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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

25:18

Chris Skinner, "Intelligent Money: When Money Thinks...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/26

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

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65:45

Sex and Love with Robots and Chatbots

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/26

It’s the UConn Popcast, and can you fall in love with ChatGPT? Can, and should, you have sex with a robot? We asked Professor Kate Devlin, a leading researcher on intimate relations between humans and artificial intelligences, to help us navigate the new landscape of sex and love with robots. Kate is a Professor of AI & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She’s the author of the excellent book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), which examines

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77:10

Anita Say Chan, "Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/25

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century's anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of

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51:34

The Audiobook's Century-Long Overnight Success

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/24

Today we present the first episode of a miniseries on audiobooks by getting into the history and theory of the medium. Audiobooks are having a moment—and it only took them over a century to get here. Dr. Matthew Rubery, a Harvard PhD and Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London, pioneered the study of the audiobook, its history, and its affordances. Among his other works, Dr. Rubery is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016, Harvard University Press). He’s

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59:23

Jeffrey Lee Funk on Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/24

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with retired professor, consultant, Discovery Institute fellow, and a winner of the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award, Jeffrey Lee Funk, about his recent book Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding, and Exploiting Investment Bubbles in Tech (Harriman House, 2024). The book provides readers with fundamental tools for exploring technology markets and spotting financial bubbles, which have been recurring at a high rate in recent decades. In

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69:09

Surekha Davies, "Humans: A Monstrous History" (U...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/23

Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science in Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous

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48:16

Richard Buttny, "Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/18

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Richard Buttny, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. With a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, his research interests include environmental communication, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. Richard's latest book, Unfracked: The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New York, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2024. About the book: Since

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49:18

Brain Rot: How Screens Affect the Minds of Young...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/16

In this episode Dr. Karyne Messina, a New Books Network host, and Dr. Harry Gill discussed the negative effects of excessive screen time on young adults' mental health and development, emphasizing the importance of face-to-face interactions and shared experiences. They focused on Erik Erickson’s first phase of adulthood which is the Intimacy versus Isolation phase from neuroscience and psychoanalytic perspectives. Dr. Gill talked about the prefrontal cortex of our brains that continue to wire until

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43:20

Mia Consalvo et al., "Streaming by the Rest of Us:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/14

The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025) Dr. Mia Consalvo, Dr. Marc Lajeunesse, and Dr. Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are

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38:42

Karl Berglund, "Reading Audio Readers: Book...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/13

What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor in Literature at Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Upsala University, examines the rise of audiobooks as a new mode of reading books. The analysis draws on digital humanities methods and a detailed industry case study to show who are the readers of audiobooks, how those readers engage and consume books, what sort of genres are most popular, and

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60:10

Matthew Fuhrmann, "Influence without Arms: The New...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/12

How does nuclear technology influence international relations? While many books focus on countries armed with nuclear weapons, this volume puts the spotlight on those who have the technology to build nuclear bombs but choose not to. These weapons-capable countries, such as Brazil, Germany, and Japan, have what is known as nuclear latency, and they shape world politics in important ways. Matthew Fuhrmann navigates a critical yet poorly understood issue by offering a definitive account of nuclear

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45:05

Leigh Ann Henion, "Night Magic: Adventures Among...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/11

“Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish [darkness] as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own.” According to Dark Sky International, 99% of people in the US live under the influence of skyglow. With each artificial light we install, we grow more unfamiliar with darkness and its riches. But what if darkness, instead of being a source of danger and discomfort,

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60:19

Eleni Kalantidou on Design, Repairability, and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/10

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Eleni Kalantidou, Assistant Professor at the Queensland College of Art and Design, about the volume of essays, Design/Repair: Place, Practice, and Community (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), which Eleni co-edited with Abby Mellick Lopes, Alison Gill, Guy Keulemans, and Niklavs Rubenis. The volume examines both the relationship of design practices to repair and repairability and the kinds of cultures needed to develop sustainable repair practices the world

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42:55

On Barak, "Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/10

Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and conveniences allow us to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Using examples from the hottest places on earth, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet (U California Press, 2024) shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to climate

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58:08

Lessons on Living with AI from the Home Computer...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/10

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common part of everyday life. Powerful AI tools are now integrated into our work, our schools, our creative industries, and our experiences of dating and companionship. This is a disorientating experience, one that changes not only our views of technology, but of ourselves. Can we look to a past technological revolution for help? We revisit Sherry Turkle's

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52:44

M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/10

This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a highly

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52:10

Luis F. Alvarez Leon, "The Map in the Machine:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/08

Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism (U California Press, 2024), Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of

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46:50

Jeremy Black, "A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/08

Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how people grew and made things to where and how they lived and moved. Railroads rewrote not only world geography but also the history of maps and mapping. Today, the needs of train companies and their users continue to shape the maps we consume and consult. Featuring full-color maps primarily from the British Library's distinguished collection--many of them

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67:29

Jorge Goldstein, "Patenting Life: Tales from the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/07

In this episode, Jorge Goldstein, the author of Patenting Life: The Commercialization of Biology, delves into the critical junction where biotechnology meets patent law. With a background as a molecular biologist turned patent attorney, Goldstein offers unique insights into how commercial biology has evolved and its profound effects on patent regulations. The discussion takes listeners on a journey from the early days of recombinant DNA technology to the cutting-edge advancements of CRISPR

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39:52

Daniel J. Solove, "On Privacy and Technology" (Oxford...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/03/07

Succinct and eloquent, On Privacy and Technology (Oxford UP, 2025) is an essential primer on how to face the threats to privacy in today's age of digital technologies and AI. With the rapid rise of new digital technologies and artificial intelligence, is privacy dead? Can anything be done to save us from a dystopian world without privacy? In this short and accessible book, internationally renowned privacy expert Daniel J. Solove draws from a range of fields, from law to philosophy to the humanities,

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