New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people.By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD. The DVD would eventually give way to streaming. As explored in Videotape (Bloomsbury, 2025), by Dr. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy in the Object Lessons series, the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment. 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

“If I had been enslaved for a year or two, I might not be able to believe in humanity any more.” “I am a victim of modern slavery.” These chilling words come from a Taiwanese female lured by a fake job offer, only to be sold into a scam compound in Cambodia. She is not alone. She is one of thousands deceived into this industry—people who left home hoping for a better life, only to find themselves trapped in a living nightmare. Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds (Verso Books, 2025) arrives at a critical moment, shedding light on one of the world's fastest-growing criminal economies: Southeast Asia's online scam industry. Running the gamut from the notorious “pig butchering” romance scams to elaborate online extortion and investment frauds, this system has transformed parts of the region into global hubs of cybercrime. Meticulously researched and grounded in years of fieldwork, Scam offers an unflinching look into the prison-like compounds that have mushroomed across multiple countries. Within these walled complexes, victims are often coerced into becoming perpetrators—trapped in what the authors describe as “compound capitalism,” a chilling hybrid of enslavement and exploitation. Scam traces how small-scale online gambling rings evolved into an international “scamdemic,” accelerated by the disruptions of COVID-19. It examines the “victim–offender trap”, a moral and psychological paradox that makes empathy difficult for outsiders. The result is a deeply human investigation into how modern slavery adapts to digital capitalism. The authors uncover the operations of scam compounds across Southeast Asia. In my interview with Ling and Ivan, what stood out was not only their depth of knowledge but their compassion. They used their skills to build trust with victims, gather evidence, and, in some cases, help orchestrate rescues. Their work is both rigorous and profoundly humane, illuminating a crisis that grows more complex each day. Though many of those involved—both perpetrators and victims—are ethnically Chinese, the networks now span continents. The scam compounds are a global phenomenon, built on economic desperation, weak governance, and digital interconnectivity. Scam is more than an exposé. It is a call to action and a vital first step toward understanding a new form of global exploitation—where modern technology and ancient cruelty combine to create a system that enslaves the vulnerable and profits from despair. Ling Li is pursuing a PhD at Ca' Foscari University of Venice with a focus on the role of technology in enabling modern slavery and human trafficking in East and Southeast Asia. In the past few years, she has been providing support to survivors of scam compounds in Southeast Asia, interacting with local and international civil society organisations to bring them relief and help with repatriation. Ivan Franceschini is a lecturer at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. His current research focuses on ethnic Chinese transnational crime, especially in the field of online fraud. He co-founded the Made in China Journal and The People's Map of Global China/ Global China Pulse. His books include Proletarian China (2022), Global China as Method (2022), and Afterlives of Chinese Communism (2019). He also co-directed the documentaries Dreamwork China (2011) and Boramey (2021). Mark Bo is a researcher who has been based in East and Southeast Asia for 2 decades. He has worked globally with local civil society partners to monitor and advocate for improved environmental and social practices in development projects and utilises his background in corporate and financial mapping to investigate stakeholders involved in Asia's online gambling, fraud, and money laundering industries. Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Her research interests include the exploration of overseas Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies. She is also a freelance translator. 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 How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change. By examining key historical moments--from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI--Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past--such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain--ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term--findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today. Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past. Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. 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 this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things, host Lee Vinsel and very special guest host, danah boyd, formerly of Microsoft Research, presently Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, chat with writer and activist, Cory Doctorow, about his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. The book tracks how and why companies degrade their digital platforms and products and argues especially for the role that monopoly power plays in this phenomenon. Vinsel, boyd, and Doctorow talk about many different dimensions of these processes and go down various joyful rabbitholes, too, including our present AI bubble. 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

Silicon Valley wants to disrupt finance, and it might just succeed. In FinTech Dystopia, professor Hilary Allen offers an accessible, irreverent, and occasionally furious account of how tech elites are quietly taking over the financial system and making it worse in the process. Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of conversations with policymakers, journalists, and regulators, Allen explains how fintech and crypto have failed to deliver on their promises and why so much of Silicon Valley's power comes from manipulating the law rather than from real innovation. She also explores how the spread of tech-driven finance connects to the biggest issues of our time, from inequality to political influence. Written as a serial for readers outside the academic or policy worlds, FinTech Dystopia invites you to grab a drink, settle in, and learn how Silicon Valley is reshaping money, power, and the everyday economy and what we can do about it. 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

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest. Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support. Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. 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 of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny speaks with Alex Priou, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin, about how technology and ideology shape the modern soul. From Machiavelli's “dikes and dams” to Odysseus's struggle against the Sirens, Priou traces how modernity's drive for control has left us materially fulfilled yet spiritually impoverished. The conversation explores liberalism's crises, the moral stakes of AI, the American “technological republic,” and why revisiting Homer and Plato may be key to recovering wisdom and restraint in an age of restless innovation. 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

Complex systems seem to magically emerge from the interactions of their parts. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules. A living cell from organic molecules. You emerge from the cells of your body. Not since chaos has a concept from physics spread like wildfire to other disciplines. Emergence can be found from chemistry to economics; from psychology to ecology. At its heart is the alluring idea that there's more to the world than physics, that there is a holistic component to nature, an edge of mystery. "Physics Fixes All the Facts" starts by taking you on a tour through a fascinating world of complexity, exploring phenomena from the inside of an atomic nucleus to bacterial behaviour to the ability of your thoughts to affect the world. These examples are used along with a thorough exploration of the philosophical literature to untangle the notoriously poorly defined concept of emergence. This reveals something surprising: the term emergence is redundant. In its weak form it is so weak that it applies to everything. In its strong form it is so restrictive that it is like the belief that there are pixies in your garden, impossible to exclude but not worth spending your time on. Emergence either applies to all systems or to none. Rather than telling us something about the nature of the world, it is an illusion, an artefact of our cognitive limitations. The past decade has seen a dozen or so monographs and collections about emergence, almost all resolutely supportive of the concept. This book aims to redress the balance. But it is more than just a campaign against the idea of emergence. Graham presents a framework called Austere Physicalism and argues that it is the only coherent way to view the world. He uses this framework to reinterpret so-called emergent phenomena and investigates its wider implications for science. In this radically materialist view, we are nothing but physical systems among others. "Physics Fixes All the Facts" ends by exploring what this means for our sense of free will and consciousness. The book will appeal to academics in fields which use the concepts of complexity or emergence. Scientists and philosophers alike will find unexpected and exciting ideas in these pages. But the target audience is much broader including students who want to add context to their studies and the intellectually curious with some scientific background. 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 fourth edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, drawing on important feminist concepts -- social reproduction, the gender division of labor, and patriarchy -- Mimi Abramovitz exposes the gendered and racialized myths and stereotypes built into welfare state programs. The book explains the contextual conditions that contributed to the precursors of the modern welfare state, its rise and expansion after World War II, and the recent neoliberal effort to dismantle the cash assistance programs most likely to lift women out of poverty. This edition marks the most extensive overhaul to date. It revises the conceptual and background chapters, discusses cash assistance programs, and considers emerging ideas such as the role of economic crises in the development of the US welfare state. It also considers the future of the welfare state under the second Trump Presidency. Regulating the Lives of Women is an essential resource for all students of social work, sociology, history, political science, public policy, and gender studies. 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 is artificial intelligence transforming journalism as both a profession and an institution? In this episode, Ning Ao speaks to Dr. Joanne Kuai, exploring how AI reshapes journalistic roles, organisational structures, and governance systems through the lens of China's media landscape—while drawing comparisons with the US and EU. Dr. Joanne Kuai is a Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and holds a PhD from Karlstad University in Sweden. Her research focuses on digital journalism, the social implications of automation and algorithms, and the governance of data and AI. Ning Ao is a PhD student at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies (ACE) at Lund University. Her research looks at generational differences among Chinese Mongols. Episode producer: Ning Ao - - - - - - Links: Joanne's article-based PhD dissertation: AI, News, and the State: Reinstitutionalising Journalism in Global China's Algorithmic Age Joanne's recommendations: Julie E. Cohen's Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism Kevin Xu's bilingual newsletter - Interconnected Ghost in the Shell (1995) Detroit: Become Human Follow Joanne's research on: Joanne Kuai at RMIT University ResearchGate Linkedin The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia) Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland) Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) Norwegian Network for Asian Studies 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 September 26, 1998, a video game made its debut in Japanese arcades. It was over seven feet tall and weighed just over 900 pounds. It had no characters, no story, no quests to fulfill or bosses to beat. What it had was a metal platform on which you were supposed to stand, put your feet into the right place at the right time, and dance. Join two music critics, long-ago players, and Sota Fujimori fans as they take you on the astonishing journey through the artists, influences, and innovators of Dance Dance Revolution, a game two and a half decades in the making and still going -- in homes, arcades, and expos. From its unexpected appearance to its social heyday to its reappearance in the American market, DDR has taken many forms -- not all of them sanctioned by Konami. It has spawned community, creativity, competition, lawsuits, 1,000+ songs that range from wacky to tacky to beautiful, and yes, a lot of dancing. While we were all leaning on the back bar, working up a sweat, DDR managed to change the world. Jessica Doyle has a Ph.D. in city planning and a love for writing about the connections between pop music, globalization, and the built environment. She cares for her family in the Atlanta suburbs. Jordan Ferguson is the author of J Dilla's Donuts, #93 in the 33 1/3 series of record guides, and co-host of the Geekdown, a podcast about fandoms. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Find him online @jordan_ferguson. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master's degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. 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

Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing (U Toronto Press, 2025) takes historiographic and sociological perspectives developed to understand large-scale scientific and technical systems and uses them to highlight the standardization that went into "standardized testing." Starting in the 1850s achievement tests became standardized in the British Isles, and were administered on an industrial scale. By the end of the century more than two million people had written mass exams, particularly in science, technology, and mathematics. Some candidates responded to this standardization by cramming or cheating; others embraced the hope that such tests rewarded not only knowledge but also merit. Written with humour, Making a Grade looks at how standardized testing practices quietly appeared, and then spread worldwide. This book situates mass exams, marks, and credentials in an emerging paper-based meritocracy, arguing that such exams often first appeared as "cameras" to neutrally record achievement, and then became "engines" to change education as people tailored their behaviour to fit these tests. Taking the perspectives of both examiners and examinees, Making a Grade claims that our own culture's desire for accountability through objective testing has a long history. James Elwick is Associate Professor at the Department of Science, Technology and Society, for which he is also Chair. He has written on the history of the life sciences and scientists including John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and T.H. Huxley, and is currently writing a history of academic integrity, viewed through the lens of students who cheat on their tests and other school assessments. Jacob Ward is a historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written in the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he's currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day. 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 age when digital media permeates every aspect of our lives, understanding its influence is more critical than ever. Algorithmic Saga: Understanding Media, Culture, and Transformation in the AI Age (Atique Mindscape Publishing, 2025), serves as a compass, guiding readers through the complexities of our interconnected world. From the moment we wake to a flurry of notifications to the late-night scrolling that often accompanies our downtime, we find ourselves enmeshed in a digital landscape that shapes our perceptions, relationships, and routines. The journey ahead will illuminate the dual-edged nature of technology—its ability to connect and empower as well as its potential to isolate and overwhelm. By examining the algorithms that curate newsfeeds and the social media platforms that redefine communication, this book unpacks the intricacies of modern digital life. But beyond the challenges lie opportunities; this book also highlights the ways in which digital media fosters social activism and creative expression, showcasing the remarkable power of collective voices and innovative ideas. Whether digital natives or just beginning to explore this expansive realm, readers will be equipped by this exploration with insights and tools to navigate the digital age thoughtfully. Discover how to harness technology's potential, ensuring it enriches rather than diminishes our lives. Guest: Dr. Muhammad Atique holds a PhD in Public Administration with a specialization in Digital Governance and has over fifteen years of combined experience in academia and media. He has published several peer-reviewed research articles on digital media, technology adoption, and governance. His teaching and research explore the intersection of technology, media culture, and societal transformation in the AI age. He is also the founder of Atique Mindscape Publishing, an imprint of Digital Vista Ventures LLC (USA), and is based in Auckland, New Zealand. Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. 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

Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight against terrorism and extremism. Yet despite mass content takedowns, account suspensions, and mounting pressure on technology companies to do more, hate thrives online. Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025) looks at how content moderation shapes the tactics of harmful content producers on a wide range of social media platforms.Drawing on a wealth of original data on more than a hundred militant and hate organizations around the world, Dr. Tamar Mitts shows how differing moderation standards across platforms create safe havens that allow these actors to organize, launch campaigns, and mobilize supporters. She reveals how the structure of the information environment shapes the cross-platform activity of extremist organizations and movements such as the Islamic State, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and QAnon, and highlights the need to consider the online ecosystem, not just individual platforms, when developing strategies to combat extremism.Taking readers to the frontlines of the digital battleground where dangerous organizations operate, Safe Havens for Hate sheds critical light on how governments and technology companies grapple with the tension between censorship and free speech when faced with violence, hate, and extremism. 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

War, and the threat of war, spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weapons. Imperial Japan, ahead of the Second World War, was no exception. After the First World War, Japan set up the Noborito Research Institute: a division of scientists and technicians to invest in overt and clandestine warfare. Stephen Mercado dives into this history in his new book Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito's Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War (Pen & Sword Books: 2025). At Noborito, Japanese scientists researched fanciful weapons, like balloon bombs and death rays; covert techniques like poisons and counterfeiting—and more insidious activities, like biological weapons. Stephen Mercado, the author of The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army's Elite Intelligence School, has also written a dozen articles and several dozen book reviews on Asian and open-source intelligence. His writing has appeared in the journals Intelligence and National Security, International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence, Studies in Intelligence and on the website 38 North of the Henry L. Stimson Center. His translations include numerous declassified Chinese and Japanese diplomatic documents published as part of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project. Retired from the CIA Open Source Enterprise, he has twice won a CIA Studies in Intelligence award for his writings. He is also a frequent contributor to the Asian Review of Books. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. 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

When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We find ourselves weighing arguments, or relying on intuition, then reaching a conscious decision about what to do. What is going on behind the scenes? In The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines (Basic Books, 2025), Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland show that our experience is the tip of an iceberg of brain activity that can be captured in an artificial neural network. Such networks--initially developed as models of ourselves--have become the engines of artificial neural intelligence. Suri and McClelland aren't reducing mankind to mere machines. Rather, they are showing how a data-driven neural network can create thoughts, emotions, and ideas--a mind--whether in humans or computers. The Emergent Mind provides a fascinating account of how we reach decisions, why we change our minds, and how we are affected by context and experience. Ultimately, the book gives a new answer to one of our oldest questions: Not just how do minds work, but what does it mean to be a mind at all? 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

GeoAI and Human Geography: The Dawn of a New Spatial Intelligence Era (Springer, 2025) outlines a comprehensive journey into how geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) is reshaping our understanding of people and places. Merging traditional geographic inquiry with AI technologies, it offers a holistic view of digital tools and advanced algorithms that redefine human geography. Across twenty‐eight chapters, the book chronicles the evolution of geographic thought into the GeoAI era. Innovative methodologies--from explainable spatial analysis and natural language processing to human-centered computer vision and high-performance computing--reveal new patterns and relationships beyond conventional approaches. Each contribution highlights both technical strides in data processing and enriched perspectives on cultural, economic, political, health, and urban studies. Showcasing diverse applications in disaster management, climate change adaptation, and urban planning, the volume demonstrates GeoAI's transformative potential. It also engages with ethical, sustainable, and social challenges, emphasizing that technological innovation must serve real-world impacts and inclusivity. Ideal for researchers, students, and practitioners alike, this volume invites you to explore new frontiers at the intersection of technology and human experience. 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

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, in Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914 (University of Arizona Press, 2025) historian Dr. Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. Dr. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century. This work traces how scientific intellectuals studied and debated what it meant to know and claim the flora that sprang from Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes—and the importance they placed on indigeneity. It also points to the short- and long-term consequences of these efforts. Dr. López draws on archival and published sources produced from the sixteenth century through the start of the twentieth century and gives special attention to the use of visual images such as scientific illustrations and landscape art. López employs the term “visualization” in recognition of the degree to which officials, botanists, and draftsmen produced imagery and also how they and others viewed nature. Rooted in Place reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican history. 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

Efficiency is the engine that powers human civilization. It's the reason rates of famine have fallen precipitously, literacy has risen, and humans are living longer, healthier lives compared to preindustrial times. But where do improvements in production efficiency come from? In The Origins of Efficiency (Stripe Press, 2025), Brian Potter argues that improving production efficiency--finding ways to produce goods and services in less time, with less labor, using fewer resources--is the force behind some of the biggest and most consequential changes in human history. With unprecedented depth and detail, Potter examines the fundamental characteristics of a production process and how it can be made less time- and resource-intensive, and therefore less expensive. The book is punctuated with examples of production efficiency in practice, including how high-yield manufacturing methods made penicillin the "miracle drug" that reduced battlefield infection deaths by 80 percent during World War II; the 100-year history of process improvements in incandescent light bulb production; and how automakers like Ford, Toyota, and Tesla developed innovative production methods that transformed not just the automotive industry but manufacturing as a whole. He concludes by looking at sectors where production costs haven't fallen, and explores how we might harness the mechanisms of production efficiency to change that. The Origins of Efficiency is a comprehensive companion for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived at this age of relative abundance--and how we can push efficiency improvements further into domains like housing, medicine, and education, where much work is left to be done. 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 I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the intersection of defense contracting, intellectual property, and government secrecy in Great Britain and the United States. We talk about her process in researching and writing her latest book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State and how breaking the law, historically speaking, has been important for the emergence of new technologies. 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 ecologist in California claimed that the iron laws of nature locked humanity into destroying our environment. This meant that we must take drastic measures to rein in unfettered capitalism and the American habit of overconsumption, lest we deplete our common resources. That argument made Garrett Hardin one of the most influential and celebrated environmentalists to ever live. Yet, he had a tragic view of the world that turned his green dream into a green nightmare. This is the final episode of Cited Podcast's new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). There were a number of works that we pulled from to help us understand this story. If you want to learn more about conservative ecological thought, the population panic, and related themes, we recommend that you read: by Richard Hames and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Eco-Fascism: Climate Change and the Far Right; from Jason Oakes, Garret Hardin's Tragic Sense of Life, a short article on the the ecological models that influenced Hardin; and finally, Thomas Robertson's excellent survey of the population panic of the mid-60s to late-70s, The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism. 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 I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the intersection of defense contracting, intellectual property, and government secrecy in Great Britain and the United States. We talk about her process in researching and writing her latest book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State and how breaking the law, historically speaking, has been important for the emergence of new technologies. 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 period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to suit their "tropical" needs and increase profitability. Not only were technologies reinvented so as to keep manufacturing processes local but slaveholders' adaptation of new racial ideologies also shaped their particular usage of new machines. Finally, these businessmen forged a new set of relationships with one another in order to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States. In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineers and iron-makers in Virginia to collaborate with railroad and sugar entrepreneurs in Cuba. Through his examination of the creation of these industrial bodies of knowledge, Daniel B. Rood demonstrates the deepening dependence of the Atlantic economy on forced labor after a few revolutionary decades in which it seemed the institution of slavery might be destroyed. The reinvention of this plantation world in the 1840s and 1850s brought a renewed movement in the 1860s, especially from enslaved people themselves in the United States and Cuba, to end chattel slavery. This account of capitalism, technology, and slavery offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Americas. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. 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

Winston Churchill famously remarked that the threat of the German U-Boats was the only thing that had “really frightened” him during World War Two. The U-Boats certainly claimed a bitter harvest among Allied shipping: nearly 3,000 ships were sunk, for a total tonnage of over 14 million tonnes, nearly 70% of Allied shipping losses in all theatres of the war. With justification, then, they are an integral part of the traditional narrative of the Battle of the Atlantic; a story of technological brilliance, dramatic sinkings, life and death, and – of course – the sinister, unseen threat of the U-Boats themselves. For Allied seamen during the war, the U-Boat was a hidden menace, a faceless killer lurking beneath the waves; and the urgent needs of survival afforded them little time or energy to consider the challenges and privations of their enemy. History, however, affords us that time and energy, and any pretence of comprehensiveness demands that we consider what life was like for the crews of those most claustrophobic vessels; packed into a steel hull, at the mercy of the enemy, of the elements – and of basic physics. Germany's U-Boat crews posted the highest per-capita losses of any combat arm during World War Two. Some 30,000 German submariners were killed – over 75% of the total number deployed – the vast majority of whom have no grave except the seabed. Using archival sources, unpublished diaries and existing memoir literature, Wolfpack: Inside Hitler's U-Boat War (Basic Books, 2025) by Roger Moorhouse gives the U-Boatmen back their voice, allowing their side of the narrative to be aired in a comprehensive manner for the first time. With that testimony, Wolfpack takes the reader from the heady early days of the war, when U-Boat crews were buoyed with optimism about their cause, through to the challenges of meeting the Allied counterthreat, to the final horror of defeat, when their submarines were captured by the enemy or scuttled in ignominy. Using the U-Boatmen's own voices to punctuate an engaging narrative, it tells their story; of courage, certainly, but also of fear, privation and – ultimately – 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

Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its preference for practicality has not adopted the most practical, scientific, and innovative system of measurement? Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America (Vanderbilt UP, 2025) by Dr. Hector Vera answers these questions by analyzing the political, economic, and international factors that determined the trajectory of the United States as a nation self-excluded from one of the most successful global technical languages. Using a historical-comparative approach and qualitative analysis of archival material, the book examines the trajectories of American scientists, engineers, politicians, and industrialists from 1787 to 1982, to detail what they wanted to attain and to explain what was actually possible to achieve given the political and economic conditions in which they lived. Yardstick Nation argues that in order to understand the unbreached distance between the United States and the metric system, we must consider the interaction between three structural elements: historical timing, state infrastructural power, and international economic integration. Dr. Vera's systematic look at when and why countries have adopted the metric system shows that its introduction is never casual. In the countries that voluntarily embraced the metric system, this was the result of either deep internal political transformations or momentous changes in the international economy. When the adoption of the metric system is politically driven, it comes as the result of a social revolution, independence war, national unification, or the draft of a new constitution. When it is propelled by economic factors, metrication is part of the efforts of economically stagnant countries to integrate into international markets. 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

Nothing captivates the human imagination like the vast unknowns of space. Ancient petroglyphs present renderings of the heavens, proof that we have been gazing up at the stars with wonder for thousands of years. Since then, mankind has systematically expanded our cosmic possibilities. What were once flights of fancy and dreams of science fiction writers have become nearly routine – a continuous human presence orbiting the Earth, probes flying beyond our solar system, and men walking on the moon. NASA and the Russian space program make traveling to the stars look easy, but it has been far from that. Space travel is a sometimes heroic, sometimes humorous, and always dangerous journey fraught with perils around every corner that most of us have never heard of or have long since forgotten.Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (Doubleday, 2024) brings these unknown, offbeat, and obscure stories of space to life. From the showmanship and bravado of the earliest known space fatality, German Max Valier, to the first ever indictment under the Espionage Act on an Army officer who leaked secrets concerning the development of early U.S. rockets; and the story of a single loose bolt that defeated the Soviet Union's attempt to beat America to the moon.Author Joe Cuhaj also sheds light on the human aspects of space travel that have remained industry secrets – until now: how the tradition of using a musical playlist to wake astronauts up began, fascinating tales about inventions like the Fischer Space Pen, Omega watches, and even Tang breakfast drink.In addition to fun and entertaining space trivia, Space Oddities also features stories of the profound impact that space travel has had on challenges right here at home, like the effort by civil rights leaders and activists in the 1960s to bring the money from the space program back home to those in need on Earth; NASA's FLATs (First Lady Astronaut Training) program and the 13 women who were selected to become astronauts in 1960, but were denied a chance at flying even after successfully completing the rigorous astronaut training program; and, the animals who many times sacrificed their lives to prove that man could fly in space.Filled with rare and little-known stories, Space Oddities will bring the final frontier to the homes of diehard space readers and armchair astronauts 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

Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025) arrives at the perfect moment as artificial intelligence and other technologies promise to unleash another wave of major transformation. This book is a kaleidoscopic look at how eleven disruptive innovations—including the iPhone, transistor, disposable diapers, and Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking—reshaped industries and societies, propelling humanity toward new frontiers. It masterfully weaves together the fascinating stories behind history's most transformative disruptions—from ninth-century China to twenty-first-century Silicon Valley. Through the eleven pivotal innovations that it covers, including the printing press, mass-produced automobiles, the McDonald's revolutionary food system, and the iPhone, the author Dartmouth Business School Professor Scott D. Anthony reveals the hidden patterns behind world-changing breakthroughs from gunpowder to generative AI. These forces of disruption are repeatedly rewriting the rules of business, society, and human possibility. Through vivid storytelling and sharp analysis, Professor Anthony introduces the iconoclasts who dared to think differently—the Renaissance-era scientists, French-cooking enthusiasts, and corporate visionaries who saw opportunities others missed. This books shows how disruptions actually took place. 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

Based on two years of extensive fieldwork, Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (Cornell UP, 2023) examines ecological policies in the People's Republic of China to show how campaigns of scientifically based environmental protection transform nature and society. While many point to China's ecological civilization programs as a new paradigm for global environmental governance, Jesse Rodenbiker argues that ecological redlining extends the reach of the authoritarian state. Although Chinese urban sustainability initiatives have driven millions of citizens from their land and housing, Rodenbiker shows that these migrants are not passive subjects of state policy. Instead, they creatively navigate resettlement processes in pursuit of their own benefit. However, their resistance is limited by varied forms of state-backed infrastructural violence. Through extensive fieldwork with scientists, urban planners, and everyday citizens in southwestern China, Ecological States exposes the ways in which the scientific logics and practices fundamental to China's green urbanization have solidified state power and contributed to dispossession and social inequality. Ecological States is freely available with support from the Henry Luce Foundation. The link to the book is Ecological States by Jesse Rodenbiker,Foreword by Albert L. Park | Paperback | Cornell University Press. Jesse Rodenbiker is Assistant Professor in the Geography department at Rutgers University. He is a human-environment geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist focusing on environmental governance, urbanization, and social inequality in China and globally. His email address is jesse.rodenbiker@rutgers.edu. Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and ecological anthropology. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found 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

The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century's history of war, destruction, and cruelty. This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project--uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world's largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany's machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak's film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout. Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak's and Agfa's global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today. Alice Lovejoy is author of the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. A former editor at Film Comment, she is Professor of film and media studies at the University of Minnesota. 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

AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how.AI's impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated misinformation. Everywhere it will be used, it will create risks and opportunities to shake up long-standing power structures.In this highly readable and advisedly optimistic book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press, 2025), security technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders cut through the AI hype and examine the myriad ways that AI is transforming every aspect of democracy—for both good and ill.The authors describe how the sophistication of AI will fulfill demands from lawmakers for more complex legislation, reducing deference to the executive branch and altering the balance of power between lawmakers and administrators. They show how the scale and scope of AI is enhancing civil servants' ability to shape private-sector behavior, automating either the enforcement or neglect of industry regulations. They also explain how both lawyers and judges will leverage the speed of AI, upending how we think about law enforcement, litigation, and dispute resolution.Whether these outcomes enhance or degrade democracy depends on how we shape the development and use of AI technologies. Powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence, and AIs built by corporations don't deliver the fairness and trust required by democratic governance. But, steered in the right direction, AI's broad capabilities can augment democratic processes and help citizens build consensus, express their voice, and shake up long-standing power structures.Democracy is facing new challenges worldwide, and AI has become a part of that. It can inform, empower, and engage citizens. It can also disinform, disempower, and disengage them. The choice is up to us. Schneier and Sanders blaze the path forward, showing us how we can use AI to make democracy stronger and more participatory. Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist focused on making policymaking more participatory. His research spans machine learning, astrophysics, public health, environmental justice, and more. He has served in fellowships at the Massachusetts legislature and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard 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 age of AI, where personal data fuels corporate profits and state surveillance, what are the implications for democracy? This incisive book You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem: Renegotiating the Socio-Technical Contract (Policy Press, 2025) explores the unspoken agreement we have with tech companies. In exchange for reducing the anxiety of an increasingly complex online world, we submit to algorithmic classification and predictability. This reduces incentives for us to become “algorithmic problems” with dire consequences for liberal democracy. He calls for a movement to demand that algorithms promote play, creativity and potentiality rather than conformity. This is a must-read for anyone navigating the intersection of technology, politics and identity in an increasingly data-driven world. 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

Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound (University of California Press, 2024) explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of prerecorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century's development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious. A free e-book version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit here to learn more.​ Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.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 How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton UP, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies—the United States and China—have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change. By examining key historical moments—from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI—Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past—such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain—ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term—findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today. Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the 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

A leading astrobiologist "demonstrates how becoming a true space-faring species is more than just humanity's future" (Adam Frank, author of The Little Book of Aliens)--it is an evolutionary event at least as important as life's first journey from sea to land The story of life has always been one of great transitions, of crossing new frontiers. The dawn of life itself is one; so, too, is the first time two cells stuck together rather than drifting apart. And perhaps most dramatic were the moves from the sea to land, land to air. Each transition has witnessed wild storms of innovation, opportunity, and hazard. It might seem that there are no more realms for life to venture. But there is one: space. In The Giant Leap: Why Space Is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life (Hachette UK, 2025), astrobiologist Caleb Scharf argues that our journey into space isn't simply a giant leap for humankind--it's life's next great transition, an evolution of evolution itself. Humans and our technology are catalysts for an interplanetary transformation, marking a disruption in the story of life as fundamental as life's movement from sea to land, and land to sky. Inspired by Darwin's account of his journey on the Beagle, and packed with stories from the past, present, and future of space travel, The Giant Leap thrills at both life's creativity and the marvels of technology that have propelled us into the cosmos. And it offers an awesome glimpse of the grander vistas that wait in the great beyond. 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 story of AI isn't finished yet. The question is: how will you be part of it? With the unprecedented adoption of artificial intelligence and its far-reaching implications, people everywhere are witnessing the world change around them. Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI (Aevo UTP, 2025) answers today's most pressing questions about AI - from the fundamental to the futuristic - offering readers a new, informed worldview. In an age of unparalleled innovation and change, artificial intelligence has become the heart of our fears, discussions, and debates. Thus, AI researcher and award-winner David Eliot takes readers on a journey through the key moments and decisions that have shaped its creation and our world. A socially driven history, the book explores its technical breakthroughs and the social forces that made them possible.But this book isn't just about the past - it's about you. Artificially Intelligent invites readers to find their place in the story of AI, to understand its impact on their lives, and to decide what kind of future they want to help create.Artificially Intelligent tells the story of the technology the way it was meant to be told: not as an exhaustive retelling of history, nor as a prophecy of doom and gloom, but as a human story that is not yet complete. 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 Whitney Laemmli, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute, about her forthcoming book, Making Movement Modern: Science, Politics, and the Body in Motion. The book traces a technique for visualizing human movement, Labanotation, from its origins in expressionist dance, Austro-Hungarian military discipline, and contemporary physiology to its employment in factories and offices a half-century later. In this way, Making Movement Modern provides a beautiful example of following an object of study into many different, surprising, and unexpected worlds. The pair also discuss one of Laemmli's new projects, which examines the history of Western ideas and theories that memory might be stored not only in brains but also in bodies. 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

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn  (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary 'nonhuman turn' in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy, and theology, it offers readers new contexts - and questions - for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking. Guest Dr. Madeleine Chalmers  is a lecturer in French studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, and holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Dr. Chalmers is the recipient of or shortlisted for a number of prestigious essay prizes, and has written numerous articles as well on topics ranging from modernist authors  to automation and the idea of “bricolage,” as well as editing a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies on “French Perspectives on Conflict” in 2022. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at the University of Alabama with research focusing on speculative literatures of metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, as well as the translator of the novels Mevlido's Dreams and The Inner Harbour. 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 At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP's increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. Exploring how musicians, producers, and other industry professionals navigated these dynamics, Mueller contends that the practice of making LPs significantly changed how jazz was created, heard, and understood in the 1950s and beyond. By attending to the details of audio production, he reveals how Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charles Mingus worked to redefine prevailing notions of race and cultural difference within the United States. Mueller demonstrates that the LP emerges as a medium of sound and culture that maps onto the more expansive sonic terrain of Black modernity in the 1950s. Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.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

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity? In Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar (U Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar's value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly. Taking us to unexplored spaces in the world of sugar, from laboratories and docks to refineries and the halls of Congress, Dr. Singerman illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism. 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

Statistics are everywhere: in news reports, at the doctor's office, and in every sort of forecast, from the stock market to the weather. Blogger, teacher, and computer scientist Allen B. Downey knows well that people have an innate ability both to understand statistics and to be fooled by them. As he makes clear in this accessible introduction to statistical thinking, the stakes are big. Simple misunderstandings have led to incorrect medical prognoses, underestimated the likelihood of large earthquakes, hindered social justice efforts, and resulted in dubious policy decisions. There are right and wrong ways to look at numbers, and Downey will help you see which are which. Probably Overthinking It: How to Use Data to Answer Questions, Avoid Statistical Traps, and Make Better Decisions (University of Chicago Press, 2023) uses real data to delve into real examples with real consequences, drawing on cases from health campaigns, political movements, chess rankings, and more. He lays out common pitfalls--like the base rate fallacy, length-biased sampling, and Simpson's paradox--and shines a light on what we learn when we interpret data correctly, and what goes wrong when we don't. Using data visualizations instead of equations, he builds understanding from the basics to help you recognize errors, whether in your own thinking or in media reports. Even if you have never studied statistics--or if you have and forgot everything you learned--this book will offer new insight into the methods and measurements that help us understand the world. Allen B. Downey is a curriculum designer at the online learning company Brilliant and professor emeritus of computer science at Olin College. Gregory McNiff is a Managing Director in the New York office of the Blueshirt Group, an IR firm focused on technology. Greg holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an M. Litt. in Shakespeare Studies from the University of St. Andrews and a B.A. in Classical Languages from Columbia University. 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

Until recently, no one could access the detailed contents of your mind directly the way only you can. This level of protection of our mental data was guaranteed by the way we are built biologically – and it can no longer be taken for granted. In Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law (Routledge, 2025) S. Orestis Palermos considers the ethical and legal implications of the extended mind thesis – the idea that information-processing technologies are not merely tools but literal parts of our minds. While this thesis remains controversial, there is little doubt that technological devices can push information that coheres in an integrated way with your thoughts – for example, when your phone presents photographs of last year's holiday on today's anniversary. Such mind extensions create new vulnerabilities to invasions of mental privacy, freedom of thought, and protection from personal assault. Palermos, who is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Ioannina, articulates these new problems and explores what levels of protection we should adopt in the face of them, up to the point of making it technologically impossible to access or manipulate your extended mental contents.  S. Orestis Palermos is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Ioannina, in Greece. 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

Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany (Brill, 2025) reconstructs the industrial histories of the American and German automotive industries in a new light. From the Fordist assembly line to Japanese lean production and Industry 4.0, Anthony J. Knowles critically examines major technical developments within the historical dynamics of capitalism. Both countries face the pressure to automate, transform labor, and increase efficiency, yet their responses differ due to divergent paradigms of integrating business, labor, and government. Driving Productivity makes the case that improving productivity is a never-ending process that becomes a compulsory social imperative that industries must respond to but are nevertheless responded to differently between countries. Guest: Anthony Knowles (he/him) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Sociology and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: here Linktree: 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