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PODCAST

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

100:44

Delia Casadei, "Risible: Laughter without Reason and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/21

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

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35:26

Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/17

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

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81:54

Caleb Scharf, "The Giant Leap: Why Space Is the Next...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/17

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 landThe 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

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66:38

David Eliot, "Artificially Intelligent: The Very...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/14

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,

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31:50

Madeleine Chalmers, "French Technological Thought and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/13

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

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61:42

Whitney Laemmli on Making Movement Modern

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/13

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

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74:40

Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/12

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

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68:28

David Singerman, "Unrefined: How Capitalism...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/11

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

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62:40

Allen B. Downey, "Probably Overthinking It: How to...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/10

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

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60:37

S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/10

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

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46:21

Anthony J. Knowles, "Driving Productivity:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/09

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

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34:05

Susannah Fisher, "Sink Or Swim: How the World Needs...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/07

The world needs to adapt to climate change – but how? What are the key problems and hard choices that lie ahead for the global community? Sink or Swim: How the world needs to adapt to a changing climate (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Susannah Fisher reveals all.Heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding caused by climate change are already impacting people and nature. Adaptation until now has been incremental with governments and institutions tinkering around the edges of current systems. This will

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25:30

Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/06

Selfies are more than fleeting images—across India, they shape how people imagine themselves, connect with others, and inhabit spaces. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Xenia Zeiler from the University of Helsinki talks to Prof. Avishek Ray about his co-authored book Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India. This book explores how the digital selfie, unlike traditional photography, turns the lens inward while reconfiguring social identities, gender

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37:23

Carlotta Daro, "The Architecture of the Wire:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/05

The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of the modern age—from poles, wires, and cables, to “micro-architectures,” such as the théâtrophone and the telephone booth. Starting with the intrepid worldwide infrastructures of the late nineteenth century, Carlotta Darò proposes a new history that explores the multiple links and crossroads of such technical “things” with architecture and art.Based on

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69:43

Daniel K. Sodickson, "The Future of Seeing: How...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/03

Over the centuries, we have learned to peer into what was once invisible. Imaging devices like cameras, telescopes, microscopes, and MRI machines map the world around, beyond, and within us in ways the naked eye could never see. In so doing, these technologies have transformed our understanding of our place in the universe and our conception of our own bodies--and we may be on the cusp of an even greater revolution.Daniel K. Sodickson--a physicist and biomedical imaging innovator--explores the

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46:23

157 Mangrum's Comical Computation (JP)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/02

When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford UP, 2025), which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.” Comedy has provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them "collective repertoires") for responding to the looming

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35:02

Cass R. Sunstein, "Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/29

Imperfect Oracle is about the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is better than we are at making judgments. Its limits are evidenced by the fact that AI cannot always make accurate predictions--not today, not tomorrow, and not the day after, either. Natural intelligence is a marvel, but human beings blunder because we are biased. We are biased in the sense that our judgments tend to go systematically wrong in predictable ways, like a scale that

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80:13

Ashleigh Wade on How Black Girls Use Social Media

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/29

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Ashleigh Greene Wade, Assistant Professor of Digital Studies with a joint appointment in Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, about her book, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice. The book examines how black girls use social media posts to fashion self images that express the girls’ self-understandings, goals, and worldviews. Vinsel and Wade talk about the research methods and

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49:41

Vanessa Warne, "By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/27

By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Vanessa Warne demonstrates how reading by touch not only changed the lives of nineteenth-century blind people, but also challenged longstanding perceptions about blindness and reading. Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of blind people learned how to read by touch. Using fiction, essays, letters, and speeches authored by blind readers, By Touch Alone traces the ways in which literacy

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65:12

Mark Vellend, "Everything Evolves: Why Evolution...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/27

How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligenceEverything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More Than We Think, from Proteins to Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving

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2,398 results

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