x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

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:

science social sciences

All Episodes

76:09

Mark Crinson, "Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/22

Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape(Paul Mellon Centre, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastructure and enclosure, from the common land of Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century to the global transport

en

62:59

Daniel L. Gardner, "Thresholds of Digital Gameplay"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/21

Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account logins, controllers, and an assortment of menus, settings, and other peripheral-to-gameplay elements support a range of practical and necessary functions that result from the transformation of gameplay into digital gameplay, as well as broader shifts toward an increasingly networked and data-driven world. The games industry has adopted usability testing on

en

27:49

Stefan Höltgen et al., "Commodore 64: Past, Present,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/20

The Commodore 64 is the most signiﬁcant computer of its era. From 1982 to 1994, a total of 27 million units were sold—more than any other computer from a single manufacturer afterwards. Due to its widespread use as well as its technical features, the C64 has a huge international following—even to this day. The 19 contributions compiled inCommodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer(Projekt Verlag, 2026)illustrate the signiﬁcance of the platform for the digitalization of society, the

en

56:51

Hector Amaya, "The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/18

We use avatars to play videogames. We use pseudonyms on social media. We use VPNs to mask our identities and activities. In the digital realm, anonymity is everywhere, a persistent option for those who wish to hide, experiment, and deceive. But we are anonymous in more contexts than the digital. In urban settings, we routinely experience the anonymity of the crowd, and routinely use anonymity to participate in political life and social protests. Anonymity matters. This book is a wager that we

en

50:09

Gretchen Heefner, "Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/18

Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions the US military had navigated during World War II, the United States defense establishment took a keen interest in these places, dispatching troops to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, the South Pacific, and beyond. To preserve the country’s status as a superpower after the war, to pave

en

51:22

Fenwick McKelvey, "SimPolitics: America’s Quest to...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/17

This book is available open access. For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers (MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem,

en

0:00

Spirituality, Science and Environmentalism in Taiwan

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/16

Who is Shennong, the Divine Farmer? And how can he help us understand the intricate relationships between spirituality, science and environmentalism in Taiwan today? These questions are at the heart of new research by the University of Oslo’s Koen Wellens and Mette Halskov Hansen. In this episode, we are joined by Koen Wellens for a conversation on religious responses to environmental change, community temples, and reconnecting to nature via the Divine Farmer in the context of contemporary

en

34:09

Adam Geczy, "Glasses" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/15

Glasses are among the oldest and most commonplace prosthetics we have invented. But what does it mean to wear glasses? There is more to the answer than correcting vision. Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us. Everyone has encounters with glasses, passively or actively, from reading glasses to sunglasses. At times they are the main identifiers in a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and brainy to cool and

en

66:35

Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/14

Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Soraya Murray is a

en

60:00

The Emerging Anocracy: AI, Tech Oligarchs, and the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/12

In this episode ofInternational Horizons, RBI Acting Director Eli Karetny sits down with Alexis Cruz, founder of Enough Consulting and former strategic advisor for governance at Meta. Cruz explores how the proliferation of AI and digital platforms has shifted global politics into an "anocracy"—a precarious gray zone situated between traditional democracy and authoritarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member

en

43:17

Ali Fard, "Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/10

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and

en

78:49

Kit Chapman, "The Age of Alchemy: How Early...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/09

The first chemists were Sri Lankan forgers who crafted unimaginably strong steel millennia before it should have been possible. They were alchemists in Roman Egypt, who designed apparatus still in use today. They were Stone Age leatherworkers, Tang Dynasty herbalists and Mayan stoneworkers. The Enlightenment is usually credited with the origins of chemistry, but in truth, the science blossomed gradually. As early innovators distilled, smelted, forged and fermented their way through

en

61:50

Meena Khandelwal, "Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/08

Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options? Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles:

en

70:51

Roberta J. Magnusson, "Urban Infrastructure in...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/08

In the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society. In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed, and sustained their defenses, bridges, streets, water systems, and harbors. Dr. Magnusson reveals how even modest communities, like the

en

61:23

Aswin Punathambekar, Adrienne Shaw and Jonathan Gray...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/07

In the three decades since the rise of the global internet, digitalization has transformed how media are made, circulated, and consumed, reshaping culture on a planetary scale. Yet the story of global media is not one of seamless connection or cultural homogenization. Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader (NYU Press, 2026) challenges the myth of a “global village,” revealing instead how regional histories, infrastructures, economies, and power relations shape the uneven terrains of

en

67:08

Hayagreeva Rao and Henrich R Greve, "Ctrl+Alt+Doubt:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/05

Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions, that is as stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, Rao and Greve show that conspiracy

en

35:38

Bjørn Berge, "Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/03

The sense of smell is often linked to the dark, the antisocial, the primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. Today we live in an almost odorless world, where everything is reduced to images. Yet smell plays a vital role in how we relate to others and our surroundings, forming our experiences and our memories. Tracing a history of smell from the first ancient cities, through medieval plagues and the Industrial Revolution to the present day, Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense

en

67:04

Joseph Turow, "The Problem with Personalization: How...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/03

A respected voice on technology shows how seemingly simple ads help dismantle democracy and public discourse. Whether you’re intentionally shopping or casually browsing social media, something is following you: ads. Their creators seem to know your income bracket, politics, age, location, medical conditions, and tastes in clothing, food, and romantic partners. As advertising firms use predictive AI to discover your hot buttons and generative AI to push them, your online world becomes an

en

0:00

Chinese EVs: From Nordic Streets to Central Asian Hubs

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/02

Can Europe afford to stand back as China rewrites the global electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem? In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen at the University of Helsinki talks to United Nations Senior Adviser Matthew Gray for Europe and Central Asia Markets, who discusses the rapid international expansion of Chinese EVs. The conversation highlights how Chinese brands have moved beyond public buses to growing passenger car markets in the Nordic region and Central Asia through superior technology, lower price

en

60:03

Christian Martinez, "NYC Open Data Student Gallery"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/07/02

About NYC Open Data During the Fall 2025 semester, students in the M.S. program in Psychological Research at Brooklyn College completed the inaugural offering of Reproducible Psychological Research. Using the R programming language, students developed weekly R Markdown documents to solve simulated real-world analytical problems using authentic datasets, with an emphasis on transparency, documentation, and reproducibility. For their final projects, students were tasked with conducting independent,

en

2,487 results

Similar Podcasts

Beyond the Divide

Koala Moon

Old Time Science Fiction

solgoodmedia.com

Autobiography of an Electron

Charles R. Gibson

Timeless Sci-Fi Radio

solgoodmedia.com

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

New Books Network