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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

55:17

Eugenia Lean, "Vernacular Industrialism in...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/17

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities

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61:47

Luz María Hernández Sáenz, "Carving a Niche: The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/16

In Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico 1800-1870 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), Luz María Hernández Sáenz follows the trajectory of physicians in their quest for the professionalization of medicine in Mexico. In the nineteenth century, medical practitioners sought to earn scientific and professional recognition both at home an internationally, and in doing so, they created institutions that shaped their profession, and sought to establish a monopoly in the realm of public

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51:50

Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/15

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science. Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite

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53:06

Fay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/14

Before the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, public health experts in the U.S. and U.K. were warning of the epidemic of loneliness. Loneliness steals more years of life than obesity. Loneliness is as much of a risk as smoking. Loneliness shortens a lifespan as much as poverty. It is associated with addiction, depression, anxiety, paranoia, and even suicide. And more and more of us report feeling lonely. Nevertheless, despite our 21st-century fears of an epidemic of loneliness, we know very little

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71:40

Lizzie O’Shea, "Future Histories" (Verso, 2019)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/13

When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology (Verso), Lizzie O’Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O’Shea constructs a “usable past” that help us determine our digital

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42:00

Philip M. Plotch, "Last Subway: The Long Wait for the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/13

Ever since New York City built one of the world’s great subway systems, no promise has been more tantalizing than the proposal to build a new subway line under Second Avenue in Manhattan. Yet the Second Avenue subway--although first envisioned in the 1920s, did not open until 2017—and even then in a truncated form. In the story of this long-awaited subway line, which Philip Mark Plotch explores in the context of the transit system around it, we learn how the subways knit York City together and how

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62:19

Matto Mildenberger, "Carbon Captured: How Business...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/13

Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not? In his new book Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Press, 2020), Matto Mildenberger (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) uses a comparative analysis of Norway, Australia, and the United States to explain differences in climate policy-making . Mildenberger concludes that despite variation in policy preferences and

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81:41

David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/13

David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past and future of science. As a historian, he studies mostly 20th-century physics, and in particular the history of quantum mechanics, Feynman diagrams, physics in the counterculture era, and much more. As a physicist, he studies particle physics and theories of cosmology, focused mostly on the early expansion of the universe. In this New Books Network

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27:40

P. W. Singer and A. Cole, "Burn-In: A Novel of the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/10

In P. W. Singer and August Cole's groundbreaking book, Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), an FBI agent hunts a new kind of terrorist through a Washington, DC, of the future - at once a gripping technothriller and a fact-based tour of tomorrow. America is on the brink of a revolution, one both technological and political. The science fiction of AI and robotics has finally come true, but millions are angry and fearful that the future has left them

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25:04

Sabine Hildebrandt, "The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/09

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As Sabine Hildebrandt reveals in The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich (Berghahn, 2017), however,

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62:17

Greg Mitchell, "The Beginning or the End: How...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/07

dSoon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (The New Press, 2020) chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the

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84:02

Rachel Mundy, "Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/07

“What makes song sparrows, Verdi, medieval monks, and minstrelsy part of the same taxonomy?” So asks—and answers—Rachel Mundy, who is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University–Newark. In her book, Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), Mundy shows how the history of the humanities is intimately connected with the lives of animals. Focusing on animal musicality, with a particular emphasis on birdsong, Mundy recounts dozens of

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44:57

Allison Bigelow, "Mining Language: Racial Thinking,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/06

Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was created for and founded upon the mining and coining of silver ore from its colonies. Our knowledge about this vital industry, however, remains invariably tethered to the elite sources and perspectives that were preserved in the written record. In Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World

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60:33

Ruth Leys, "The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/06

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Ruth Leys (she/hers), Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, on The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2017). In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their basic

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83:34

He Bian, "Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/02

He Bian’s new book Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2020) is a beautiful cultural history of pharmacy in early modern China. This trans-dynastic book looks at how Chinese approaches to knowledge changed during the Ming and Qing as state-commissioned pharmacopeias dwindled, amateur investigations into the knowledge of things soared, and, ultimately, as natural history was de-medicalized, all while commercialization, monetization,

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55:15

Doron Galili, "Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/07/02

With the burst of new technologies in the 1870s, many inventors and visionaries believed that the transmission of moving images was just around the corner. As Doron Galili details in his book Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020), the half-century of speculations that followed did much to shape the development of broadcast television well before it emerged in the 1930s. Galili notes that much of this occurred within the context of contemporary

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59:32

Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/06/30

We sit at the beginning of what could be “both a truly terrifying and a golden era in humanity.” In The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (HarperOne, 2020), leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”–Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting,

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39:43

Ainissa Ramirez, "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/06/25

In this interview, I talk to Dr. Ainissa Ramirez about her new book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (MIT Press, 2020) Dr. Ramirez examines eight inventions―clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips―and reveals how they shaped the human experience. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies. Ainissa Ramirez, Ph.D. is an

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30:39

Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/06/24

What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it something more? In The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019), Lee McIntyre addresses recent attacks on science in areas such as climate change, vaccination, and even belief that the world is flat by explaining why science is a culture built around a “scientific attitude” that embraces evidence and

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46:34

Julia Obertreis, "Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2020/06/23

In Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860-1991 (V & R Unipress, 2017), Julia Obertreis explores the infrastructural, technical, and environmental aspects of the history of cotton agriculture and irrigation in Soviet Central Asia. Based on published sources and archival research conducted in Tashkent, Obertreis’ monograph offers new insights into the nature of Russian Imperial and Soviet statecraft, as well as the technical and ideological motivations behind the

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2,490 results

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