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PODCAST

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

New Books Network

Interviews with Scholars of Science, Technology, and Society about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

science social sciences

All Episodes

30:37

Joshua Specht, "Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/31

Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that shows how our diets and consumer choices remain rooted in nineteenth century enterprises. A century and half ago, he writes, the colonialism and appropriation of indigenous lands enabled the expansion of western ranch outfits. These corporate ranchers controlled loose commodity chains, until powerful

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52:51

Dan Davies, "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/30

For this episode of Liminal Library, I interviewed Dan Davies about The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind (U Chicago Press, 2025). Davies examines how we've systematically engineered responsibility out of our institutions, creating a world where major decisions happen without clear human accountability.Davies draws on Stafford Beer's cybernetics to explain how modern organizations function as systems with their own patterns and

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64:00

Ian Scoones, "Navigating Uncertainty: Radical...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/27

Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks or new technologies, we don’t know what the future will hold. For many contemporary challenges, navigating uncertainty – where we cannot predict what may happen – is essential and, as the book explores, this is much more than just managing risk. But how is this done, and what can we learn from different contexts about responding to and living with uncertainty? Indeed, what might it mean to

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61:30

Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The Cancer Problem: Malignancy...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/25

Agnes Arnold-Forster's book The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2021) offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its

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38:48

Nick Spencer, "The Landscapes of Science and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/24

The relationship between science and religion has long been a heated debate and is becoming an ever more popular topic. The scientific capacity to manipulate and change humans and their environment through genetic engineering, life extension, and AI is going to take a huge leap forward in the twenty-first century, provoking endless debates around humans “playing God”. But what do we mean by this? Asking this question is surprisingly hard work. Attempts to 'essentialise' science, let alone religion,

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43:43

Jack Buffington, "Environmental Innovation: An Action...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/24

Environmental sustainability policy has failed due to focusing on symptoms rather than the root cause problems. Through significant research and a detailed roadmap for how to achieve sustainability by 2050, Buffington provides a realistic, game changing path forward that is both good for the environment and the economy.Dr. Jack Buffington received a Ph.D. in Supply Chain Management from the Lulea University of Technology in Sweden, and a Post-Doctorate at the Royal Institute of Technology in

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39:55

Ben Connable, "Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/23

Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War (Georgetown UP, 2025) reveals the gritty details of land warfare at the tactical level and challenges the overly subjective and often inaccurate American approach to characterizing war. Ben Connable's motivation for writing the book is to replace overly subjective analyses with an evidence-based approach to examining war. From analyzing a set of over 400 global ground combat cases, Connable shows there has been a modest and evolutionary shift in the

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56:53

Tim Lenton, "Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/22

As global change escalates, we are already starting to experience damaging tipping points in the social, ecological and climate systems that we depend upon - and much worse is to come. These shocks tell us we have left it too late for incremental change to save us: we need to change course fast to avoid the worst, yet we are acting far too slowly. Our supposed leaders appear paralysed by the complexity of the situation or, worse still, determined to maintain the status quo. This is leading to

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59:00

Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic, "The Future of Memory:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/21

We're pleased to welcome Dr. Jimi Jones and Dr. Marek Jancovic, authors of The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive (U of Illinois Press, 2025), to the New Books Network.In this book, Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic document the development and adoption of JPEG 2000, FFV1, MXF, and Matroska while investigating the social and material aspects of their design and the forces driving their journeys from niche to ubiquity. Drawing on interviews with

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65:23

Gary Rivlin, "AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/20

A veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist shadows the top thinkers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, introducing the breakthroughs and developments that will change the way we live and work. Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally

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62:25

Noah Giansiracusa, "Robin Hood Math: Take Control of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/20

Everything we do today is recorded as data that’s sold to the highest bidder. Plugging our personal data into impersonal algorithms has made government agencies more efficient and tech companies more profitable. But all this comes at a price. It’s easy to feel like an insignificant number in a world of number crunchers who care more about their bottom line than your humanity. It’s time to flip the equation, turning math into an empowering tool for the rest of us. In Robin Hood Math: Take Control

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60:17

Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/19

Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and speculative futures. For this week's Liminal Library, I spoke with Jascha Bareis, co-editor of The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025), about how these dual existences shape international relations and cultural imagination. The collection examines autonomous weapons not just as military hardware but as psychological tools that reshape

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43:30

Raphael Cormack, "Holy Men of the Electromagnetic...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/18

An international history of the uncanny in the 1920s and 1930s.The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind readers, and Jinn summoners all set out to assure the masses that just as newly discovered invisible forces of electricity and magnetism determined the world of science, unseen powers commanded an unknown realm of human potential Drawing on untapped sources in Arabic in addition to European ones, Raphael Cormack follows two of

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58:40

Petter Törnberg and Justus Uitermark, "Seeing Like a...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/13

'Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity (Taylor & Francis, 2025)' by Petter Törnberg & Justus Uitermark In my conversation with Petter Törnberg about Seeing Like a Platform, we kept returning to a simple but unsettling point: platforms don't just carry our messages or connect us to information. They've created an entirely new way of knowing the world. His book with Justus Uitermark argues that when everything must be tagged, ranked, and fed through recommendation

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61:41

Hannah Star Rogers, "Art, Science, and the Politics...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/13

'Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022)' by Hannah Star RogersWhen I sat down with Hannah Star Rogers to discuss her new book Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge, I found myself nodding along to a refreshingly obvious yet somehow radical proposition: why do we insist on keeping art and science in separate corners? Rogers makes a compelling case that this artificial boundary isn't just limiting our understanding of both fields, it's actively distorting how we think

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58:41

Vijay Selvam, "Principles of Bitcoin: Technology,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/11

Principles of Bitcoin presents a holistic, first-principles-based framework for understanding one of the most misunderstood inventions of our time. By stripping away the hype, jargon, and superficial analysis that often surrounds the crypto industry, this book uncovers the true ingenuity behind Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation—and its profound implications for the future of money, governance, and individual freedom. Vijay Selvam analyzes the technology, economics, politics, and philosophy of Bitcoin,

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55:56

Tatiana Bur, "Technologies of the Marvellous in...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/11

Tatiana Bur, Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge UP, 2025)This open-access book investigates the ways that technological, and especially mechanical, strategies were integrated into ancient Greek religion. By analysing a range of evidence, from the tragic use of the deus ex machina to Hellenistic epigrams to ancient mechanical literature, it expands the existing vocabulary of visual modes of ancient epiphany. Moreover, it contributes to the cultural history of the

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20:01

Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/10

African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic performance, economic opportunities, and social outcomes. Despite numerous educational initiatives striving for parity, African American males persistently bear the brunt of the highest rates of suspensions, expulsions, and dropout rates, surpassing all other demographic groups. Educational environments often fail to acknowledge and integrate the cultural

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59:54

Paul Thagard, "Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/09

Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? (MIT Press, 2021), Paul Thagard looks at how computers (“bots”) and animals measure up to the minds of people, offering the first systematic comparison of intelligence across machines,

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42:39

Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/09

Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States. In Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America (Oxford UP, 2021),

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2,239 results

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