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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

72:16

Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/08

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep

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88:20

Emilio Elizalde, "The True Story of Modern Cosmology:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/08

This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicated observers and pioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the universe. It was in antiquity that humankind first attempted to explain the universe often with the help of myths and legends. This book, however, focuses on the time when cosmology finally became a true science. As the reader will learn, this was a slow process, extending over a large part of the 20th century and involving many astronomers, cosmologists

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57:38

Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/08

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (Princeton UP, 2020) delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer’s evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments. Athena Aktipis goes back billions

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62:13

David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/07

Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly anything to them: atoms are more than 99.9999999999 percent empty space. Yet scientists have learned to count these slivers of near nothingness with precision and to peer into their internal states. In looking so closely, we have learned that atoms, because of their inimitable signatures and imperturbable internal clocks, are little archives holding the

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46:23

154 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/07

With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB’s JP, KSR’s friend and

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74:49

Maxim Samson, "Earth Shapers: How Humans Mastered...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/07

Mountains, meridians, rivers, and borders--these are some of the features that divide the world on our maps and in our minds. But geography is far less set in stone than we might believe, and, as Maxim Samson's Earth Shapers contends, in our relatively short time on this planet, humans have become experts at fundamentally reshaping our surroundings. From the Qhapaq Ñan, the Inca's "great road," and Mozambique's colonial railways to a Saudi Arabian smart city, and from Korea's sacred Baekdu-daegan

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56:37

The Social Impact of Automating Translation

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/03

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Esther Monzó-Nebot, Associate Professor in Translation and Interpreting Studies at Universitat Jaume I in Catalunya. They talk about Dr. Monzó-Nebot's new book The Social Impact of Automating Translation: An Ethics of Care Perspective on Machine Translation.The conversation delves into ideological issues involved in the widespread use of machine translation and the real-life impact for those who may rely on machine

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69:47

Gavin Williams, "Format Friction: Perspectives on the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/08/01

With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly became an industrial standard even while the gramophone itself

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20:40

On Bullshit in AI

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/31

Today we’re continuing our series on Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. I have the privilege to speak with Arvind Narayanan co-author of the book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What it Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (Princeton University Press, 2024). Arvind is the perfect guest to explore the subject of bullshit in AI as AI Snake Oil takes on the ridiculous hype ascribed to the promise of AI. AI chatbots often hallucinate and many of the promoters of AI engage

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65:03

Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/30

When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women's movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they

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69:21

Anil Ananthaswamy, "Why Machines Learn: The Elegant...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/30

Machine learning systems are making life-altering decisions for us: approving mortgage loans, determining whether a tumor is cancerous, or deciding if someone gets bail. They now influence developments and discoveries in chemistry, biology, and physics—the study of genomes, extrasolar planets, even the intricacies of quantum systems. And all this before large language models such as ChatGPT came on the scene.We are living through a revolution in machine learning-powered AI that shows no signs of

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70:01

Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/29

What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to understand how science discovers the truth. At the current moment, when expertise is under attack and the idea of truth is contested from all sides, Strevens explains the remarkable success of science’s “irrational” method to settle debates, regardless of philosophical, religious, or aesthetic preferences. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of

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68:16

Aline Nardo, "Evolutionary Theory and Education"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/29

How has evolutionary theory shaped educational thinking over the past two centuries? ‘Evolutionary Theory and Education: The Influence of Evolutionary Thinking on Educational Theory and Philosophy’ (Brill, 2025) explores the considerable but under-appreciated influence of evolutionary ideas on educational theory and the philosophy of education. The book reveals the interplay between educational and evolutionary perspectives along the concepts of ‘adaptation’, ‘selection’, ‘inheritance’, and

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35:28

Kurt D. Fausch, "A Reverence for Rivers: Imagining an...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/28

In A Reverence for Rivers: Imagining an Ethic for Running Waters (OSU Press, 2025), Kurt Fausch draws on his experience as a stream ecologist, his interest in Indigenous cultures, and a thoughtful consideration of environmental ethics to explore human values surrounding freshwater ecosystems. Focusing on seven rivers across the globe—from the Salmon River in Oregon to the Sarufutsu River in Japan—he examines the growing ethical dilemmas threatening our rivers, including increasing demands for

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59:27

Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/26

Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal government’s largest and most important ongoing health surveys that tracks Americans’ use of illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco. War Stories

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56:42

Paul A. Thomas, "Inside Wikipedia: How It Works and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/25

In this book, Paul A. Thomas—a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who has accrued about 60,000 edits since he started editing in 2007—breaks down the history of the free encyclopedia and explains the process of becoming an editor. Now a newly minted Ph.D. and a library specialist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he outlines the many roles a Wikipedia editor can fill. Some editors fix typographical errors, add facts and citations, or clean up the prose on existing articles; others create new

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65:13

Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, "The AI Con: How to...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/23

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?Linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear that kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft,

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42:01

Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Brian T....

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/22

In Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics, Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen come together across disciplines to offer a kaleidoscopic view of the relationship between sperm, health, and the intersecting politics of gender, race, and reproduction. Always insightful and often provocative, the essays in this unprecedented collection cover a broad range of issues related to male reproductive and sexual health—including the latest technological developments for creating sperm;

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47:03

Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/20

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy expert, advising top government officials on the fentanyl crisis, and continuing to follow the story on his Substack account. The author of two previous

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22:14

How ClioVis is Transforming Education and Historical...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/07/19

Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I’m thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our

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2,239 results

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