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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

63:54

Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/06

In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones,

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20:48

Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/06

A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond.In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively known as “Star Wars,” a space-based missile defense program aimed at protecting the US from nuclear attack. In Weapons in Space, Aaron Bateman draws on recently declassified American, European, and Soviet documents to provide

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59:41

David Morris, "Stealing The Future: Sam...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/05

Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider – but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. “Effective Altruism” and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumanism, remain dangerously influential in today’s Silicon Valley. Despite Bankman-Fried’s pose as a cuddly

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42:56

Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/05

Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point for the rather curious story of the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and how they created a new system with a strong independent nuclear safety regulator that has refused to back down even as

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41:56

Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/01

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer,

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44:17

Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/01

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed--and in some cases demolished--our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As

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47:34

James Welsh et al., "Weathering Space" (American...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/31

Past human space missions were protected by Earth’s magnetic field and a measure of luck, but future missions beyond the Earth–Moon system will face far greater and longer-lasting radiation risks that cannot be managed by route planning alone. The authors argue that safe deep-space exploration will require major advances in understanding radiation, developing effective shielding, and mitigating both acute and long-term health effects, rather than relying on chance. Learn more about your ad choices

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77:04

Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/31

Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinariness is the ultimate symbol of its success.However, behind the mundanity of the barcode lies an important history. Barcodes bridged the gap between physical objects and digital databases and paved the way for the

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38:17

Jeremy Black, "A History of Artillery" (Rowman &...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/29

Jeremy Black's book A History of Artillery (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) traces the development of artillery through the ages, providing a thorough study of these weapons. From its earliest recorded use in battle over a millennium ago, up to the recent Gulf War, Balkan, and Afghanistan conflicts, artillery has often been the deciding factor in battle. Black shows that artillery sits within the general history of a war as a means that varied greatly between armies and navies, and also across

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51:40

Colin Williamson, "Drawn to Nature: American...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/25

What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent scientific models and ideas about nature were an important inspiration for Disney’s groundbreaking animated realism. In Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Dr. Colin Williamson presents a vivid portrait of how developments in biology, physics, and geology between 1900 and the long 1960s

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37:17

Emanuel Deutschmann, "Mapping the Transnational...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/23

Increasingly, people travel and communicate across borders. Yet, we still know little about the overall structure of this transnational world. Is it really a fully globalized world in which everything is linked, as popular catchphrases like “global village” suggest? Through a sweeping comparative analysis of eight types of mobility and communication among countries worldwide—from migration and tourism to Facebook friendships and phone calls—Mapping the Transnational World demonstrates that our

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72:32

Jennifer Ott, "Where the City Meets the Sound: The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/19

From canoes on the beach at Dzidzilalich to steamships and piers, Seattle's waterfront was the center of the city's economy and culture for generations. Its tumultuous history reflects a broader story of immigration, labor battles, and technological change. The 2001 Nisqually Earthquake brought fresh urgency and opportunity to remake this contested space, sparking intense debates over history preservation, the environment, and Indigenous connections long ignored.Today, the revitalized Waterfront

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25:13

Erik Lin-Greenberg, "The Remote Revolution: Drones...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/19

In The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft (Cornell UP, 2025), Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security, but not in ways one would expect.Emerging technologies like drones are often believed to increase the likelihood of crises and war. By lowering the potential risks and human costs of military operations, they encourage decision-makers to deploy military force. Yet, as Lin-Greenberg contends, operations involving drones are, in fact,

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41:20

Luis Felipe Murillo, "Common Circuits: Hacking...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/17

A digital world in relentless movement—from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing—has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley "big tech" and venture capital firms. Yet very little is discussed in the public sphere about existing alternatives. Based on long-term field research across San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shenzhen, Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures (Stanford UP, 2025) explores a transnational network of hacker spaces that stand as potent,

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60:04

Matthew A. Tattar, "Innovation and Adaptation in War"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/15

An analysis of advances in military technology that illustrates the importance of organizational flexibility in both an attacker’s innovations and an opponent’s adaptations.How important is military innovation in determining outcomes during armed conflict? In Innovation and Adaptation in War, Matthew Tattar questions the conventional wisdom that, to succeed, military organizations must innovate early and often. Because successful methods of warfare are soon widely imitated or countered on the

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20:31

Chaim Gingold, "Building SimCity: How to Put the...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/15

Building SimCity explores the history of computer simulation by chronicling one of the most influential simulation games ever made: SimCity. As author Chaim Gingold explains, Will Wright, the visionary designer behind the urban planning game, created SimCity in part to learn about cities, appropriating ideas from traditions in which computers are used as tools for modeling and thinking about the world as a complex system. As such, SimCity is a microcosm of the histories and cultures of computer

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67:58

Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/15

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world’s most influential philosophers.How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the

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38:21

Edward McPherson, "Look Out: The Delight and Danger...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/13

Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View (Astra House, 2025) by Edward McPherson is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging perspectives—from pre–Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest. Blending history, reporting, personal experience, and accounts of activists, programmers, spies, astronauts, artists, inventors, and dreamers, McPherson reveals

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61:53

Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen, "Thinking...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/10

To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global climate models, and it is crucial for biodiversity, flood control, and freshwater resources. Perhaps no other material is asked to do so much for the human environment, and yet our basic conceptual model of what soil is and how it works remains surprisingly vague.In cities, soil

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102:06

Thomas Haigh on the History of “AI” as a Brand

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/12/08

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Thomas Haigh, Professor and Chair of History and affiliate of the Department of Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, about his forthcoming book on the history of artificial intelligence. The book, which has had the working title _Artificial Intelligence: The History of a Brand_ with the final title to be determined, examines how and why historical actors have decided to apply the term “artificial intelligence” to a variety of disparate

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2,396 results

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