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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

58:49

Ted Striphas, "Algorithmic Culture Before the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/18

In this episode, Ted Striphas, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Alex Rivera Cartagena discuss Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet(Columbia University Press 2023), considering how some pre-digital human systems functioned through repetitive structures and automated processes that have similarities to electronic algorithms. They discuss how cognition has become digitized, dispersed across algorithmic and biological systems, and how digital tools attempt to overtake lived experiences and knowledges

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34:06

Vanessa Rampton, "Making Medical Progress: History of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/15

Answers to the question 'what is medical progress?' have always been contested, and any one response is always bound up with contextual ideas of personhood, society, and health. However, the widely held enthusiasm for medical progress escapes more general critiques of progress as a conceptual category. From the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy, and the medical humanities, in Making Medical Progress: History of a Contested Idea (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Vanessa Rampton sheds light on

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47:42

Howard Alan Israel, "Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/13

What if the tools that shaped your life’s work were rooted in unimaginable evil? In this haunting episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Dr. Howard Alan Israel to discuss Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A Dissection of Evil, a book born from a single, shattering moment in an operating room. For over twenty years, Dr. Israel had prepared for surgeries using the same anatomy atlas—methodically studying each illustration, planning for every variation, and building a career marked by innovation, research, and

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54:21

Javiera Barandiaran, "Living Minerals: Nature, Trade,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/13

A sobering investigation of the rush for lithium for electric vehicles, the problematic history of lithium mining, and the consequences for sustainability.Consumers today are buying electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries motivated by the belief that they are doing good and decarbonizing society. But is sustainable lithium extraction possible? In Living Minerals, Javiera Barandiarán examines the history of lithium mining and uses during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on the two

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44:43

Yi-Ling Liu, "The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/12

Not too long ago, in the 2000s and 2010s, many felt that the internet–even one behind the Great Firewall–would bring about a more open China. As President Bill Clinton famously quipped in 2000, Beijing trying to control the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.”Things don’t look quite so certain now. China’s internet is now more controlled than it was a decade ago, with platforms, content creators, and tech companies now firmly guided by rules and signals from Beijing. Yi-Ling

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54:30

Tom Bolton, "Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/11

The United Kingdom has sixteen nuclear power stations. Most go under the radar, but their presence is enormous, both physically and culturally. They divide opinion like nothing else. Are they relics of a past era, or a crucial part of our futures? Are they cathedrals of science or temples of doom?Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations (Strange Attractor, 2025) by Dr. Tom Bolton is a journey around Britain’s nuclear power stations and the country itself. From the Essex

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58:03

Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, "Governing Digital...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/11

China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China (Cambridge UP, 2025) challenges this perception, arguing that China's approach is radically different in practice. This book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, the authors track governance of

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35:47

Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/08

Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, such as a free speech entropy: the perception of rulers or governments that if speech is not restricted

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38:59

Jon R. Lindsay "Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/07

At the heart of cybersecurity lies a paradox: Cooperation makes conflict possible. In Age of Deception (Cornell University Press 2025), Jon R. Lindsay shows that widespread trust in cyberspace enables espionage and subversion. While such acts of secret statecraft have long been part of global politics, digital systems have dramatically expanded their scope and scale. Yet success in secret statecraft hinges less on sophisticated technology than on political context.To make sense of this, Lindsay

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27:02

Rob Gallagher, "Artgames after GamerGate" (Palgrave...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/06

Videogame culture is obsessed with development. But gaming is still widely associated with wasted time, squandered potential and backwards attitudes. Even as the average gamer grows older, the medium remains dogged by the same old question: when will videogames grow up? The Gamergate movement lent this question renewed urgency, launching attacks on feminists and “social justice warriors” that have come to be seen as a catalyst for the emergence of the alt-right and election of Donald Trump. Artgames

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62:35

Polina Dimova, "At the Crossroads of the Senses: The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/06

Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Dr. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism (Penn State UP, 2024) traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia—the physiological or figurative blending of senses—as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its

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68:37

Tom Griffiths, "The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/04

The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind (Henry Holt and Co., 2026) is an exploration of the quest to use mathematics to describe the ways we think, from its origins three hundred years ago to the ideas behind modern AI systems and the ways in which they still differ from human mindsEveryone has a basic understanding of how the physical world works. We learn about physics and chemistry in school, letting us explain the world around us in terms of concepts like force,

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34:22

Jennifer Vail, "Friction: A Biography" (Harvard UP,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/02/03

Friction, the force that resists motion, is synonymous with difficulty and complication. If you’ve ever replaced tires worn smooth by the road or reached for a can of WD-40 to fix a creaking door hinge, then you know the headache this force can cause.In Friction: a Biography (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. Jennifer Vail reveals beneath the difficulty and complication a force as enigmatic and intriguing as it is central to the human story. She traces how, from the moment we first harnessed the power of

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36:54

John L. Rudolph, "Why We Teach Science (and Why We...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/31

Today I talked to John L. Rudolph about his book Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should) (Oxford UP, 2023). Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more -- or so we think. But

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71:59

LiLi Johnson, "Technologies of Kinship: Asian...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/28

Delving into the complex interplay of race, kinship, and technology, Technologies of Kinship: Asian American Racialization and the Making of Family (NYU Press, 2025) challenges conventional notions of racial identity in an era of advanced genetic testing. As Author LiLi Johnson argues, kinship, far from being solely defined by biological ties, is a social construct shaped by "technologies of kinship"—systems like government bureaucracy, immigration policies, photography, online profiles, and

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62:07

Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/26

As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets.Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked

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57:21

Michelle Henning, "A Dirty History of Photography:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/22

In A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire (U Chicago Press, 2026), Professor Michelle Henning presents an environmental history of chemical photography through the lens of its deep connections to empire and industry.Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, chemical photography’s emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of

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73:39

Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, "The Organism Is a...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/21

A bold reimagining of life that bridges science, philosophy, cybernetics, and the complexities of biological existence The Organism Is a Theory: Giuseppe Longo on Biology, Mathematics, and AI (Giuseppe Longo and Adam Nocek, 2026) is an intriguing synthesis of decades of interdisciplinary research by eminent mathematician and biological scientist Giuseppe Longo. A unique collaboration between Longo and philosopher of technology Adam Nocek, the volume confronts foundational issues in the history of

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64:20

Alex Wellerstein, "The Most Awful Responsibility:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/21

Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II was, arguably, the most controversial decision of the 20th century. The responsibility for that “decision” has logically fallen on US President Harry S. Truman. But in The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (Harper, 2025), Alex Wellerstein argues that Truman's actual decision wasn’t what everyone thinks it was.The conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan,

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67:40

The Friends of Attention, "Attensity! A Manifesto of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/20

“You are correct: something is seriously wrong.” So begins Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown, 2026) written by members of the friends of attention collective. That something is that our attention, and it is being captured and commodified by corporate entities that see our attention as a precious resource, perhaps as fundamental as water, that can be mined and extracted. This new process of extraction, called human fracking by the collective, is not simply a

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2,509 results

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