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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

01:16:13

Will AI Make Human Labor Obsolete? with Garrison Lovely

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/10/04

Today I’m speaking with Garrison Lovely, technology journalist and author of the new book, Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us — and How to Stop It (OR Books, 2026). Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most discussed and most misunderstood topic today. Even to the experts and captains of industry, the frontier large language models are essentially black boxes. AI poses many reasons to be both skeptical and optimistic, yet it also poses a fundamental threat to our

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00:45:05

Aarthi Vadde has a Platform (JP)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/10/01

It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to prevailing sense of defeat and nostalgia that guides them.”Her conversation with John, like the book itself, aims to narrate the history of Web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present and to explore how writers themselves have

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00:25:06

The Generative Organization: AI Playbook for...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/10/01

How Do AI & Innovation Cohabitate?Bryan Cassady is an author, professor, and all-around innovator, whether in book form or in classrooms, real and virtual, stretching from Europe to India. He is a professor, consultant, and aserial entrepreneur now with a mission: to teach1 million innovators by 2027.He hasbuilt companies in 6 countries and trained 40,000+ leaders.He’s also a former professional racquetball player turned mathematician, a United Nations professional who speaks four languages. A

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00:35:37

Assassins and Secret Listeners: Britain's Invisible...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/10/01

Throughout Britain, all day, every day and in the dead of night, the secret listeners went about their solitary work. Hands on headphones, these men and women, drawn from all walks of civilian life, listened to the coded messages of German intelligence and passed hundreds of thousands of them on to Bletchley Park.At the same time, men with firearms experience were recruited into secret patrols trained in sabotage and silent killing with knife or garotte. In June 1940, with a full-scale German

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01:04:43

How to Stay Human Forever: On America's Digital...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/30

Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social crisis is just our way of merely dealing with the fallout?So argues the political theorist James

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00:37:44

“Ten Percent” – Will Humanity Survive AI?

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/27

Could humanity’s most powerful invention become a threat to its survival? In this episode of The Survival Curve, we examine the disturbing prospect behind the “ten percent” debate: a risk of catastrophe that cannot be precisely calculated, but whose consequences demand serious attention.We explore three routes to disaster: machines escaping human control, people using AI to unleash devastating cyber or biological attacks, and military systems accelerating a crisis towards nuclear war. What happens

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01:11:59

The Story of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/25

Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (RTP) emerged under the unique circumstances of a poor Southern state that needed to find a way to offset the declining industries of tobacco, furniture, and textiles in the 1950s. Through the sustained commitment of nearby universities, business leaders, and local and state officials, state leaders established the largest science and research park in the United States in an area that was nothing but “possums and pines.” Miracle Road:The Story of Research

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00:39:03

Mehran Gul, "The New Geography of Innovation: The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/24

Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab.For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many.Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his bookThe New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies(Simon and

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00:47:59

Ehsan Dehghan, "The Discursive-Digital Link:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/22

We are in a state of crisis. Democracy is under threat, authoritarian politics are on the rise, and digital media—once heralded as emancipatory technologies—are increasingly implicated in democratic erosion. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a critical framework for understanding the entangled relationships between discourse, digital media, and the hidden dynamics behind antagonism and polarisation.The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces (Routledge,

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00:47:48

Mary Beth Weber and Melissa De Fino, "Library...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/21

Library Technical Services: Future Forward (Bloomsbury, 2025) edited by Mary Beth Weber and Melissa De Fino looks at the future of technical services post-pandemic and at the brink of technological disruptions through a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility lens. Libraries have undergone a tremendous transformation that has been driven by multiple factors that include technological developments, and societal impacts such as declining college enrollment and the aftermath of the COVID-19

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01:23:01

Building Better Scientific Teams through Team Science...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/18

This inaugural podcast for the Voices of Discovery podcast from the University of Houston Clear Lake features a discussion of Team MAPPS, a federally-funded program that is available online to help people increase collaboration within teams. The Team Methods to Advance Processes and Performance in Science (Team MAPPS) training program was specifically designed to help scientific teams develop and master the skills of Team Science so that collaboration is more effective as scientific teams tackle the

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36:22

R. Joshua Scannell, "The Carceral Surround" (U...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/12

As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communities, The Carceral Surround (U Minnesota Press, 2026)offers a powerful new theory of police and prison power in the digital age. Making sense of the rapid expansion of digital carceral infrastructure in a nation that claims to value freedom and individual rights, R. Joshua Scannell moves beyond familiar debates over privacy to show that understanding digital

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48:01

Lee Alan Dugatkin, "Nary a Horse Left Standing: How a...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/08

InNary a Horse Left Standing: How a Nineteenth-Century Epidemic Transformed Medicine, Animal Welfare, and the Modern City(MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Lee Dugatkin chronicles this little-known crisis, revealing how the epidemic disrupted nearly every aspect of urban life. From coast to coast, livelihoods collapsed as horses lay sick, or worse dying, on stable floors, fires raged unchecked without horse-drawn wagons, and city development stalled for lack of horsepower. Just as the Gilded Age was dawning and

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55:39

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/04

We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound ofnatural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying climate change? This question is particularly poignant along the Ring of Fire, a tectonic belt in the Pacific region that routinely faces some of the most devastating disasters in the world. Based on ethnographic research spanning seven years, Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of

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62:58

Marnie Hughes-Warrington, "Artificial Historians"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/03

I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 bookArtificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms. The book raises

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40:03

Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/09/02

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI. With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and

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24:21

Special Episode: Accounting for Computing, or Why We...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/08/31

This special episode features a short talk Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, gave at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event featured a great mix of historians and Science and Technology Studies scholars and was organized by Jacob Bruggeman, who recently finished his dissertation on the politics of computer hackers at Johns Hopkins University and is now headed to a job at Ohio State University. Thanks to Jacob for putting the event together and hearty

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34:10

Eran Shalev, "The Star-Spangled Republic: Political...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/08/24

Why does the American flag use stars to represent the states? InThe Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation(U Virginia Press, 2025), Eran Shalev answers this and many other questions, considering the cosmic imagery—so familiar today but so peculiar on reflection—that suffused the United States’ early political culture. In this comprehensive study, Shalev uncovers how “political astronomy”—the discussion and representation of politics through

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45:24

Steve Feldstein, "Bytes and Bullets: Global...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/08/23

Steve Feldstein's Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare(St. Martin's Press,2026) opens with a juxtaposition: China spending vast sums to reach the far side of the moon, and Ukraine using cheap drones to blunt a far larger military. Both are stories about technology and power, but they point in opposite directions. In our conversation, Feldstein argues that the outcome of technological competition is not predetermined. Small states, non-state

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54:54

Sandeep Vaheesan, "Democracy in Power: A History of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/08/22

InDemocracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Sandeep Vaheesanrecounts the rather overlooked story of how electricity spread across the U.S. economy during the 20th century. This book sheds careful light on the varied institutions and interests mediating the process, including investor-owned utilities andtherural electric cooperative. Vaheesan does not hesitate to critique the successes and failures cropping upalong the way; rather, he

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2,508 results

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