertainty also offers a thick and fascinating description of the practices and local environments of a community of artisan-practitioners charged with creating a kind of object–a weather forecast–that many of us consume regularly. After developing a sociological theory of decision making within the context of this case study, Daipha concludes the book by testing the theory in two other fields: finance and medicine. This is a compelling and clearly-written account that will be of interest to sociologists, STS scholars, and general readers alike!

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Noriko Manabe, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima” (Oxford UP, 2015) Jul 09, 2016

Noriko Manabe’s new book is a compelling analysis of the content, performance style, and role of music in social movements in contemporary Japan. Paying special attention to the constraints that limit and censor people–both ordinary citizens and musicians–from speaking out on sensitive political issues, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford University Press, 2015) focuses on the music of post-Fukushima antinuclear protests. Manabe looks carefully at the roles and motivations of musicians in Japan who have become involved in protest movements and demonstrations that reach across a range of physical and virtual spaces. This book will be of interest to any readers eager to learn more about modern Japan, protest movements, music, and the histories of nuclear power and its discontents.

Make sure to check out the companion website, which includes lots of multi-media materials that articulate with the chapters of the book!

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Ronald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) Jul 08, 2016

I like to think

(it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal

brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace.

– Richard Brautigan, 1967

By the time Richard Brautigan distributed his fifth collection of poetry, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, on the streets of San Francisco, his reference to “a cybernetic ecology” was not an obscurantist metaphor so much as a direct nod to a pervasive and generative intellectual discourse. In The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015), historian of technology Ron Kline traces the emergence of this protean discourse, along with the shifting demarcations occurring within and around it as cybernetics worked its way between technology and theorization of the social world. In doing so, he provides perhaps the most comprehensive and incisive history to date of American cybernetics and information theory.

While cybernetics began as a distinctly postwar science of communication and control, Kline shows how it was linked to but split off from discussions of the physical definition of information. Cyberneticians’ emphasis on circular causality was a major influence on mid-century social science, and cybernetic theory was a common frame through which electronic computers were discussed in the media. As the subtitle suggests, Kline also grapples with the coherence of the term ‘information age,’ whose advocates departed from cybernetics yet, as he argues, remained under its shadow. Through historicizing cybernetics as a ‘moment,’ Kline characterizes the activities of its larger-than-life adherents with a sociologist’s eye, while unearthing both the material and conceptual artifacts left in its wake.

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Sabine Arnaud, “On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) Jul 05, 2016

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. Arnaud asks, “What made it possible to view dozens of different diagnoses as variants of a single pathology, hysteria?” The answer can be found in a long process of rewriting and negotiation over the definition of these diagnoses enabled this retrospective assimilation, which was driven by enormously diverse political and epistemological stakes. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender.

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Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016) Jul 01, 2016

Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning public health, safety, risk, and immunity. But additionally there are epistemological questions about these communities. Though frequently dismissed as simply ignorant, misinformed, or superstitious, it turns out that vaccine suspicion, denial, and refusal are positively correlated with higher levels of education, and greater depth of knowledge about vaccine science. Accordingly, the common view that vaccine refusal is the product of ignorance seems simplistic. Yet the more strident forms of vaccine refusal are based in demonstrably false beliefs. How is this best explained? In Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care (Routledge 2016) Mark Navin offers a balanced examination of the epistemology and value commitments of various stripes of vaccine refusal. After arguing that vaccine refusers may be reasonable, he defends a novel version of the view that there is a moral requirement to vaccinate one’s children. He then defends the claim that the State may use coercive means to enhance vaccination, but Navin makes room for exemptions for non-medical reasons. Navin’s book is a fascinating philosophical exploration of some very deep questions at the intersection of social epistemology and social ethics.

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Samuel Morris Brown, “Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human” (Oxford University Press, 2016) Jun 29, 2016

Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and personal context must be negotiated. In Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human (Oxford University Press, 2016), Samuel Morris Brown approaches the problem of end-of-life care with a clinician’s eye and a scholar of religion’s touch.

The book places advance directives in the clinic in their historical context while unpacking their ethical and legal nature, describes the psychological aspects of medical decision-making and how moral distress clouds judgment, and provides recommendations on how to heal the process of healing in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). An ICU physician himself, Brown’s account is interwoven with powerful stories that render his argument for humanistic care particularly salient. As such, Through the Valley of Shadows offers as much to dyed-in-the-wool humanists as it does to those focused on measuring and improving outcomes.

This is the second of a pair of interviews on communication in health care, preceded by Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care, by Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz.

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Greg Jenner, “A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from Stone Age to Phone Age” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) Jun 26, 2016

Greg Jenner’s A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from Stone Age to Phone Age (St. Martins Press, 2016), explores the history of the modern material world through the lens of a typical Saturday in the twenty first century. Jenner gives his readers a fascinating look at our daily routines from the medical origins of corn flakes to the ecclesiastical origins of the newspaper. Beginning with the ring of an alarm clock, Jenner explores historical conceptions of time with many humorous and illuminating facts from sources as diverse as French Revolution to the Harappan Civilization of the Bronze Age. Ambitious in its scope and always dedicated to giving his readers a good laugh, Jenner takes a lighthearted look at the improbable people, fortuitous accidents, and unusual places that helped create our modern material world. Jenner’s book closes the historical distance between the lives of earlier epochs. Jenner shows the familiar struggles of domestic life are not unique to our own time, but rather shared throughout human history. Whether the Neolithic, medieval, or otherwise, Jenner shows how our ancestors responded to the shared problems of the everyday from setting an alarm clock to cooking breakfast. Jenner also points out that many successful inventions were lost and then rediscovered (such as sewage systems and the Roman bath), questioning popular notions of the linear path of technological development.

James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_

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Saul J. Weiner and Alan Schwartz, “Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care” (Oxford University Press 2016) Jun 22, 2016

When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a riveting account of a decade of research on improving outcomes by incorporating patients’ individual life contexts into planning of care.

Their groundbreaking studies showed that physicians, while getting the biological details largely correct, frequently disregard personal circumstances that lead to medical errors. Such an assertion might appear intractable or unfit for empirical study, but Listening for What Matters describes a series of creative experiments that strongly support it. From placing fake patients into real clinical contexts to measure the appropriateness of recommendations, to recording interactions between real patients and doctors (for which they developed a system, Content Coding for Contextualization of Care), and finally training groups of medical students to ask about individual context, Weiner and Schwartz build a case for the existence of a widespread problem while simultaneously offering compelling solutions.

This is the first of a pair of interviews on communication in health care, to be followed by Samuel Morris Brown’s Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human.

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Gabriel Mendes, “Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry” (Cornell University Press, 2015) Jun 15, 2016

In his 1948 essay, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks after the Great Migration as leaving “even the most balanced Negro open to anxiety.” In Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry (Cornell University Press, 2015), Gabriel Mendes undertakes an engaging study of race and mental health in the 20th century through the lens of an overlooked Harlem clinic.

While providing the first in-depth history of the Lafargue Clinic (1946-58), the book focuses on the figures who came together in a seemingly unlikely union to found it: Richard Wright, the prominent author; Fredric Wertham, a German Jewish emigre psychiatrist now known for his advocacy for censorship of comic books; and The Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, an important Harlem pastor. Wright’s literary prowess, work for the Communist party, and brush with Chicago School sociology met with Wertham’s socially-conscious and uncompromising brand of psychoanalysis to challenge mainstream psychiatric theory and its discriminatory practices in the Jim Crow North. Those who could afford it were charged 25 cents for sessions in the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal church in Harlem, and 50 cents for court testimonials. A thoroughgoing grassroots effort, ignored by philanthropists and state funding, the Lafargue Clinic throws mid-20th Century mental health and race relations into relief, and is sure to stir interest in the untold stories of projects like it.

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Michael F. Robinson, “The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent” (Oxford UP, 2016) Jun 03, 2016

Michael F. Robinson‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if just with that one word.) It’s not just because its a beautifully crafted work of prose. And it’s not just because its quite literally a page-turner. The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016) is also a masterful biography of an idea: the life story of the Hamitic hypothesis and its relationship to to the histories of exploration, science, ideas of human origins, and much much more. Robinson’s book opens with an account of reporter David Ker going to the London mansion of Henry Morton Stanley in 1885 to interview the man who was at that point the world’s most famous explorer. (As Robinson puts it, Stanley resided in London, but in truth he lived nowhere.) As the story unfolds we learn about Stanley’s encounter with the white race of Gambaragara and its imbrication with a set of larger questions (Where did the human species originate? Why had it split into separate races? And how had these races come to settle the different regions of the planet?) as we meet some fascinating and compelling figures. The Lost White Tribe also has mummies, ruins, skulls, adventure fiction, and Freud. Enjoy!

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Katie Gentile, ed., “The Business of Being Made” (Routledge, 2015) May 28, 2016

In this interview, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appearing in The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2015). It is striking that while personhood amendments proliferate and sovereignty over the reproductive body shifts frighteningly more and more to the State, a global, bio-medical industrial complex has arisen comprising ARTs, surrogate pregnancy, egg/sperm donation and the like. Gentile points out the rise of the post-9/11 fetishization of the fetus a receptacle for all our vulnerabilities which must be protected at all costs in the face of the hyper-object: the threat of global catastrophe looming large. ARTs and its associated industries manufacture hope and optimism in conceiving babies at any cost (for those of privilege) while serving to further elevate, protect and fetishize the fetus. It’s a space of repro-futurity in which life is constructed around achieving reproductive milestones. ARTs have become another neoliberal trope to imagine life without limits as they have been subsumed into ordinary medicine for all women. With ARTs there is often no space to acknowledge loss, shame, uncertainty and the sexual re-traumatization that often occur during the process. On the plus side, ARTs offer the promise and opportunity of biological parenthood to marginalized people (for example, trans men) resulting in diverse family configurations. Gentile asks can other spaces be nurtured so that babies are not the main focus of generativity, especially for women? How can we better theorize childfree lives of creativity that are not seen as displaced parenting but generativity for its own pleasure?

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Rebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015) Apr 27, 2016

Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less traveled and the tale of a forgotten future. The book is anchored around the story of Harvard-trained social scientist Bert Kaplan, who embarked on, in her words, a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture peoples dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank. While unique in scope, Kaplan’s project can be characterized as the culmination of efforts to apply techniques of personality capture–projective testing, dream analysis, and life history–in cross-cultural research on indigenous peoples, an effort to account for the full spectrum of human life amidst the encroachment of modernity upon cultures based, for example, in oral traditions.

Richly documenting the entanglements of Kaplan and others in their attempts to render subjects as data, Lemov throws the transactional nature of anthropology into relief. A data point for an ethnographer can be many things for a research subject: cash for buying American niceties, a beer, a dream lost in the act of recounting, even a permanent mark of distrust. The book is also a history of a technology which never came to fruition: the futuristic reader for Kaplan’s Microcards was never realized, and the boxes of cards became dispersed and lost their value as a total archive of human personality. Lemov argues that we would do well to regard the fate of Kaplan’s database as a parable for our age by calling attention to the information loss upon which the technologies of documentation that saturate our present rely. What, then, will become of our compressed audio files, forgotten social media accounts, and backup hard drives stashed in the back corners of drawers?

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Mark Carrigan, “Social Media for Academics” (Sage, 2016) Apr 27, 2016

How can academics respond to the rise of social media? Or should they respond at all? In Social Media for Academics (Sage, 2016), Mark Carrigan, from the Centre for Social Ontology, offers an informed and reflective take on social media, with some practical guidelines for academics. The book introduces key concepts, such as digital scholarship, social media and ‘the public’, alongside discussions of specific platforms including twitter (Mark himself tweets @mark_carrigan). The book is not only a guide for academics who are interested in social media, as it considers the impact of new media forms on scholarship itself, with considerations of academic identities, academic networks and relationships, as well as the benefits and risks of embracing social media.The book is essential reading for any academic seeking an informed understanding of both the ‘how to’ and, perhaps more importantly, the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of social media for academics.

Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien

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David J. Meltzer, “The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past” (U Chicago Press, 2015) Apr 26, 2016

David J. Meltzer‘s new book is a meticulous study of the controversy over human antiquity in America, a dispute that transformed North American archaeology as a practice and discipline, tracing it from 1862-1941. The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces the heated and multi-disciplinary debates over the existence of a Pleistocene human antiquity in North America. Meltzer’s book is a thick history that introduces readers not only to the major conceptual, epistemological, and methodological issues at stake in the controversy, but also to the figures who debated the nature and scope of human antiquity in America. Anyone with an interest in the history of archaeology or the study of human origins should check it out!

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David Grazian, “American Zoo: A Sociological Safari” (Princeton UP, 2015) Apr 20, 2016

Urban zoos are both popular and imperiled. They are sites of contestation, but what are those contests about? In his new book, American Zoo: A Sociological Safari(Princeton, 2015), ethnographer David Grazian tracks the competing missions of zoos as site of education, entertainment, philanthropy, and work. Grazian coins the term nature making to describe the process through which people assert and police an imagined division between nature and culture. On his sociological safari as a dung-shoveling, insect-eating volunteer at two urban zoos, Grazian observes how a range of stakeholders including visitors, employees, and corporate donors all participate in nature-making. Yet these groups make nature in different, patterned ways, which spawns everyday controversies as well as broader struggles to manage zoos rival missions. These contradictions shape what people learn in zoos (no evolution, please), how they imagine distant people and places (often crudely), and how species, both human and nonhuman, interact in zoos and in the wider world. American Zoo affirms the importance of urban ethnography for studies of organizations, science, and culture. Plus, in an age of irony, the book is constructive not only critical. With both laughter and bite, Grazian models how to sustain ambivalence as well as hope.

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Eben Kirksey, “Emergent Ecologies” (Duke UP, 2015) Apr 18, 2016

Eben Kirksey new book asks and explores a series of timely, important, and fascinating questions: How do certain plants, animals, and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances, and find emergent opportunities? When do new species add value to ecological associations, and when do they become irredeemably destructive? When should we let unruly forms of life run wild, and when should we intervene?…Which creatures are flourishing, and which are failing, at the intersection of divided forces, competing political projects, and diverse market economies? Amid widespread environmental destruction, with radical changes taking place in ecosystems throughout the Americas, where can we find hope? Emergent Ecologies (Duke University Press, 2015) takes readers on an adventure through the Americas stopping over in ecosystems, laboratories, art exhibits, forests, and more in Panama, New York, Maine, Florida, Costa Rica to tell a story about the practices of worldmaking by ants, frogs, fungi, and other ontological amphibians. This is an exuberant and sensitively-written multispecies ethnography that is also a pleasure to read.

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Alfie Bown, “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism” (Zero Books, 2015) Apr 18, 2016

What is enjoyment and what can contemporary critical theory tell us about it? In Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2015), Alfie Bown, a lecturer at Hang Seng Management College and co-editor of Everyday Analysis and the Hong Kong Review of Books, talks through the political potential of new forms of enjoyment. Using Candy Crush Saga, Football Manager, Gangnam Style, Game of Thrones, and the act of reading critical theory itself, the book argues we need to take enjoyment seriously. Enjoyment is understood in relation to work and capitalism, unpacking ideas of productive and unproductive enjoyment and how they might serve or subvert power and control in modern life. The book will be of interest to scholars across philosophy, literary studies, and the social sciences, alongside anyone with a smart phone, tablet or love of the television box set!

Dave OBrien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien

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Sigrid Schmalzer, “Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China” (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Apr 11, 2016

Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) reframes how we understand the relationships between science and politics in history by looking closely at the “unique intersection” of the red and green revolutions in modern China. Thoughtfully integrating a source base that includes interviews, propaganda works, films, memoirs, hand-copied underground novels, and more, Schmalzer offers a history of socialist Chinese agricultural science that is at the same time critical and empathetic. One of the core premises of the book is that “scientific farming meant different things to different people,” and so the chapters offer insights into the experiences of very different people and places in order to offer readers multiple entry-points into this crucial period of the history of science and modernity. The book’s analysis hinges on the importance of a productive binary of tu (here, a constellation of meanings that include “native, Chinese, local, rustic, mass, crude”) and yang (a constellation of “foreign, Western, elite, professional, ivory-tower”), following the work of individuals and groups of various sorts and sizes in navigating, producing, and troubling this binary. The chapters not only offer sensitively-wrought case studies of particular sites and contexts of socialist and post-socialist Chinese history, but also speak directly to a number of key debates and concepts that currently animate the field of STS. This is absolutely first-rate work that is highly recommended for anyone interested in the histories of modern science and/or China.

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Benjamin Castleman, “The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) Apr 03, 2016

Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) urges educators to meet teens on their must-have device.

Author Benjamin Castleman of the University of Virginia shows how text messaging combined with insights from behavioral scienceâ€•more specifically the fields of behavioral economics and social psychologyâ€•can be leveraged to help students complete assignments, perform to their full potential on tests, and choose schools and colleges where they are well positioned for success.

In his own research, Castleman has studied how to use personalized text messages to reduce “summer melt,” in which up to 40 percent of high school graduates who have been accepted to college, mostly from underserved communities, fail to show up for the fall semester.

Behavioral strategies extend beyond texting and even beyond smartphone technology. By focusing on behavioral changes, Castleman demonstrates that small tweaks in how we ask questions, design applications, and tailor reminders can lead to better decision making and have remarkable impacts on student and school success. The 160-Character Solution makes a broader case for employing these behavioral strategies to improve educational outcomes from preschool all the way to college.

John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML, a full-service marketing agency with offices around the globe. He has spent his career applying behavioral science strategies in the marketing and advertising field through direct mail and email, display and .coms, mobile messaging, e-commerce and social media. You can follow on Twitter @Nudgeblog and contact him at nudgeblog@gmail.com.

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Adam Kucharski, “The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling” (Basic Books, 2016) Mar 31, 2016

Adam Kucharski, who won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, has delivered another winner in an area rife with both winners and losers. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling (Basic Books, 2016) is a brilliant, fascinating, and sometimes slightly terrifying look at how math and science are not just conquering gambling, the algorithms that math has devised and the computerized means of implementing them are paradoxically simultaneously removing risk and creating a lot more of it.

Jim Stein is an emeritus professor of mathematics at California State University, Long Beach. As has been noted, the word ’emeritus’ comes from the Latin ‘ex’ — meaning ‘out’ — and ‘meritus’ — meaning ‘ought to be’. Despite that, Jim still teaches a course a semester, either at CSULB or El Camino Community College. He is the author of L.A. Math: Romance, Crime and Mathematics in the City of Angels, Cosmic Numbers: The Numbers That Define the Universe, The Paranormal Equation, How Math Can Save Your Life, The Right Decision, and How Math Can Save the World. He responds to any and all emails addressed to jim.stein@csulb.edu

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Jonathan Donner, “After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet” (MIT Press, 2015) Mar 14, 2016

Thanks to mobile phones, getting online is easier and cheaper than ever. In After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet (MIT Press, 2015), Jonathan Donner challenges the optimistic narrative that mobile phone will finally close the digital divide. How we log on, how long we stay, what we choose to do, what we can do – all are shaped by our environments, resources and digital literacies. After Access examines the implications of the shift to a more mobile, more available Internet throughout the developing world. Donner addresses these implications specifically for socioeconomic development and broad-based inclusion in a global society. He offers a note of caution about the Panglossian views of mobile phones arguing that access and effective use are not the same thing, and the digital world does not run on mobile handsets alone.

Donner, a Senior Director of Research at Caribou Digital, a UK-based consultancy focused on building inclusive digital economies in the developing world. After Access draws on ethnographic and survey research in South Africa and India, as well as the burgeoning literature from the ICT4D (Internet and Communication Technologies for Development) and mobile communication communities. It introduces a conceptual framework for understanding effective use of the Internet by those whose “digital repertoires” contain exclusively mobile devices. In showing that there is no singular internet experience, Donner argues that both the potentialities and constraints of the shift to a more mobile Internet are important considerations for scholars and practitioners interested in internet use in the developing world.

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Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Gut Feminism” (Duke UP, 2015) Mar 07, 2016

Elizabeth A. Wilson‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of science studies and feminist theory. In its introduction, Gut Feminism (Duke University Press, 2015) lays out two major ambitions: it seeks “some feminist theoretical gain in relation to how biological data can be used to think about minded and bodily states,” and seeks “some feminist theoretical gain in relation to thinking about the hostility intrinsic to our politics.” The book shows that the gut is an organ of the mind via an exploration of melancholia, depression, some fascinating psychoanalytic literature, and contemporary conversations and debates about psychopharmaceuticals. Wilson’s book unflattens biology, offering an incredibly helpful way to think about anatomy as an ever-changing site of entanglement that enacts “malleability, heterogeneity, friction, and unpredictability.” Highly recommended!

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Justin E. H. Smith, “Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy” (Princeton UP, 2015) Mar 02, 2016

Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) argues that “in order to understand the forces that shaped thinking about racial difference in early modern philosophy, we must look to the philosophers’ own interest in a scientific classification and physical anthropology, with an eye to the way these projects were influenced by early modern globalization and by the associated projects of global commerce, collection, and systematization of the order of nature.” The resulting book is a thoughtful contribution to both the history of philosophy and science in early modernity, and to the modern history of concepts of race and identity, and is highly recommended to readers and teachers in both fields.

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Jeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015) Feb 22, 2016

What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts that metadata powers our digital society. After defining metadata-data that has the potential to provide information about an object-Pomerantz considers the various kind of metadata. This raw material provides descriptions about individuals and most every other thing in the world. This data allows people, places, and things to be found. According to Pomerantz, metadata has become infrastructural as it plays such a pivotal role about in all of the things we do, yet, it is invisible. This invisible foundational material is created and collected all the time, and has vast implications for governments, corporations, and individuals.

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Carin Berkowitz, “Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Feb 16, 2016

Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philosopher. Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks closely at the involvement of Bell and others in a project of conservative reform in nineteenth century British medical education. We follow Berkowitz not only into the pages of the works that made Bell famous, but also into the classrooms in which Bell advocated a pedagogy that trained hand and eye together and developed his interest in systems of all sorts, including the nerves, education, and display. Readers will learn about the growth of a new genre of medical weeklies that changed the public face of medicine, the founding of new institutions that changed the teaching of medicine, and the controversy over motor and sensory nerves that accompanied major transformations in the medical science of Bell’s lifetime. It is a fascinating story that honors the importance of the history of education in shaping the histories of science and medicine.

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Paul R. Josephson, “Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) Jan 29, 2016

Paul R. Josephson‘s new book explores everyday technologies – fish sticks, sports bras, sugar, bananas, aluminum cans, potatoes, fructose, and more – as technological systems that embody vast social, political, cultural histories within relatively small packages. Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) traces some major themes through a series of fascinating and engagingly written case studies. As readers explore the chapters, we learn that fish sticks (the “ocean’s hot dog”) were created less as a result of consumer demand, and more as a result of over-production thanks to new technologies related to fishing, refrigeration, materials science, the postwar kitchen, and more. We learn about the invention of the sports bra as a story of “reverse gender engineering” that involved the transformation of jock straps. We learn of the colonial and postcolonial histories – of slavery, exploitation, technological innovation – staring back at us every time we look at a banana or an aluminum can. We learn to see French fries and high fructose corn syrup as “self-augmenting technologies.” We learn that there’s nothing strictly “natural” about natural disasters. And we are offered a glimpse into the use of large-scale technologies as symbols of state power in Russia. The book concludes with two more stories – of books and bicycles – that leave us with important lessons to take away from the book after we put it down. Enjoy!

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Dale Jamieson, “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future” (Oxford UP, 2014) Jan 21, 2016

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, NYU) grapples with these questions. The book is a pragmatic philosophical exploration of climate change and the human response to it at the same time that it provides a clear scientific, conceptual, and economic history of the issues involved. Ultimately, the book asks how to “live in productive relationship with the dynamic systems that govern a changing planet” (180). Our conversation covers the obstacles to action on climate change, competing economic approaches to addressing climate change, the needed ethical and moral resources, a reflection on the 2015 Paris talks, and more.

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Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, “Enjoying Machines” (MIT 2015) Jan 06, 2016

When we consider the television, we think not only about how it’s used, but also it’s impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in the West in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was seen as a form of entertainment and enjoyment for the family. Other “technology” that assists with leisure include things like rubber-soled shoes, books, and other digital devices. In their new book, Enjoying Machines (MIT 2015), Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, both scholars in the Stockholm University Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center, the success of a particular technology can be measured by how well it creates pleasure.

The authors argue that pleasure “is fundamentally social in nature,” and that to understand how technology supports leisure it is important to “produce a more sophisticated definition” of enjoyment. To do this Brown and Juhlin embark on an ethnographic investigation of technology and enjoyment that combines the sociological study of activity and the study of human-machine interaction. Over the course of their examination, the authors are careful to consider both the positives – enjoyment – and negatives – addiction- in relation to devices. Ultimately, Enjoying Machines offers a model of enjoyment useful for better understanding how to design useful machines.

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Peter J. Gloviczki, “Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) Dec 30, 2015

Humans have coped with tragedy using ritual and memorials since the Neolithic era. Doka called a memorial a space invested with meaning, “set aside to commemorate an event such as a tragedy.” Memorialization is a ritual of bereavement, the creation of a place, permanent or not, that facilitates the persistence of memory. This space allows for the restructuring of the social network between the living, those who create the memorial, and the dead, those for which the memorial is created.

Memorialization happens in both the analog and digital contexts. In fact, some now decline to recognize a distinction between the on- and offline worlds. In his new book, Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), Peter J. Gloviczki, an assistant professor at Coker College, conceptualizes online memorials as networked remembrance spaces. These social media posts and groups are “immediate, interactive and public and they function across a great distance.” Online memorials are both user-driven – the users drive the conversations and are responsible for keeping up the sites – and story-driven – the sites are places where users tell stories related to the subject(s) of the memorial.

Thorough, fact-based journalism plays an important role in the maintenance of online memorials. According to Gloviczki, news reports provide the foundation for the discussion of events, as well as being central to making sense of those events. So significant is journalism for online memorials that, in some cases, a memorial will cease once coverage of that event ends. But many online memorials continue long after media interests concludes. The persistence of these sites demonstrates how online memorials “disrupt the notion of a finite end.”

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Nathan Altice, “I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer-Entertainment System Platform” (MIT Press, 2015) Dec 23, 2015

The genre of “platform studies” offers both researchers and readers more than an examination of the technical machinations of a computing system. Instead, the family of methodologies presents a humanist exploration of digital media from the perspective of the platform itself. That is, this approach contemplates the social, economic and cultural influence and significance of the technology. Although more formally identified by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort in 2007 at the Digital Arts and Cultures Conference, the decades old platform studies discipline affords an understanding of the material manifestations of culture and creative work produced by computing systems.

In his new book, I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer Entertainment System Platform (MIT Press, 2015), Nathan Altice, a digital media creator and scholar, studies the NES system and the Family Computer, it’s precursor. More than considering the NES as a single entity, the author investigates the platform as a “network of objects and texts,” that go beyond a “stable configuration of hardware and software.” In this way, Altice dives deep to unearth the code and design decisions that shape the creative affordances of the NES, how users choose to play using the platform, and how the system was received outside of Japan.

The NES’s cultural reception is foundational for grasping a key theme throughout the book, that of “translation.” For Altice, translation produces errors – “new meanings, new expressions, new bodies, and new objects.” That is, the flaws in hardware and software, including the translation of language from Japanese to English, are not necessarily negative objects to be overcome. Instead, these bugs in the machine add to the performance of the games and the platform, and have very real social, economic, and cultural consequences.

I Am Error is one book in the Platform Studies series from MIT Press.

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Natasha Myers, “Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter” (Duke UP, 2015) Dec 21, 2015

After reading Natasha Myers’s new book, the world begins to dance in new ways. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is a sensory ethnography of protein crystallographers that is based on five years of fieldwork conducted between 2003-2008 at a research university on the East Coast of the US. “Protein modelers are the scientists to watch in order to see what forms of life and what materialities are coming to matter in the twenty-first-century life sciences,” according to Myers, and the book bears out this statement. Those forms of life and materialities emerge from kinesthetic and affective entanglements created and navigated by the scientists in the course of their modeling work. Understanding that work – in part thanks to a thoughtful exploration of the notion of “rendering” that unfolds over the course of the book – helps us understand the ways that scientific knowledge is fundamentally embodied and gestural, and refigures scientific cultures as performance cultures. This is an exciting, inspiring book that is simultaneously a careful study of a particular local scientific culture, and a model for how to re-enchant our knowledge of the living world.

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Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 ) Dec 15, 2015

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke.

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Anna L. Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (Princeton UP, 2015) Dec 06, 2015

Anna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “what manages to live despite capitalism.” Tsing’s book is based on fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2011 in the US, Japan, Canada, China, and Finland, plus interviews with scientists, foresters, and matsutake traders in those places and in Denmark, Sweden, and Turkey. The book is an exemplar of the kind of work that can come out of thoughtful and extended scholarly collaboration, here resulting from Tsing’s work with the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. The book treats matsutake mushrooms as objects and companions that are good to think with, offering an exuberant picture of what it might look like to live “in our messes” as parts of contaminated and contaminating multispecies worlds and assemblages. Tsing calls for renewed attention to the importance of “arts of noticing,” of curiosity, of play, of polyphony, of adventure. And at the same time as it accomplishes all of this, The Mushroom at the End of the World is deeply committed to telling stories, taking us into moments in the lives of individual smellers and sellers and pickers and tasters and bosses and crusaders. It is a wonderful work of ethnography that, in many ways, transcends genre and discipline.

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Stephen Macekura, “Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century” (Cambridge UP, 2015) Dec 04, 2015

Today, sustainability is all the rage. But when and why did the idea of sustainable development emerge, and how has its meaning changed over time?

Stephen Macekura’s new book, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores this question by connecting three of the most important aspects of the twentieth century: decolonization, the rise of environmentalism, and the pursuit of economic development and modernization in the Third World. Macekura, who is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Indiana University, demonstrates how environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attempted to promote environmental protection in the post-colonial world, then, after failing to do so, challenged the economic development approaches of the United States, World Bank, and United Nations. The book reveals how environmental activists initially conceived of “sustainable development” as a way to link environmental protection with Third World concerns about equality and justice in the global economy, but how, over time, the phrase’s meaning moved far away from this initial conception.

In addition to exploring the idea of “sustainable development,” Macekura also examines the growth and limits of the environmental movement’s power. He pays close attention to how international political disputes have scuttled major global treaties over issues such as climate change; he also documents the evolution of international development politics and policy since 1945. In sum, Of Limits and Growth offers a new history of sustainability by elucidating the global origins of environmental activism, the ways in which environmental activists challenged development approaches worldwide, and how environmental non-state actors reshaped the United States’ and World Bank’s development policies.

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Nick Hopwood, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Nov 30, 2015

Nick Hopwood‘s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the question of how images succeed or fail. Hopwood is Reader in History of Science at Cambridge University, and creator on the online exhibition “Making Visible Embryos,” which display some of the images from the book.

Hopwood’s ambitious book retraces the social life of drawings of embryos first produced in 1868 by the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel. The book follows the turbulent travels of the images across 150 years and three countries. Some of the perennial controversy surrounding the images centered on debates about Darwinism, for in them Haeckel drew the development of human embryos alongside that of other animals and, in retrospect, seemed to illustrate his famous claim that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” But Hopwood argues that, while Haeckel’s reputation has continued to suffer from repeated allegations of fraud, his images have actually thrived on controversy, appearing in 2010, for example, on the cover of Nature magazine. Hopwood’s far-reaching and intricate analysis explains how one of the most controversial images in the history of science–namely, Haeckel’s embryo grid–has also been one of its most successful. The book is an essential study in the history of images and is itself a masterpiece of visual argument.

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Jorg Matthias Determann, “Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East” (I. B. Tauris, 2015) Nov 29, 2015

Jorg Matthias Determann‘s new book looks at the history of modern biology in the Arab Gulf monarchies, focusing on the treatment of evolution and related concepts in the publications of biologists who worked in the Gulf states. Researching Biology and Evolution in the Gulf States: Networks of Science in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2015) begins by describing a fatwa against Pokemon and opens out into an introduction of the sensitive nature of discussions related to evolution and creation in the Gulf. The ensuing chapters approach and answer a major question: given this sensitivity, what enabled scientists to nevertheless employ evolution in the political, religious, social, and natural environments of the Gulf? At least part of the answer lies in the importance of networks between scientists, plants, princes, local tribes, European businesses, animals, and other historical actors. The history of those networks – and the botanical, zoological, ornithological, and paleontological research they enabled – is a transnational and transregional one, and looks carefully at concerns with conservation, climate change, and economies at multiple levels. Determann’s book avoids telling this story in terms of the common tropes of decline and stagnation, and seeks instead to “go beyond the wholesale and often negative views of scientific production in the contemporary Arab world.” Enjoy!

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Dan Bouk, “How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Nov 23, 2015

Who made life risky? In his dynamic new book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historian Dan Bouk argues that starting in the late nineteenth century, the life-insurance industry embedded risk-making within American society and American psyches. Bouk is assistant professor of history at Colgate University, and his new book shows how insurers categorized individuals and grouped social classes in ways that assigned monetary value to race, class, lifestyles, and bodies. With lively prose, Bouk gives historical context and character to the rise of the “statistical individual” from the Guided Age to the New Deal. Bouk’s primary argument is that risks did not always already exist, nor was risk invented by the medical establishment. Instead, the threat (and reality) of economic crisis helped insurers to create risk as a commodity, and eventually to control the lives it measured. As Bouk phrases it in the interview, “Insurers improved their bottom line by improving Americans’ bottom lines.” Bouk invites readers critically to reflect upon how we have come to see ourselves through a statistical lens in our daily lives– an issue of continued relevance in the age of big data and vast analytical capabilities.

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Megan Prelinger, “Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age” (Norton, 2015) Nov 19, 2015

Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can be extrapolated from a close look at the associated graphic art?” Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W. W. Norton, 2015) treats the commercial and advertising art of the mid-twentieth century as an archive to explore the social and cultural engagement with electronics technologies during a particularly vibrant moment for the American graphic commercial arts. Incorporating text and image as sources to be read, Prelinger’s book moves from the beginnings of FM technology and vacuum tubes, to televisions and quartz crystals, to transistors and circuit boards, to digital computing and into space. Of special interest is the attention Prelinger pays to to the importance of graphic designers and staff artists at major labs and research centers. The book models an innovative and inspiring way to read graphic images as historical documents, and the story is a pleasure to read for specialists and non-experts alike.

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Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015) Nov 15, 2015

By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed individuals to access masses of information faster than ever before. What, then, has been the effect of digital tools on research practices? In their new book Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press, 2015), Eric T. Meyer, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Ralph Schroeder, Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, explore how digital tools have transformed research. To do this, Meyer and Schroeder use case studies to examine how new technology has, and continues to, change research in various fields, and what this means for the future of e-research.

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Peter A. Shulman, “Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) Nov 09, 2015

Peter A. Shulman‘s new book is a fascinating history of the emergence of a connection between energy (in the form of coal), national interests, and security in nineteenth century America. Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) focuses on three groups who helped shape America’s relationship between energy and security: naval administrators and officers, politicians and policy makers, and scientists and engineers. In clear and persuasive prose, the book advances three main arguments that collectively reframe the way we understand the historiography of energy. First, Americans didn’t begin thinking about energy in terms of security around oil in the early twentieth century, but instead around coal in the nineteenth. Second, the security need for distant coaling stations in the late nineteenth century didn’t catalyze the emergence of an American island empire around 1898. Instead, it was the other way around: the establishment of an American island empire created new demands for coal and coaling stations. Third, technological change was integral to American foreign relations. Shulman’s book shows all of these and much more, in a story that moves from steam power and the postal system, to the development of notions of an economy of time and space, to Commodore Perry, to President Lincoln’s interest in setting up a colony of free blacks to the calculation of great circle routes, to the study of logistics in early twentieth century classrooms, to the Teapot Dome scandal, and beyond. The conclusion of the book discusses some of the most important ways that the arguments of the book are still relevant today, and pays special attention to the ideal of energy independence.

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Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Nov 04, 2015

Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead body to sites of dissection across the city, after which we are introduced to four anatomists – charter members of the Paris Academy of Sciences – who will act as focal points for the rest of the story.The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2015) opens up Parisian bodies – human and animal, dead and alive – to argue that dissection played a major role in the development of experimental methods in seventeenth century science. In Guerrini’s hands, the history of science and medicine in early modern Paris was simultaneously a history of fairy tales and opera, dogs and chameleons, artists and knife-makers, labyrinth-making and oratory. It is a fascinating book that is a must-read for historians of anatomy and of early modern science and medicine, and will be accessible and gripping for readers well beyond those fields.

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Colin Milburn, “Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter” (Duke UP, 2015) Oct 27, 2015

Colin Milburn’s wonderful new book looks carefully and imaginatively at the relationship between nanotechnology and play. Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) considers the many ways in which the research methods of nanotech and related fields blend with the practices of gaming, fiction, and fantasy in a world where scientists become gamers and gamers become scientists, a world filled with nanocars, nanotoilets, nanotaurs (nano-scale Minotaurs!), and nanopants. Milburn explores the spaces of this world, from islands to Second Life to a NanoCity. Incorporating chapters that are counted in binary (0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, etc.) and clues to a game hidden inside the narrative (!), Milburn’s book embodies the kind of play that the book explores. It’s a fun and fabulous work that blends literature, STS, and history.

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Eugene Raikhel, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr, “Somatosphere.net” Oct 13, 2015

Somatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.” Founded in July 2008, Somatosphere has evolved into an innovative platform for collaborative experiments, interdisciplinary exchange, and intellectual community. As such, it reveals how websites–and the communities of discourse that create and read them–have become important sites of intellectual production, authorship, and exchange. In editorial departments such as “In the Journals” and “Web Roundup,” authors distill recent scholarly contributions across disciplines and spaces. More recently, the editors have incubated creative digital endeavors such as Commonplaces, a “collaborative cabinet” that itemizes the technological present, with entries devoted to topics such as the petri dish, the brain, and the waiting room. Book Forum invites commentary from a range of authors, representing not only different scholarly disciplines but offering intriguing, timely, and often original angles on recent important texts. Thanks to its editorial vision and the palpable energy of its contributors, Somatosphere has become informative, creative, and essential reading.

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James E. Strick, “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” (Harvard UP, 2015) Oct 06, 2015

“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!”

The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A “midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s” who was famed for his work on the science of orgasm, was widely maligned as a charlatan and pseudoscientist, did extensive work on the science of cancer, had his books and instruments publicly burned by the US government, and died in prison: it’s hard not to find Wilhelm Reich fascinating. In his new book, James E. Strick reminds us that Reich was also a diligent and accomplished laboratory scientist whose work has potentially important implications for the modern biosciences. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard University Press, 2015) takes readers into the making of this modern scientist, from his early relationships with Freud and dialectical materialism, to his work on the orgasm as a kind of “electrophysiological discharge,” to his research into potential treatments for cancer. The book concludes by considering why understanding Reich’s scientific work matters for us today, including a brief introduction to some recent experimental work related to Reich’s research. It is an absorbing story that’s also a pleasure to read, and pays careful attention to Reich’s scientific work while still translating it in clear terms for non-specialist readers.

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Joseph M. Reagle, “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” (MIT Press, 2015) Oct 02, 2015

What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to material created by others? Joseph M. Reagle, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, examines these online pontificators and provocateurs in his new book Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web (MIT Press, 2015). Reagle categorizes the different kinds of comments, thereby organizing the different kinds of commenters into groups. In addition, Reagle considers both the function and value of comments in society. Just listen.

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Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, “Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship” (Oxford UP, 2015) Sep 28, 2015

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is an assistant professor of new media at Fordham University. Baldwin-Philippi’s book fits into a larger Oxford series on Digital Politics which has been featured on the podcast in the past. She uses an ethnographic approach focused on understanding how political campaigns in 2010 had incorporated various technologies. She also collects original data on specific digital strategies, especially social media. But the book is not just about technology; Baldwin-Philippi tries to understand how campaigns shape citizenship and democracy through the tools they use.

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Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee, “Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine” (Oxford UP, 2015) Sep 26, 2015

Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms of emerging fora for academic publications. In Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2015), Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee bring together a range of authors to outline a new research programme. Alongside individual essays that range from the allocation of transplant organs, questions of plagiarism in science, the ownership of generically modified organisms though to desire and neuroscience, the book points to a new way to think through questions of valuation. As a result its importance moves beyond an STS audience to establish value practices as a vital framework for understanding contemporary life.

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Federico Marcon, “The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan” (U of Chicago, 2015) Sep 22, 2015

Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces practices and practitioners of natural knowledge from the late-sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, arguing that the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) saw Japan desacralizing the natural environment, and eventually developing a way to systematically study natural objects that was” surprisingly similar to European natural history without being directly influenced by it.” Marcon’s study traces the objectification of Japan’s natural species, showing how plants and animals were transformed into physical and intellectual commodities and leaving a fascinating pictorial archive that developed as part of this commodification. The book charts transformations not only of natural objects and studies of them in Japan, but also of the professional and social identity of scholars, the disciplinary identity of the field, the popular engagement with natural history, and the illustration of the natural world. The chapters are framed by epigraphs from some of the intellectual and philosophical touchstones of Marcon’s book – including Horkheimer, Adorno, and others – and the text weaves readings and echoes of these thinkers into inspiring readings of Japanese history. It is a must-read for historians of early modern science, natural history, and Tokugawa studies!

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Ryan Craig, "College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education" (Palgrave McMillan, 2015) Sep 21, 2015

AirBnB has dramatically altered the landscape for the hotel, tourism, and real estate sectors. Uber and Lyft have done the same to transportation. But, how come we haven't seen the same in American higher education? Ryan Craig, Managing Director of University Ventures, engages that question in his new book, entitled College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave McMillan, 2015). The author is critical of the current higher educational system in the US, which he says focuses too much on the "four Rs": Rankings, Research, Real Estate, and Rah! (college sports) rather than on teaching and learning. For this reason, students graduate (or don't) without the skills needed to actually get a job. In the book, Craig suggests that universities should unbundle the various services they offer and allow students to choose things that they need or want. He compares this unbundling to the current trend in cable providers, as many people are leaving behind the mammoth packages with 300 channels and instead pairing down their wants to more specific options, especially via the web. We haven't really seen this in higher education, yet, but this book shows that the current system could be moving in that direction.

Ryan Craig joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. You can find him on Twitter at @ryancraiguv. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd.

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Dana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Sep 15, 2015

Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: “a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state.” That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were waged that challenged participants to rethink the most basic elements of a notion of society: What were the “needs” that must be fulfilled in order to keep persons productive? Were those needs physical and/or psychological? What were the characteristics of a model “person,” anyway? The chapters of the book narrate the traces that these debates left on the bodies of workers, the pages of history, and the basic notions (like “minimum wage,” like “citizen”) that make up modern conceptions of civil society. Highly recommended!

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Kristin Peterson, “Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria” (Duke UP, 2015) Sep 10, 2015

Kristin Peterson‘s new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmaceutical landscape. Peterson pays special attention to the Idumota market, an area that was strictly residential in the 1970s and has since become one of the largest West African points of drug distribution for pharmaceuticals and other materials from all over the world. Peterson looks at the consequences of major local and global historical factors in that transformation, including civil war in the late 1960s and migration that followed, a 1970s oil boom and bust, and changes in the global pharmaceutical market in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, Nigeria was deep into an economic crisis that had profound implications for the production, circulation, and marketing of pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry remade itself by becoming tied to the speculative marketplace, with wide-ranging implications that included the rise of new professional relationships & market formations in Nigeria, new relationships with firms in China and India, new forms of speculation, and new questions about the ontology of markets. Peterson demonstrates that these transformations continue to have important consequences for the bodies of individual Nigerians, including major problems with drug resistance and a mismatch between existing drug therapies and existing diseases. The book avoids the usual discourse of corporate greed, instead focusing on the “structural logics of pharmaceutical capital through which corporate practices can be understood.” It is a timely and fascinating study.

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Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Sep 04, 2015

Sandra Harding‘s new book Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (University of Chicago Press, 2015) raises new questions about two central concepts in STS – objectivity and diversity – and in doing so it allows us to animate them in new kinds of relationships and shows that objectivity and certain forms of diversity can be mutually supportive. Harding does this in two major ways: by considering specific cases where science has been shaped by social values and interests and drawing conclusions about the “logical positivist legacy” from them; and by locating these issues within particular historical contexts. Though the “social” tends to be treated as an impediment to scientific research rather than a source of new resources and pathways, social and political movements have deeply shaped the practices and philosophy of science. Ch. 1 offers a historical context in which to understand the approaches that dominate today’s analytic philosophy of science, describing and analyzing the ways in which the social conditions for scientific research and its philosophy were created in two eras of significant institutional change: the postwar era of the 1940s-1950s, and the 1960s-1970s. Three science studies research fields that have emerged since the 1960s – science studies, postcolonial STS, and feminist STS – show that sciences and their societies co-produce and co-constitute each other and they deeply influence the project of the book and its remaining chapters. Ch. 2 – 7 explore six major arguments for the claim that the “social norm of diversity and the epistemic norm of objectivity can provide mutual support for each other” and they introduce helpful case studies that both illustrate Harding’s arguments and model a methodology for bringing about the kind of integration of philosophy and socially-aware STS that the book advocates. It’s a wonderful, clear read and is highly assignable in undergraduate and graduate courses devoted to science, policy, philosophy, and/or STS!

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Liz McFall, “Devising Consumption Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending” (Routledge, 2014) Sep 02, 2015

The role of financial services in individuals’ and communities’ everyday lives is more important than ever. In Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending (Routledge, 2014), Liz McFall charts the rise of one particular element of financial services, door-to-door sales, to understand the role of insurance and credit in society. In doing so McFall aims to ‘ventriloquise the lives and consumption practices of the silent poor’, as well as charting a the history of a very neglected element of the story of finance’s role in contemporary life. The book contains a wealth of historical data, alongside a theoretical engagement with the meaning of ‘the device’ within current social theoretical literature. Moreover the book offers reflections on the role and workings of markets and states, both with regard to finance and more broadly to the government of social life. The combination of these perspectives offers an important new lens through which to understand the sociology of consumption and thus, more generally, the social world itself.

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Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Aug 30, 2015

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were “enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally.” As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer’s account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education.

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Shellen Wu, “Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920” (Stanford UP, 2015) Aug 25, 2015

Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2015) brings readers into the nineteenth century industrialization of China, when coal became the “fuel of a ‘new’ imperialism.” Wu’s book asks how China came to matter in a new modern world order of the nineteenth century that was built on a perception that coal was a measure of a country’s standing in the world. In answering that question, Empires of Coal looks carefully at the importance of mining (including state management and legal regulation thereof) to the political economy of late imperial China. As geology developed into an independent discipline separate from geography, it help colonizers cement their power by aiding efforts to extract valuable mineral deposits from the colonies. Wu traces the archive produced in this context as coal became crucial not just to foreign interest in China, but also to China’s interest in mineral resources, exploring a wide range of maps, translations, letters, essays, journals, textbooks, and other materials. The book also situates this story within a history of mineral sciences, scientists, and engineers in China. It will be required reading for anyone interested in the entanglement of science, technology, and modernity in global history.

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Nicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015) Aug 25, 2015

Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, 2015) looks carefully and imaginatively at the geography of undersea cable networks, paying special attention to the materiality of network infrastructure and its relationships with the histories of the Pacific. The book revises what we think we know about the infrastructure of global networks: they are not “wireless,” but wired; not rhizomatic and distributed, but semicentralized; not deterritorialized, but “territorially entrenched”; not resilient, but precarious and vulnerable; and not urban, but rural and aquatic. After providing a broad overview of three major eras of cable development – the copper cables of the 1850s-1950s, the coaxial cables of the 1950s-1980s, and the fiber-optic cables of the 1990s on, in each case focusing on the importance of security, insulation, and interconnection – Starosielski analyzes how cables have become embedded into existing natural and cultural environments in a number of specific sites in Hawai’i, California, New Zealand, British Columbia, Tahiti, Guam, Fiji, Yap, and beyond. Countering the rhetorical pull of terms like “flow” that tend to provoke an approach to media that is deterritorializing and dematerializing, Starosielski instead turns readers’ attention to the ecological dimension of media and the fixed, material investments grounding today’s communication networks. It is a brilliant book that deserves a wide readership.

Don’t miss the website that is woven together with the book: www.surfacing.in.

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Stefan Ecks, “Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India” (NYU Press, 2013) Aug 19, 2015

Drugs exist that are meant to help people feel better. The doctors who prescribe them might believe that they work, while their patients do not. In explaining the drugs to their patients, should those doctors use the medical terminology they themselves use – which might not be immediately understandable to their patients – or should they translate the description into terms more comfortable and familiar to the patient? And what are the practical and ethical consequences of each decision? Stefan Ecks‘ new book carefully considers these problems in the context of health-related practices in modern Calcutta. Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India (NYU Press, 2013) looks successively at the different and overlapping medical and healing contexts that together make up a significant part of the medical marketplace in Calcutta. Ch. 1 treats popular notions that include the importance of the belly as the “somatic center of good health,” the power of the mind to regulate good health, and the connection between modernity and pollution as causes of illness. Ch. 2 looks at Ayurvedic practices in Calcutta. It reflects on some of the most important ways that Ayurveda is changing in India – especially at the levels of practitioner training, language, and the patient-physician relationship – despite the fact that the centrality of food and digestion has remained constant. Ch. 3 looks closely at homeopathy, the second most popular type of medicine in Bengal, and focuses on the principles, histories, and pluralities of homeopathic practices in Calcutta. Ch. 4 looks at the ways that Calcutta psychiatrists position themselves with respect to popular beliefs about psychopharmaceuticals, general physicians, practitioners of non-biomedical treatments, and the pharmaceutical industry. This chapter pays special attention to how Bengali doctors use metaphors to help patients understand and respond to psychiatric diagnoses, with comparisons to nature, the Ganges river, fairytales, everyday over-the-counter drugs, diabetes, and food. The conclusion explores a key argument of the book, proposing that “patients’ suspicions of psychopharmaceuticals are based on suspicions of biomedicine’s ‘magic bullet’ model of drug effects,” looking at the implications of this conclusion, and considering the possible broader impacts of this study beyond Calcutta. It’s a fascinating study of potential interest to historians and anthropologists of medicine and healing, as well as readers interested in learning more about the medical marketplace of modern India and anyone interested in modern psychopharmaceuticals.

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Candis Callison, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke UP, 2014) Aug 14, 2015

Candis Callison‘s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious groups, economic collectives, and others shape and influence public engagement around the issue. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) looks carefully at the discourses and practices of five collectives within and through which climate change becomes meaningful: Arctic indigenous representatives of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, corporate social responsibility activists in Boston, American evangelical Christians, science journalists, and science policy experts. Callison explores meaning-making in these contexts in a series of beautifully written chapters that collectively narrate the forms of expertise and translation through which climate change comes to matter. The book pays special attention to the ways that these case studies can inform efforts to mobilize greater collaboration across multiple epistemologies, ethical imperatives, vernaculars, and social norms. It’s an insightful, compelling, and enjoyable read!

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Alexandra Minna Stern, “Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) Aug 10, 2015

Due in part to lobbying efforts on behalf of the human genome project, human genes tend to be thought of in light of the present–genetic components of human disease and differential risks associated with genetic individuals–before the future, what gets passed on to later generations. However, public understanding of genetics did not merely radiate from laboratories, as Alexandra Minna Stern‘s book, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University, 2012) shows. Before the age of genetic sequencing and mass-produced tests, physicians from various specialties provided genetic counseling on an ad-hoc basis, most of which took the form of reproductive advice. Medical genetics had only been established in the 1960s, with the shadow of eugenics still looming large over a field that was now more inclined toward description of heritable conditions than prescription of reproductive sanctions and sterilization. The founding of the first master’s program in genetic counseling in 1969 established the institutional and intellectual basis for a new kind of health care professional, one that would further the reorientation of medical genetics toward patient-centered care.

Stern’s book connects this emergent professional identity to the broader history of genetic and eugenic programs in the United States. So, while this is a history focused on how the distinct profession of genetic counseling emerged as an alternative to traditional medical authority, it is firmly situated within the conflicts that have persistently plagued the development and application of human genetic knowledge. This orientation toward fundamental tensions is reflected by the book’s structure. While she begins with a historical overview of genetic counseling as a profession, the rest of the book is organized around issues; genetic risk and the questionable efficacy of disease apprehension; the politics of race inherent in population knowledge; the fundamental role played by disability in the understanding of inherited disorders; the gender politics of genetic counseling as a challenge to the medical establishment; therapeutic ethics; and the emergence of prenatal testing.

This highly readable whirlwind tour through the complex ethical and historical landscape of genetic counseling rewards those new to the history of genetics by virtue of its accessibility, along with those more familiar through the vast amounts of new source material it blends in seamlessly with broader frames. If you enjoy this book, look out for a new edition of Eugenic Nation, Stern’s first book on the politics of eugenics.

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Janet Vertesi, “Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Aug 10, 2015

Janet Vertesi‘s fascinating new book is an ethnography of the Mars Rover mission that takes readers into the practices involved in working with the two robotic explorers Spirit and Opportunity. Based on two years of immersive ethnography from 2006-2008, Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the visuality of the mission, exploring “how scientists and engineers on Earth work with the digital images” sent by their robots to make sense of Mars and to work together to explore it. Vertesi proposes a way of understanding image-making practices as a kind of teamwork: learning to see like a rover, here, is an embodied, skilled, social achievement. Building on Wittgenstein’s notion of seeing as, Vertesi conceptualizes these imaging practices in terms of an analytic framework of drawing as: the Rover scientists “use digital tools to draw Mars as consisting of different kinds of materials or surfaces, with implications for future viewings and for team relations.” From mapping Mars to robot funerals, it’s a wonderful study for readers interested in space exploration, visual studies, sociology, and STS alike!

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Eva Hemmungs Wirten, “Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information” (U of Chicago, 2015) Aug 01, 2015

When we study the history of a famous scientific figure – especially one that has gone on to become a cultural icon – we are dealing not just with a person, but also with an identity or series of identities that have been constructed over time. Eva Hemmungs Wirten‘s new book looks carefully at the work that has gone into the making of Marie Curie (1867-1934) as an individual, a celebrity, an icon, and ultimately a brand. Three motifs that thread through the narrative of Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and they each form the basis for one of its chapters: the impact of intellectual property on science and research; the role of celebrity culture in shaping the image of the scientist; and the “question of how to organize scientific information as part of the modern infrastructure of knowledge.” It’s a compellingly argued book that’s also a pleasure to read.

For videos of two of the duels discussed in the book, check out the following links!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QlUw1k0ItE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rElNQuBvFeQ

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Raf De Bont, “Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Jul 24, 2015

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this oversight, turning our attention to the importance of biological field stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in generating new scientific practices, theories, and networks. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the German- and French-speaking scientific community in Europe, looking at a number of influential case studies that collectively embody what de Bont calls a “station movement” in this period. Exploring the relationship between these field stations and a notion of “experimentalism” embraced therein, de Bont usefully undermines a tendency to focus on laboratories as sites of experimentation in the history of science. The stations ranged in kind from very technologically sophisticated marine labs to cabins in the woods, from urban Naples to the isolated beaches of France to the birdlands of East Prussia. Some of the practices cultivated at these sites spread into a wider political and intellectual economy, transforming disciplines and spaces of inquiry and education in the process. It’s a fascinating study that offers readers a more robust and complex understanding of the spaces of modern science and their entangled histories.

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Jonathan Coopersmith, “Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) Jul 17, 2015

Jonathan Coopersmith‘s new book takes readers through the century-and-a-half-long history of the fax machine and the technologies that shaped and were shaped by it, from Alexander Bain’s 1843 patent to the computer-based faxing of the end of the 20thcentury. Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) chronicles the transformations of fax wrought by a range of industries and technologies in the context of world wars and global economic changes. In Coopersmith’s able hands, the history of the fax machine substantively informs a number of fields and disciplines that might not seem immediately related to it: these include visual studies (as newspapers and the military helped drive the development of fax markets and technology thanks to the need for rapid transfer of images in times of war and beyond) and East Asian studies (as fax machines can be traced through the history of modern homes and businesses in Japan). Coopersmith tells a story of fax as a story of repeated failures that were nevertheless productive and germinal, whether they resulted from competition from other technologies and industries, compatibility problems in a fracturing market, or foundation-laying for the acceptance of the email and internet technologies that would ultimately surpass it. It’s a fascinating and elegantly told story of a technology that was, for many years, a constant element of the living and working spaces of many of our lives.

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Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015) Jul 08, 2015

According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredible women, Meredith K. Ray‘s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks both at women’s practical engagements with science and with their literary engagements with natural philosophy.

Ch. 1 brings us to the Romagna, and to the formidable Caterina Sforza’s experiments with alchemical recipes as compiled in a manuscript that exists today in only a single manuscript copy. Both recipes and secrets were forms of currency in this context, and Ch. 2 looks at the vogue for printed “books of secrets” in sixteenth century Italy. This chapter pays special attention to the influential Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont (1555) and the Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese, while also exploring the influence of books of secrets on other early modern literary genres including vernacular treatises, dialogues, and letter collections. Ch. 3 look at the literature of debate over women, or querelle des femmes that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looking particularly closely at the intertwining discourses about women and science in Moderata Fonte’s writing of chivalric romance and dialogue, and in Lucrezia Marinella’s epic poetry and pastoral writing. Ch. 4 moves us to Padua and Rome, where women had begun, by the early seventeenth century, to participate in scientific discourse in more formal ways. Here, Ray looks closely at Camilla Erculiani’s letters on natural philosophy (1584) that defended women’s aptitude for science, and at her networking with scientific communities in Poland and her eventual questioning by the Inquisition. The chapter then turns to Margherita Sarrocchi’s work, her epic poem Scanderbeide, and her fascinating relationship with Galileo. It is a fascinating book that will be of interest to readers eager to learn more about the history of science, literature, and/or women in early modernity. If you listen closely to the interview, you’ll also hear me comparing Caterina Sforza to Doritos. Enjoy!

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James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) Jul 03, 2015

James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) is a fascinating exploration of books and their readers during a moment of intense transformation in British society. Secord brings us into a period of the nineteenth century when transformations in publishing and an expanded reading public helped create a wide-ranging conversation about science and its possible futures. Out of this utopian moment several works emerged that reflected on the practices and prospects of science, and Secord guides us through seven of them in turn: the dialogues of Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel, the polemic of Charles Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, John Herschel’s moralizing Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Mary Somerville’s mathematical On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, George Combe’s phrenological The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, and Thomas Carlyle’s bizarre and wonderful Sartor Resartus. In each case, Secord pays careful attention to the physicality of books and the ways that their readers create and transform them. In addition to being great fun to read, the book will also be helpful for teachers putting together material for undergraduate lecture courses on the history of science and/or book history, and will find a happy home on syllabi for upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminars in the history of books and reading, the sciences and modernity, and many others.

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Jonathan Eig, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” (Norton, 2014) Jul 03, 2015

Jonathan Eig is a New York Times best-selling author of four books and former journalist for the Wall Street Journal. His book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2014) gives us a lively narrative history of the development and marketing of the birth control pill. He presents us with four risk-taking outsiders whose path became intertwined in the pursuit of a reliable and simple contraceptive. The feminist Margaret Sanger, in her campaign for the rights of women, sought a reliable birth control method as a means to sexual and social liberation. The genius scientist Gregory Pincus’s research stretched the boundaries of law and ethics and tied him to the business interest of Searle pharmaceuticals. The wealthy socialite Katharine McCormick’s singular focus and funding kept the research going. The handsome promoter John Rock, a Catholic infertility doctor, was willing to go against his church’s teaching and provide untested drugs to desperate patients. The story begins in the radical and sexually freewheeling Greenwich Village of the early twentieth century. Eig follows Sanger’s crusade for birth control information, cultural change, scientific victories and defeats, and the marketing of what became the first FDA-approved contraceptive pill in 1960. This is a well-researched and riveting story of four exceptional people and a revolution in the intimate lives of women and men. The birth control pill forever changed how we think about marriage, sexuality, and parenting.

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M. Alper Yalcinkaya, “Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Jun 15, 2015

What were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science?

In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. Alper Yalcinkaya‘s new book Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015) introduces the history of science as discussed and debated by nineteenth-century Turkish-speaking Muslim Ottomans in Istanbul. The book compellingly argues that these discussions and debates were not so much about the nature of science than the characteristics of the “man of science” and his relationship to Ottoman identity. In the course of YalÃ§inkaya’s study, readers also learn about the economic and political transformations of nineteenth century Ottoman society, the changes wrought by the gradual integration of the Ottoman Empire into the world capitalist system, and the consequences of those changes for the Ottoman state and its relationship to education and the press. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the entangled histories of science and modernity, and the ways that particular forms of identity and subjectivity emerged from inscriptions of that entanglement. I especially recommend it to readers paying special attention to the histories of the press, language, and the state as they are bound up with nineteenth century science and technology.

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Jenifer Van Vleck, “Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy” (Harvard UP, 2013) Jun 14, 2015

[Re-posted with permission from Who Makes Cents?] Today’s guest discusses the history of aviation and how this provides a lens to interpret the history of capitalism and U.S. foreign relations across the twentieth century. Amongst other topics, Jenifer Van Vleck tells us how the airline industry helped solve various political and logistical challenges for the U.S. government during World War II and how the airlines relied on the government and vice-versa.

Jenifer Van Vleck is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. She is author of Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Harvard University Press, 2013).

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Nick Sousanis, “Unflattening” (Harvard UP, 2015) Jun 12, 2015

Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) uses the medium of comics to explore “flatness of sight” and help readers think and work beyond it by opening up new perceptive possibilities. It proposes that we think about unflattening as a “simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing,” and beautifully embodies what it can look like to make that happen. Readers will find thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and constraints afforded by working and thinking with different kinds of verbal and visual language, including a consideration of comics as “an amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments,” and some wonderful work on storytelling and imagination. The book includes a wonderful “Notes” section that offers some background on the inspiration behind many of the images (including Flatland, Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, Deleuze & Guattari, and many others) a bibliography for further reading, and a series of maps of the structure of the book when it was a work-in-progress. It’s a fabulous book that is a pleasure to read and deserves a wide readership.

For more on Nick’s work on Unflattening and beyond, check out his website: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. For listeners and readers interested in teaching with the book, check out this site: http://scholarlyvoices.org/unflattening/index.html

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Charis Thompson, “Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research” (MIT Press, 2013) Jun 08, 2015

Charis Thompson‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “ethical choreography” of the consolidation of human embryonic stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century, drawing important implications for the possible futures of stem cell research by looking carefully at its past and developing an approach to what Thompson calls “good science.” The book compellingly argues that “a high level of political attention to the ethics of the life sciences and biomedicine…is a good thing for science and democracy,” especially as we have now reached “the end of the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research.”

Part I of the book (Stem Cell Biopolitics) explores early attention to the embryo debate. Ch. 2 looks at stem cell research as it’s widely understood to engage ethical concerns, describing the “pro-curial frame” of stem cell research in the period under scrutiny, when promoting stem cell innovation involved aspirations to be pro-cure and there was an ethical focus on the procurement of stem cells and cell lines for research. Pt. II of the book (Stem Cell Geopolitics) looks at what happened domestically as the debate over stem cells moved from the federal to the state levels and back in the US, and then turns to consider transnational circuits that were crucial to those practices and conversations. Ch. 3 looks at three phases that made up the beginning of human pluripotent stem cell research in the US: the time around President Bush’s 2001 policy, the period when states “seceded” from that policy (exemplified by California’s Proposition 71), and the period around Obama’s 2009 policy. Ch. 4 looks at the transnational geopolitics of stem cell research in an era when stem cell research became increasingly international and research advocates were deeply concerned with international competition and “brain drain.” Thompson takes readers into laboratory environments in South Korea and Singapore in order to undermine a popular rhetorical binary of East/West that contrasted an “East” that had a pro-science spirit and lack of concern with the moral status of the embryo, and a “West” that had been taken over by anti-science religious fanatics and technophobes.

Pt. III of the book (Thinking of Other Lives) looks carefully at questions of research subjecthood. Ch. 7 focuses on human-human relationships and practices of donation at a time when a number of norms came under renewed scrutiny – including altruism, anonymity, and the alienation of tissue from donors – and this led to the conclusion that the old model for donation wasn’t working. In this context, there were increasing demands for reciprocity in various forms, and Thompson considers various models in California that rethought the relationships between donor/recipient and biomaterial/bioinformation. Ch. 6 focuses on the logic of using animals as substitutive research subjects for human-focused research, and calling for a move away from using animals as research subjects and toward using in vitro systems instead.

To do all of this, Thompson develops a methodology she calls “triage” which we talk about early in the interview. Good Science is a wonderful and critical book, and well worth reading and teaching widely!

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John Sharp, “Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art” (MIT Press, 2015) Jun 01, 2015

That games, particularly video games, could be viewed as art should come as no surprise. And yet, a debate exists over what is and should be considered art with respect to games. In his new book, Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art (MIT Press, 2015), John Sharp offers context for the discussion of games and art. To do so, Sharp presents case studies of “Game Art,” “Art Games,” and “Artists’ Games” in an explication of three communities of practice that provide the foundation for the discussion of games and art. Game Art examines the use of games as tools for the creation of art. Sharp, then, examines the Art Game movement that pushes video games into the domain of other humanistic art forms. Finally, Artists’ Games examines the use of video games as an artistic medium that combines the aesthetics of artists and game developers. Sharp also discusses the potential for the the merging of the values of traditional artists and gaming communities.

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Greg Siegel, “Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity” (Duke UP, 2014) May 26, 2015

Greg Siegel‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging and meticulously researched account of a dual tendency in modern technological life: treating forensic knowledge of accident causation as a key to solving the accident, and treating this knowledge as the source for the future improvement of both technology and civilization. Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity (Duke University Press, 2014) argues that accidents, forensics, and media have been central to the emergence and evolution of this tendency. The chapters of the book trace the forms of media (graphic, photographic, electronic, and digital) that have been crucial forensic mediation since the nineteenth century, a period when the accident became “technologically modern” and the relationship between progress and catastrophe was transformed by the rise of “forensic rationality.” A series of fascinating case studies guides readers through the nature and implications of this transformation by introducing the rise of the forensic engineer, the inscribing apparatus of Charles Babbage, the “black box” technology of the flight-data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, and the high-speed cinematography that offered a way of mapping and making sense of vehicle collision in the 1950s. There are some extremely moving moments nestled in the narratives of these cases, including a must-read discussion of last words and cockpit voice recorders in Chapter 3. Forensic Media is not only a gripping read, but will make a great addition to the syllabi for upper-level courses that treat any combination of STS, technology studies, media studies, and studies of modernity

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Jon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015) May 25, 2015

That privacy in the digital age is an important concept to be discussed is axiomatic. Cameras in mobile phones make it easy to record events and post them on the web. Consumers post an enormous amount of information on social media sites. And much of this information is made publicly available. A common question, then, is what can people truly expect to be be private when so much information is accessible. In his new book Privacy in the New Media Age (University Press of Florida 2015), Jon L. Mills (University of Florida, Levin College of Law), discusses another issue related to privacy in the digital environment: the conflict between privacy and freedom of expression. In so doing, Mills examines how the law, particularly in the United States, is always chasing advances in technology, and discusses how countries in the European Union have attempted to tackle this matter. Throughout the book he discusses famous court cases that illustrate the issues with privacy and new media in an attempt to come to a resolution for the dispute.

Just listen.

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Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) May 19, 2015

Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch ateliers in which exotic geography was produced by bookmakers, paying special attention to frontispieces and other paratexts through which these editor-printer-booksellers created a new way of looking at the world. Picturing, here, was a kind of performance. Schmidt considers how the exotic, non-European body was produced not just in texts and pictures but also in a range of material arts that depicted the body experiencing pleasure and pain. The book concludes by looking ahead to the middle of the eighteenth century, when there was a backlash against exotic geography, and a call for more “order and method” in the geographical description of the world. Inventing Exoticism is a focused, gorgeously illustrated multi-media exploration of a topic of crucial importance to the history of the early modern world.

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Myles W. Jackson, “The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race” (MIT Press, 2015) May 18, 2015

What happens when you allow human materials to become property? More specifically, how does granting monopoly rights over genetic material affect the potential for innovation and research on treatments of disease related to those genes? In his new book, The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race (MIT Press, 2015), Myles W. Jackson (NYU) considers this question by examining the history of the sequencing and patenting of the CCR5 gene, which was found to have an important role in HIV/AIDS viral infection. In doing so, Jackson chronicles the challenges to the granting of property rights over materials that occur naturally, and the legal and policy arguments both for and against allowing patents on these materials.

But the book is more than just an examination of the instability of patent law. On the contrary, Jackson provides an interdisciplinary examination of the history of CCR5, which analyzes the role of race, culture, medicine and other fields, to examine of the wider impact of science and science policy on society. Just listen.

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Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014) May 10, 2015

Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others collaborate to create objects and experiences of great thoughtfulness and beauty. Growing out of a traveling art exhibit of the same name, The Multispecies Salon (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a collection of works that explore three major questions: “Which beings flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide?” “What happens when the bodies of organisms, and even entire ecosystems, are enlisted in the schemes of biotechnology and the dreams of biocapitalism?” “…In the aftermath of disasters…what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?” Pioneering a style of collaboration inspired by Michel de Certeau’s notion of “poaching,” the contributions to the volume span essays on bioart and matsutake worlds, recipes for human-milk cheese and acorn mush, ruminations on the production of assmilk soap and on the nature and importance of hope, considerations of the brittlestar and the art of Patricia Piccinini, and much more. This is a volume that I will be returning to, recommending, and assigning for years to come.

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Lu Zhang, “Inside China’s Automobile Factories” (Cambridge UP, 2014) May 10, 2015

China’s automobile industry has grown considerably over the past two decades. Massive foreign investment and an increased scale and concentration of work spurred the creation of a new generation of autoworkers with increased bargaining power. At the same time, China entered the global competition in mass-producing automobiles at a stage when the level of that competition was very high and profit margins were very thin. The state, as a consequence, has restructured the industry and increased competition since the late 1990s, and this has forced Chinese automakers to move toward a “leaner & meaner work regime,” according to Lu Zhang‘s new book. The result for autoworkers has been an increased intensity of work, reduced job security, stagnant wages, a lack of opportunities to advance, and an inferior status in a very hierarchical factory social order. Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) explores one important consequence of this transformation, the emergence of “labor force dualism” (a divide between formal and temporary workers) as a central component of labor relations in the Chinese auto industry. Lu Zhang’s book is the fruit of 20 months of ethnographic research inside seven large auto assembly factories in six cities in China between 2004-2011 – spending at least two months in each factory – in addition to interviews with a range of workers and managers from those factories and archival research. She reminds us of the importance of reading this ethnography with a sensitivity to the specificity of China’s condition as a “state-led, late-industrializing nation with strong revolutionary and state-socialist legacies.” Tracing the roots and mechanics of labor unrest as it has emerged from those conditions, the book argues that widespread grassroots protests among autoworkers in China have succeeded, on some level: they’ve won workers wage increases, improved conditions on the shop floor, and pressured the government into enacting new labor laws and policy changes. Still, there is work to be done, and the book concludes by considering possible future scenarios for Chinese auto labor relations in the context of labor force dualism.

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Timothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015) May 05, 2015

Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society (Pluto Press, 2015). The book aims to connect a critical theoretical reading of the idea of information with the architectures and practices surrounding information. The text begins by setting out how information is not separated from contemporary struggles over liberation and exploitation and points towards the principles of information politics that guide the reader through an engagement with contemporary theories, including the work of Haraway and Deleuze. These principles then inform theories of networks, recursion and the affordances of technologies that are used, in turn, to account for the platforms and battlegrounds of informational politics. The book does not offer up information as a new master discourse for political struggles, but rather shows, through examples including Facebook, the ICloud, the iPad, online gaming, and hacktivism, how information can be connected to, and can shape, other areas of social contestation. The text will be of interest to anyone using the internet, in particular those concerned with who is control of that space and how it might be reimagined.

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Naomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015) May 01, 2015

Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both visual and text. But it is not necessarily the ubiquity of screens that has societal implications. The significance is in how screens fundamentally change how we ingest information.

In her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford University Press, 2015), Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching, Research & Learning at American University, asserts that despite the benefits of convenience and monetary savings, reading onscreen has many drawbacks. Using surveys of millennials in the United States, Japan and Germany, combined with anecdotes, and information from writers, Baron provides evidence of the impact of technology on reading, and thinking, in society.

Just listen.

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Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013) Apr 27, 2015

In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and practice during the decolonization of European empires in Africa in the mid-twentieth century. His story follows the transcultural Nigerian psychiatrists who tried to transform the discourse around and treatment of mental illness in both their local contexts and in global psychiatric circles. The decolonization of psychiatry, Heaton argues, had an “intensely cross-cultural, transnational, and international character that cannot be separated from local, regional, and national developments” (5). Heaton shows how, amid these contexts and changes, Nigerian psychiatrists actively participated in negotiating postcolonial modernity and the place of global psychiatry within it. The book begins by tracing the larger story from colonialism to postcolonialism: the first chapter offers an essential, incisive account of “Colonial Institutions and Networks of Ethnopsychiatry”; the second chapter lays out the decolonizing of psychiatric institutions and networks in the 1950s and 1960s, a story told mainly through the fascinating figure of Thomas Adeoye Lambo. In the remaining four chapters, Heaton narrows the aperture of historical lens to explore particular cases: Nigerian migrants in the UK who experienced psychiatric issues; debates about culture-bound syndromes such as “brain fag disease” and universality of psychiatric diseases; encounters between psychotherapists and “traditional” healers; and the ambivalence around the use and meaning of drug therapies by Nigerian psychiatrists. Black Skin, White Coats persuasively shows us that postcolonial psychiatry in particular and postcolonial modernity more broadly are best understood in terms of connectivity and interrelatedness rather than provincial dichotomies. In so doing, he also succeeds in bringing together scholarly areas such as African Studies, the history of medicine and psychology, and postcolonial studies.

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Christine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015) Apr 20, 2015

Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the practices that surround its collection, is all the rage in both the media and in research circles. What makes data “big,” is described by the v’s: volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. Volume refers to the massive scale of the data that can be collected, velocity, the speed of streaming analysis. Variety refers to the different forms of data available, while veracity considers the bias and noise in the data. Although many would like to focus on these details, two other v’s,validity and volatility, hold significance for big data. Validity considers the level of uncertainty in the data, asking whether it is accurate for the intended use. Volatility refers to how long the data can be stored, and remain valid.

In her new book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015), Professor Christine L. Borgman, Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, examines the infatuation with big data and the implications for scholarship. Borgman asserts that although the collection of massive amounts of data is alluring, it is best to have the correct data for the kind of research being conducted. Further, scholars must now consider the economic, technical, and policy issues related to data collection, storage and sharing. In examining these issues, Borgman details data collection, use, storage and sharing practices across disciplines, and analyzes what data means for different scholarly traditions.

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Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014) Apr 17, 2015

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields.

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Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014) Apr 13, 2015

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.”

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Casey O’Donnell, “Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators” (MIT Press, 2014) Apr 06, 2015

In his new book, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (MIT Press, 2014), Casey O’Donnell, an assistant professor in the department of Media and Information in the College of Communication Arts at Michigan State University, takes the reader inside the game development process. An ethnographic study of the people and the process of videogame creation, Developer’s Dilemma considers the interactions between engineers and designers, publishers and executives, all motivated to ship out the completed product to the public. The dynamics of these relationships are shaped by the organizations, policies, and the marketplace, leading to a system of creative and collaborative practice that is not always in balance.

O’Donnell uses the imagery of the videogames in his book, breaking the chapters into levels that include “bosses” and final rants. Both the book design and O’Donnell’s masterful storytelling provide much-needed insight into the obscure world of videogame development. Just listen.

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A. Mark Smith, “From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) Mar 21, 2015

A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) suggests that the transition from ancient toward modern optics was accompanied by a turn in optical studies from a concern with explaining sight to a focus on light by optical scholars. The book argues that Kepler’s theory of retinal imaging was instrumental in this turn. In the course of an amazingly comprehensive narrative of optical studies from Aristotle through the seventeenth century, From Sight to Light offers clear and persuasive discussions of the historical understanding of color and of visual illusions, the use of mirrors as optical devices, the relationships between physical and psychological theories of visual perception, and the study of reflection and refraction. Smith pays special attention to explaining the mathematical bases of optical theories, and he highlights the formative role that Arabic scientists and translation played in the history of optics. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sight, vision, light, and the study thereof

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Nick Wilding, "Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge" (U Chicago Press, 2014) Mar 16, 2015

Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo's 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian's role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family's mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a "rich, old, slightly batty widow" in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of "intermediaries and go-betweens" in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits.

There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.)

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Orit Halpern, “Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945” (Duke UP, 2014) Mar 09, 2015

The second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern‘s new book traces the emergence of the “communicative objectivity” that resulted from this shift and produced new forms of observation, rationality, and economy. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2014) beautifully accomplishes this by creating a dialogue between fields that don’t often speak to one another in our scholarship: the history of science and knowledge, and the study of design, planning, and aesthetics. The result is a fascinating history of the construction of vision and cognition after WWII that looks carefully at the impact of early cybernetics on American design, urban planning, psychology, political science, management, and governmentality. Along the way, readers are treated to explorations of the “smart city” of Songdo Korea, the 1964-65 World’s Fair, labs at MIT, tricks played on porpoises, images of Marilyn Monroe, experiments on frog eyes, gardens designed by Isamu Noguchi, and much more. It’s a deeply thoughtful, wonderfully trans-disciplinary book that’s also a lot of fun to read.

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Lisa Stevenson, “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic” (University of California Press, 2014) Mar 05, 2015

Lisa Stevenson‘s new book opens with two throat-singing women and one listening king. Whether we hear them sitting down to a normal night’s dinner (as the women) or stalking the pages of a short story from Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun (as the king), listening to these voices can potentially transform our notion of listening itself, as well as our understanding of what a “self” is and could be. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) shows us this by exploring formulations and practices of life, death, and care in a history and ethnography of Canadian policies and attitudes toward the Inuit during two epidemics, a tuberculosis epidemic (1940s-early 1960s) and a suicide epidemic (1980s-present). In juxtaposing those two cases, the book considers different forms of “care,” bureaucratic and otherwise. In her archival and ethnographic research, Stevenson works as a collector of images, paying careful attention to the ways that they give meaning to life itself, even and especially amid conditions of uncertainty and confusion. The first three chapters of the book trace the practices of anonymous care that characterized the two epidemics in question, considering how the Canadian North has functioned as a massive laboratory for transforming Inuit into Canadian citizens. Whether the biopolitical project operated on tubercular or suicidal subjects, Inuit people were conceptualized as serialized bodies that needed to be brought back to health. Life Beside Itself shows that despite this, Inuit were never fully made into biopolitical subjects: instead, we come to know the friends and acquaintances that animate Stevenson’s work as they cultivate multiple forms of life and of care. This is a beautiful and thoughtful book that will reward a wide range of readers, whether they come to it with an interest in health care and its histories, in the Canadian North, in forms of life and death, or simply in a moving and generously narrated story.

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Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America” (U Chicago Press, 2014) Feb 23, 2015

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women’s rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to answer the eternal “woman question.” Hamlin’s fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women’s rights in the home and society. Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women’s equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin’s theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As “reform Darwinists,” Hamlin’s subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women’s subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of “woman’s experience” against claims of scientific men.Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science.

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Kristina Kleutghen, “Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces” (U of Washington Press, 2015) Feb 20, 2015

Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press, 2015) guides readers into the scenic illusions of the Qing dynasty, focusing on pictorial illusions and the technologies that helped create and contextualize them in high Qing palaces, and especially under the reign of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-95). Imperial Illusions describes and explains a range of visual images and objects that were meant to trick the eye and delight the viewer, from illusionistic murals in tombs and temples, to massive wall- and ceiling-mounted paintings, diagrammed treatises on optics and vision, copperplate engravings, and more. Not only do these illusions help us understand Qianlong – especially when read alongside his poems – but they also inform a broader history of Sino-European artistic and technological exchange and help broaden the very notion of “Chinese painting.” This trans-disciplinary book is relevant not just to the history of art and of the high Qing, but also to the history of science and technology!

Check out the website for Imperial Illusions for some wonderful multi-media accompaniments to the book! http://arthistorypi.org/books/imperial-illusions

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Ann C. Pizzorusso, “Tweeting Da Vinci” (Da Vinci Press, 2014) Feb 18, 2015

Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can significantly inform how we see its art, literature, medicine, architecture, and more, Tweeting Da Vinci (Da Vinci Press, 2014) takes a deeply interdisciplinary approach to engaging the cultural history of Italy from the Etruscans to Da Vinci and beyond. The chapters explore the significance of volcanic activity, cave geology, lightning, gemstones, the healing powers of amber, underwater cities, and much more as they inform how we understand the histories of painting, religious practice, entombment, and the work of authors including Virgil, Dante, and Leonardo Da Vinci, among others. A pair of chapters focuses particularly closely on demonstrating how analyzing Da Vinci’s art from the perspective of geology and botany has helped to identify and authenticate his work and that of his students. Enjoy!

Here’s the website for an upcoming conference on medical geology, a topic that Ann discusses during the interview: http://medgeo15.web.ua.pt/

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Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) Feb 10, 2015

“Show me how it doos.”

Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95), on the other hand, busied himself at “delivering sermons from tree stumps” as a young boy, before joining the navy, studying jellyfish, eventually launching an assault against the Anglican Church and gaining world renown as the biologist who was “Darwin’s Bulldog.”

Matthew Stanley’s wonderful new book introduces us to Maxwell and Huxley as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice of science that began to diverge relatively late and in very particular historical circumstances. Beginning at a point when Maxwell’s theistic science was the “standard” and Huxley was the “challenger,” and ending at the point when Huxley “won,” Stanley goes on to guide readers through some of the major topics of debate that characterized Victorian science (including the nature of miracles and of consciousness, the limits of science, the origin of the universe, the question of intellectual freedom, the morality of education, the possibility of free will) to show the gradual divergence of perspectives that were always rooted in concerns about scientific practice, and to consider the ramifications of this history for how we understand and conduct debates over Intelligent Design and related issues today.

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Nicolas Rasmussen, “Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) Jan 30, 2015

Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) takes readers into the fascinating world of entrepreneur-biologists as they developed five of the first products of genetic engineering. Based on a documentary archive that includes oral history interviews and corporate documents resulting from patent litigation, Rasmussen’s book emphasizes the agency of the biologists in in driving the development of first-generation recombinant DNA drugs like insulin, human growth hormone, and interferon. After an introduction to the development of basic molecular biology in a Cold War context – and paying special attention to the ways that Kuhn’s notion of “normal science” helped shape the discipline – the ensuing chapters each present a case study that illustrates an important aspect of the history of biotech’s rise as manifest in laboratories, courtrooms, universities, freezers, markets, and the public arena. Gene Jockeys closes with a chapter that considers the policy lessons that can be taken from this story.

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Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, “Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) Jan 16, 2015

In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain‘s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. Life on Display: Revolutionizing U. S. Museums of Science & Natural History in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) guides readers through a transformation in American science and nature museums as museums moved from a nineteenth-century focus on research and specimen collections to a twentieth-century emphasis on public engagement and display. Written collaboratively over nearly a decade, Life on Display simultaneously develops an argument for a “renegotiation of the relationship between display, research, and education in American museums of nature and science,” and opens up an archive of fascinating (and at times hilarious and moving) stories of members of the museum-going public (some of who gifted dog fleas and dead pets to their local museums), non-human inhabitants of interactive museum displays (including an owl with a penchant for riding in cars and “trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches”), and museum professionals who painted, debated, made dioramas, invented “Exploratoria,” and occasionally wrote limericks. This is a book for anyone interested in American history, museum studies, visual culture, science studies, the history of education, grasshopper surgery, or Jurassic Park (among many, many other fields it contributes to). It’s a wonderfully engaging history.

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Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information” (Harvard UP, 2015) Dec 24, 2014

Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promotion of information, etc. These complex formulas, or processes, are thought by many to be unbiased and impartial and, therefore, good for automated decision-making. Yet, recent scandals, as well as information uncovered by researchers and investigative reporters have uncovered that these algorithms may not be as neutral as believed. At the same time, there is no mechanism, legal or otherwise, that would force organizations to make these hidden processes transparent for evaluation.

In his new book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015), Frank Pasquale, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, and affiliate fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, explores the significant influence that hidden processes have on finance, search, and reputation. Pasquale examines the increasing corporate, and government, surveillance of consumers, and the incongruity between the secrecy allowed to corporations in comparison to that allowed to regular citizens. In so doing, he calls for greater oversight, transparency, and enforcement to help restore organizational trust and to combat the possible deleterious effects that technical secrecy may have.

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Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014) Dec 14, 2014

Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The words of “technology” and “innovation” are exemplars of how definitions impact perspectives. Ask most people what they think of when they hear these words, and most often they will respond pictures of computers, the Internet, and mobile systems. But these pictures fail to encapsulate the true meanings of technology and innovation because they are narrow, and reflect bias toward the idea of the digital or information society.

What’s needed is a broad view of technology and innovation that encompasses a wide variety of the ways that different communities solve problems. In Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT 2014), Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, asserts that technological innovations are ways in which regular people solve the problems that they face in everyday life. Focusing on communities in Zimbabwe, Mavhunga demonstrates how innovation happens not only in laboratories or studios, but also in the spaces where individuals encounter obstacles.

To do so, Mavhunga details how creativity can be found in the mobilities of African people. In addition, he makes evident the folly in ignoring and sometimes criminalizing traditional knowledge when that technology has, time and again, proven indispensable.

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Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014) Dec 11, 2014

Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology.Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014) simultaneously introduces the nature and function of information graphics, awakens readers to the visual interfaces prevalent in our daily work, and considers how paying careful attention to visual interpretation can serve a broader humanistic agenda. Drucker urges us to think of graphic forms of knowledge not as mere presentation, but as interpretation, as “arguments made in graphical form.” Here, images are not necessarily fixed displays of information:Drucker suggests a way to think about images as producers of knowledge. Once we understand and approach a graphic display as a generative technology, it opens up some fascinating ways of imagining the future of the book, of reading, and of composition. As a thoughtfully and beautifully produced volume, Graphesisalso challenges our visual and material expectations for a book-as-object in its form as well as its argument. This will be a fascinating and compelling read for anyone working in/on/with visual forms of knowledge production in the humanities (digital and otherwise) or the history of the book. It is an excellent and productive book to think with, to create with, and to teach with.

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Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Dec 09, 2014

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of “objectivity,” and the concept of the public sphere. Don’t miss the beautiful color plates nestled in the midst of the book!

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Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) Dec 03, 2014

Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine code and screen interface. Using a methodology called “media archaeology” that is informed by the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Kittler, Heidegger, Stiegler, and others, Chromatic Algorithms traces a transformation of color from optics to algorithms. The chapters trace a history of synthetic color in Western aesthetics and philosophy, the rise of Day-Glo, the aesthetics of color in video art from the 1960s and 1970s, the technology of color TVs, the connection between color and notions of transcendence and utopia, “democratic color” and Salvador DalÃ’s urinated-upon pen, the early history of art/engineering at Bell Labs, the technology of digital infrared visualization, the aesthetics of “Photoshop cinema,” bioart and its glow-in-the-dark bunnies, and the work of some amazing artists including Lillian Schwartz, Jeremy Blake, and many many others. It is a gorgeous and fascinating study of color, technology, visualization, the digital, and beyond.

As you work through the book, I highly recommend searching the Web for some of the amazing work described in its chapters. I’m based in Canada and so some of the following links may not work for you: in that case, just try searching on your own for the title:

The rock opera Battle for Milkquarious! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDMhwq3pcA

Jeremy Blake, Winchester Redux http://vimeo.com/16485005

Zbigniew RybczyÅ„ski, Tango http://vimeo.com/9033947

Paper Rad: http://www.paperrad.org/

This site has some clips from Lillian Schwartz’z Proxima Centauri: http://lillian.com/kinetic/

You can browse video clips from WGBH’s New Television Workshop here: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/

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Janet K. Shim, “Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease” (NYU Press, 2014) Nov 27, 2014

Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other things) in health and illness. Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease (New York University Press, 2014) integrates several kinds of sources into a theoretically-informed sociological investigation of inequality and cardiovascular disease, including interviews with epidemiologists and people of color who are dealing in different ways with the disease, participant observation at conferences and health education events, and engagement with discourses of cultural and social theory. Shim considers the points of commonality and divergence among lay and epidemiological communities in terms of how each group conceptualizes the nature of social and cultural difference, the significance of difference for health and disease, and the reliability of different forms of knowledge. In the process, Heart-Sick places these accounts into dialogue with theories of biopower and biopolitics, intersectionality (a notion that addresses how “interlocking systems of oppression shape both the distribution of chances and of risk”), and fundamental causality (a concept that considers social conditions as fundamental causes of disease). The result is a masterfully articulated and clearly argued study that will be of interest to sociologists of science and medicine, historians, and curious readers interested in becoming better informed about the processes through which we have come to understand our bodies and selves and the consequences of those processes for research and treatment of heart disease.

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William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) Nov 13, 2014

“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Turkel‘s new book traces the emergence and inhabiting of an electric world through the span of human history and beyond. Embracing a “big history” approach to the archive, Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) is a story of the human understanding and use of electricity through the study of strongly-electric catfish, rays, and eels. It’s a history of intimacy between life and the electric, humans and instruments, life and death, from the earliest history of human interaction with strongly electric fish through the modern world. Turkel collects a fascinating set of sources and stories on therapeutic, experimental, and conceptual encounters with fish as apparatus, and readers will find wonderful engagements with the work of Darwin, Volta, Galvani, von Humboldt, Faraday, Du Bois-Reymond, and many more writers and thinkers. Spark from the Deep is also the result of a very inventive and thoughtful approach to digital history, and we talk about Turkel’s research methodology and engagement with digital tools and sources in the course of the interview. As a result, this will be of interest to listeners who seek stories of the electric, as well as listeners interested more broadly in the craft of history. Enjoy!

You can find Turkel’s introduction to doing research with digital sources on his website.

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Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014) Nov 07, 2014

Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, to the ill-equipped and ill-fated responses to disasters like the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, and Hurricane Katrina, a common denominator in all of these events, and those similar, was a lack of inter- and intra-government information sharing. In his new book Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange (MIT 2014), Alon Peled, associate professor of political science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, conceptualizes a platform that would incentivize inter-agency information sharing. Called the Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE), the platform would not only enable the trading of information, but also offers the valuation of information assets. In this way the PSIE creates an inter-government economic system. In detailing of the opportunities and threats to such a system, Peled offers examples of how similar systems have been implemented in governments throughout the world, and uses interdisciplinary training and experience in information technology and political science to describe a system and rationale that could offer assistance to those looking for simplified and efficient government.

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Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013) Nov 06, 2014

In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as never before. However, as Ethan Zuckerman argues in Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (Norton, 2013), just because a connection is possible does not mean disparate voices are being heard. Instead, things and not ideas have become more connected; we now live in a world where is easier to get a bottle of water from a tropical island halfway around the world than it is to get (let alone comprehend) news from that island.

Zuckerman, a media scholar and activist based at MIT, suggests despite our perceived “connectedness,” the wired world is actually becoming more provincial and narrow, as we shift from professionally curated news and information, to search engines and algorithmically selected information based on previous “likes” and those of our homogeneous social circles. In other words, we are getting more and more of what we already know we want with ever-greater efficiency, but not what we need to be informed participants in a global world.

In an expansive analysis that takes on everything from the global response to modern pandemics, to Greek philosophy, to the “Arab Spring,” to musical hybridization across cultures, Zuckerman calls for a world of “digital cosmopolitans,” where those who can bridge between communities are called upon to foster deeper, more nuanced conversations around the globe in ways that fulfill the promise of expanding technological opportunities.

At once a thoughtful analysis, an engaging history, and a bold call to arms, Rewire offers readers a deep understanding of how media is evolving to shape and be shaped by global voices. As such, it has vast implications at both personal and geopolitical levels for the future of information, technology.

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Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014) Nov 05, 2014

Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking, Lipking traces it through the works of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Hooke, and many others, demonstrating that the ability to envision new worlds is as crucial to their critical insights as rational thought.Each chapter of the book approaches a different discipline, from astronomy to natural history and the life sciences, exploring the intersection between imagination and the emerging ideas surrounding the scientific process.

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John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014) Oct 30, 2014

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism.

John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine.

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Kara W. Swanson, “Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2014) Oct 20, 2014

How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson‘s wonderful new book traces the history of body banks in America from the nineteenth century to today, focusing especially on milk, blood, and sperm. Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014) takes readers into early twentieth-century America, when doctors first turned to human bodies and their parts as sources of material to help cure their most desperate cases. As these doctors developed an expertise in harvesting body products and sought reliable and cooperative supplies thereof, human milk and blood were first transformed into commodities. Swanson’s story introduces some of the most crucial actors in this history, including wet nurses, professional blood donors, Red Cross volunteer “Grey Ladies,” doctors, blood bank managers, mothers who ran milk banks, sperm donors, and many, many others. The story is deeply satisfying on many levels: as a window into particular human lives, as a conceptual history with material consequences, and as a set of case studies that illuminates and informs today’s legal and medical landscapes. This is a book that should be on the shelves and in the hands of anyone interested in legal history, medical history, modern notions of “property,” and the ways that the past had shaped what happens to our bodies in the present and what might happen to them in the future.

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Hugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014) Oct 09, 2014

There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. But the changes that we are seeing are far from novel. In fact, most are a continuation of changes to society and societal structure with roots in the past. So argues Hugh F. Cline, adjunct professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, in his new book, Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation: A Social and Historical Perspective (Routledge, 2014). According to Cline, the technopanics, or strong objections to new technology have happened since the days of Aristotle. In spite of the objections, technological innovations can positively advance societal interests. Mixing history, sociology, anthropology, and technological studies, Cline provides context for the examination of how ICTs are impacting society.

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Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014) Oct 02, 2014

Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers through the unfolding of successive eco-historical periods in Japan. Stolz charts the transformations of an “environmental unconscious” lying at the foundation of modern social and political thought. Bad Water begins by describing the establishment of the autonomous individual as a political unit, tracing the relationship between the Meiji liberal subject and the environment beginning in the 1870s. With the emergence of toxic flows that penetrated the body, and in light of the Ashio Copper Mine incident as Japan’s first experience with industrial-scale pollution, nature and politics were increasingly difficult to keep separated. Stolz looks closely at the work of Tanaka ShÅzÅ – Japan’s famous “first conservationist” – in this context, from Tanaka’s jikiso appeal to the Meiji Emperor in 1901 through an environmental turn in which he conducted river pilgrimages and developed an ecological philosophy of “flow” (nagare) and “poison” (doku). Bad Water also considers the work of anarchist Ishikawa SanshirÅ (1876-1956) and Snow Brand Dairy founder Kurosawa TorizÅ (1885-1982), two thinkers who took up the issue of the relationship between nature, the individual, and society after Tanaka’s death in 1913. It is a fascinating and important study that will be of wide interest to scholars and readers of the histories of Japan, environmentalism, hygienic modernity, and ecology. Enjoy!

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Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Oct 01, 2014

Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, then, that the law is in large part an epistemological enterprise. And yet when one looks at the ways in which judges have wielded epistemological concepts, there is plenty of room for concern.

In Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Susan Haack brings her skill as an epistemologist to bear on a series of tangles concerning the legal concepts of proof, evidence, and reliability, especially as they apply in a series of notorious toxic tort cases. Along the way, she exposes several philosophical confusions in the law’s current understanding of the epistemological concepts it wields, and shows how her own distinctive epistemology–Foundherentism–can be useful to the law.

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Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Sep 11, 2014

In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-European or Anglo-centric models of the history of colonial medicine, Osborne’s book focuses on the centrality, transformations, and ultimate demise of naval medicine in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Motivating the central arguments and narrative of the book is a concern with place, places, and emplacement, and Osborne explores maritime medical practices and the ecology of disease in French provincial port cities, on ships, in prisons, in hospitals and schools, and beyond. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France pays special attention to how the study and conception of race, and its connection with health and disease, was formed and reformed in these settings. Readers with a special interest in the relationship between medicine and the military will find much to enjoy here, as will those who come to the book wanting to know more about the maritime history of diseases like Yellow Fever, lead poisoning, and Malaria. There’s also some wonderful storytelling here, including a fascinating account of a book-bomber in Chapter 4. It is a beautifully written account, and it should be required reading for those interested in the history of medicine and healing, of France, of the colonial medical past, and of place and locality.

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John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Sep 05, 2014

John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) narrates the emergence of a new image of the machine, a new concept of nature, a new theory of knowledge, and a new political orientation through a series of chapters that each use the work of a single figure to open up a world of romantic machines.

Part 1 of the book looks at the work of physical scientists whose model of precision experiment and math was transformed by an encounter with romantic philosophy and aesthetics, and introduces the electro-magnetic work of physicist AndreMarie Ampre, the instrumental practices of Prussian geophysical researcher Alexander von Humboldt, and the labor theory of knowledge in relation to the instruments of astronomer and politician Francois Arago. Part 2 looks at the impact of technology on theories of the self and the human, focusing on the fantastic arts and public spectacles featuring new discoveries in optics, mechanics, and natural history. (Readers will find lively discussions of dioramas, hallucinatory opera, symphonies, museums, magic shows, and expositions, here.) Part 3 treats the utopian thinkers and engineer-scientists of the late Restoration and the July Monarchy, looking at religiously-inflected social technologies of conversion, communication, and temporal coordination in the work and thought of Saint-Simon and his followers, printer and literary critic Pierre Leroux’s work and theories, and Auguste Comte’s instruments of thought and paper. It is a rich, elegantly argued work that offers not just a history of science and technology, but also a tracing of the roots of some contemporary continental philosophy, as well.

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John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) Aug 22, 2014

Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of our objects of study. John Protevi‘s new book offers a wonderfully stimulating conceptual toolbox for doing just that. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) creates (and guides readers through) a dialogue between the work of Gilles Deleuze and some key works and concepts animating contemporary geophilosophy, cognitive science, and biology. In doing so, Protevi’s work also has the potential to inform work in STS by turning our attention to new possibilities of thinking with scale, and with a process-oriented philosophy (among many other things). A first introduction lays out some of the basic conceptual tools and orientations emerging from Deleuze’s work, and a second introduction uses some of these ideas to explore the work of Francisco Varela in terms of a political physiology of “bodies politic.” After this pair of introductions, the following chapters focus on particular case studies, ranging from ancient and modern warfare, to hydropolitics, to the notion of a “socially mediated neuroplasticity” in cognitive science, to the role of affect in understanding the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the “eco-devo-evo” of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, and much, much else. It’s a fascinating study that has much to offer for the reader who is interested in the creative and analytic possibilities of bringing continental philosophy to bear in science studies.

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Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Aug 16, 2014

Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a fascinating account of the co-production of facts and worlds, taking readers into the sciences of Rome from the first century BC to the second century AD. Masterfully blending approaches from the history and philosophy of science, Lehoux traces the significance of the “threefold cord” of nature, law, and the gods in making up the early Roman world. The chapters use the works of Cicero, Seneca, Galen, Ptolemy, and others to explore topics making up the foundation of a history of Roman science, including the importance of divination to Roman politics and natural knowledge, the relationship between optics and ethics in the Roman world, and the entanglements of law, nature, and witnessing. What Did the Romans Know? also contributes to philosophical debates over the theory-ladenness of observation, scientific and historical realism, and relativism. Lehoux ends his account as an “epistemological coherentist,” suggesting a model for thinking about and with the sciences in history and beyond. On top of all of this, the language of the text sparkles. It’s a wonderfully enjoyable read.

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Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) Aug 16, 2014

In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013) is a deeply contextualized study of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake and its reverberations into the twenty-first century, arguing that the quake not only played an important role in shaping ideas about politics, religion, geography, and the sciences in Japan, but also generated new ways of thinking about human agency and earthquakes that continue to be influential today. When the Earth Roars: Lessons from the History of Earthquakes in Japan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) is a synthetic account of earthquakes along the Sanriku coast of Japan from early modernity to now, offering a deep contextualization of the 3/11 disaster and some important lessons for how we might cope with the possibilities of further seismic activity (in Japan and beyond) in the future. Both books build on Smits’ expertise in the documents of Japanese history to inform and create a history of science that speaks beautifully to contemporary issues of profound global importance. Enjoy!

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David N. Livingstone, “Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) Aug 06, 2014

David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinians in different local contexts. Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) locates evolutionary debates in particular sites and situations as a way of understanding the history of science in terms of “geographies of reading” and “speech spaces.” The chapters introduce episodes that bring us into specific localities of reading and talking about Darwin, from Edinburgh in the 1870s, to Belfast during the “Winter of Discontent” following John Tyndall’s “Belfast Address,” to Toronto, to South Carolina, and finally to Princeton, NJ. These episodes collectively move readers away from understanding Darwin and his histories in terms of “isms,” instead looking carefully at the roles of three interrelated factors in shaping public encounters with Darwin’s ideas: place, politics, and rhetoric. The book concludes with a look at the ways that these factors continue to be pervasive in more recent dealings with Darwin. With its vibrant language, careful research, and compelling argument, Dealing with Darwin will be a must-read for historians of science, especially those interested in evolution, religion, Darwin, and/or locality.

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William E. Connolly, “The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism” (Duke UP, 2013) Jul 30, 2014

Bill Connolly‘s new book proposes a way to think about the world as a gathering of self-organizing systems or ecologies, and from there explores the ramifications and possibilities of this notion for how we think about and practice work with markets, politics, daily life, and beyond. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke UP, 2013) opens with a prelude that takes readers into the 1755 earthquake disaster in Lisbon via Voltaire’s Candide, using this to introduce a critique of neoliberalism that will continue to be so important for the duration of the book. Connolly reframes our understanding of markets in terms of an entanglement of human and nonhuman systems, with main chapters successively offering a critique of current thinking about neoliberalism and clear suggestions for how to move forward from it, a close reading of the work of Friedrich Hayek, and wonderfully productive dialogues between Kant and Hesiod (in Ch. 3) and Nietzsche and Whitehead (in Ch. 4). A series of interludes open up the narrative and ideas from the main chapters in light of contemporary film, bridges and thermodynamic systems, and the idea of human “fullness” and vitality. A postlude explores the relations between belief, sensibility, role experimentation, and political activism. In short, The Fragility of Things is an inspiring and beautifully written work. For readers interested in STS in particular, it also offers a way to think with self-organizing systems in the service of reorienting our stories about (human and nonhuman) individuals, their relationships, and the larger networks of which they’re a part. Highly recommended!

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Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013) Jul 29, 2014

Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as this neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. In Memphis, and in America generally, we remain haunted by the history of “race” as a concept, and racism as a set of social practices. To gain some perspective on our local history, it is useful to take a step back, both in time and place. Alice Conklin‘s newest book, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2013), tells the story of how the discipline of anthropology and Paris’ ethnographic museum par excellence, the Museum of Man, are wound into the history of racial science and colonial conquest, but also ultimately played an important part in undoing scientific racism. The book offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as recovers a neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. Alice Conklin is a professor in the Department of History at Ohio State University. Her first book, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997) examined the ways in which France’s liberal Third Republic produced a consensus on the legitimacy of imperialism through the notion of a special “mission to civilize” – highlighting the racist and republican elements that together influenced French policy-making. The book won the 1998 Book Prize of the Berskshire Conference of Women’s Historians.

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Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam” (University of California Press, 2014) Jul 22, 2014

Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014) develops an anthropology of belonging, paying special attention to the ways that women and their communities understand and make decisions based on ultrasound imaging technologies. In the course of making life-and-death decisions, the subjects of Gammeltoft’s book confronted ethically demanding circumstances through which they forged moral selves. Inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Haunting Images considers their reproductive choices as acts of collective belonging, producing the subjectivities of both mother and fetus. The book considers these choices in light of the extended repercussions of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the local specificity of biopower, national concepts of “population quality,” and the precarity of individual attachments to social collectives. The second half of the book follows the experiences of women who were informed via 3D ultrasound scans that the children they expected would be anomalous, tracing their choices, questions, contexts, and encounters with childhood disability. It is a powerful and deeply affecting study

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Craig Martin, “Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) Jul 14, 2014

Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Based on a close reading of a staggering array of primary sources, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) in turn subverts several assumptions about the connection between Aristotelian thought and the emergence of the new sciences in early modernity. The book argues that we ought to understand the seventeenth century decline of Aristotle and Aristotelians as an authority in natural philosophy in its relation to the contemporaneous religious readings of Aristotelian texts. In a series of chapters that each look carefully at a particular temporal and philosophical context of debate over the readings of Aristotle, Averroes, and their interlocutors by various religious communities, Martin’s book offers a compelling and deeply textured account of arguments over the piety, language, translation, and other aspects of the Aristotelian corpus. This is a book that beautifully shows the interrelationships of the histories of science and religion, while taking readings on a journey through the philosophical corpora of some of the most foundational thinkers on the nature of the cosmos and the soul; through transformations in the craft of historical analysis; and through an important period when translation (and debates about it) helped shape the intellectual histories of the medieval and early modern worlds. It is a fascinating book, and an especially important study for anyone interested in the history of early modern science and/or the relationships between the early histories of science and religion.

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Amit Prasad, “Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India” (MIT Press, 2014) Jul 09, 2014

In his new book, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014), Amit Prasad, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Missouri, examines what he calls the “entangled histories of MRI” by studying the development of the technology in the United States, Britain and India. In this way, Prasad deconstructs West/non-West technological and cultural divisions, as well as elucidating Euro/West-centrism in the histories of technology. To do so, Prasad examines five key aspects of MRI research: invention, industrial development, market, history, and culture. In so doing, Prasad provides a critique of the situating of the origin of modern science in the West.

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Lisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents” (Duke UP, 2014) Jul 09, 2014

“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…”

From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelman‘s new book, the reader is introduced to a way of thinking about documents as tools for creating bodily experience, and as material objects situated within hierarchies and relationships of labor. Working beautifully at the intersection of media studies and history, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a thoughtful and inspiring collection of moments from the expansion of a modern “scriptural economy.” The case studies explore fill-in-the-blank forms in the context of late nineteenth century job printing, typescript books and scholarly communication in the 1930s, photocopies and photocopying in the 1960s and 1970s, and PDF files in the 1990s and beyond. The final chapter is a fascinating exploration of what it might look like to write a situated history of amateurdom and the figure of the “amateur,” a theme that recurs throughout the preceding chapters. Though all of these cases are carefully rooted within a US context, the insights gleaned from them potentially apply to a much wider and trans-local conversation about the documentary media of writers and readers. It is a history of documenting as an epistemic practice and documents as instruments, and that history is consistently and productively entangled with concerns about reproduction, access, labor, and the emergence of a bureaucratic self. Along the way, Paper Knowledge helpfully opens up some persistent historiographical notions that benefit from such opening, such as “print culture,” “digital humanities,” “authorship,” and other categories that have defined the history of and with communication, and that animate contemporary debates within academia and beyond.

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Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Jul 04, 2014

Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) explores this world via the work of Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur and his vast and varied networks of correspondents, assistants, colleagues, and co-naturalists. As we read, we follow this loose network across the bakeries, gardens, tidepools, hedges, studies, academies, kitchens, poultry yards, specimen collections, and other spaces of quotidian life and their associated practices of natural history. As these men and women observed, chased, collected, dissected, preserved, painted, described, and tested, they practiced the production of knowledge about the natural world as a part of their intimate, daily lives. The chapters of Terrall’s book observe them as they in turn observe aphids, mayflies, sea anemones, chickens, and other creatures as a means to understand larger questions about the nature of generation, metamorphosis, reproduction, and other lived behaviors and processes. They feed material from inside the quills of young pigeon feathers to spiders in order to study spider silk and its commercial potential. They glue glass to cocoons to create windows into the metamorphoses of the butterflies inside. They use hog bristles to turn tiny polyps inside-out and observe how they responded. They draw, they incubate, and they incorporate practices and materials from the physical sciences to do so. Catching Nature in the Act contributes thoughtfully to several interrelated historiographical threads in the history of science – the histories of practice and place, the importance of the household as a space of observation and experiment, the role of networks of correspondence and collaboration, the relationship between natural science and theology – and offers helpful revisions of dominant approaches to each of those historiographies of science and its histories. It is a must-read for historians of science, and a fascinating narrative for any interested reader.

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Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard University Press, 2014) Jun 20, 2014

“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.”

From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fascinating narrative of how this came to be, exploring the entwined histories of narcissism, psychoanalysis, and modernity in 20th and 21st century America. Narcissism permeated 1970s discourse on America, its decline, the relationship of that decline to material consumption, and the physical and emotional pathologies associated with these transformations. The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014) takes readers into the deeper history of the emergence, complexities, and metamorphoses of the study of narcissism in the work of psychoanalysts Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg in the early 20th century, at the same time offering a wonderfully rich account situating them in the larger context of interlocutors that included Freud, Joan Riviere, and others. The book concludes with a thoughtful reflection on the recent resurgence of the idea of “healthy narcissism,” its relationship to the notion of charismatic leaders (like Steve Jobs), and the place of “Generation Me” in all of this. Lunbeck’s book should be required reading for anyone working in the history of the human sciences, of psychoanalysis, and of the modern US. It’s also an enlightening and very readable story that helpfully and productively problematizes a commonplace (narcissism = bad = American) that permeates contemporary popular culture, from TV shows to online personality quizzes. Enjoy!

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Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life” (Harvard UP, 2014) Jun 12, 2014

Why do we study the history of science?

Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research, and guide us to reliable sources of information on which to base our policies and opinions. Jane Maienschein‘s new book is a model of the kind of careful, balanced, and beautifully written history of science that makes a significant contribution not just to the historiography of science, but also to the public understanding of science and its lived consequences. Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life (Harvard University Press, 2014) traces the historical transformations in the observation and observability of the earliest stages of developing life. Maienschein’s account is a focused and thoughtfully organized book that gradually reveals aspects of the history of early stages of life, carefully curating the elements of her narrative such that they collectively inform broader debates over embryo-related policy in the contemporary United States. Readers follow animal and human embryos in their metamorphoses from hypothetical to observed entities, seeing them sequentially transform into experimental, computational, and engineered objects. The final chapter considers the implications of the story in light of recent debates on topics such as fetal pain, paying special attention to the distinction between making policy decisions based on metaphysics vs. science. Embryos Under the Microscope is equally well-suited to academic historians of science wanting a clear introduction to the history of developmental biology, general readers seeking an introduction to a crucial topic of social and political debate, and teachers interested in assigning one or more of the chapters in relevant undergraduate courses. Enjoy!

You can find the related Embryo Project Encyclopedia, a wonderful digital and open access resource, here.

Listeners might also be interested in this recent article on slate.com.

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David Nemer, “Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology” (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013) Jun 05, 2014

Inherently problematic in most mainstream discussions of the impact of technology is the dominant western or global northern perspective. In this way, the impact of technology on societies in developing countries, the impact of these societies on technology, and how those technologies are used is often ignored or marginalized. In his book Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013), David Nemer, a doctoral candidate in Social Informatics at Indiana University, analyzes the ways in which the people of the slums in Brazil are using technology. Using photography as the dominant medium, Nemer explores the questions of whether, and how technology is a tool for both empowerment and disempowerment.

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Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Jun 02, 2014

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. Observing by Hand treats not just published images, but also argues for the centrality of “working images” to the histories of science and observation, paying special attention to personal drawings in private notebooks as instruments of individual and collective observation. Nasim’s approach blends the history and philosophy of science in a study that informs the histories of astronomy, images, and paperwork, and that emphasizes the importance of the philosophy of mind and its history in shaping this heavenly narrative. His transdisciplinary approach spans several media that include maps and portraits, oil paintings and etchings, private drawings and collectively-produced published images. The book helped me see Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and the starry night above, with new eyes and a new appreciation for the vision and visioning of nineteenth century astronomical observers.

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Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014) May 29, 2014

The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to save information remotely and access that information from anywhere. And an increasing number of organizations and individuals are using the cloud almost exclusively for their computing and storage purposes. The question remains, however, whether there is an actual understanding of what the cloud is, and the issues and implications that surround the growth in cloud storage and computing. In To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, Vincent Mosco, a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen’s University, where he was the Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, describes the political, social, and cultural issues surrounding cloud computing. According to Mosco, “cloud computing serves as a prism that reflects and refracts every major issue in the field of information technology and society.” In To The Cloud, Mosco examines this prism and considers the historic, present day, and future implications of cloud computing.

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Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) May 23, 2014

The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that this work was read and rendered in modern Arabic-language contexts. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) invites us into a late nineteenth-century moment when the notions of “science” and “civilization” mutually transformed one another, and offers a thoughtful and nuanced account of the ways that this played out for scholars working and writing in Syria and Egypt. The early chapters of Elshakry’s book focus on the central role played by popular science journals like Al-Muqtataf (The Digest) in translating and disseminating Darwin’s ideas. We meet Ya’qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr, young teachers at the Syrian Protestant College who were instrumental in translating scientific works into Arabic there and, later, in Egypt. An entire chapter looks closely at Isma’il Mazhar’s work producing the first verbatim translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic, but the book also looks well beyond Darwin to consider broader Arabic discourses on the relationship between science and society, as those discourses were shaped by engagements with the work of Herbert Spencer, and many others. Elshakry pays special attention to the ways that this story is embedded in the histories of print culture, the politics of empire, and debates over educational reform, materialism, and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and concludes with a consideration of the continuing reverberations of these issues into late twentieth century Egypt and beyond. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the entanglements of science, translation, and empire in the modern world, and it will change the way we understand the place of Arabic interlocutors in the history of modern science.

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Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies” (Ballentine, 2014) May 18, 2014

In Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (Ballentine Books, 2014), Lawrence Goldstone recounts the discovery and mastery of aviation at the turn of the twentieth century–and all the litigation that ensued. Foremost amongst the legal battles in early aviation was the suits waged between the Wilbur and Orville Wright and Glenn Curtiss. Goldstone offers an in depth view of that struggle.

From the publisher: “While the Wright brothers’ contributions to aviation are so famous as to be legendary, the ruthlessness with which they stifled their competitors remains largely unknown. The feud between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss was a collision of strong, unyielding, profoundly American personalities. On one side was a pair of tenacious siblings who together had solved the centuries-old riddle of powered, heavier-than-air flight. On the other was an audacious young motorcycle racer whose aircraft became synonymous in the public mind with death-defying stunts. For more than a decade, they battled each other in court, at air shows, and in the eyes of the scientific and business communities. At issue were more than just the profits from a patent, but control of the means of innovation in a new age of rapid industrial change. The outcome of this contest of wills would shape the course of aviation history– and take a fearsome toll on the lives and livelihoods of the men involved.”

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Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) May 14, 2014

During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know this thanks to a diary in which he recorded these burnings and burials. In his new book, Richard Yeo contextualizes the diary-keeping and document-organizing practices of men like Pepys within a rich, detailed account of notes and note-taking among early modern English virtuosi. Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a fascinating glimpse into practices of information management as they allowed English scholars to bridge text and memory, print media and manuscripts, journals and commonplace books, reading and observation, the individual and the collective. Yeo’s book explores the relationship between early modern methods of collecting and storing information and the larger project of Baconian natural history, paying special attention to the ways that Bacon and several Fellows of the Royal Society used notebooks and other note-keeping technologies. Beyond this, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science is also deeply embedded in the history of memory and its (dis)contents, and engages (especially in a chapter on Samuel Hartlib and his circle) the historiography of epistolary networks and early modern histories of correspondence. Enjoy!

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danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014) May 12, 2014

Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, educators, and legislators concerned with issues of privacy, harm prevention, and and cyberbullying. In her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP, 2014), danah boyd, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Research Assistant Professor at NYU, and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, demystifies teen use of social media for communication. In particular, boyd uses ethnographic interviewing and observation techniques to examine the how, what and why of youth use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

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Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Apr 26, 2014

Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold War American politics, education, and society. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how open-mindedness took on a political role (as a model of citizenship contrasted with that of totalitarian states), an academic role (as a model of a scientist or thinker), and a broader role as a model of human nature in the mid-late twentieth century. Cohen-Cole’s book not only offers a fascinating glimpse into the development of mid-century psychology and cognitive science, but also shows the deep connections among what was happening in what might otherwise be considered separate social and political spaces that include laboratories, classrooms, cocktail parties, conferences, academic departments, and various physical and textual loci of political and social engagement. It is exceptionally clear in its narrative structure, prose style, and argument, and it offers a fresh perspective on how we understand the co-creation of science and society in Cold War America.

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Robert Mitchell, “Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) Apr 16, 2014

Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of dry ice. In Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Mitchell argues that we are in the midst of a vitalist turn in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and that this is only the latest in a series of eras of what he calls “experimental vitalism.” Experimental Life is largely devoted to exploring the first of those eras by tracing an experimental vitalism through a wide range of Romantic textual worlds from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After a wonderful discussion of the meanings of the “experimental” in the arts and sciences, Mitchell’s book proceeds to look at a series of cases through which we can understand how Romantic thinkers sought out the points of perplexity in vital phenomena, encouraged that perplexity, and often did so by exploring “altered states” that seemed to confuse life and death. These altered states included suspended animation, disorientation, digestion and collapsurgence, mediality, and encounters with the uncanniness of plant life, and Mitchell’s treatment of each case is both beautifully articulated and full of unusual and illuminating juxtapositions. Ultimately, Experimental Life offers readers not just a way of understanding these Romantic contexts, but also engages each case in a way that informs how we think about contemporary biomedical sciences and biopolitics.

Experimental Life has also just won the annual book prize for the British Society for Literature and Science. Congratulations, Rob!

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Paul-Brian McInerney, “From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market” (Stanford UP, 2014) Apr 14, 2014

Paul-Brian McInerney is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is the author of From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market (Stanford University Press 2014).

McInerney’s book tells the fascinating history of the Circuit Riders and NPower, the leading organizations in the nonprofit information technology social movement of the late 1990s. He ties together excellent elite interviews with social movement leaders with a clear institutional history of the time period. There is so much for political scientists, sociologists, and economists to learn about how social movements work.

For listeners, McInerney mentions one of the presentations made to funders to support the movement. See Rob Stuart’s Circuit Rider presentation here.

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Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) Apr 10, 2014

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madagascar. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2014) tells the stories of six plants, all sourced in African countries, that competing groups of plant specialists have tried to transform into pharmaceuticals since the 1880s. The leaves and roots and seeds of the book’s narrative collectively map the contours of a story that emerges from a crucial and germinal tension: on the one hand, much of the history of the plant sciences in these African spaces is motivated by a race for patents and scientific credit; at the same time, the mobility of plants across the borders of Osseo-Asare’s study has complicated efforts to assign priority of discovery to individuals or groups, and in fact challenges the very notion of a “traditional” or “indigenous” body of knowledge in the first place. Simultaneously a carefully situated ethnography and a history informed by a material archive that encompasses pages and petals, the book explores that tension in a critical assessment of what it means to talk about “African” science or “local” knowledge. Bitter Roots will deservedly have a wide audience in African studies, science studies, and the histories of medicine, pharmacy, and botany.

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David Kaiser, “How the Hippies Saved Physics” (W.W. Norton, 2012) Apr 02, 2014

David Kaiser‘s recent book is one of the most enjoyable and informative books on the history of science that you’ll read, full-stop. The deservedly award-winning How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W.W. Norton, 2012) takes readers into the “hazy, bong-filled excesses of the 1970s New Age movement” in order to explain and reveal the origins of some of the most transformative breakthroughs in twentieth-century quantum physics. Kaiser shows how the roots of quantum information science, a field that has given us the technology behind electronic bank transfers and information encryption systems, emerged from a rich soil made up of equal parts playful speculation, sophisticated calculation, and philosophical reflection, all entwined in the practices of the Fundamental Fysiks Group in the 1970s. It is a story that pays careful tribute to Einstein andThe Dancing Wu Li Masters, psychedelic mushrooms and the double-slit experiment, opera and Bell’s Theorem, quantum entanglement and Uri Geller. It is also a story of transformations in what it has looked, meant, and felt like to be a physicist since World War II. Whether you come to How the Hippies Saved Physics primarily for the hippies or the physics, you will come away with a sense of awe both for the brilliance of these tricksters and for the deft hand that Kaiser has brought to creating a thoroughly enjoyable account of their lives, work, and legacy.

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Andrew L. Russell, “Open Standards in the Digital Age” (Cambridge UP, 2014) Mar 27, 2014

We tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possible because of standards. In his book Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dr. Andrew L. Russell examines standards and the standardization process in technology with an emphasis on standards in information networks. In particular, Russell examines the interdisciplinary historical foundations of openness and open standards by exploring the movement toward standardization in engineering, as well as the communication industry. Paying careful attention to the politics of standardization, Russell’s book considers the ideological foundations of openness, as well as the rhetoric surrounding this ideology. Notable also is the consideration of standardization as a critique of previous ideology and a rejection of centralized control.

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Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Mar 23, 2014

The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) maps the visual traces of drawing, collecting, and building practices between 1650 and 1720 to narrate the emergence of a particular kind of intelligence that was formed by visualization techniques. Hunter’s book pays close attention to the work of Robert Hooke while situating Hooke within a community of painters, architects, writers, customs brokers, telescope makers, and other fashioners of early modern experiments of all sorts. A significant contribution to both the histories of science and of art, Wicked Intelligence pays equal attention to the flat spaces of the imaged page and the built spaces of the museum, the city, and the “laboratory of the mind.” It is a beautifully written book based on a gorgeously weird archive. Enjoy!

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Sarah Franklin, “Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship” (Duke University Press, 2013) Mar 09, 2014

Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Duke University Press, 2013) treats IVF as a looking-glass in which can see not only ourselves, but also transformations in modern notions of biology, technology, and kinship. In addition to a fascinating ethnography of the various kinds of work (by artists, by scientists, by patients and doctors) at IVF and stem cell research facilities, readers will find insightful explorations of the work of Marx and Engels, Haraway, Plato, Strathern, Derrida, Firestone, along with a wide range of authors of feminist texts from the 1980s and after. It is a book full of hands, socks, pipettes, eggs, screens, organisms, and arguments, it is fascinating, and it was a great pleasure to talk with Sarah about it.

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Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) Feb 23, 2014

So much of Science Studies, of STS as a field or a point of engagement, is deeply concerned with objects. We create sociologies and networks of and with objects, we study them as actors or agents or actants, we worry about our relationships to them and their relationships to each other. We wonder if humans and their objects are really so different, or whether we are all octopuses shrinking behind our own ink.

In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Timothy Morton offers a way of thinking with and about hyperobjects, particular kinds of things of which we see only pieces at any given moment. (Though by the end of the book, Morton invites us to consider that perhaps every object is a hyperobject.) Hyperobjects have a number of qualities in common, and the first half of Morton’s book introduces and explores them: they stick to other beings, and they potentially transform our taken-for-granted notions of time, space, locality, causality, and the possibility of ever being “away.” How this all happens is explained in a wonderfully personal and engaging narrative voice that ranges from Heidegger to The Lord of the Rings to the Tardis to Op Art, and the second half of the book introduces some of the consequences of and opportunities created by thinking with hyperobjects. It is about global warming and intimacy and object-oriented ontology and modern art and the possibilities of a phenomenology after we get rid of any notion of “the world” as something out-there and beyond-us. For those who are interested in STS and its environs, it offers a very different and very thoughtful language for articulating narratives beyond a simple “object agency” frame or a human/object binary. It’s also a great pleasure to read.

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Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Feb 19, 2014

Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as a pseudoscience. And indeed it is. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when practitioners and advocates of parapsychology abounded. William James, one of the very founders of modern psychological science, was a fan. Most of the founders of modern psychology, of course, weren’t fans. They considered the parapsychologists frauds peddling cheap tricks to gullible people. These con-men, they said, gave true psychological science a bad name. There was only one thing to do: unmask them.

As Michael Pettit shows in his fascinating book The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), that is precisely what the scientific psychologists did, or at least tried to do. They worked hard to create a firm boundary between their legitimate practice and what they considered illegitimate trickery. In so doing, they developed a science of deception, one that had far reaching implications for science, the law, and commerce in the United States. Listen in.

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Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013) Feb 09, 2014

When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, dreams about policemen and peccaries, dreams prophetic and dreams instrumental. In this brilliant new ethnography of a village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, those dreams are woven into the lives and deaths of a bookful of selves (both human and non-human) to help readers reconsider what it means to be a thinking, living being and why it matters to anthropology, science studies, and beyond. In creating this “anthropology beyond the human,” Kohn calls into question our tendency to conflate representation with language, rethinking the relationship between human language and other forms of representation that humans share with other beings. Here, human lives are both emergent from and contiguous with a wider semiotic community of were-jaguars and sphinxes, barking dogs and falling pigs, men and women alive and dead, walking stick insects and tanagers, spirit masters and rubber trees. It is a transformative, inspiring, and critically meticulous book that deserves a wide readership and rewards close reading.

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Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Jan 31, 2014

Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the biological sciences. Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (University of Chicago Press, 2013) follows the data through the physical and virtual spaces from which the “new epistemic things” of bioinformatics have emerged. As computers were introduced into biology, they changed the nature of biological questions. Hallam traces the resulting reshaping of the practices, problems, and objects of biology, guiding readers through the pipeline to watch the transformation from material to digital as biological samples move through computational programs, get translated into ontologies, and become data. The histories of biology, computing, database technology, and bioinformatic imaging all play a role in this wonderfully trans-disciplinary story.

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Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Jan 21, 2014

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), include reflections on Darwin’s theories of natural selection and divergence, Ernst Haeckel’s life and work, the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer, the linguistic theories of August Schleicher, and the historical tendency to relate Hitler’s Nazism to Darwinian evolutionary theory. Individually, the essays are models of close and careful reading of the documentary traces of the life and work of Darwin, Haeckel, and others, and include some exceptionally affecting and tragic moments. Many of them touch on evolutionary theory’s moral character, its roots in Romanticism, and its conception of mankind. In addition to offering a fascinating set of case studies in the history of biology, the essays and appendices also collectively raise some important questions about how historians understand the past and bring it into narrative existence. What kind of thing is the past? What sets the history of science apart from other historical disciplines? Is it reasonable to use contemporary science to help construe the past? What is a scientific theory and where is it located? What does it mean to ask (and what might it look like to carefully answer) a question like, Was Hitler a Darwinian? The essays in Richards’ collection are wonderfully reflective considerations that reward the time and attention of both specialists in the history of biology and thoughtful general readers alike.

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Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013) Jan 14, 2014

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.”

For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electricity, but also in a series of public lectures that generated very strong, furious responses, du Bois-Reymond galvanized (ha! see what I did there? galvanized? electricity?) nineteenth century publics of all sorts. In Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany (MIT Press, 2013), Finkelstein considers how someone so famous and so important could end up so forgotten, and he does a masterful job in rectifying that situation. The book traces du Bois-Reymond’s life and work, from a childhood in Berlin, to an early life and schooling in Bonn, and then back to Berlin and beyond in the course of a mature career in laboratories and lecture halls. We meet the scientist as teacher, as writer, and as public and university intellectual, and follow his transformation from Romantic to Lucretian and his dual existence as simultaneously staunch individual and product of his class and culture. The chapters are beautifully written, and range from exploring diary pages and love letters to laboratory equipment, with stopovers to consider frog pistols and hopping dances of joy along the way. Whether du Bois-Reymond was accepting the advice of his friends (as offered above) or avoiding his underwear-proffering mother-in-law (of which you’ll hear more in the conversation), he emerges here as not just an important historical figure, but also a fascinating person who’s a joy to read about. Enjoy!

The author suggests the following links for interested listeners who would like to learn more:

* A short description of the book on the MIT Press website.

* A Q & A that goes into more detail about the book that John Horgan published on “Cross-Check,” his blog for Scientific American.

* Another Q & A with Andreas Sommer at Cambridge University for his blog “Forbidden Histories“.

* Du Bois-Reymond’s “frog pistol,” as featured in the current exhibition “Mind Maps” at the Science Museum in London.

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Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Jan 07, 2014

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2013) traces a history of radioisotopes as military and civilian objects, for experimentation and therapeutic use, from the 1930s through the late twentieth century. Creager follows the emergence of a political and economic market for radioisotopes, looking carefully at their use as controversial political instruments, as representations of the benefits of atomic energy for US citizens, and as commodities.

After six chapters that trace these broader contexts of the production and circulation of radioisotopes, the second half of the book offers a set of fascinating case studies that explore representative users and uses of the technology in biochemistry, molecular biology, medicine, and ecology. Aspects of the story touch on the history of scientific and medical research using human and animal subjects, the early history of radiation therapy, and the history of ecology and environmental science. Not only is it a historiographically important and meticulously crafted work based on exhaustive research, but it’s also a great set of stories. The pages of Life Atomic are full of guinea pigs, scientific vaudeville, and stories and characters from many different fields of the modern life sciences, expertly weaving them together into a compelling set of arguments. Enjoy!

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Conevery Bolton Valencius, “The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Dec 28, 2013

The story begins with Davy Crockett and his hunting dogs chasing a bear in 1826. The bear gets caught in an earthquake crack, an effect of the great Mississippi Valley earthquakes of 1811-1812 that are now collectively known as the New Madrid earthquakes. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Conevery Bolton Valencius beautifully narrates a riveting tale of the production and forgetting of knowledge surrounding these earthquakes, massively disruptive events that liquefied the soil in much of the Mississippi floodplain and briefly made the Mississippi River flow backward. Valencius situates these events in the New Madrid seismic zone within their past, present, and possible futures. We are treated to the perspectives of those who experienced the quakes and their transformation of New Madrid into a hinterland, from river travelers and writers to the “Shawnee Prophets” Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. Because of the wide range of historical actors treated in the book, the account is of relevance not only to the histories of early American science and environmental studies, but also to the histories of religious practice and native American politics and culture. Undoubtedly a rich and fascinating story, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes is also a special pleasure to read, thanks to the warm (and often very funny) asides and anecdotes with which Valencius peppers the book. Enjoy!

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Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Nov 27, 2013

Men and women are different, there’s no doubt about it. And you might well want to know what the root of that difference is. What makes a man a man and a woman a woman? Before the beginning of the twentieth century, most answers to this question were rather unsatisfying, unless of course you like your answers religio-mythical or pseudo-scientific. Then scientists discovered a genetic difference that seemed to correspond to sexual dimorphism: the 23rd pair of chromosomes was XX in (almost all) human females and XY in (almost all) human males. Thus was a research program born, one prefect for the age of molecular genetics: the search for “sex itself.”

In her fascinating book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Sarah S. Richardson explores the ways in which molecular geneticists pursued this program and, just as importantly, the ways in which their “findings” were molded by contemporary attitudes toward sex and gender. The science we see in Sex Itself is not just about “the facts”; it’s about facts embedded in culture. She shows how the two–sexual science and culture–did a sort of dance, each leading the other about the floor of public discourse. Sometimes the dance is beautiful; other times the dancers stumble all over each other. Listen in to our lively discussion.

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Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, eds., “Addiction Trajectories” (Duke UP, 2013) Nov 26, 2013

Addiction has recently emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry. In a wonderful, focused volume of ethnographies of addiction in a wide range of contexts, Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott have curated a collection of essays that each follow a particular “addiction trajectory.” Addiction Trajectories (Duke University Press, 2013) includes studies that trace epistemic, therapeutic, experiential and experimental transformations across time and space. Collectively, they blend approaches from ethnography and science studies. Readers who are interested in historical ontologies, the concretion of new diseases and illnesses, the history of pharmaceutics and drug use, local styles of medical and clinical reasoning, the politics of healing, and the spaces of experimentation will find much of interest here. Eugene and Will generously made time to talk with me about the volume itself the workshop with which it began, and their own fascinating contributions on addiction medicine in Russia and methamphetamine addiction in rural West Virginia. Enjoy!

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Todd H. Weir, “Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview” (Palgrave, 2012) Nov 25, 2013

I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, you may be a monist too and not even know it. Do you believe that there is really only one kind of stuff and that everything we observe–and our powers of observation themselves–are made of that stuff? If so, you’re a monist.

But what kind? As Todd explains, the history of monism is not monistic: since its birth in the nineteenth century, there have been multiple monisms (which, you must admit, is a diverting irony). You can read about many of them in Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview (Palgrave, 2012), the edited volume Todd and I discuss in the interview. Despite their differences, all the monisms were radical, for they implied that there was no God and that religion was essentially an evolved superstition. This being so, monism was always controversial. It still is. Stephen J. Gould didn’t like it, but his colleague E.O. Wilson and most of the “New Atheists” do. Listen in and see where you stand.

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Kim TallBear, “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) Nov 23, 2013

Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all is for so-called “Native American DNA.”

All of this rests upon some uninterrogated (and potentially destructive) assumptions about race and human “origins,” however. In Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kim TallBear asks what’s at stake for Indigenous communities and First Nations when the premises of this ascendant science are put into practice.

TallBear, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin and enrolled Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, conducted years of research on the politics of “human genome diversity,” decoding the rhetoric of scientists, for-profit companies, and public consumers. The result is a vital and provocative work, tracing lineages between racial science and genetic testing, “blood talk” and “DNA talk,” and the undemocratic culture of a field which claims it can deliver us from racism.

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Thomas Bey William Bailey, “Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society” (Belsona Books, 2012) Nov 22, 2013

Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture. Thomas traces the history of self-released audio from its origins in mail-art networks of the 1970s to the present day practice of using antiquated media – the humble cassette tape – for the dissemination of experimental sounds. Net-labels, mp3 blogs, tape traders, and their many casts of characters are examined along the way as changing technologies impact the strategies for resilience among self-releasing audio artists.

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Ian Jared Miller, “The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo” (University of California Press, 2013) Nov 10, 2013

A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (University of California Press, 2013), Ian Jared Miller explores this transformation and its reverberations in a fascinating study of the emergence of an “ecological modernity” at the Ueno Zoo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Miller considers how imperialist expansion reshaped what the “natural world” was and how it was represented in the context of the zoo. He also looks carefully at the transformations of the zoological garden in wartime, when the core mission of the Ueno Zoo shifted from public education and imperial entertainment to mobilization for total war, including a “Great Zoo Massacre” in which the zoo’s most famous and valuable animals were systematically slaughtered in the summer of 1943. The zoo was reimagined in the postwar period, including the establishment of a new children’s zoo and a repopulation with gift animals from China, the US, and beyond.

In addition to its compelling arguments and affecting narratives of Japan’s modern animal ecologies in the context of empire and beyond, The Nature of the Beasts also offers a paper bestiary of dancing bears, Bactrian camels proudly displayed as war trophies, horses that served as “animal soldiers” in wartime, a chimpanzee named Suzie who met the emperor, pandas who functioned as “living stuffed animals” and biotechnologies, and two beloved elephants that were deliberately starved to death as part of a series of wartime animal sacrifices. It is a wonderful book and it was a pleasure to talk with Ian about it. Enjoy!

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Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012) Nov 10, 2013

We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht transforms this understanding by arguing instead that nuclearity is a process, a phenomenon, a property distributed among and across objects. In this multi-sited study of several localities in Africa, Hecht weaves together narratives of atomic history, African history, and the histories of mining, economies, and health. Part I of the book looks carefully at the invention of a global market in uranium, exploring the place of African ores in a worldwide uranium trade in a series of accounts of the market and technopolitics in areas that include Niger, Gabon, Namibia, Europe, and the US. Part II focuses on the bodies and work of African mine workers and the production of nuclearity in the context of occupational health in locations that include Madagascar, Gabon, South Africa, and Namibia. Being Nuclear is grounded on several years of research extending across multiple media of historical evidence, including interviews, archives of very different sorts in different places, and experiences in underground mine shafts, haul pits, and other spaces of the story. It is a fascinating, transformative, and important study.

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William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012) Nov 03, 2013

How does conducting fieldwork on another planet, using a robot as a mobile laboratory, change what it means to be a scientist? In Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers (MIT Press, 2012), William J. Clancey explores the nature of exploration in the context of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

From 2002-2005 (and with additional interviews thereafter), Clancey led a group of computer and social scientists who acted as participant observers of the MER science team. The resulting book is a fascinating study of the scientists and engineers on the team, their living and working conditions, the relationship of their project to other exploratory and laboratory contexts in the history of science, and the implications of their work for current and future interplanetary missions. Working on Mars beautifully uses rich ethnographic fieldwork to open up larger conceptual issues for the field of science studies, while never losing sight of the aesthetic, personal, and professional lives of MER scientists as individuals. Readers will learn about what it’s like to live on local Mars time, how virtuality is crucial to the experience of MER scientists and engineers, what it means for a scientific team to share a robotic laboratory-body, and why understanding and communicating the poetics of this research may be crucial to realizing the goals of space exploration in the future. It is a wonderful, rich, and sensitively-wrought account.

Working on Mars was recently awarded the Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Congratulations, Bill!

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Sienna R. Craig, “Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine” (University of California Press, 2012) Nov 03, 2013

Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is efficacy determined, and what is at stake in those determinations?Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012)guides readers through the ecologies of mind, body, and society within which Sowa Rigpa is practiced, understood, and transformed from rural Nepal to New York City. The first two chapters each chronicle a day spent in one of the main ethnographic sites featured in the book: a rural clinic and school in Mustang, Nepal; and a major medical institution in urban China. After this grounding in the wide varieties of experience that might collectively fall under the category of “Tibetan medicine,” the following chapters explore how associated people, objects, and practices engage with the opportunities and challenges posed by encounters in very different contexts. These contexts range from warehouses meant to prepare drugs for the global pharmaceutical market, to government-supported medical facilities in Nepal and China, to dissertation defenses, to private clinics in a variety of towns and cities, to fields in which medicinal drugs grow wild, to randomized clinical drug trials. It is a fascinating story, a moving and engaging narrative, and a pleasure to read.

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Ian Bogost, “Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing” (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Oct 26, 2013

“Particle Man”, Charles Bukowski, Heidegger’s tool-analysis, Atari, Ace of Cakes, aliens, tiny ontology, Bruno Latour, ontography, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the Bossa-Nova, Scribblenauts, Ben Marcus, “What is it like to be a bat?”, carpentry, cyborg homes, sugar granules, and The Wire.

What you’ve just read (assuming that you’ve gotten here via the list above) is a very particular form of knowledge-making. It is a list, a catalogue, a community of things. It is also a kind of travelogue, a “Latour litany” that maps some of the objects populating Ian Bogost‘s beautifully written and wonderfully stimulating new book, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Opening with a piece of a They Might Be Giants song and ending with a part of a poem by Charles Bukowski, Bogost’s book introduces readers to the field of object-oriented ontology by asking us to consider a fundamental question: why do we ignore “stuff” in scholarship, poetry, science, or business as anything more than a way to continue talking about humans? Is there a way to think and live with stuff in the world that doesn’t reduce it to that which concerns people, but instead considers and lives with it on its own terms? Alien Phenomenology helps us explore this question and understand the stakes of the problem in five chapters that each introduce a key concept informing a discussion of the being of objects in our world: “tiny ontology” as a model for thinking with things, ontography as a means of mapping them as parts and wholes, metaphorism as a way of getting at the experiences of nonhumans, carpentry as a philosophical practice, and wonder. Though it will be of special interest to readers with an interest in literature, philosophy, and the humanities, the book itself speaks beyond any single disciplinary frame. From the perspective of science studies or STS, it offers a way of moving with and beyond the language of Actor-Network Theory and “agency” of the non-human world, potentially helping us to reframe our questions about objects and the narratives of science, medicine, technology, and modernity in innovative ways. (At the very least, it has been transformative for this historian of science.) Not only is it thoughtfully argued and elegantly (at times, gorgeously) written, but it’s also a lot of fun.

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Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013) Oct 26, 2013

We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), Aaron Stephen Moore critiques this account in a study of the relationship between technology and power in the context of Japanese fascism and imperialism. Moore traces the emergence of a “technological imaginary” in wartime Japan, exploring how different groups (including intellectuals, technology bureaucrats, engineers, and state planners) invested the term “technology” with ideological meaning and power in the course of discussing and shaping national policy. Paying careful attention to the ways that technological and colonial development co-produced and challenged each other, Moore’s story respects the archives of both text and practice: the book deeply cuts into into the intellectual history of technology in the context of Japanese empire, while also following the activities, material difficulties, and large-scale products of many thousands of engineers as they traveled to Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo, and China to build roads, canals, ports, dams, cities, irrigation, sewage and water works, and electrical and communications networks. It is a fascinating case study that informs a larger global historiography of the modern technosciences, while also using the social study of technology to extend the historiography of Japanese empire.

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Marga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Oct 19, 2013

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Marga Vicedo explores the emergence of the science of children’s emotional needs in the twentieth century. Masterfully bringing together approaches from the history and philosophy of the biological sciences, Vicedo’s book focuses on British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907-1990), whose ethological work became one of the most influential and controversial psychological theories of the 20th century. Vicedo uses the story of Bowlby’s science to explore a broader modern history of work on animal and human behavior that includes Konrad Lorenz, Anna Freud, Benjamin Spock, and Niko Tinbergen, among others. Along the way, The Nature & Nurture of Love chronicles the emergence of a kind of anthropomorphic material culture of the human sciences, inhabiting its story with a fascinating cast of robots, dolls, geese, monkeys, and stuffed animals, as well as humans. It is a fascinating and gripping trans-disciplinary story and an absolute pleasure to read.

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Sanja Perovic, "The Calendar in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2012) Oct 03, 2013

Brumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican calendar that became official in 1793 (the calendar was back-dated to 1792, or Year I). In The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sanja Perovic explores the history and meanings of the republican calendar as a representation of the complexities of revolutionaries' understandings of past, present, and future. As she examines the tensions between linear and cyclical visions of time during this pivotal period in French and world history, Perovic considers the calendar as both an object and an ideological project. The book is a history of the calendar itself and also a literary, intellectual, and political biography of Sylvain MarÃ©chal, a revolutionary who played a pivotal role in the development of the new temporal order.

Anyone who has ever wanted to know more about the massive cultural and political shifts of the French Revolution will be interested in reading this book. Perovic's narrative and arguments speak to a wide range of scholarship on republican values and culture, as well as to the broader periodization and historiography of the French Revolution. At the same time, the book reaches further, reading the republican calendar as exemplary of the bigger picture of modern temporality, offering the reader much to think about in terms of the time structures and habits we use to understand our daily lives and our places in history.

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Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Sep 27, 2013

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What followed has become one of the most well-known accounts in the history of science and one of the most famous trials of twentieth-century America.

In Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Adam R. Shapiro urges us to look beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both. The story begins with a pair of Pinkerton detectives spying on a pair of textbook salesmen in the Edwards Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. Shapiro brings us from that hotel room into a series of classrooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms while exploring the battle over textbook reform in the twentieth-century US. Based on a close reading of high school curricular materials around the discipline of botany, with special attention to the emergence of “civic botany” as a pedagogical field, Shapiro’s book uses the debates over pedagogy, evolution, and the textbook industry to explore a number of issues that are of central importance to the history of science: the construction of authorship, the histories of reading practices, the co-emergence of economies and technologies, and the ways that urban and rural localities shape the nature of sciences and their publics. It is a gripping, moving, and enlightening story. Enjoy!

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John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945” (Stanford UP, 2013) Sep 27, 2013

For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. In Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), John DiMoia explores emergence of that marketplace in the context of a confluence between biomedicine, bodies, and the nation in South Korea since the last half of the 20th century. In a series of case studies that range from quarantine efforts after the arrival of the U.S. Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) to plastic surgery in today’s South Korea, DiMoia traces a number of themes through his history of biomedicine and healing: the gradual transition from German/Japanese academic medicine to American and international models of medicine; a corresponding embracing of diverse forms of bodily intervention; and the ultimate adoption of private models of health care in modern South Korea. We meet several fascinating characters in the course of the narrative, from practitioners of traditional Korean medicine, to groundbreaking vascular surgeons, to men and women whose bodies became the testing grounds for reform in birth control technologies.

DiMoia’s account introduces public health practices that included spraying of human bodies with DDT, surgical practices that transformed the spaces and bodies of medicine mid-20th century South Korea, and antiparasitic practices that saw thousands of children bring stool samples to school. It is a rich account of a hybrid medical ecology with moments that would collectively make up a riveting fictional novel if they weren’t all true. Enjoy!

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Ian Samson, “Paper: An Elegy” (Harper Collins, 2012) Sep 24, 2013

In our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches. Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from the internet than from newspapers. But how irrelevant has paper really become? As Ian Samson argues in his new book, Paper: An Elegy (Harper Collins, 2012), not only is paper still vital in our society, it pretty much dominates all our lives. From advertising to currency, to board games and origami, paper still revolves around most business and leisure. Even “post-paper” products, such as e-readers, imitate the aesthetics and feel of paper, mirroring it in spirit if not in product. And how many of us have heard, “yes, I have an e-book reader, but I just really like the feel of a book in my hand”? In this interview, Ian Samson tells us about the history of paper, its uses throughout time, and our love affair with the “ultimate man-made material.”

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Tim Maudlin, “Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time” (Princeton UP, 2012) Sep 17, 2013

Tim Maudlin‘s Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press, 2012) is a clear, approachable, and engaging introduction to the philosophy of physics that focuses on fundamental notions of space and time. The book expertly interweaves the history and philosophy of science in the course of its narrative; readers will explore the historical development of ideas about space and time in the course of learning the outlines and intricacies of some of the most powerful physical concepts in the history of science. Maudlin is an expert teacher in these pages, using material examples to explain and explore aspects of the philosophy of physics from the geometrical structure of space to the topology of time. Over the course of our conversation, we talked about the place of the volume within the larger trajectory of Maudlin’s work, the ways that his experience as a student and a teacher of the philosophy of physics has shaped the volume, and some of the ways that the work significantly departs from similar introductions to the field. Enjoy!

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Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Sep 08, 2013

In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of professional and public engagements with science and technology in the 1960s. Based on an archive that spans texts, oral histories, and interviews with some of its major figures, The Gaia Hypothesis charts the development of the idea of the earth as a self-regulating organism. Ruse explores the development of the idea by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, and analyzes the nature and bases of the reactions to Margulis and Lovelock’s ideas from within different scientific and public communities. All of this is contextualized in a deep history of the different world concepts and philosophies of nature that informed the heated debate over Gaia, considering the idea of the earth as organism and nature as a self-regulating system in a range of texts that include Plato’s Timaeus, the work of German idealists, and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, among many others. (The attentive reader will also note a surprising connection between Gaia and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.) The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia and its histories. It is also a wonderfully lively and readable narrative. Enjoy!

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Rachel Prentice, “Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education” (Duke UP, 2013) Aug 28, 2013

Rachel Prentice‘s new book blends methodological approaches from science studies and anthropology to produce a riveting account of anatomical and surgical education in twenty-first century North America. Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education (Duke University Press, 2013) carefully considers three field sites in which physical interaction is crucial to the development of medical knowledge: anatomy labs in which students dissect human cadavers, operating rooms that serve as spaces for surgical training, and design labs that are creating the body as a “computational object” at the same time that they produce technologies for simulating surgery and dissection or virtually enabling it from afar. Prentice offers a fascinating window into the aspects of medical education that produce the technical, ethical, and affective modes of the medical and surgical self. It is a sensorily-grounded, embodied ethnography that considers its bodies – of cadavers, of surgeons, of computer programs, of students, of patients – simultaneously as material entities and active participants in the narrative. Enjoy!

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Hannah S. Decker, “The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry” (Oxford UP, 2013) Aug 23, 2013

Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States and beyond. The each revision of the DSM directly influences people’s lives, guides treatment, and has important legal and economic consequences. In her book, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2013), history professor Hannah S. Decker explores the history of the important third revision of DSM. DSM-III was revolutionary at the time because it changed the field of psychiatry from a generally psychoanalytic approach to a more symptom-based, medical model of diagnosis. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with people who were involved in its creation, Dr. Decker paints a picture of the DSM-III in the 1970s. She also explores the landscape of psychiatry before, during, and after the creation of DSM-III. Dr. Decker’s work is important in understanding the context and controversies that surround the DSM, which continue to this day with the recent release of DSM-V. This book will be of interest to people interested in the history of medicine and psychiatry, clinicians and researchers in any mental health discipline, and anyone who is interested in ongoing debates about the field of psychiatry.

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David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012) Jul 29, 2013

How do you measure a star?

In the middle of the 20thcentury, an interdisciplinary and international community of scientists began using radio waves to measure heavenly bodies and transformed astronomy as a result. David P. D. Munns‘s new book charts the process through which radio astronomers learned to see the sounds of the sky, creating a new space for Cold War science. A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy (MIT Press, 2012) uses the emergence of radio astronomy to upend some of the commonly-held assumptions about the history of the modern sciences. Munns emphasizes the relative freedom of radio astronomers that stands in contrast to the popular meta-narrative of Cold War scientists bound by the interests of the military-industrial complex. He also shifts our focus from the more commonly-studied individual local and national contexts of science to look instead at scientific communities that transcended disciplinary and national boundaries, blending accounts of Australia, the UK, the Netherlands, and the US into a story that emphasizes the importance of cooperation (not competition) in driving scientific development. In addition to this, A Single Sky pays special attention to the importance of material culture (especially that of big radio telescopes) and pedagogy in shaping modern radio astronomy. It’s a fascinating story. Enjoy!

For more information about The Dish, a film that Munns mentioned in the course of our conversation, see here.

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T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, eds., “Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History” (Harvard UP, 2012) Jul 29, 2013

T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes have produced a volume that will change the way we learn about and teach the history of health and healing in China and beyond. Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard University Press, 2012) collects ten chronologically-organized chapters that each explore practices of health and healing in a specific historical period, ranging from oracle bones in the pre-Han period to modern McDonald’s restaurant dÃ©cor. Each chapter is supplemented by short vignettes that introduce noteworthy texts, important concepts, or examples relevant to and contemporary with the material in the chapter. Taken together, the resulting volume can be used and enjoyed by a wide range of readers, from instructors and students in a university classroom to interested browsers on a Sunday afternoon in the park. It’s a phenomenal accomplishment and makes for an enjoyable and compelling read. In the course of our conversation, we talked about a wide range of issues germane to the volume, the research and writing of each of the editors, and the wider field of medicine and healing in China. Enjoy!

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Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013) Jul 18, 2013

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing medical remedies on others before using them on her friends and family. Elisabeth was an invalid patient whose preferred treatments included topical remedies and ministrations from the “almighty physician,” but never “the smear.” We meet these three lively women in the pages of Alisha Rankin‘s wonderful new book on the medical practices of noblewomen from the last decades of the sixteenth century. Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013) considers the intellectual and social contexts of healing practices in early modern Germany, focusing on elite women who spent much of their adult lives devising and administering medicinal remedies. The book argues that noblewomen were celebrated as healers not despite their gender, but because of it, offering a useful corrective to the historiography of gender and the sciences in early modernity. Rankin situates three in-depth case studies within a careful exploration of some of the main factors that enabled the kind of success that noblewomen-healers like Dorothea of Mansfield and Anna of Saxony enjoyed in sixteenth-century Germany: more opportunities for information exchange through local communities and wider epistolary networks; an increasing focus on empirical knowledge in its many forms; and the foundation role of written medicinal recipes as a form of kunst. It is a thoughtfully written and very clearly argued work that informs many aspects of the history of gender, of science and medicine, and of practical epistemologies. Enjoy!

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Nathaniel Comfort, “The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine” (Yale UP, 2012) Jul 05, 2013

“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history of the twentieth century. Based on a rich documentary and oral history archive, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale University Press, 2012) reframes the histories of early and contemporary human genetics. Rather than treating eugenics as “a contaminant of good, honest biomedicine,” the book shows that early human genetics had many of the same basic goals – human improvement and the relief of suffering – as genetic medicine today. At the same time, contemporary genetic medicine emerges as much less benign than it has often been depicted.

All of this is accomplished through a sensitive historical tracing of two major approaches to understanding human heredity through the twentieth century: a Galtonian approach characterized by a concern with quantification, public health, and populations; and a Garrodian approach characterized by an interest in conceptualizing the human as individual, and in synthesizing heredity with other forms of knowledge. As we follow these threads along with Comfort, he introduces us to a bookful of colorful, vibrant characters from the history of medical genetics: the idealistic inventor of a “Gumption Reviver,” the sanitarium-operator who was fond of prescribing yogurt-enemas, and the medical geneticist with a talent for boogie-woogie piano, among others. These figures are embedded in an exceptionally carefully-wrought narrative of the spaces, practices, and events by which medicine became genetic, genetics became molecular, and molecules made the engineering of humanity possible in a new way.

In the course of our discussion, we talked about the importance, for Comfort, of paying careful attention to elements of the writer’s craft when composing a historical work. The John McPhee essay on narrative structure that was mentioned in that part of the interview can be found here (A subscription to the New Yorker is required to read the full piece.)

The Oral History of Human Genetics Project can be found here.

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Nicco Mele, “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013) Jun 24, 2013

Nicco Mele is the author of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). He is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard University. Mele writes as a technology expert and as a witness to history. He served as a campaign staffer for the Howard Dean for President Campaign in 2003. He and his colleagues implemented many of the web-based campaign innovations that resulted in President Obama winning the 2008 presidential election and define the modern American political campaign. Mele links that experience with radical social changes brought about by the internet. His title thesis, The End of Big, suggest that big institutions in nearly every sector of our lives (business, government, news) have been eroded and, in some cases, supplanted by smallness. An enthusiast for technology, Mele also cautions against the risks associated with this transformation.

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Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012) Jun 22, 2013

Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope.

There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan (Stanford University Press, 2012), the zograscope not least among them. The book opens with Fukuoka’s account of stumbling upon a manuscript of a botanical work called the Honzo shasin (1826) while on a trip to Leiden to see a Japanese zograscope, a device that enhanced the sense of depth when looking through it at otherwise flat pictures. Much of the book centers on the history and work of a small community of nineteenth-century scholars called the Shohyaku-sha, the group that produced the Honzo shashin and were interested in the study of materia medica. This focused case study allows Fukuoka to simultaneously stay anchored while opening up to an expansive history of transformations in modes of understanding visuality and evidence of knowledge of the natural world in Tokugawa Japan. As the book guides readers through the changing meanings of the word shashin, a term used to mean “photography” in contemporary Japanese, it demonstrates how knowledge of the spheres of textual knowledge, visual illustration, and physical plant specimens mutually reinforced one another while practitioners of the visual arts sought to define and secure relationships of “fidelity” among these very different media. This fundamentally trans-disciplinary book offers much of interest to historians of East Asia, of science, and of art: histories of public exhibitions, of natural history, of photography, of anatomical dissection, of translation and typography, and much more can be found within the pages of The Premise of Fidelity. And if I haven’t already mentioned it, there’s also a zograscope. What more reason would you need to read it?

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Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013) Jun 20, 2013

It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble is we would have to cut back on all the good things that carbon emissions produce, like big houses, cool cars, and tasty food imported from far-away places. We don’t want to do that.

So what’s a global citizen to do? One idea is to take control of the environment, engineering-wise. Why cut back when we can simply manage the carbon-cycle a bit like we manage the climate in hothouses? In Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering(Yale UP, 2013), Clive Hamilton surveys the proposals big-thinking engineers have dreamed up to control the carbon-cycle on a truly massive scale. Some are wacky, others less so, but all are, well, very bold. Does any of it make sense? Can any of it be done? Hamilton investigates.

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Dominic Pettman, “Human Error” (UMinnesota, 2011)/”Look at the Bunny” (Zero Books, 2013) May 31, 2013

“The humans are dead.”

Whether or not you recognize the epigram from Flight of the Conchords (and if not, there are worse ways to spend a few minutes than by looking here, and I recommend sticking around for the “binary solo”), Dominic Pettman‘s Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) will likely change the way you think about humanity, animals, machines, and the relationships among them. Pettman uses a series of fascinating case studies, from television programs to films to Sufi fables to pop songs, to explore the notion of Agamben’s “anthropological machines” and the human being as a “technospecies without qualities” in a modern mediascape that includes Thomas Edison’s film Electrocuting an Elephant, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and the interplanetary soundscape created by NASA (among many, many others). We recently gathered over Skype to talk about some of the major thematic and argumentative threads snaking through this book and Pettman’s recent exploration of totems in Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Zero Books, 2013). Both books take on the varied ways that love, technology, identity (both human and not), and economies have been transformed in a world that includes pacifist Orcs, voices without bodies, ecologies without nature, reptile-doctors, and pixelated lovers. Enjoy!

During our conversation, Pettman mentions a film about the zigzag totem that can be found here.

Cabinet Magazine, which also comes up in the course of our conversation, can be found here.

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Joseph November, “Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) May 14, 2013

There are pigeons, cats, and Martians here. There are CT scanners, dentures, computers large enough to fill rooms, war games, and neural networks. In Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Joe November mobilizes this ecology of instruments and objects, people and programs, in a story that maps out the early years of the introduction of computers to biology and medicine from 1955 to 1965. As computing technology was gradually integrated into different spaces of biomedicine that were characterized by agents with very different agendas (a set of processes not without significant contestation), biomedicine and computing transformed one another. Life itself was changed as a result, as the objects of biomedical computing were translated into the kinds of system-entities that computers could describe. The historian of technology who reads November’s book will find fascinating stories of machines like LINC, ENIAC, and UNIVAC. The historian of science will find accounts of the ways that military funding shaped the computerization of biomedicine, windows into the mid-century work supported by the NIH, stories of the transformation of diagnostic medicine in the US, and chapters from the history of crystallography and molecular biology. The historian of networks and computing will find analyses of the importance of operations research, expert systems, and transdisciplinary research practices to the work of some of the central figures in the history of the computational sciences. In addition to all of this, November’s book can also be read as a history of the modern personal computer. (There are also men in RNA-themed neckties sprinkled throughout the early part of the story.) Enjoy the interview, and imagine as you listen that you’re here with me at the National Humanities Center, Skyping with Joe as a thunderstorm booms overhead, rain falls loudly outside the window, and brilliant humanities scholars share excited conversation about their work outside the door. It was a special afternoon.

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Paul Barrett, “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” (Broadway, 2013) May 02, 2013

History is in many respects the story of humanity’s quest for transcendence: to control life and death, time and space, loss and memory. When inventors or companies effectively tap into these needs products emerge that help define their times. The Kodak ‘Brownie’ allowed average consumers – without the knowledge of chemistry or math of a Matthew Brady – to capture powerful images. Ford’s Model T gave the ‘working man’ the ability to travel further and faster than wealthy aristocrats of previous generations. The Timex watch made time accessible to anyone with a few bucks, whether they had interest in philosophical debates about the meaning of time or not. The Glock handgun is on this list of iconic products and while it did not democratize deadly force like the AK-47 it has made its own mark on the American psyche.

The Glock has become the standard bearer for American handguns, placing it at the center of some of the most important conflicts of our times from gun control to globalization. It was initially invented for the Austrian army, but its many innovations and the growing belief that American cops were outgunned by criminals made it first popular with law enforcement, and then later with gun enthusiasts of all types. Tupac Shakur praised the Glock and was later murdered with one. Municipalities railed against the Glock then later helped flood the streets with them. Paul Barrett‘s Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (Broadway, 2013) is the story of a gun, but in a nation of 300 million guns, it tells a much larger story.

Paul was kind enough to speak with us. I hope you enjoy.

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Alexandra Hui, “The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910” (MIT Press, 2013) Apr 30, 2013

In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics and natural science came together in the psychophysical study of sound in nineteenth century Germany. Though we tend to consider the performing arts and sciences as occupying different epistemic and disciplinary realms, Hui argues that the scientific study of sound sensation not only was framed in terms of musical aesthetics, but became increasingly so over time. The book traces a series of arguments by practitioners of the study of sound sensation as they sought to uncover universal rules for understanding the sonic world: How much epistemic weight ought to be placed on the experiences of an individual listener? What sorts of expertise were relevant or necessary for a sound scientist’s experimental practice? Did musical training matter? Was there a proper way to listen to music? The Psychophysical Ear follows sound scientists as they grappled with these and other questions, struggling with the consequences of understanding the act of listening as a practice that was fundamentally grounded in particular historical contexts as phonographic technology and the increasing number of performances of non-Western music in Europe were transforming the sonic world of Europe. Hui’s story often involves the reader’s own sensorium in the story, urging us to imagine or play sequences of musical notes that prove crucial to some of the arguments of the actors in the story. Enjoy!

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Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Apr 01, 2013

Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven of his many years of incarceration in the Tower of London excerpting, rearranging, editing, and recopying passages from his 500+ volume library to produce a book that has been read and interpreted in many different (and sometimes conflicting) ways in the hundreds of years since its initial printing.

Popper’s book uses a very focused account of the texture of this single book as a basis from which to offer a wonderfully expansive account of the practices of history in the Renaissance, and the ways that Ralegh’s work and associated practices of historical analysis ultimately transformed European politics, religion, and scholarship. Along the way, there are fascinating accounts of the origins of the modern archival mode of historiography, the differences between causal and narrative accounts of the past, and the many ways that early modern historical practices were inextricable from scriptural exegesis. Popper’s study is both inspired by the methods and insights of the historiography of science, and offers a way to think about the practices of knowledge-production that help identify what we’re talking about when we talk about early modern “science.” Enjoy!

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Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Mar 28, 2013

The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel, observation, imaging, astronomy, and many other aspects of the places and identities of early modern history. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) pays special attention to the many resonances of emplacement and locality, and to the agency of the Vesuvian landscape, as it explores the continuities and transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century volcanic landscape. Volcanology emerged along with Neapolitan identity while volcanoes became emblematic of the south in the writings of European travelers: rumbling, unpredictable, given to heated eruptions. Cocco’s account shows us the beauty of these transformations as they were embodied in paintings, poems, letters, and other media. Scholars and enthusiasts of the urban and political history of Europe will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the history of vernacular understandings of nature. Enjoy!

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Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Mar 18, 2013

What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish?

Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from their early Greco-Egyptian foundations through early modern chymistry, pausing along the way to reflect on the reinterpretation and refashioning of alchemy from the eighteenth century to the present. Principe’s pages reveal histories of alchemy that are wonderfully rich and diverse, and we meet them in laboratories, recipes, images, dramatic plays, and poems. In the course of our conversation, we talked about aspects of the craft of the alchemist as well as that of the historian, including Principe’s fascinating attempts to recreate alchemical recipes and practices in his own laboratory. Enjoy!

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Matthew Wisnioski, “Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America” (MIT Press, 2012) Feb 26, 2013

In his compelling and fascinating account of how engineers navigated new landscapes of technology and its discontents in 1960s America, Matthew Wisnioski takes us into the personal and professional transformations of a group of thinkers and practitioners who have been both central to the history of science and technology, and conspicuously under-represented in its historiography. Between 1964 and 1974, engineers in America wrestled with the ethical and intellectual implications of an “ideology of technological change.” Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (MIT Press, 2012) takes us into the debates among engineers over their responsibilities for crafting a future in a world where nuclear weapons and chemical pollutants were now facts of life, as citizens were rising in support of environmental and civil rights, and in protest of war and violence. Wisnioski introduces us to the changing resonances of and debates over key concepts in the print culture of engineers in mid-century America, key experiments in the pedagogy and training of engineers at major US institutions, and key efforts to promote creativity in the profession by collaborating with artists, social activists, and others. The book situates all of this within a wonderful introduction to the classic historiography of social studies of technology and engineering, and is illustrated with striking images from the visual culture of engineering in the 1960s. Readers interested in how these issues extend into the more recent history of technology will also find much of interest in Wisnioski’s accounts of Engineers Without Borders and the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace (ESJP) Network. Enjoy!

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E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Feb 18, 2013

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implication in networks of expertise; cafes as social leveling-grounds, performance spaces, and chemical laboratories; and the production of new liqueurs. Spary’s work urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading. Enjoy!

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Deborah R. Coen, “The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Feb 11, 2013

Deborah R. Coen‘s new book chronicles how the earthquake emerged and receded as a scientific object through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Half of the chapters in The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (University of Chicago Press, 2012) treat local experiments in planetary science in Scotland, Switzerland, imperial Austria, and California, all places that relied on networks of ordinary citizens in the course of developing modern seismology. The other chapters look at the international circulation of the stories of earthquake witnesses as evidence for an emerging global science of disaster. Coen’s book is both carefully argued and full of surprises. We learn of Kant producing what was essentially the first work of modern seismology. We learn of a geologist who studied both global tectonics and the ways that some neighborhood drinking-water supplies came from the drainage of cemeteries. We learn of the connection between evidence for earthquakes and ghosts in Britain. (I learned that my hometown of Closter, NJ was the site of an important earthquake observation in the nineteenth century.) The Earthquake Observers excavates a multilingual documentary archive that spans newspapers, seismographs, cartoons, philosophical tracts, romantic letters, and much more. It’s a fascinating multi-sited study of the changing nature of material and human instruments through which communities have understood modern disasters, and it is well worth reading.

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Audra J. Wolfe, “Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America” (Johns Hopkins, 2013) Feb 04, 2013

Audra Wolfe‘s new book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press, 2013) offers a synthetic account of American science during the Cold War. Wolfe pulls together a rich and disparate literature to provide a thematic, chronological and accessible story about the distinctive ways that Americans wove science and government together for the five decades after WWII. Beyond the familiar story of physics, Wolfe shows not only how science prospered under federal patronage but how the federal government itself came to depend on science as it tried to deal with the problems it faced around the world and at home. The nature of American science, and the promise of american modernity, was put on display in works and institutions as varied modernization theory and the Apollo missions. Wolfe has written a delightful little book offering the historical state of the art for those interested in thinking about the characteristic relationships forged between science and the state during the Cold War and their lasting consequences.

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Joel Isaac, “Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn” (Harvard UP, 2012) Jan 28, 2013

Imagine the academic world as a beach.

The grains of sand making up the beach are the departments, institutes, and other bodies and related gatherings that make up the officially sanctioned parts of academic institutions and academic life. There is a world between the grains, however – a world of unofficial, accidental, and trans-departmental conversations and inspirations. And it is within that “interstitial academy” that some of the most remarkable work in the history of modern social and humanistic thought has been born.

In Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard University Press, 2012), Joel Isaac takes readers into the interstitial academy of Harvard University in the middle of the twentieth century. Isaac traces a kind of early history of interdisciplinarity in the American academy in the course of an elegantly wrought argument for situating one of the most pivotal texts of the history and philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, within the emergence of what have become known as the human sciences. Twentieth century philosophers and social scientists sought to replace Kant’s transcendental notions with concepts more firmly rooted in the activities of working scientists and mathematicians, creating an epistemology that was deeply rooted in social practices. Maturing in this context and coming of intellectual age largely in the interstitial academy, Kuhn developed a notion of scientific paradigms that were “revealed in its textbooks, lectures, and laboratory exercises,” grounding his philosophy in a fundamental concern with pedagogical practices. At the same time, Isaac’s book is about so much more than Kuhn: it treats the history of American universities, the sociology of Pareto, the development of the case method in legal education, the changing disciplinary relationships between philosophy and psychology, the development of an idea of “social sciences,” among many other themes and stories. It is an exceptionally rich and persuasive story, and well worth reading – be it on the beach or elsewhere.

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Christopher I. Beckwith, “Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012) Jan 22, 2013

In Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012), Christopher I. Beckwith gives us a rare window into the global movements of medieval science. Science can be characterized not by its content, but instead by its methodology. Starting from this premise, Beckwith focuses on a crucial part of this methodology, the recursive argument method. Developed among Central Asian Buddhist scholars, the recursive method was transmitted along with other core elements of medieval science (including the institution of the college) to Muslims in Central Asia, and from there to medieval Western Europe. Beckwith’s analysis of this transformation is based on a deep knowledge of disputational texts in many languages, and integrates archaeological evidence in a compelling account of the spatial and institutional relationships of the college, the European cloister, the Islamic madrasa, and the Central Asian vihara. The story of Warriors of the Cloisters ranges widely across India, Tibet, China, and Greco-Roman antiquity, while focusing on a Central Asian context that has largely been absent from global histories of science. It is an important contribution to what will hopefully become an emerging new field of scholarship on Central Asian science, medicine, and technology. Enjoy!

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Alec Foege, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great" (Basic Books, 2013) Jan 17, 2013

From its earliest years, the United States was a nation of tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw. Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work, and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with the inventions that laid the foundations for America's economic dominance. Recently, Americans have come to question whether our tinkering spirit has survived the pressures of ruthless corporate organization and bottom-line driven caution. But as Alec Foege shows in The Tinkerers, reports of tinkering's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Through the stories of great tinkerers and inventions past and present, Foege documents how Franklin and Edison's modern-day heirs do not allow our cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity to interfere with their passion and creativity. Tinkering has been the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations such as the personal computer and Ethernet, and smaller scale inventions with great potential, such as a machine that can make low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in impoverished countries and a device that uses lasers to shoot malarial mosquitoes out of the sky. Some tinkerers attended the finest engineering schools in the world; some had no formal training in their chosen fields. Some see themselves as solo artists; others emphasize the importance of working in teams. What binds them together is an ability to subvert the old order, to see fresh potential in existing technologies, and to apply technical know-how to the problems of their day.

As anyone who has feared voiding a warranty knows, the complexity of modern systems can be needlessly intimidating. Despite this, tinkerers can – and do – come from anywhere, whether it's the R&D lab of a major corporation, a hobbyist's garage, or a summer camp for budding engineers. Through a lively retelling of recent history and captivating interviews with today's most creative innovators, Foege reveals how the tinkering tradition remains, in new and unexpected forms, at the heart of American society and culture.

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Michael D. Gordin, “The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Jan 15, 2013

“No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist.”

From the very first sentence, Michael D. Gordin’s new book introduces readers to the characters, plotlines, and crises that have shaped the narratives of fringe science since the early twentieth century. Focusing on Cold War America from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the transformations of science at the margins that were stimulated by Immanuel Velikovsky, “the first grand wizard of the Universal Order of Mass Pseudo-Scholarship” and a Russian-born psychoanalyst whose Worlds in Collision triggered an epistemic avalanche among members of the American scientific community. Gordin tracks the surprising relationships of Velikovsky and his work, from Zionism to Creationism, and from Freud to Einstein. It becomes a story of competing attitudes toward historical evidence, as the scientific orthodoxy reacted to threats from the margins and those on the margins sought to preserve their own orthodoxy on the fringes. Gordin’s book is a multi-layered modern history of problem of scientific demarcation as well as a fascinating read. We talked about many aspects of the book, as well as Gordin’s approach to the craft of research and writing for a book-length project.

For a different take on The Pseudoscience Wars, see also the interview on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

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Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Jan 09, 2013

You were amused to find you too could fear

“The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.”

The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the many media through which people explored the ramifications of Einstein’s ideas about the cosmos in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Masterfully incorporating a contextual sensibility of the historian of science with a sensitivity to textual texture of the literary scholar, Katy Price guides us through the ways that readers and writers of newspapers, popular fiction, poems, magazines, and essays translated and incorporated Einsteinian relativity. Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (University of Chicago Press, 2012) situates this popular engagement with the physical sciences within the political transformations of early twentieth-century Britain, looking at how the scientific and publishing communities attempted (with different levels of success) to use media coverage of relativity to rally the support of a wider reading public. It is a rich study that has much to offer to those interested in the history of science, of literature, and of popular culture, while helpfully complicating all of those categories.

“Fly with me then to all’s and the world’s end

And plumb for safety down the gaps of stars

Let the last gulf or topless cliff befriend,

What tyrant there our variance debars?”

*Both quotes above are from William Empson’s poems, and can be found on pages 167 and 162 of Price’s book.

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Janice Neri, “The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) Dec 13, 2012

Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern period. Inspired by the archaeology of Foucault but using an approach that spans the history of science, art history, and visual studies, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) identifies a “specimen logic” through which images of insects were removed from their habitats, decontextualized, and mobilized into networks of regional and global exchange and circulation. Part I of the book traces the emergence of insects as subject matter for artistic representation, looking in turn at the work of Joris Hoefnagel, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Thomas Moffet, and still-life painters from 1580-1620. The choices made by these artists contributed to the transformation of ideas about nature as controllable and commodifiable. Part II shifts our attention to the later seventeenth century, and considers how the work of artists such as Robert Hooke and Maria Sibylla Merian helped visualize insects (as well as their own professional identities) anew across several media. Neri’s work urges us to reconsider some common binaries that tend to characterize thinking and writing about images in history: art/science, professional/amateur, image/object.

To see some of the images that we talked about in the interview, check out the following links:

Hoefnagel images can be found here, and the stag beetle is here.

Digitized images from Aldrovandi’s work can be navigated to from here [site is in Italian].

The Van Der Ast image can be found here.

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Signe Rousseau, “Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet” (AltaMira Press, 2012) Dec 13, 2012

The other day I found myself in a cooking situation that’s fairly common: I had a few odd ingredients–some oxidized strips of bacon, a withered red pepper, a bunch of half-wilted parsley–and needed to use them before they went bad, but how? The cookbooks on my counter didn’t have an index in which I could search for multiple ingredients, and I didn’t have time to flip through all of the recipes for each ingredient in the hopes of a possible hit. So I popped them into Google, along with the search-term “recipe,” and in .31 seconds I had 2,830,000 hits and a variety of options, from a recipe for crispy potatoes on the Food Network’s website to Martha Stewart’s recipe for gnocchi. I opted for a cold tuna salad.

In her new book, Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet (AltaMira Press, 2012), Signe Rousseau begins her first chapter by reminding us just how uncommon my situation actually is and how that feeling, that sense that this is what I do, that nowadays this is what we do, is just one of the fascinating characteristics of our digitized food culture. Consider, for example, that 800 million users connect through Facebook everyday or that every week Twitter users generate a billion tweets or that there’s now a 150 million bloggers adding new content to the web everyday. With pith and insight, Rousseau looks at how this explosion of social media is changing not only how we view food, but also how we understand ourselves. (You can find Rousseau on her blog and on Twitter.)

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Sally Smith Hughes, “Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) Dec 03, 2012

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (University of Chicago Press, 2011) tells many stories of many things. It is the story of a handful of people who figured out how to make recombinant DNA technology into a thriving business. It is the story of the emergence of a new hybrid organism, the entrepreneurial biologist, who lived with one leg in academia and one in corporate research. It is the story of a series of compounds that became big business in the American corporate world: human insulin, human growth hormone, and interferon among them. Drawing on a series of fascinating oral histories, Sally Smith Hughes recounts all of these tales as they unfolded in a volatile environment sparking with questions over the political and ethical implications of recombinant DNA technology: Could living organisms be patented? Did scientists own their research materials? When a team of scientists discovered something that was worth millions or billions of dollars, who should get credit and reap the rewards? Hughes’ story manages to address these major issues without sacrificing the human stories and colorful characters behind the rise of Genentech.

For the Bancroft Library Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies Regional Oral History Office, see this website.

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Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Nov 26, 2012

Daniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images.

In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical images assembled by Spanish natural history expeditions to explore the connections between natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteenth century Hispanic world. In beautifully argued chapters, Bleichmar explores that ways that eighteenth century natural history expeditions were grounded in a visual epistemology where observation and representation were powerful tools for negotiating both scientific and imperial spheres. The “botanical reconquista” spanned fields, shops, gardens, and cabinets across the New World and the Old. Botanists, artists, and others employed images for collaboration and competition, developing distinct styles and practices for observing and representing the natural world. The expeditions’ taxonomic botanizing was ultimately more successful than their efforts to exploit the cinnamon, cinchona, and other products that comprised the “green gold” of the colonial herbarium. Nonetheless, they made imperial nature visible…even as they made much of the empire invisible. Enjoy the book! And be sure to check out the fifth chapter, which juxtaposes Casta paintings from Mexico with some fascinating and little-known paintings from Quito and Peru to deepen and extend our understanding of the visuality of Spanish empire in the eighteenth century.

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David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline” (University of Chicago, 2012) Nov 20, 2012

In Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 1012), David Sepkoski tells a story that explains the many ways that paleontologists have interpreted the meaning and importance of fossils in the light of evolutionary theory. Starting with Darwin and his dilemma concerning the fossil record, Sepkoski tracks the relationships between paleontology and evolutionary theory over the course of the twentieth century. As it was formulated at mid-century the evolutionary synthesis did not really allow paleontology to contribute to evolutionary theory and it fell to a self-consciously revolutionary generation of paleontologists in the 1970s to argue that reading the fossil record could change the theory of evolution. Drawing on increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling and simulating evolutionary processes, as well as on increasingly available computational power, paleobiologists built institutions and articulated ideas, such as punctuated equilibrium, mass extinction, and macroevolution, that demonstrated how the history of life revealed by reading the fossil record can amend evolutionary theory.

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Pamela O. Long, “Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600” (Oregon State University Press, 2011) Oct 26, 2012

Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011) introduces the notion of a “trading zone,” building on the articulation of the concept in anthropology and in the work of Peter Galison, to explain the gradual breaking-down of the distinction between learned scholars and artist/practitioners as distinct and coherent entities in early modern Europe. Several kinds of trading zones, from the Vitruvian tradition to the physical spaces of arsenals and the city of Rome, provided common ground on which both practitioners and university-educated men came together to share ideas about substantive issues. As a result of this interchange, Long argues, empirical values that had been intrinsic to artisanal work came to be embedded more broadly in European culture, and categories that had initially been bifurcated (like art and nature) became more interchangeable. Long guides readers from a historiographical account of the idea of artisanal influence on the new sciences as it has emerged and developed since the 1920s, and through a series of engaging chapters that introduce works and figures that are crucial to the development of these ideas, including a wonderful account of the architecture of Rome from the pages of Vitruvius through the streets of a city dotted with obelisks and occasionally overcome with waters. Enjoy!

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Catherine Jami, “The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722)” (Oxford UP, 2012) Oct 19, 2012

Challenging conventional modes of understanding China and the circulation of knowledge within the history of science, Catherine Jami‘s new book looks closely at the imperial science of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722). It focuses on the history of mathematics in this context, but situates the story of mathematics and Kangxi within a larger framework that extends from the late Ming through the years after Kangxi’s reign, and treating much more than mathematics in the course of the analysis.

The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority During the Kangxi Reign (1662-1722) (Oxford University Press, 2012) takes us from the beginning of Western learning in China in the late Ming dynasty through the commissioning by Kangxi of a massive compendium that was the largest mathematical work ever printed in imperial China. Along the way, Jami’s work surveys the changing pedagogy of imperial mathematics in late imperial China, the crucial role that materiality and instruments played in the mathematics of this period, the many languages of sciences at the court, and the ways that Kangxi alternately used Jesuit mathematics to undergird his authority over Chinese scholar-officials, and sidelined them in the service of championing the mathematical knowledge of Chinese scholars and Bannermen. It is a rich and powerful account that rewards a wide range of readers. Enjoy!

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Minsoo Kang, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2011) Oct 04, 2012

From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011) offers readers an intellectual and cultural history of Europe on the mechanical wings and flexing backs of its automata. Balancing a cognitive argument with careful historical contextualization, Minsoo Kang maps the landscape of self-moving entities as actual and conceptual objects. He allows us a glimpse into the many ways that these categorical anomalies, as perennial figures in what we might think of as a cultural imagination, have helped shape some of the most influential work in the history of science, literature, and ideas. Kang also offers many chapters worth of fascinating examples in this carefully curated cabinet of wonders. In the course of our conversation, we also spoke about the particular joys and challenges of balancing the work of a historian with a concurrent career in fiction writing, and debated the benefits of being an AM vs. PM writer. Enjoy!

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Laura Stark, “Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Sep 27, 2012

Laura Stark‘s lucid and engaging new book explores the making and enacting of the rules that govern human subjects research in the US. Using a thoughtfully conceived combination of ethnographic and archival work, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research (University of Chicago Press, 2012) locates the emergence of a system of “governing with experts” by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the middle of the twentieth century. Stark shows how the features that now characterize the IRB deliberations that consider whether research on people can proceed in institutional contexts emerged in the particular context of the NIH Clinical Research Committee in 1950s and 1960s, and she explains how they managed to spread thereafter across the US and the globe. Behind Closed Doors draws from a wide and transdisciplinary set of methodological resources in articulating the power of performative language in shaping negotiations around human subjects research, suggesting innovative ways to read documentary evidence as a narrative of voices in time.

True to its title, Stark’s story takes us behind the closed doors of occasionally heated IRB deliberations. It also introduces us to some of the spirited and disruptive “healthy patients” of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), prisoners and conscientious objectors among them, as they were dosed with LSD or infected with malaria and influenza, making a kind of home in the Center or cleverly escaping from it. It’s a wonderfully stimulating book that should be widely read and included on the syllabi of many graduate seminars to come.

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Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Sep 19, 2012

Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method, the concept of a unified science, the increasing divergence of what we might translate as theoretical and practical scientific pursuits. Though these concepts will seem familiar to readers, Phillips’ careful study pays special attention to how science emerged and transformed in German-speaking Europe in very locally-specific ways. Following the transformation of Naturwissenschaft from an eighteenth century invention to a “rallying-cry” by the middle of the nineteenth century, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850 maps the relationships between the collective use of words, the development of concepts, and the creation and ramification of collective social sites. Phillips reveals a world of many distinct but overlapping publics, spanning private learned societies, technical academies, gardens, agricultural societies, and universities, among others. Phillips urges to move beyond simple binaries in our understanding of history, demonstrating that the conceptual and material foundations of modern science in German-speaking Europe, and the figures that populated its spaces, emerged out of border zones and juxtapositions. Enjoy!

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Janet Kourany, “Philosophy of Science After Feminism” (Oxford UP, 2010) Sep 10, 2012

Do social values belong in the sciences?

Exploring the relationship between science, society, and politics, Philosophy of Science After Feminism (Oxford UP, 2010) provides a map for a more socially and politically engaged philosophy of science. Janet Kourany‘s book is a service to scholars and interested readers across the many fields of science studies, providing the reader with a set of models as well as offering a capsule history of the philosophy of science as a professional discipline. The book is a profoundly transdisciplinary work even as it maintains a very careful focus on the philosophy of science as a discipline. Kourany’s archive includes the work of philosophers of science, feminist theorists, sociologists, historians, and many others, with the reader consistently and sometimes explicitly invited into the dialogue. Kourany suggests a program that emerges from previous and contemporary attempts to create a more socially-engaged philosophy of science, guides us through some major potential challenges to the political approach that she advocates, and provides concrete suggestions for integrating philosophers into the construction of more thoughtful ethical codes for scientific practice. It is an engaging, thoughtful, and teachable text advocating a space of philosophers as public intellectuals, and we had a very enjoyable and spirited conversation about it. Enjoy!

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Helene Mialet, “Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) Sep 04, 2012

“By error or by chance, I think I have discovered an angel.”

First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a masterful, inspiring book. Rather than producing a biography of Hawking, which this is decidedly not, Helene Mialet‘s book encourages us to question the very possibility of knowing who Hawking is without taking away the agency of the man himself, ultimately helping readers reconsider how we think about individuality, embodiment, and personhood in extremely productive ways. Taking a beautifully cinematic approach, Mialet guides us through a series of chapters that help us understand different aspects of the production of Hawking and HAWKING (the distinction becoming clear in the course of the book and the interview) by looking at the machines, bodies, inscriptions, images, and movements that constitute Stephen Hawking. Together, the chapters explore the productive tensions and co-creations of the collective and the individual. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory but pushing it into new territory, Mialet’s study uses a thick description of Hawking’s “extended body” to allow us a glimpse into the formation, movement, and circulation of identity in general, in the sciences and potentially well beyond. What does it mean to say “he thinks”? What’s the difference between dealing with texts and people? How do we define what is “original” and how does that translate into the archive? Mialet’s work explores these and other questions in a series of ethnographic accounts and stories that are both fascinating to read and extremely helpful to think with. Enjoy!

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Robert Westman, “The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order” (University of California Press, 2011) Aug 29, 2012

This is an extraordinary book written by one of the finest historians of science. Ringing in at nearly seven hundred oversized, double columned pages Robert Westman‘s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and the Celestial Order (University of California Press, 2011) exhaustively examines the science of the stars in order to understand the problems that drove Copernicus and later engagements with Copernicanism. Far more than a reception study, Westman uncovers the practices, of prognostication and knowledge production, that delimited the conceptual space available to scholars of the stars and the innovative ways that they attempted to generate and secure astral knowledge. Building on his earlier identification of the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus’s ideas Westman shows how confession, patronage, friendships and university networks all factored into the many faceted appeal of Copernican ideas, illustrating the difficulty of identifying a single unitary Copernicanism in the three generations after the first circulation of Copernicus’s own ideas. Painstakingly researched, often to the point of tracing who had access to which copies of books (and their all important annotations) the book asks us to re-evaluate the scientific revolution in favour of more nuanced understandings of early modern scientific movements.

Dr. Westman has written a precis of the book that can be found at the Montreal Review .

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Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, “Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare” (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) Aug 25, 2012

Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims to bring scholars and practitioners of East Asian medicine together in a common dialogue that also informs and is shaped by cutting-edge work in Science Studies. Not a typical conference volume, the book is instead the result of years of continuing collaboration among the editors and authors, and celebrates the spirit of collaborative work in every aspect of its structure and material. The chapters collectively explore some key ideas that thread through the work and are of broad relevance to the histories and practices of health and healing: the nature of “authenticity” in alternative and complementary health practices; the problem of standardization; learning through best practices and best practitioners; and the changing and plural nature of evidence and proof in the contemporary world. The material covered in the book is extended and deepened in a series of vignettes that each illustrate exemplary phenomena, texts, settings, or concepts relevant to the chapters in which they are embedded.

I had the opportunity to speak with both co-editors about the book, the larger intellectual and practical goals that inform it, and the history and potential futures of their collaboration. It was a very enjoyable conversation about a fascinating project, and I hope you’ll enjoy!

* A quick note: You’ll notice that there’s an echo on this one due to a rare circumstance with a three-way Skype call during which not all participants had earphones handy. Because there was a lot of good material, we decided to post it regardless of the echo. Apologies for that! We’re working on trying to reduce the incidence of this kind of audio issue for future interviews, to the extent possible. Thanks for listening!

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Avner Ben Zaken, “Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010) Aug 11, 2012

In Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), Avner Ben Zaken introduces readers to a wonderfully diverse cast of characters and texts to show how fundamental notions of modern science (and modernity in general) were established in cross-cultural exchanges across the globe. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 is a study of the ways that early modern science traveled among localities and cultures and was constituted by those travels, focusing on the example of post-Copernican cosmologies. In the course of this fascinating study, Ben Zaken considers what it means to talk about “incommensurable” cultures, and champions the historical power of the mundane and the marginal. Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism traces the composition, travels, and translation of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan as a way get at a history of debates about autididacticism in twelfth-century Marrakesh, fourteenth-century Barcelona, Renaissance Florence, and seventeenth-century England. This is an elegantly written and exhaustively researched world history of a single text on wildness, childhood, and nature, among many other themes that emerged and transformed in the very different contexts that the Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan was studied and engaged.

Since these two books represent parts of a coherent intellectual project in progress, we spoke about them in both in terms of the broader issues that underpin Avner’s scholarly work. We talked a great deal about the craft of historical writing. Topics ranged from the opportunities and challenges of working at different historical scales and bringing micro- and macro-history into the same project, to how academic training leads young historians to study local cultures in a particularly monadic way. It was a very stimulating conversation for me, and I hope you’ll enjoy!

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Anjan Chakravartty, “A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable” (Cambridge UP, 2007) Jul 27, 2012

Near the opening of his book A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable (Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback 2010), Anjan Chakravartty warns readers: snack before reading! Though the occasional exemplary slice of pumpkin pie and chocolate fudge brownies do sweetly sprinkle the narrative, fear not, intrepid reader: most of A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism is devoted to providing a unified account of a metaphysical proposal in support of one of the most crucial concepts in the philosophy of science, scientific realism. In the course of his masterfully written account, Chakravartty explains the core elements of major versions of contemporary realism with exceptional clarity, laying the foundations in a systematic way that makes the contours of the major debates around scientific realism comprehensible even to readers new to the philosophy of science. After a Part I that lays a foundation for the work, offering an account of the central commitments of realism as they have evolved over time, Parts II and III of the book delve more deeply into the metaphysical and epistemological issues surrounding the theories and claims about unobservable objects in the practice and history of science. It is a wonderfully rich and clearly organized work that is written with a sense of humor and rewards a close reading, and we had a good time talking about it. Enjoy!

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P. Kyle Stanford, “Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives” (Oxford UP, 2006) Jul 17, 2012

Should we really believe what our best scientific theories tell us about the world, especially about parts of the world that we can’t see?

This question informs a long history of debates over scientific realism and the extent to which we trust what contemporary and future scientific theories tell us about unobservable phenomena. Using the history of science as an evidentiary archive, Kyle Stanford explores this set of problems in Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (Oxford University Press, 2006; paperback, 2010). He suggests that we reframe the problem as one of “unconceived alternatives.” Put briefly, if we look at the history of scientific inquiry we’ll see that scientists have repeatedly occupied an epistemic position from which they could conceive of only a fraction of the theories that would have been amply supported by existing evidence. Stanford develops this idea and demonstrates its significance via a series of case studies from the early history of theorizing about generation and inheritance, moving from Darwin’s “mad dream” to Galton’s rabbit transfusion experiments and Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm. Over the course of our conversation we talked, among other things, about the ways that a project like this can contribute to efforts to create a broader trans-disciplinary dialogue across the vast terrain of STS. Enjoy!

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Hanna Rose Shell, “Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance” (Zone Books, 2012) Jul 09, 2012

Imagine a world wherein the people who wrote history books were artists, the books occasionally read like poetry, and the stories in them ranged from Monty Python skits to the natural history of chameleons to the making of classic sniper films. Pick up Hanna Rose Shell‘s new book, and you can imagine (for a few hours, at least) that you’ve stepped into such a world. Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance is a history of the visual and material practices of strategic concealment between the first publication of the Origin of Species and the end of WWII. Shell has structured the book around three historically and conceptually linked stages in the history of camouflage: static, serial, and dynamic. Each stage comes to us full of fascinating characters, from Abbott Thayer with his painted potatoes to Len Lye with his filmic tattoos of dancing color. The text is a fabric of words and images, interweaving reproductions of the photos and stencils and taxidermied creatures of Shell’s historical actors with her own work as a visual artist. There are tattoos. There are feather paintings. There is an overcoat owned by William James and there are aerial reconnaissance photos. This is an electric and surprising world, and one that is well worth visiting in the pages of Shell’s book.

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David A. Kirby, “Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema” (MIT Press, 2011) Jul 02, 2012

First things first: this was probably the most fun I’ve had working through an STS monograph. (Really: Who doesn’t like reading about Jurassic Park and King Kong?) In addition to being full of wonderful anecdotes about the film and television industries, David Kirby‘s Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011) is also a very enlightening exploration of the role of science consultants on television and in film, and the negotiations of expertise involved in relationships between scientists and the cinema. Scholars of STS will recognize some of the major themes that Kirby raises in the course of a fascinating look behind the scenes of the cinematic production of “science”: negotiated definitions of accuracy and plausibility, technologies of virtual witnessing, the social construction of knowledge. Many of the chapters will change the way you see representations of scientists and their work in the movies and on TV, and Kirby’s description of the filmic use of “diegetic prototypes,” or cinematic depictions of future technologies, is a stand-alone contribution in itself. This is a must-read for anyone interested in popular representations of science. Kirby describes the ways that visual media interpret, naturalize, and engage with scientific theories (be they well-accepted, controversial, or fantastical), and how some scientists in turn manipulate cinematic depictions for their own ends. Plus, have I mentioned how much fun it is?

Check out David’s recent discussion of the film Prometheus!

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Sherine Hamdy, “Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt” (University of California Press, 2012) Jun 20, 2012

One of the best things about co-hosting New Books in STS is the opportunity to discover books like this one. Sherine Hamdy has given us something special in Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California Press, 2012). Framed as a study of the history and ethnography of organ transplantation in modern Egypt, Hamdy’s work uses a wide range of sources to encourage readers to think in a much more nuanced way about categories that we tend to generalize: bodies, family, religion, Islam, the idea of a “black market.” The story ranges from printed texts and interviews, to television programs, participant observation in classes on Islamic jurisprudence, and fieldwork in hospitals, private clinics, and other medical institutions. At every stage, Hamdy offers accounts (often quite moving) of individuals who are in the process of weighing the risks and benefits of transplantation, reminding us that none of these individuals exists outside of a complex web of social, political, familial, and other relationships. It is an inspiring book that ought to be read and assigned widely.

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Jessica Teisch, “Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise” (UNC Press, 2011) Jun 15, 2012

Jessica Teisch‘s new book Engineering Nature: Water Development and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) examines the ways that Californian engineers attempted to reshape their world in the late 19th century. Engineered irrigation appealed to both private individuals and the state as a way of mediating California’s competing interests, creating prosperity and fulfilling an American agrarian ideal. Ideas about irrigation, settlement and development circulated the world and Teisch shows how California’s experts circulated to Australia, South Africa and Palestine, frequently returning with new knowledge then applied to California. Despite their aspirations, few of California’s engineers were as successful as they wished but they had a lot to contend with. Teisch’s engineers inserted themselves into the tumultuous social transformations of the turn of the twentieth century, attempting to shape capitalism, all levels of government and even the developing nation state.

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Philip Kitcher, “Science in a Democratic Society” (Prometheus Books, 2011) Jun 09, 2012

Philip Kitcher‘s Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011) is an ambitious work that does many things at the same time. It offers a compelling theory of democracy, public knowledge, and a “well-ordered science” that engages the two. It considers the role of values in science and in a larger ethical project of which we are all a part. It also serves as a kind of public philosophy, helping to bring about the very kind of conversation between sciences and society that it calls for, thanks to the clarity of Kitcher’s argument and the accessibility of his prose. After characterizing a complex problem in the history and philosophy of science (namely, that of “integrating expertise with democratic values”), Kitcher proceeds to set out a definition of democratic society and describe the challenges that such societies have faced in engaging the public in the production and transmission of scientific knowledge. Not stopping at critique, Kitcher also provides clear and specific suggestions for how we might move forward. In addition to being an important work for scholars interested in the relationship between science and society, Kitcher’s book is assignable to university students at all levels. It was incredibly energizing to read the work and to talk with Kitcher about it, I’ll be assigning it in future STS courses, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Though nominally about Science (with a capital “S”), Kitcher’s work has the potential to transform the way researchers in any field think about the way we conceive and implement the stages of our work.

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John Cheng, “Astounding Wounder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) Jun 01, 2012

John Cheng‘s new book Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) uncovers the material and social circumstances that created the social phenomenon of American science fiction. To a population already enamored with the products of scientific research (aviation, automobiles and movies, for example), science fiction magazines offered opportunities for exploring science’s transformative potential, for re-imagining the boundaries of the social and the natural, and, importantly, for building communities. Cheng shows how science fiction readers consumed, produced, argued over and tried to integrate science fiction into their lives: some inspired to devote their lives to science, some inspired to write the Science Fiction Internationale. Historiographically sensitive, Cheng argues for detaching popular culture, and fan culture in particular, from a strong identification with consumption and for the importance of reading texts in their material contexts, while at the same time providing a sophisticated reading of the content of science fiction pulps. Cheng shows how stories about robots, aliens and time travel all reveal Americans’ concerns as science became integrated into American society demonstrating the need for the history of American science to be integrated with American history.

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Jim Endersby, “Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2008) May 23, 2012

I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices of Victorian science that sustained his life and work. You will not just find texts in this story. It is also full of paper and lenses, leather and wood, paint and pencils, arguing for the importance of a material history of science, and of botany in particular. Jim Endersby ranges with the characters in his book from the Antarctic to Kew Gardens, and helps us understand how the consequences of empire shaped the emergence of a scientific profession in Hooker’s lifetime. This will be required reading for scholars of Victorian science, of natural history, and of the history of imperial science, but it will also reward any reader interested in a compelling story written by a writer’s writer. It was a pleasure to read, and equally a pleasure to talk with Jim about it.

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D. Graham Burnett, “The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) May 15, 2012

Graham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2012) s an astounding book. It is an inspiring work, both in the depth of research brought to bear in Burnett’s account of the emergence of twentieth-century whale science, and the sensitivity with which he renders the characters in his story. Burnett’s writing is characteristically thoughtful, elegant, and compelling. Readers will be moved, as I was, by his sensitive rendering of the amazing cast of musicians, scientists, politicians, and dreamers, humans and other creatures trying to make a world for themselves and each other. Some fail heartbreakingly, others enjoy successes small or enormous – all of this in an academic book about the history of science. (Also, there are scientists in formaldehyde, and LSD, and concerts for whales, and ladies with lipstick who make nice-nice with dolphins.) It is a must-read for historians of science, and for anyone interested in the history of whale science.

The interview opens with a laughing interviewer and closes with a shout-out by the author, both occasioned by this review of The Sounding of the Whale by Nick Black, which Burnett did a reading of before we started recording (scroll down to “Community Reviews” for the text). You’ll note a brief cut-out in the middle of the interview, at which point the iPhone technology got the better of us.

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Helen Tilley, “Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950” (University of Chicago, 2011) May 01, 2012

Helen Tilley‘s new book Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2011) uncovers the surprising relationships that developed between science and empire as Britain attempted to fulfill its imperial projects in Africa. Focused primarily on Britain’s colonial dependencies, Tilley shows how the weakness of the empire and the complexity of Africa and of Africans transformed field studies into social and scientific laboratories conducting not merely scientific experiments but also experiments in epistemology, governance and disciplinary methods and aims. Tilley shows how what she calls “vernacular knowledge” circulated and affected metropolitan decision making, how understandings of ecology and complexity seemed to produce both epistemic and imperial humility and how some scientists were ambivalent about their participation research in states that were founded on white rule. Development, under all of its meanings, began long before decolonization, and Africa as a Living Laboratory shows us how imperial ambitions, expertise and experience transformed understandings of what was possible and how it would be best achieved.

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Christopher Mole, “Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology” (Oxford UP, 2011) Apr 27, 2012

Chris Mole‘s book, Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2011) provides a wonderfully elegant answer to a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to pay attention? What is “attention,” and why does it matter to science studies?

In addition to offering a beautifully worked-out answer to the question of attention, Mole offers a way to think about how philosophy and science can fruitfully speak to each other in ways that can benefit both fields. Our conversation about the book ranged from considering the non-spooky nature of metaphysics, to the distinction between events and objects, to Mole’s musical metaphor for thinking about cognitive processes. Enjoy!

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Lawrence Busch, “Standards: Recipes for Reality” (MIT Press, 2011) Apr 16, 2012

As Lawrence Busch reminds us, standards are all around us governing seating arrangements, medicine, experimental objects and subjects and even romance novels. In Standards: Recipes for Reality (MIT Press, 2011) Busch provides a wide ranging and accessible analysis of the ways that standards structure the world. More than simply providing a typology of standards, Busch shows the ways that the impetus to standardization and standardized differentiation have transformed as a part of historical and political changes. Under contemporary neo-liberalism the drive to standardization has generated sophisticated relationships between standards, certified professional bodies and accrediting agencies, relationships that Busch provides the resources for thinking about politically. Using plenty of accessible and insightful examples and clearly in contact with much of the literature in Science and Technology Studies Busch’s book is a great read and a great entry into thinking about technoscience, power and neo-liberalism.

Give it a read.

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David Edwards, “The Lab: Creativity and Culture” (Harvard University Press, 2010) Apr 02, 2012

To say that David Edwards‘s The Lab: Creativity and Culture (Harvard University Press, 2010) is inspiring would be a profound understatement. In a series of concise, focused chapters that range from “Dreams” to “Translational Change,” Edwards maps out a program for the artscience laboratory as a space that opens up creativity by fostering dialog across disciplines, materials, cultures, and groups of people. These ambitious ideas are illustrated by clear examples from Edwards’s own teaching and research, exploring the potential of the laboratory (broadly defined) as a creative space that maps onto the classroom, the kitchen, the gallery, the storefront, the street. The Lab is a kind of manifesto that builds on Edwards’s previous work on the innovative potential of transcending the art-science divide, and urges readers to challenge their ideas of what a laboratory is, has been, and can be. It’s a wonderful and thought-provoking book that has wide ramifications for readers interested in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), both in terms of how we conceptualize and communicate our research and how we think of the space of the classroom. I came away from our conversation wanting immediately to set up an artscience lab in Vancouver, and to head to Paris to try some whiffable chocolate.

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Marshall Poe, “A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet” (Cambridge UP, 2011) Mar 26, 2012

It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Marshall Poe does just that. At the same time, Poe guides readers through the history of communications media from the origin of speech through the culture of the Internet, and provides us with a carefully-articulated theoretical framework for explaining why successive media arose when and where they did, and how they have shaped the way people understand and organize themselves. The book is structured with extraordinary care, but doesn’t let that structure overwhelm the vibrant collection of examples, tales, and (occasionally quite funny) anecdotes along the way. Poe’s writerly voice is wonderfully engaging and colloquial, and he has given us a volume that is full of opportunities for critical reflection on the possibilities of interdisciplinary scholarship across the arts and sciences.

Give the interview a listen. In addition to being an account of an ambitious project with potentially wide-ranging implications for many fields, it’s also a rare opportunity to hear the interviewer interviewed.

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Ann M. Blair, “Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age” (Yale University Press, 2010) Mar 07, 2012

Chewing on raw turnips and sand, keeping both feet in a tub of cold water, reading with just one eye open (to give the other a chance to rest) and sleeping only every other night: no, I am not describing the typical life of a pre-tenure professor trying to get her book finished. Instead, these are just some of the sacrifices that compilers made in order to produce some of the most massive reference works in early modernity. In a work of extraordinary depth that ranges from antiquity through the eighteenth century (with stops in China and the modern world of the internet along the way), Ann Blair guides readers through the landscape of information management of early modern Europe. Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010) is many things at one: a richly textured history of early modern dictionaries and other reference works; an exploration of the emergence of the textual technologies like indexes that aided navigation through early modern texts; and a collection of stories about the lengths to which early modern authors would go to collect and manage information before the era of searchable word processing documents. Too Much To Know is a garden of paper, ready for harvesting by readers interested in a wide range of fields from book history to information technology to religious studies.

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Suman Seth, “Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926” (MIT Press, 2010) Feb 24, 2012

Though Einstein, Planck, and Pauli have become household names in the history of science, the work of Arnold Sommerfeld has yet to reach the same level of wide recognition outside the field of theoretical physics and its history. In Crafting the Quantum: Arnold Sommerfeld and the Practice of Theory, 1890-1926 (MIT Press, 2010), Suman Seth not only makes a compelling case for the centrality of Sommerfeld as a theoretician and teacher of physics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also uses the Sommerfeld School to speak to broad issues that are central to the way we understand science and its history. With humor, sensitivity, and a wide-ranging fluency in the conceptual and methodological studies of science, Seth translates the history and fabric of theoretical physics into a rich account of the practice and pedagogy of physical science, revising what we think we know about the roles of discipline, revolution, and ski trips in the history of physics. It is both an archaeology of the relationship between theory and experiment in modern history, and a beautifully wrought tale of the transformation of one of modern science’s most influential teachers and practitioners of the “physics of problems.”

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Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011) Feb 01, 2012

First things first: this is an outstanding book.

In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botanists traveling through western China and Tibet in a lyrically-written story that treats the nature of writing, bodies, beauty, images, violence, and history in creating experiences of the earth. The characters are compelling, the story is important, and the work speaks to readers well beyond the field of East Asian Studies. Listen to Mueggler’s comments, and then read the book. You will learn much, as I certainly did.

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Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011) Jan 24, 2012

Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial China that accompanied transforming geographies of empire. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011) is both the biography of a disease and a masterful tour through the history of medical practice and knowledge in later imperial China. Over the course of our discussion, we talked about the people and ideas that inspired Hanson’s work, the importance of “eureka moments,” and the SARS epidemic in Beijing.

The author has generously shared a discount on her book for listeners of New Books in East Asian Studies. To order a copy of the book through the Routledge Press website at a 20% discount, visit http://www.routledge.com/9780415602532/ and enter discount code SECM11 at the checkout to claim your discount. Offer expires 28th February 2012.

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Tong Lam, “A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949” (University of California Press, 2011) Dec 22, 2011

We tend to take for granted that we have bodies, that these bodies are knowable and measurable, and that we understand how to relate our own bodies to those of the people around us. To put it more simply: if I were to ask you how tall you were, how much you weighed, or what year you were born, while you might balk at providing an honest answer you wouldn’t be flummoxed by the question. We are modern bodies, and as such we are walking, talking, identifiable, and countable collections of facts.

Tong Lam‘s A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949 (University of California Press, 2011) explores the practices through which this became possible in the context of China during the first half of the twentieth century. Lam’s book looks closely at the construction of the Chinese nation-state through censuses, social surveys, and other social and political technologies. His sources range from census forms, to diaries, to fiction in a rich and focused work that will appeal to anyone interested in the ways that the concept of the modern nation is shaped by the histories of science, soulstealing, society, and sentiment. A Passion for Facts also poses a particular methodological challenge: what can it look like to trace the emergence of categories that change the way we understand the world?

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Andrew F. Jones, “Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture” (Harvard UP, 2011) Nov 30, 2011

Simply put: you should read Andrew F. Jones‘s new book, Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard UP, 2011).

It is both an immense pleasure to read, and a truly brilliant study of the ways that a discourse of development was taken up from evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley and translated or vernacularized into narrative forms of modern Chinese literature. Jones guides us through magic shows, children’s primers, films about toys, science fiction, and many other sources for understanding the ways that development emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a mode of narrating history in China. In the course of our conversation, we ranged from x-ray technologies that could detect qi, to a natural history museum including peng birds, to a man who was, for me, easily The Most Awesome Historical Figure In Recent Memory.

Here’s the “Modern Sketch” visual archive at the MIT Visualizing Cultures website that Jones mentions in the interview.

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Daqing Yang, “Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) Nov 15, 2011

Daqing Yang‘s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a gift to both historians of East Asia and scholars of science and technology studies (STS). Yang’s book dissects the body of the Japanese empire from 1853-1945 to reveal its pulsing “nerve system” in a network of communication technologies that extended well into Northeast and Southeast Asia. This extraordinarily rich and well-documented account moves from the first public demonstration of a working electric telegraph with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, to the Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. Along the way, Yang’s book offers wonderful glimpses of a range of sources that include the North China Telegraph and Telephone Co. company song, an adventure-action-romance film about telecommunications-enabled espionage, and experiments in early fax technology. We spoke for an hour (and could have spoken for many more) about this fascinating history of techno-imperialism.

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Yi-Li Wu’s book, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” (University of California Press, 2010) Nov 01, 2011

In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), introduces readers to a rich history of women’s medicine (fuke) in the context of late imperial China. Reproducing Women offers much more than a history of ideas and practices of women’s health in the late Ming and early Qing, however. Wu weaves together an impressive range of sources, including comparative perspectives from contemporary contexts, to create a fascinating account of the ways that human bodies were experienced and understood in Chinese medical history. In the course of our discussion and our journey through the book, we touched on topics ranging from monastery handbooks, to the late imperial version of Kinko’s, to the comparative history of pregnancy tests.

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Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010) Dec 17, 2010

What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and foremost, understanding the human body. Naturally, then, the philosophes and their successors paid close attention to the body. They cut it up, took it apart, measured it and attempted to see how it worked. They were most interested in one part in particular–the human head. It was the seat of the human characteristic the Enlightenment scientists admired most: intelligence. If one could get a handle on the human cranium, then one would understand what it meant to be human. Or at least so they thought.

In her fascinating new book The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Ann Fabian introduces us to a group of American philosophes who began to collect and study human crania in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, they took most of their cues from their European counterparts. They did, however, adapt craniology to a peculiar American context. Living in a social order in part built on supposed racial difference, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Africans mattered. Their work could support the suppositions of slavery, or not. Moreover, living in a social order that was at the very time they were working involved in a quasi-genocidal campaign against indigenous peoples, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Native Americans mattered as well. Their work might buttress the movement for Indian removal, or it might not. And being people of the “New World,” the American skull collectors knew that they were looked down upon by many of their European colleagues. They needed to collect skulls aggressively in order to establish craniology as an American science.

As one might expect, the American skull collectors were, by our lights, a strange bunch. Racists, imperialists, and nationalists to be sure. But also scientists, curators, and founders of physical anthropology. Thanks to Ann for bringing them to us in all their contradictory richness.

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James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010) Oct 20, 2010

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show the world that China had arrived. So they outfitted a small army (50,000 men) with artillery pieces and rocket launchers (over 10,000 of them) and proceeded to make war on the heavens. The idea was to “seed” clouds with silver iodide before they got to Beijing and rained on the Chinese parade. Or maybe the idea was to frighten the rain gods. Who knows? In any case, none of it worked: the massive, loud, and surely expensive operation had, according to most experts, no measurable effect on the weather around the Chinese capital.

You might say you can’t blame them for trying. But according to James Rodger Fleming, you can. In his incisive new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia UP, 2010), Fleming shows that although people have always dreamed of controlling the weather, and many have tried to do so, no one has ever succeeded. The reason is simple: the atmosphere of the Earth is not like your refrigerator or oven. It’s just too big and complex to be man-handled by any known or even realistically imagined technology. But, as Fleming demonstrates, there are always desperate people who refuse to accept this intuitive fact. So we are presented with a gallery of rain-making mountebanks, charlatans, and swindlers ever-ready to part rain-seeking fools and their rain-seeking money. In Fleming’s excellent telling, the story is entertaining though a bit sad. It’s sadder still that the weather-controlling con is still being run by seemingly well-intentioned people who claim they can “fix” global warming by means of some out-sized, outrageous, and out-of-this-world engineering scheme. Fleming, who both knows the science and has looked at the history, is more than dubious. The only way we can “fix” the sky is to leave it alone and hope for the best. It turns out, however, that leaving the sky alone is hard. It’s actually easier to attack it, proclaim victory, and continue as before. Just ask the Chinese.

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