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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

40:31

Robert Dorschel, "The Social Codes of Tech Workers:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/20

Who are the people staffing the digital economy? In The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism (MIT Press, 2025) Robert Dorschel an Assistant Professor in Digital Sociology at the University of Cambridge, explores an occupation that has emerged as central to modern economies and societies. Drawing on an extensive range of interview fieldwork, the book offers a compelling picture of the working lives, along with the social and cultural interests of these workers, giving

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50:49

Steve Ramirez, "How to Change a Memory: One...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/19

As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones. In How to Change a Memory, Ramirez draws on his own memories--of friendship, family, loss, and recovery--to reveal how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited, and even constructed from nothing. A future in which we can change our memories of

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49:02

Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/19

Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and

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61:08

Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/19

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.In Palo Alto: A

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58:50

Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/18

Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914 (Oxford UP, 2023) traces the history of unregulated drug use and dependency before 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act limited sales of opiates and cocaine under US law. Many Americans used opiates and other drugs medically and became addicted. Some tried ‘Hasheesh Candy’, injected morphine, or visited opium dens, but neither use nor

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51:50

Ines Prodöhl, "Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/18

Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950 (Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soybean became a critical ingredient in industry and agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Japanese-dominated Manchuria, Germany, and the United States, Prodöhl shows that the soybean was a serendipitous solution to numerous and varied crises from the beginning of the century into the post-WWII decades. This story of imperialism,

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51:04

Caroline Peyton, "Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/17

How and why did the South’s history, culture, and politics shape the region’s nuclear and energy industries? And how is that history linked to broader developments in the nuclear and energy industries—nationally and globally? Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Caroline Peyton answers those questions as it traces the origins of the U.S. South’s love affair with the atom.The South contains more nuclear reactors than any other region in the United

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59:41

Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich, "The Mask: A...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/13

The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air (Yale UP, 2025) by Dr. Bruno J. Strasser and Dr. Thomas Schlich presents a history of masks protecting against bad air—in cities, factories, hospitals, and war trenches—exploring how our identities and beliefs shape the decision to wear a mask.For centuries, humans have sought to protect themselves from harmful air, whether from smoke, dust, vapors, or germs. This book offers the first history of respiratory masks—ranging from simple pieces of cloth to

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45:19

Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/10

Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim that the hand gave humans dominion over all other species? Why did psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff climb into the primate cages of the London Zoo, taking hundreds of delicate palm prints? Why did Francis Galton, the father of fingerprinting, take palm prints too? And why did world-leading geneticists study the geometry of palm lines in their search for

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73:36

Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/09

An astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoir.On April 10, 2019, award-winning astrophysicist Heino Falcke presented the first image ever captured of a black hole at an international press conference—a turning point in astronomy that Science magazine called the scientific breakthrough of the year. That photo was captured with the unthinkable commitment of an intercontinental team of astronomers

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33:54

Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/08

Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and environment, with a special emphasis on the natural environment. He has devoted his life to studying it. If you sometimes feel drained, distracted, or depressed, Dr. Berman has identified the elements of a “nature prescription” that can boost your energy, sharpen your focus, change your mood, and improve your mental and physical health. He also reveals

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53:45

Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/07

The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force behind the development and decline of civilizations across the centuries. The author, Peter Frankopan, takes readers on a journey through history, showcasing how natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and solar flare activity have shaped the course of human events. Frankopan's extensive research, coupled with his accessible writing

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41:39

Rachel Midura, "Postal Intelligence: The Tassis...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/07

Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP, 2025) connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and

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63:54

Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/06

In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones,

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20:48

Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/06

A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond.In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively known as “Star Wars,” a space-based missile defense program aimed at protecting the US from nuclear attack. In Weapons in Space, Aaron Bateman draws on recently declassified American, European, and Soviet documents to provide

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42:56

Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/05

Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point for the rather curious story of the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and how they created a new system with a strong independent nuclear safety regulator that has refused to back down even as

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59:41

David Morris, "Stealing The Future: Sam...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/05

Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider – but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. “Effective Altruism” and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumanism, remain dangerously influential in today’s Silicon Valley. Despite Bankman-Fried’s pose as a cuddly

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44:17

Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/01

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed--and in some cases demolished--our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As

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41:56

Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/01

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer,

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47:34

James Welsh et al., "Weathering Space" (American...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/31

Past human space missions were protected by Earth’s magnetic field and a measure of luck, but future missions beyond the Earth–Moon system will face far greater and longer-lasting radiation risks that cannot be managed by route planning alone. The authors argue that safe deep-space exploration will require major advances in understanding radiation, developing effective shielding, and mitigating both acute and long-term health effects, rather than relying on chance. Learn more about your ad choices

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