New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

In the early hours of March 24, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumble with tanks as soldiers seize the presidential palace and topple Argentina's leader. The country is now under the control of a military junta, with army chief Jorge Rafael Videla at the helm. With quiet support from the United States and tacit approval from much of Argentina's people, who are tired of constant bombings and gunfights, the junta swiftly launches the National Reorganization Process or El Proceso—a bland name masking their ruthless campaign to crush the political left and instill the country with “Western, Christian” values. The junta holds power until 1983 and decimates a generation. One of the military's most diabolical acts is kidnapping hundreds of pregnant women. After giving birth in captivity, the women are “disappeared,” and their babies secretly given to other families—many of them headed by police or military officers. For mothers of pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law, the source of their grief is twofold—the disappearances of their children, and the theft of their grandchildren. A group of fierce grandmothers forms the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen infants and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them. At a time when speaking out could mean death, the Abuelas confront military officers and launch protests to reach international diplomats and journalists. They become detectives, adopting disguises to observe suspected grandchildren, and even work alongside a renowned American scientist to pioneer groundbreaking genetic tests. A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Haley Cohen Gilliland is the rarest of nonfiction that reads like a novel and puts your heart in your throat. It is the product of years of extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting. It marks the arrival of a blazing new talent in narrative journalism. In these pages, a regime tries to terrorize a country, but love prevails. The grandmothers' stunning stories reveal new truths about memory, identity, and family. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Most of us know something about the grand theories of physics that transformed our views of the universe at the start of the twentieth century: quantum mechanics and general relativity. But we are much less familiar with the brilliant theories that make up the backbone of the digital revolution. In Beautiful Math: The Surprisingly Simple Ideas behind the Digital Revolution in How We Live, Work, and Communicate (MIT Press, 2024) Chris Bernhardt explores the mathematics at the very heart of the information age. He asks questions such as: What is information? What advantages does digital information have over analog? How do we convert analog signals into digital ones? What is an algorithm? What is a universal computer? And how can a machine learn?The four major themes of Beautiful Math are information, communication, computation, and learning. Bernhardt typically starts with a simple mathematical model of an important concept, then reveals a deep underlying structure connecting concepts from what, at first, appear to be unrelated areas. His goal is to present the concepts using the least amount of mathematics, but nothing is oversimplified. Along the way, Bernhardt also discusses alphabets, the telegraph, and the analog revolution; information theory; redundancy and compression; errors and noise; encryption; how analog information is converted into digital information; algorithms; and, finally, neural networks. Historical anecdotes are included to give a sense of the technology at that time, its impact, and the problems that needed to be solved. Taking its readers by the hand, regardless of their math background, Beautiful Math is a fascinating journey through the mathematical ideas that undergird our everyday digital interactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, one out of five people born with a uterus will have it removed. So, why do we seldom talk about this surgery? Highly performed yet overlooked, examining the paradox of hysterectomy begins to unravel the various problems with how we medically treat uteruses and the people who have them.Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Andréa Becker weaves centuries of medical history with rich qualitative data from 100 women, trans men, and nonbinary people who had, want, or are considering hysterectomy. In compelling detail, Dr. Becker reveals how America's healthcare system routinely deprives people of the ability to control their own bodies along race and gender lines. When people ask for a hysterectomy, they are often met with pushback: Are you sick enough? Old enough? Have you had enough babies? Will you regret this? How will your future husband feel about this? Yet this pushback is not equally experienced. While some people are barred access, others are ushered toward a hysterectomy. These contradictory recommendations reveal the persistent biases entrenched within healthcare.Get It Out interrogates how little choice people with uteruses ultimately have over their reproductive health, and explores what these “choices” signify amid interlocking systems of inequality. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with space anthropologist, writer, and Virginia Tech doctoral candidate, Savannah Mandel, about her book, Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration (Chicago Review Press, 2025). The book uses history, ethnography, participant observation in policy-making, and other forms of evidence to argue for the discontinuation of human space exploration until pressing forms of human suffering are brought to an end on Earth. The pair also talk about a number of other projects Mandel is working on, including a history of apocalyptic visions and her dissertation on the history of the space mining industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

How has the digital revolution transformed criminal opportunities and behaviour? What is different about cybercrime compared with traditional criminal activity? What impact might cybercrime have on public security? In this updated edition of his authoritative and field-defining text, cybercrime expert David Wall carefully examines these and other important issues. Incorporating analysis of the latest technological advances and their criminological implications, he disentangles what is really known about cybercrime today. An ecosystem of specialists has emerged to facilitate cybercrime, reducing individual offenders' level of risk and increasing the scale of crimes involved. This is a world where digital and networked technologies have effectively democratized crime by enabling almost anybody to carry out crimes that were previously the preserve of either traditional organized crime groups or a privileged coterie of powerful people. Against this background, the author scrutinizes the regulatory challenges that cybercrime poses for the criminal (and civil) justice processes, at both the national and the international levels. This book offers the most intellectually robust account of cybercrime currently available. It is suitable for use on courses across the social sciences, and in computer science, and will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Over the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer professionals have organized to achieve greater inclusion into the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This inclusion, however, has come at a cost. In the 1970s, these professionals sought to radically transform STEM fields by confronting the homophobia and sexism embedded within them. Instead, these fields became more corporatized and privatized, and STEM institutions and workspaces—particularly in the spheres of government and business—became dominated by a focus on individualism, self-improvement/advancement, and meritocracy, which are hallmarks of neoliberalism. For many LGBTQ STEM professionals, inclusion now required becoming more apolitical, pro-capital, and focused on professional development.In Out Doing Science: LGBTQ STEM Professionals and Inclusion in Neoliberal Times (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025), Dr. Tom Waidzunas, Dr. Ethan Czuy Levine, and Dr. Brandon Fairchild explore this transformation of LGBTQ STEM professionals from oppositional outsiders to assimilationist insiders. Drawing on historical archives, oral interviews, and participant observation of professional societies and workspaces, the authors interrogate the meanings of “inclusion” and why some LGBTQ STEM professionals have benefited from it more than others. They also advocate for a “queer STEM” that challenges and transforms the racism, classism, sexism, cisheterosexism, and imperialism of these fields, institutions, and workspaces. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Out Doing Science will appeal to readers interested in LGBTQ studies, and science and technology studies, as well as anyone who wants to create a more diverse and inclusive work environment. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Dr. Phil Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer states in socialist Eastern Europe and in the postcolonial Global South utilized airlines of their own to forge rival pathways to modernization. Part of this modernization involved norms for working women. Stewardesses at airlines around the globe encountered novel threats to their dignity as the Jet Age approached. By the late 1960s, stewardesses endured harsh objectification: High hemlines, tight uniforms, and raunchy marketing were touted as modern and liberated. These women, whether from the West, East, or South, forged their own pathways to achieve greater dignity at work. In Women and the Jet Age, Dr. Tiemeyer's global account of the rise of air travel and of early feminist strivings among stewardesses is one of the first histories to place such developments—political, economic, and feminist—in dialogue with each other. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Because brainwashing affects both the world and our observation of the world, we often don't recognize it while it's happening—unless we know where to look. As Rebecca Lemov writes in The Instability of Truth, “Brainwashing erases itself.” What we call brainwashing is more common than we think; it is not so much what happens to other people as what can happen to anyone. The Instability of Truth exposes the myriad ways our minds can be controlled against our will, from the brainwashing techniques used against American POWs in North Korea to the “soft” brainwashing of social media doomscrolling and behavior-shaping. In our increasingly data-driven world, anyone can fall victim to mind control. Lemov identifies invasive forms of emotional engineering that exploit trauma and addiction to coerce and persuade in everyday life. Tracing the word “brainwashing” from deep in the files of an operative of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in the 1950s to the pioneering research of Robert Jay Lifton, to the public trials of cult leaders and the case of Patty Hearst, Lemov also studies how the idea of mind control has spread across the globe and penetrated courtrooms, secret labs, military schools, and today's digital sites. The Instability of Truth offers lessons from mind-control episodes past and present. Truth is always subject to question in more mundane walks of life than most people believe, and Lemov equips us for the increasing challenges we face from social media, AI, and an unprecedented, global form of surveillance capitalism. The Instability of Truth develops a rigorous new understanding of both brainwashing's paradoxes and its emotional roots, by giving voice to brainwashers, the brainwashed, and third-party observers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

How did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years later? How efficient are wild animals as investors, and how do dog breeds become national symbols? Why have scientific breakthroughs so often originated in the study of shadows? How did the file card prepare scholarship and commerce for the rise of electronic data processing, and why did the visual metaphor of the tab survive into today's graphic interfaces? Why have Amish artisans played an important role in manufacturing advanced technology? Why was United Shoe Machinery the Microsoft of the 1890s? Surprises like these, Edward Tenner believes, can help us deal with the technological issues that confront us now. Since the 1980s, Edward Tenner has contributed essays on technology, design, and culture to leading magazines, newspapers, and professional journals, and has been interviewed on subjects ranging from medical ethics to typography. Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press, 2025)--named for one of the paradoxes that can result from the inherent contradictions between consumer safety and product marketing--brings many of Tenner's essays together into one volume for the first time, accompanied by new introductions by the author on the theme of each work. As an independent historian and public speaker, Tenner has spent his career deploying concepts from economics, engineering, psychology, science, and sociology, to explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity. Edward Tenner is an independent writer and Distinguished Scholar in the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and teaches the course Understanding Disasters at Princeton University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2025), solar power is no less likely to exploit marginalized communities than dirtier forms of energy. Drawing from ethnographic research on clean energy corporations and community solar campaigns in New York City, Lennon argues that both groups overlook solar's extractive underside because they primarily experience energy from the sun in the virtual world of the cloud. He shows how the material properties of solar technology—its shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and modularity—work closely with images, digital platforms, and quantitative graphics to shape utopic visions in which renewable energy can eradicate the constitutive tensions of racial capitalism. As a corrective to this virtual world, Lennon calls for an equitable energy transition that centers the senses and sensibilities neglected by screenwork: one's haptic care for their local environment; the full-bodied feel of infrastructural labor; and the sublime affect of the sun. Myles Lennon is Dean's Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Anthropology at Brown University. Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this episode, New Books Network host Nina Bo Wagner talks to Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling about his recently published book The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science (PublicAffairs, 2025). They talk about the process of writing the book, including delving deep into the local paranomal community in New Hampshire. The book contrasts profound institutional distrust effecting higher education policy and scientific literacy, with a desperate grapple for community through paranormal beliefs. It portrays the Kitt Research Initiative, established in 2010, with the mission to use scientific method to document the existence of spirits. Founder Andy Kitt was unafraid — perhaps eager — to offend other paranormal investigators by exposing the fraudulence of their less advanced techniques. Kitt's efforts attracted flocks of psychics, alien abductees, witches, mediums, ghost hunters, UFOlogists, cryptozoologists and warlocks from all over New England, and the world. Hongoltz-Hetling brings our attention to the exponential growth of new age beliefs in the United States, with the potential to be the largest religion in the nation by 2050 at current rates. He argues that it is time for institutions in both science and policy to sit up, take notice, and engage with paranormal beliefs instead of marginalizing, or worse, ostracizing them. Wagner and Hongoltz-Hetling touch on mental health, domestic violence, satanic panic and capturing paranormal orbs. The conversation is sure to provide fascinating insight into unconventional and riveting science journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the mid-nineteenth century the balloon remained relatively unchanged and was no longer seen as the harbinger of a new era. Yet that all changed in the last third of the century, when following the traumatic Franco-Prussian War defeat, the balloon reemerged to become the modern artifact that captured the attention of many. Through this process, the balloon became an important symbol of the fledgling Third Republic, and France established itself as the world leader in flight. In Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira tells for the first time the story of this surprising revival.Through extensive research in the press and archives in France, the United States, and Brazil, De Oliveira argues that French civil society cultivated popular enthusiasm for flight (what historians call “airmindedness”) decades before the advent of the airplane. Champions of French ballooning made the case that if the British Royal Navy controlled the seas and the Imperial German Army dominated the continent, then France needed to take ownership of the skies. The French appropriated this newly imagined geopolitical space through a variety of practices, from republican savants who studied the atmosphere at high altitudes to aristocrats who organized transcontinental long-distance competitions. All of this made Paris into the global capital of a thriving aeronautical culture that incorporated seemingly contradictory visions of sacrificial patriotism, aristocratic modernity, colonial anxiety, and technological cosmopolitanism. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.Incorporating insights from Afshordi's cutting-edge research and Halper's original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins (University of Chicago Press, 2025) compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory's strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these notions. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community—all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Wisnioski, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, about his new book, Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life. The pair talk about how the new book connects to Matt's earlier book, Engineers for Change; how what Matt calls “innovation expertise” first emerged; how government played a key role in promoting the idea of innovation; how the idea of innovation was democratized from focusing on elite white men to focusing on women, people of color, children, and, well, everyone; and much more. Vinsel and Wisnioski also talk about Matt's current book project with Michael Meindl, Associate Professor of Communication at Radford University - a history of the television show and multimedia product, The Magic School Bus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, 2025) is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to eminent health officials—repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence. As a result, for the first time in modern American history, millions of healthy children did not set foot in a classroom for more than a year.Since the spring of 2020, many students in Europe had been learning in person. Even many peers at home—in private schools, and public schools in mostly “red” states and districts—were in class full time from fall 2020 onward. Whatever inequities that existed among American children before the pandemic, the selective school closures exacerbated them, disproportionately affecting the underprivileged. Deep mental, physical, and academic harms—among them, depression, anxiety, abuse, obesity, plummeting test scores, and rising drop-out rates—were endured for no discernible benefit. As Europe had shown very early, after they had sent kids back to class, there was never any evidence that long-term school closures, nor a host of interventions imposed on students when they were in classrooms, would reduce overall cases or deaths in any meaningful way.The story of American schools during the pandemic serves as a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis and uncertainty. Ultimately, this book is not about COVID; it's about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress. David Zweig is the author of the novel Swimming Inside the Sun and the nonfiction book Invisibles. He has testified twice before Congress as an expert witness on American schools during the pandemic, and his investigative reporting on the pandemic has been cited in numerous congressional letters and a brief to the Supreme Court. Zweig's journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, Wired, The Free Press, The Boston Globe, and, most often, his newsletter, Silent Lunch. He lives with his family in New York State. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In The Computer Always Wins: A Playful Introduction to Algorithms through Puzzles and Strategy Games (MIT Press, 2025), Elliot Lichtman will teach you some of computer science's most powerful concepts in a refreshingly accessible way: exploring them through word games, board games, and strategy games you already know. Learn recursion by playing tic-tac-toe, efficient search through puzzle games like sudoku and Wordle, and machine learning by way of the playground classic rock-paper-scissors. Finish the book, and you'll come away with not only a deeper understanding of these foundational programming techniques but also a new appreciation for the amazing feats that can be accomplished using simple, readable code. Elliot Lichtman started teaching online classes in computer science when he was a freshman in high school. Small classes quickly grew into a series of larger and longer offerings, and from those, this book was born. Elliot is currently a junior at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The 1960s continue to hold an almost mythical place in Western culture, particularly in Britain, where change was widespread and infiltrated many aspects of life. This included architecture, whose role in a modern democracy and the form it should take were hotly debated. 1960s University Buildings: The Golden Age of British Modern Architecture (Lund Humphries, 2025) by John Barr discusses the architectural thinking of the time through an examination of the design of university buildings. While there were notable buildings being built in other spheres, no other field of architecture provided the opportunity to express those ideas as freely, while also reflecting innovative new thinking about education and society. Somehow, the university buildings of the 1960s seemed to represent the cutting edge of modern architecture in the UK. This book provides the first critical analysis and overview of these buildings, designed by some of the leading British architects of the period including Basil Spence, Leslie Martin, Alison and Peter Smithson, Denys Lasdun, Powell and Moya and James Stirling. By placing the buildings in a wider social, cultural and political context, it examines the combination of circumstances and attitudes that produced results that are equally admired and detested and allows us to understand how we might replicate or avoid them in the future. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Bookish Words & their Surprising Stories (Bodleian, 2025) by Dr. David Crystal, explore how books have played a pivotal role in the history of English vocabulary. The noun itself is one of the oldest words in the language, originating from boc in Old English, and appears in many commonly used expressions today – by the book, bring to book and bookworm – to name a few. Alongside the arrival of the printing press came the development of the newspaper industry. Terminology such as stop the press, front page news and hit the headlines have developed into common English vernacular over time. Still, the emergence of the internet continues to change all languages. This anthology presents a selection of more than 100 words which show the influence of writing, reading and publishing books on our everyday vocabulary over the centuries, telling the stories behind their linguistic origins, and uncovering some surprising twists in the development of their meaning through time. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Jeremy Stolow is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as our aura. This rich, interdisciplinary study by Dr. Stolow chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how its images are put to work in the diverse realms of psychical research, esotericism, art photography, popular culture, and the New Age alternative medical and spiritual marketplace.At their core, pictures of auras are boundary objects that operate simultaneously in multiple conceptual and practical realms, serving varying goals of making art, healing bodies, and exploring the cosmos. Drawing on extensive archival as well as field research, Stolow reconstructs a global history of this boundary-crossing enterprise through its evolving media technologies, markets, and cultural arenas. It is a story shaped through exchanges among professionals and amateurs, scientists and occultists, countercultural artists and entrepreneurs, metropolitans and hinterland figures. With more than 60 full-color illustrations, Picturing Aura brings to light a remarkable, entangled history of picture-making that challenges settled assumptions about religion, art, and science. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

How can technology creates new possibilities for transgender people? How do trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology? Trans Technologies, (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Oliver L. Haimson, explores how and why mainstream technologies often exclude or marginalize transgender users. Trans Technologies describes what happens when trans people take technology design into their own hands. Dr. Haimson, whose research into gender transition and technology has defined this area of study, draws on transgender studies and his own in-depth interviews with more than 100 creators of technology—including apps, games, health resources, extended reality systems, and supplies designed to address challenges trans people face—to explain what trans technology is and to explore its present possibilities and limitations, as well as its future prospects.Dr. Haimson surveys the landscape of trans technologies to reveal the design processes that brought these technologies to life, and to show how trans people often must rely on community, technology, and the combination of the two to meet their basic needs and challenges. His work not only identifies the role of trans technology in caring for individuals within the trans community but also shows how trans technology creation empowers some trans people to create their own tools for navigating the world. Articulating which trans needs and challenges are currently being addressed by technology and which still need to be addressed; describing how trans technology creators are accomplishing this work; examining how privilege, race, and access to resources impact which trans technologies are built and who may be left out; and highlighting new areas of innovation to be explored, Trans Technologies opens the way to meaningful social change. Our guest is: Dr. Oliver Haimson, who is an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI) where he directs the Community Research on Identity and Technology (CRIT) Lab, and is affiliate faculty with the Digital Studies Institute (DSI) and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies (CATS). He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and a Henry Russel Award. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: More Than A Glitch Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters Raising Them Public Scholarship and Feminist Communications Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic. But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory. Charms and potions could still be found nestled between glistening brass instruments and leather-bound tomes. The line between the natural and supernatural remained porous, yet to be defined. From the icy Danish observatory of Tycho Brahe, to the smoky, sulphur-stained workshop of John Dee, in Inside the Stargazer's Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe (OneWorld, 2024) Dr. Violet Moller tours the intellectual heart of early European science. Exploring its rich, multidisciplinary culture, Inside the Stargazer's Palace reveals a dazzling forgotten world, where all knowledge, no matter how arcane, could be pursued in good faith. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Stories of teen sexting scandals, cyberbullying, and image-based sexual abuse have become commonplace fixtures of the digital age, with many adults struggling to identify ways to monitor young people's digital engagement. In When Rape Goes Viral: Youth and Sexual Assault in the Digital Age (Univ of California Press, 2023), Anna Gjika argues that rather than focusing on surveillance, we should examine such incidents for what they tell us about youth peer cultures and the gender norms and sexual ethics governing their interactions. Drawing from interviews with teens and high-profile cases of mediated juvenile sexual assault, Gjika exposes the deeply unequal and heteronormative power dynamics informing teens' intimate relationships and online practices, and she critically interrogates the role of digital cultures and broader social values in sanctioning abuse. The book also explores the consequences of social media and digital evidence for young victim-survivors and perpetrators of sexual assault, detailing the paradoxical capacities of technology for social and legal responses to gender-based violence. 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 at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research on: 1.) escape rooms 2.) the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social), Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email (johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this 100th episode (!!!) of Peoples & Things, host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Benjamin H. Snyder, Associate Professor of Sociology at Williams College, about his recent book, Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore's Surveillance Experiment (University of California Press, 2024). Spy Plane examines how the city of Baltimore, Maryland, came to adopt a corporate-run surveillance program using aerial surveillance planes that could supposedly photograph and track every person in public. Snyder bases his account on incredible access and direct observations inside the for-profit tech startup that ran the program. He also examines the complex reactions of community members in the neighborhoods that were surveilled and how the program eventually fell to pieces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Data Enclaves (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) focuses on our increasing dependence upon Big Tech to live, manage, and enjoy our lives. The author examines how we freely exchange our personal data for access to online platforms, services, and devices without proper consideration of the implications of this trade. Our personal data is the defining resource of the emerging digital economy, and it is increasingly concentrated in a few data enclaves controlled by Big Tech firms, cementing an increasingly parasitic form of technoscientific innovation. Big Tech controls access to these data, dictates the terms of our use of their services and products, and controls the future development of key technologies like artificial intelligence. The contention of this book is that we need to rethink our political and policy approach to data governance and to do so requires unpacking the peculiarities of personal data and how personal data are transformed into a valuable asset. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In 1818, a curious root arrived in a small English village, tucked—seemingly by accident—in a packing case mailed from Brazil. The amateur botanist who cultivated it soon realized that he had something remarkable on his hands: an exceptionally rare orchid never before seen on British shores. It arrived just as “orchid mania” was sweeping across Europe and North America, driving a vast plant trade that catered to wealthy private patrons as well as the fast-growing middle classes eager to display exotic flowers at home. Dubbed Cattleya labiata, the striking purple-and-crimson bloom quickly became one of the most coveted flowers on both continents. As tales of the flower's beauty spread through scientific journals and the popular press, orchid dealers and enthusiasts initiated a massive search to recover it in its natural habitat. In The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession (Harvard University Press, 2025) Dr. Sarah Bilston illuminates the story of this international quest, introducing the collectors and nurserymen who funded expeditions, the working-class plant hunters who set out to find the flower, the South American laborers and specialists with whom they contracted, the botanists who used the latest science to study orchids in all their varieties, and the writers and artists who established the near-mythic status of the “lost orchid.” The dark side of this global frenzy was the social and environmental harm it wrought, damaging fragile ecologies on which both humans and plants depended. Following the human ambitions and dramas that drove an international obsession, The Lost Orchid is a story of consumer desire, scientific curiosity, and the devastating power of colonial overreach. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

An interview with Jean Ryoo and Jane Margolis about Power On! A diverse group of teenage friends learn how computing can be personally and politically empowering and why all students need access to computer science education. This lively graphic novel follows a diverse group of teenage friends as they discover that computing can be fun, creative, and empowering. Taylor, Christine, Antonio, and Jon seem like typical young teens—they communicate via endless texting, they share jokes, they worry about starting high school, and they have each other's backs. But when a racially-biased artificial intelligence system causes harm in their neighborhood, they suddenly realize that tech isn't as neutral as they thought it was. But can an algorithm be racist? And what is an algorithm, anyway?In school, they decide to explore computing classes, with mixed results. One class is only about typing. The class that Christine wants to join is full, and the school counselor suggests that she take a class in “Tourism and Hospitality” instead. (Really??) But Antonio's class seems legit, Christine finds an after-school program, and they decide to teach the others what they learn. By summer vacation, all four have discovered that computing is both personally and politically empowering.Interspersed through the narrative are text boxes with computer science explainers and inspirational profiles of people of color and women in the field (including Katherine Johnson of Hidden Figures fame). Power On! is an essential read for young adults, general readers, educators, and anyone interested in the power of computing, how computing can do good or cause harm, and why addressing underrepresentation in computing needs to be a top priority. Listen to the interview on the New Books Network Spanish here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with historian Beth Linker, Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, about her recent book, Slouch: Postural Panic in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2024). Slouch examines the history of conceptions of “bad posture” as they arose over the course of the 20th century. The book is a beautiful example of taking a perhaps seemingly small topic and showing how it connects to many, both surprising and well-known, themes in history. The pair also discuss a few of the potential projects Linker may be turning to next, all of which sound fascinating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Lina Pinto-García delves into the relationship between war and disease, focusing on Colombian armed conflict and the skin disease known as cutaneous leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis is transmitted through the bite of female sandflies. The most common manifestation, cutaneous leishmaniasis, is neither deadly nor contagious: it affects the skin by producing lesions of varying size and shape. In Colombia, the insect vector of the disease is native to the same forested environments that have served as the main stage for one of the longest and most violent civil wars in Latin American history. As a result, the populations most affected by leishmaniasis in Colombia are members of the state army and non-state armed groups.  Pinto-García explores how leishmaniasis and the armed conflict are inextricably connected and mutually reinforcing. Her title, Maraña, means "tangle" in Spanish but is also commonly used in Colombia to name the entangled greenery, braided lianas, and dense foliage that characterize the tropical forests where leishmaniasis typically occurs. Pinto-García argues that leishmaniasis and the war are not merely linked, but enmarañadas to each other through narratives, technologies, and practices produced by the state, medicine, biomedical research, and the armed conflict itself. She also uses the concept of desenmarañados (disentangled) to discuss how other attachments between leishmaniasis and society could be formed through different scientific programs, technological designs, healthcare practices, regulations, and social and cultural processes capable of challenging violence, suffering, and inequality. All told, Maraña is a passionate study of how war has shaped the production of scientific knowledge about leishmaniasis and access to its treatments in Colombia. This episode is hosted by Elena Sobrino, a lecturer in the Science and Technology Studies Program at Tufts University. Her research explores volunteer work, union histories, and environmentalism in the Flint water crisis. She is currently writing about the politics of fatigue and crisis, and teaching courses on science and technology studies, ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

To what extent do cyberspace operations increase the risks of escalation between nation-state rivals? Scholars and practitioners have been concerned about cyber escalation for decades, but the question remains hotly debated. The issue is increasingly important for international politics as more states develop and employ offensive cyber capabilities, and as the international system is increasingly characterized by emergent multipolarity.In Escalation Dynamics in Cyberspace, Erica D. Lonergan and Shawn W. Lonergan tackle this question head-on, presenting a comprehensive theory that explains the conditions under which cyber operations may lead to escalation. In doing so, they challenge long-held assumptions about strategic interactions in cyberspace, arguing that cyberspace is not as dangerous as the conventional wisdom might suggest. In some cases, cyber operations could even facilitate the de-escalation of international crises. To support their claims, Lonergan and Lonergan test their theory against a range of in-depth case studies, including strategic interactions between the United States and key rivals; a series of case studies of the role of cyber operations in international crises; and plausible future scenarios involving cyber operations during conflict.  The authors then apply their analytical insights to policymaking, making the case that skepticism is warranted about the overall efficacy of employing cyber power for strategic ends. By exploring the role of cyber operations in routine competition, crises, and warfighting, Escalation Dynamics in Cyberspace presents nuanced insights about how cyberspace affects international politics Our guest is Erica D. Lonergan, an Assistant Professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Why we must rethink our residency on the planet to understand the connected challenges of tribalism, inequity, climate justice, and democracy. How can we respond to the current planetary ecological emergency? In To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental Learning (MIT Press, 2020), Mitchell Thomashow proposes that we revitalize, revisit, and reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth. First, we must understand that the major challenges of our time--migration, race, inequity, climate justice, and democracy--connect to the biosphere. Traditional environmental education has accomplished much, but it has not been able to stem the inexorable decline of global ecosystems. Thomashow, the former president of a college dedicated to sustainability, describes instead environmental learning, a term signifying that our relationship to the biosphere must be front and center in all aspects of our daily lives. In this illuminating book, he provides rationales, narratives, and approaches for doing just that. Dr. Mitchell Thomashow is a renowned environmental educator with a career that spans decades, and this is his 4th book within this domain… published by MIT press. An overarching theme of ‘sense of place' has permeated this and his other writings, and all have asked people to stop, see and reflect on the changes around them. Mitch has a had varied career in academia, from teaching and advising graduate students, to initiating a cohort-based, low residency model, for a PhD in Environmental Studies. He has chaired an Environmental Studies Department at Antioch University and subsequently was appointed as the President of Unity College. Mitchell's expertise is still in demand in the environmental arena. He has been well received through over a hundred of his plenary addresses, workshops, and sustainability consultations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car (Simon & Schuster, 2022), Alex Davies tells the enlightening and significant story of the effort to create driverless cars and the intense competition among tech heavyweights such as Google, Uber, and Tesla to move this technology forward. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been one of the most hyped technologies of recent years, but early promises that they would quickly become common place have not borne fruit. Alex Davies set forth the twisted paths of this technology's evolution from its genesis to the current moment. The idea began with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which aimed to create a land-based equivalent to the drone, a vehicle that could operate in war zones without risking human lives. DARPA established “Grand Challenges” that enticed future-oriented thinkers including amateurs and students to help drive the technology from fantasy to reality. Carnegie-Mellon University and other universities played a major role. The technology got the attention of Silicon Valley companies like Google and Uber. Next arriving were the major US automakers, GM and Ford, who initiated their programs of their own to commercialize the technology, and Chinese companies also showed an intense interest. As road testing went forward, however, the challenges became far more apparent. The difficulties of traversing diverse terrains under varying weather conditions without a driver came out to be far more daunting than expected. Progress was made but in no way as fast as the developers of the technology hoped. The early enthusiasm of the key players dissipated as they came to realize that AI-assisted driverless transportation faced formidable barriers. This book provides fabulous insights into the key characters in this story and how they struggled with a technology that was not ready for rush-hour driving It is a fast-paced, exciting account of how autonomous technology emerged, the main players, the conflicts between companies, and state of the technology today. The book provides the reader with a genuine feel for how real happens. The writing is fantastic because of the emphasis on that details that come from the many conversations that Davies had with people at the center of the story. Hosted by Alfred Marcus, Edson Spencer Professor of Strategy and Technology University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

This book from Cambridge University Professor Tim Minshall provides an enlightening view of how the world of manufacturing world has an immense influence on our lives. We all reside in a world of multiple manufactured products, which include our clothing, food, furniture, electronics, automobiles, and so many other products upon which we rely, including commercial aviation, pharmeceuticals, baked good, and medical devices. Nonetheless, the processes by which these items are made and enter our lives are nearly unknown to us. How often do we think about from where these items come, how they are made, and how they come into our lives? Professor Minshall delivers answers in How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing (Ecco, 2025). The book traces the amazing paths that everyday products take to enter our lives, showing how products are designed, delivered, and assembled in small shops and giant factories throughout the work. The book depicts the role that global shipping hubs plays as well as the role that home delivery is playing in providing us with the products we want and upon which we depend. The book also delves into the important question of how we can improve the resiliency of the global manufacturing system. What makes the book special is that Professor Minshall pays substantial attention to the impacts of global manufacturing on nature and on how we can move to a more sustainable future. Brimming with vitality and sparkling examples, this book depicts the grand system of global of manufacturing that allows us to have all the products we need for virtually every aspect of our existence. By making sense of this astonishing and largely concealed world, Professor Minshall is enabling us to make better choices for ourselves, our communities, and the planet. Alfred Marcus is Edson Spencer Professor Chair of Strategy and Technology Leadership at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones are joined by crypto journalist Matt Binder and longtime observer of U.S. politics and policy Edward Luce to explore the staggering wealth being generated by the Trump family's crypto empire. We also hear from Sergei Sergienko, a crypto entrepreneur who has made and lost hundreds of millions in the crypto markets. Sergei has also faced down gangsters who tried to extort his wealth—an attack that mirrors a recent spate of kidnappings and abductions of crypto players in Paris. Join us for a modern tale of global grift that is changing how the American presidency can function and do deals on the world stage. Guests Matt Binder – Journalist and host of the Scam Economy podcast Edward Luce – U.S. national editor and columnist at the Financial Times. His forthcoming biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Zbig: The Life of Zbig Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet, will be published in May 2025 by Simon & Schuster (U.S.) and Bloomsbury (U.K.). Sergei Sergienko – CEO at Chrono.tech; Australian entrepreneur and leading blockchain expert Producer: Pearse LynchExecutive Producer: Lucinda Knight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Rejecting much of the conventional wisdom to what makes up a modern Army, William F. Owen's Euclid's Army: Preparing Land Forces for Warfare Today (Howgate Publishing Limited, 2025) massacres fields sacred cows to challenge many of the mainstream ideas about the future of land warfare and how it should be conducted. Based on his experience working with the British Army and industry, Owen draws the reader back to basics based on limited budgets, limited resources and an overall reduction in cost, weight and complexity to comprehensively understand how armies might or should equip, train and organise for any unknowable future. Stripped of traditional academic or journalistic approaches and well-worn familiar narratives, Euclid's Army reformulates how soldiers, civil servants and politicians should think about land warfare, thus war in general.William F. Owen (Wilf) served for 12 years in the British Army in regular and reserve Infantry and Intelligence units. He then worked on defence advisory and security projects in West Africa and the Far East before moving to writing and editing on defence matters. In 2010, he co-founded Military Strategy Magazine, for which he is currently editor. He also worked as a consultant and contractor for the British Army and several defence agencies and companies worldwide.Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “is the main tool we have to bridge the divide.” She explains that the motivation in Searches as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication—or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: she and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today's media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers' paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that “don't have a perspective,” makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too “out there,” stay tuned for Vauhini's down-to-earth answer to our signature question. Mentioned in this episode: Vauhini Vara, Searches (2025), The Immortal King Rao (2022), “My Decade in Google Searches” (2019) Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580) Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (2023) Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (2024), “According to Alice” (2023) Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools will never Dismantle the Master's House” (1979) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University's Science in Human Culture program. Ben is the author “The Art of Text to Speech,” which recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, and he's currently writing a history of text-to-speech computing.  In this conversation, we explore:  the fascinating backstory to HAL 9000, the speaking computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey  2001's strong influence on computer science and the cultural reception of computers the weird technology of the first talking computers and their relationship to optical film soundtracks Louis Gerstman, the forgotten innovator who first made an IBM mainframe sing “Daisy Bell.” why the phonemic approach of Stephen Hawking's voice didn't make it into the voice of Siri the analog history of digital computing and the true differences between analog and digital  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely? In Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford University Press, 2025) Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Grounding her analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Dr. Tucker-Abramson persuasively argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony's global trajectory. Shifting our focus from Americanness to the fraught geopolitics of US Empire, from the car to the built environment through which it moves, and from passengers to those left behind, Dr. Tucker-Abramson remaps the road novel, elucidating the genre's unique ability both to reveal the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization and to obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The Rise of Unmanned Warfare: Origins of the Us Autonomous Military Arsenal (Oxford UP, 2023) tells the fascinating story of the people, processes, and beliefs that led to the contemporary American unmanned arsenal. It takes an expansive look at automated and autonomous technologies, from mines and torpedoes to guided bombs and missiles, satellites, and ultimately, drones. Instead of asking the question, "Why unmanned rather than manned?" the book explains why certain types of unmanned systems became popular while others languished in research or in small pockets of the American military. To answer this question, Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia Macdonald use interviews of senior decision-makers, military doctrine and writings, and historical sources to detail the proliferation of over a hundred years of unmanned weapons in the US arsenal, from mines and balloons to Reapers and Global Hawks. Their exploration reveals how multiple factors--key policy entrepreneurs, like Andy Marshall in the Office of Net Assessment; critical junctures like the fall of the USSR or the 9/11 attacks; beliefs that emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War; and US military service culture--all interacted in complex ways to form today's unmanned arsenal. The Hand Behind Unmanned uses theories of organizational innovation and process tracing of historical cases to explain recent developments, including US precision munition shortfalls and the rise of unmanned aerial platforms. It also foreshadows where the US unmanned arsenal may be headed in the future. Ultimately, the book uses a remarkable case study to illustrate how ideas diffuse across people and organizations to build the weapons of modern warfare. Our guests are Doctor Jacquelyn Schneider, who is the Hargrove Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and an affiliate with Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation; and Doctor Julia Macdonald, who is a Research Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and Director of Research and Engagement at the Asia New Zealand Foundation. 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Mice are used as model organisms across a wide range of fields in science today--but it is far from obvious how studying a mouse in a maze can help us understand human problems like alcoholism or anxiety. How do scientists convince funders, fellow scientists, the general public, and even themselves that animal experiments are a good way of producing knowledge about the genetics of human behavior? In Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders (U Chicago Press, 2018), Nicole C. Nelson takes us inside an animal behavior genetics laboratory to examine how scientists create and manage the foundational knowledge of their field. Behavior genetics is a particularly challenging field for making a clear-cut case that mouse experiments work, because researchers believe that both the phenomena they are studying and the animal models they are using are complex. These assumptions of complexity change the nature of what laboratory work produces. Whereas historical and ethnographic studies traditionally portray the laboratory as a place where scientists control, simplify, and stabilize nature in the service of producing durable facts, the laboratory that emerges from Nelson's extensive interviews and fieldwork is a place where stable findings are always just out of reach. The ongoing work of managing precarious experimental systems means that researchers learn as much--if not more--about the impact of the environment on behavior as they do about genetics. Model Behavior offers a compelling portrait of life in a twenty-first-century laboratory, where partial, provisional answers to complex scientific questions are increasingly the norm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Episode 8, Dr. Messina and Dr. Gill, the host and co-host of this podcast, talked about the emotional toll that is associated with lost time---time that cannot be reclaimed. While there are many things in life that can be found or recovered when lost, time is not among them; once it is gone, it is lost forever. They highlighted the impact of technology on human connections and the importance of judicious use of time for personal growth and well-being since the risks of constant digital device usage can lead to depression, suicidal ideation, and social isolation. However, alternative activities to foster more meaningful connections can mitigate losses. The inherent ambiguity of this type of loss – its lack of clear definition or resolution – is precisely what makes it so difficult to process. Because the loss is intangible (lost presence, loss of potential connections) and is ongoing rather than a single, definable event, it prevents the typical processes of grieving from unfolding naturally. Individuals can become stuck. It is also the case for older adults. While they may not spend too much time on smartphones or scrolling through their social media accounts—some older adults do engage in these types of activities---they can lose time by watching continuous episodes of a television show versus connecting with friends. At any age, no matter how much time anyone has lost, it is important to come to the realization that our time spend with others is a precious commodity that can't be reclaimed but there are ways to change our behavior. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil liberties, democratic principles, and the foundation of the public interest over the past century. Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024) is a policy history that chronicles how the past century of regulating media infrastructure in the United States has eroded global civil liberties as well as democratic principles and the foundation of the public interest. Jennifer Holt explores the long arc of regulating broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and the data centers that serve as the cloud's storage facilities—an evolution that is connected to the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media and networks, including railroads, highways, telephony, radio, and television. In the process, Cloud Policy unearths the lasting inscriptions of policy written for an analog era and markets that no longer exist on the contemporary governance of digital cloud infrastructure.Cloud Policy brings together numerous perspectives that have thus far remained largely siloed in their respective fields of law, policy, economics, and media studies. The resulting interdisciplinary argument reveals a properly scaled view of the massive challenge facing policymakers today. Holt also addresses the evolving role of the state in the regulation of global cloud infrastructure and the growing influence of corporate gatekeepers and private sector self-governance. Cloud policy's trajectory, as Holt explains, has enacted a transformation in the cultural valuation of infrastructure as civic good, turning it into a tool of commercial profit generation. Despite these current predicaments, the book's historical lens ultimately helps the reader to envision restorative interventions and new forms of activism to create a more equitable future for infrastructure policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the Radio Craze. Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home (Bodleian Library, 2025) expresses what the radio's arrival signified at a personal level. This narrative history recounts the perspective of listeners who adopted the then radical form of communication technology, invested in their first-ever gadgets, and tuned in by their firesides to outside voices, music, SOS calls, the Pips, news, sports, royalty, and innovative radiogenic comedy. Listen In also traces how radio affected family life by exploring whether it altered dynamics between children and adults, changed relationships between women and men, as well as affected class and a wider sense of nationhood. Packed with touching stories and anecdotes, Listen In comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting, and the experience of how people consume audio is once again transforming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society