New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

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Shawn William Miller, "Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World's Longest Highway" (U California Press, 2026) Jun 29, 2026

Show notes

A century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its story remains largely unknown—even to the hundreds of motorists who annually attempt the 30,000-kilometer drive from far northern Alaska to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. There is more to the highway, however, than the persistent allure of the open road. In Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World's Longest Highway (University of California Press, 2026), historian Dr. Shawn William Miller unveils a larger tale of lofty ideals and bedrock greed, romantic adventure and pragmatic diplomacy, immigrant desperation and Indigenous resistance.

This book journeys to the early 1920s when everyday Americans invented the idea of a road that would spread fraternity, democracy, and prosperity across the hemisphere. It looks at the commercial and geopolitical interests that shaped the highway—often with little concern for those living along its margins—and explains why the road became an escape route for millions of migrants rather than a corridor for tourists. Dr. Miller contends that the highway’s troubled past points to an unresolved future, offering insights into the growing costs of continuing down well-worn paths.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Dallas Liddle, "News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885" (Oxford UP, 2026) Jun 29, 2026

Show notes

British daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century, ballooning in size and radically reorganizing staffing and production decade by decade. By mid-century, newspapers had grown from the folded single sheets of the previous century to large multi-page broadsheets, so impressive in the quantity of print they held and their speed of production that one of their nicknames was 'the daily miracle'.

Traditional news history has overlooked a key fact for understanding this era of news: that Victorian daily newspapers were high-pressure systems. As demand for newspapers outpaced their original production capacity, newspaper organizations began to build complex technical and production mechanisms to continue to grow and compete. As these systems expanded, newspapers became dependent on them, and decisions about how daily journalism should develop began to pass from editorial choice to systemic necessity. The previously untold story of Victorian daily news is that the personalities of editors and owners and the larger social forces at work in that era were not the only (or even primary) drivers of its history. Once set in motion, the systems of Victorian news gained major shaping agency over their own development.

Combining deep archival research and traditional historical analysis with modern data mining methods, News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885 (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Dallas Liddle reconstructs the systemic workings of Victorian daily news in unprecedented detail, offering new and counterintuitive accounts of when and why daily papers expanded, how and why steam-powered printing machines developed, how specialized news discourses evolved, and how newspaper leadership was organized.

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Thomas S. Mullaney, "How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information" (W. W. Norton, 2026) Jun 28, 2026

Show notes

This is the third time I have the great fortune of interviewing Tom Mullaney. I can hardly think of a more worthy ambassador for the history discipline, and the work we are discussing today, I believe, will serve as the perfect bridge from Tom’s historical scholarship to the wider, reading public. We are discussing Tom’s latest book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W.W. Norton, 2026). Tom’s book takes on some of the most philosophically rich ideas at the center of both history and memory. Over time, things come apart: objects, archives, ephemera, people, memories, histories. For millennia, we relied on common tools to remember the past: oral tradition, writing, and artifacts. In under 200 years, we developed more advanced information technology like the camera, phonograph, typewriter, computer, and more. The information encoded by these devices has a shelf life too, decaying over time, disintegrating, becoming obscured, getting deaccessioned. How We Disappear explores this process through the lens of family tragedy: the death of Tom’s parents and the attempts to recover and remember the past. What happens when we try to recover the lives of our parents, the people who shape our world, and what do we do when we discover the unexpected? To take us through his brilliant new book, I’m pleased today to have Tom Mullaney on the podcast.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and UNESCO Chair in Digital Futures at Stanford University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Ijeoma Uchegbu, "Chain Reaction: How Chemistry Shapes Us and Our World" (HarperCollins, 2026) Jun 28, 2026

Show notes

By one of the world's leading chemists, an entertaining and revealing tour of the chemical bonds that shape our everyday lives and provide the infrastructure for our chaotic world.

We all have a relationship with chemistry. Bonds between molecules, forged and broken in the blink of an eye, underpin everything from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to the ways we treat illnesses and construct our homes. It’s a relationship we nurture, whether we know it or not, and for leading chemist Ijeoma Uchegbu, it was serious from the beginning.

In Chain Reaction: How Chemistry Shapes Us and Our World (HarperCollins, 2026) Uchegbu shows us the world through a chemist’s eyes, revealing the intricate science we take for granted: how our body’s most fundamental chemical structure, our DNA, is estimated to be two meters long, resting tightly within each of our cells; how egg yolks are held together by weak chemical bonds that make them primed for emulsifying our salad dressings; and how the chemical makeup of PFAs, or “forever chemicals,” makes them so good at sticking around.

Along the way, we travel from Uchegbu’s home in London to Nigeria, where cooking experiments go awry in her family kitchen, and to Italy, where the chemically inert compounds that make up stained glass keep medieval windows shining. The careful interplay of bonds and molecules brings a sense of order and wonder to the chaos of our lives, she shows, and we don’t have to wear a lab coat or study solutions in beakers to appreciate it.

For readers of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and anyone who wanted to be like Elizabeth Zott in Lessons in Chemistry, Chain Reaction is a lively and intimate portrait of the wondrous and under-explored field that shapes our everyday lives.

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Elizabeth Cotton, "UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health" (Policy Press, 2025) Jun 27, 2026

Show notes

UberTherapy: The New Business of Mental Health (Policy Press, 2025) is the essential guide to the rise of digital therapy for anyone working in, researching or using mental health services.

This timely book explores the emerging uberization of therapy through algorithmic control, datafication of despair and attrition by design. Analysing the deployment of e-commerce business models, this book makes a compelling case that the rise of 'therapeutic Tinder' allows would-be clients to sidestep the deep, uncomfortable work of therapy. UberTherapy offers a defence for the irreplaceable value of human therapists and a roadmap for preserving the legacies of real therapy in the digital world.

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Cleo Nisse, "Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting" (Princeton UP, 2026) Jun 26, 2026

Show notes

Between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on canvas instead of wood or walls. Nowhere was more important to this shift than Venice, where painters experimented with canvas with remarkable creativity and innovation. In Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting(Princeton University Press, 2026), Dr. Cleo Nisse investigates why Venetian artists adopted canvas and how it revolutionized their art between 1400 and 1600.
Intertwining approaches from art history and art conservation, and featuring stunning new photographs that show details as never before, the book presents groundbreaking research based on close study of Venetian artworks, archival sources, art-making treatises, and early modern art criticism. It sheds new light on the materiality of early modern canvas, its production and supply, and the influence of climate on its use. The book offers fresh interpretations of iconic works and important concepts such as pittura di macchia and non finito, and demonstrates how canvas contributed to the radical new style of painters such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. But above all else, it shows how canvas changed the making and meaning of paintings.

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Jonathon W. Penney, "Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age" (Cambridge UP, 2025) Jun 23, 2026

Show notes

In Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jonathon W. Penney explores the increasing weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and new technology to repress and control us. With corporations, governments, and extremist actors using big data, cyber-mobs, AI, and other threats to limit our rights and freedoms, concerns about chilling effects – or how these activities deter us from exercising our rights – have become urgent. Penney draws on law, privacy, and social science to present a new conformity theory that highlights the dangers of chilling effects and their potential to erode democracy and enable a more illiberal future. He critiques conventional theories and provides a framework for predicting, explaining, and evaluating chilling effects in a range of contexts. Urgent and timely, Chilling Effects sheds light on the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power, and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and in the future.

You can find more information about Jon at his website: https://jonpenney.com/

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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Gareth Doherty, "Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design" (U Virginia Press, 2025) Jun 21, 2026

Show notes

Landscape architecture is at a crossroads. The ability to draw upon interdisciplinary perspectives and generate insights from the combined vantage points of design, environmental studies, and the social sciences puts it in a prime position to address the most pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and social inequality. Its current reliance on digital and technological solutions, however, has increasingly caused landscape architects to lose sight of the ways in which humans actually use spaces. And while landscapes are designed all over the world, the discipline remains inordinately centered on the Global North. Dr. Gareth Doherty's Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design (University of Virginia Press, 2025) alters that long-standing paradigm through real-life examples that provide tools for practitioners to engage more deeply with multidimensional, diverse landscapes and the communities that create, live in, and use them.

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Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age Jun 20, 2026

Show notes

In her recent publication, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, scholar Ayala Fader 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. 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 investigates religious doubt and social change in the digital age. In following those living double lives, who range from the religiously observant but open-minded on one end to atheists on the other, 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.

Join YIVO for a discussion of this recent publication featuring Fader in conversation with Josh Lambert, professor and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on September 22, 2022.

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Emily Doucet, "Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts" (Duke UP, 2026) Jun 16, 2026

Show notes

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts (Duke UP, 2026), Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.

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