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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

52:04

Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/09

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented,

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74:21

The Technological Soul: Alex Priou on Modernity,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/06

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny speaks with Alex Priou, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin, about how technology and ideology shape the modern soul. From Machiavelli’s “dikes and dams” to Odysseus’s struggle against the Sirens, Priou traces how modernity’s drive for control has left us materially fulfilled yet spiritually impoverished. The conversation explores liberalism’s crises, the moral stakes of AI, the American

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46:53

Liam Graham, "Physics Fixes All the Facts" (Springer...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/05

Complex systems seem to magically emerge from the interactions of their parts. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules. A living cell from organic molecules. You emerge from the cells of your body. Not since chaos has a concept from physics spread like wildfire to other disciplines. Emergence can be found from chemistry to economics; from psychology to ecology. At its heart is the alluring idea that there's more to the world than physics, that there is a holistic component to nature, an edge of

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29:58

Mimi Abramovitz, "Regulating the Lives of Women:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/04

In the fourth edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, drawing on important feminist concepts -- social reproduction, the gender division of labor, and patriarchy -- Mimi Abramovitz exposes the gendered and racialized myths and stereotypes built into welfare state programs. The book explains the contextual conditions that contributed to the precursors of the modern welfare state, its rise and expansion after World War II, and the recent

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36:01

Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson, "Dance Dance...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/03

On September 26, 1998, a video game made its debut in Japanese arcades. It was over seven feet tall and weighed just over 900 pounds. It had no characters, no story, no quests to fulfill or bosses to beat. What it had was a metal platform on which you were supposed to stand, put your feet into the right place at the right time, and dance. Join two music critics, long-ago players, and Sota Fujimori fans as they take you on the astonishing journey through the artists, influences, and innovators

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34:27

AI, News, and the State: Reinstitutionalising...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/03

How is artificial intelligence transforming journalism as both a profession and an institution? In this episode, Ning Ao speaks to Dr. Joanne Kuai, exploring how AI reshapes journalistic roles, organisational structures, and governance systems through the lens of China’s media landscape—while drawing comparisons with the US and EU.Dr. Joanne Kuai is a Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and holds a PhD from Karlstad University in Sweden. Her research focuses

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63:06

James Elwick, "Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/02

Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing (U Toronto Press, 2025) takes historiographic and sociological perspectives developed to understand large-scale scientific and technical systems and uses them to highlight the standardization that went into "standardized testing."Starting in the 1850s achievement tests became standardized in the British Isles, and were administered on an industrial scale. By the end of the century more than two million people had written

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46:04

Muhammad Atique, "Algorithmic Saga: Understanding...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/01

In an age when digital media permeates every aspect of our lives, understanding its influence is more critical than ever. Algorithmic Saga: Understanding Media, Culture, and Transformation in the AI Age (Atique Mindscape Publishing, 2025), serves as a compass, guiding readers through the complexities of our interconnected world. From the moment we wake to a flurry of notifications to the late-night scrolling that often accompanies our downtime, we find ourselves enmeshed in a digital landscape that

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45:21

Tamar Mitts, "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/31

Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight against terrorism and extremism. Yet despite mass content takedowns, account suspensions, and mounting pressure on technology companies to do more, hate thrives online. Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025) looks at how content moderation shapes the tactics of harmful content

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38:33

Stephen C. Mercado, "Japanese Spy Gear and Special...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/30

War, and the threat of war, spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weapons. Imperial Japan, ahead of the Second World War, was no exception. After the First World War, Japan set up the Noborito Research Institute: a division of scientists and technicians to invest in overt and clandestine warfare. Stephen Mercado dives into this history in his new book Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito’s Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the

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140:51

Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland, "The Emergent Mind:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/29

When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We find ourselves weighing arguments, or relying on intuition, then reaching a conscious decision about what to do. What is going on behind the scenes? In The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines (Basic Books, 2025), Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland show that our experience is the tip of an iceberg of brain activity that can be captured in an artificial neural network. Such networks--initially developed as models of

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29:25

Xiao Huang et. al, "GeoAI and Human Geography: The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/29

GeoAI and Human Geography: The Dawn of a New Spatial Intelligence Era (Springer, 2025) outlines a comprehensive journey into how geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) is reshaping our understanding of people and places. Merging traditional geographic inquiry with AI technologies, it offers a holistic view of digital tools and advanced algorithms that redefine human geography. Across twenty‐eight chapters, the book chronicles the evolution of geographic thought into the GeoAI era. Innovative

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50:26

Rick A López, "Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/28

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, in Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914 (University of Arizona Press, 2025) historian Dr. Rick A

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51:26

Brian Potter, "The Origins of Efficiency" (Stripe...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/28

Efficiency is the engine that powers human civilization. It's the reason rates of famine have fallen precipitously, literacy has risen, and humans are living longer, healthier lives compared to preindustrial times. But where do improvements in production efficiency come from? In The Origins of Efficiency (Stripe Press, 2025), Brian Potter argues that improving production efficiency--finding ways to produce goods and services in less time, with less labor, using fewer resources--is the force

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75:27

Garrett Hardin’s Tragic Environmentalism

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/27

An ecologist in California claimed that the iron laws of nature locked humanity into destroying our environment. This meant that we must take drastic measures to rein in unfettered capitalism and the American habit of overconsumption, lest we deplete our common resources. That argument made Garrett Hardin one of the most influential and celebrated environmentalists to ever live. Yet, he had a tragic view of the world that turned his green dream into a green nightmare. This is the final episode

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41:09

Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/27

The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to

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93:30

Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/27

In this episode I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the intersection of defense contracting, intellectual property, and government secrecy in Great Britain and the United States. We talk about her process in researching and writing her latest book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State and how breaking the law, historically speaking, has been important for

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93:30

Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/27

In this episode I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the intersection of defense contracting, intellectual property, and government secrecy in Great Britain and the United States. We talk about her process in researching and writing her latest book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State and how breaking the law, historically speaking, has been important for

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65:15

Roger Moorhouse, "Wolfpack: Hitler’s U-Boat War...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/26

Winston Churchill famously remarked that the threat of the German U-Boats was the only thing that had “really frightened” him during World War Two. The U-Boats certainly claimed a bitter harvest among Allied shipping: nearly 3,000 ships were sunk, for a total tonnage of over 14 million tonnes, nearly 70% of Allied shipping losses in all theatres of the war. With justification, then, they are an integral part of the traditional narrative of the Battle of the Atlantic; a story of technological

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57:44

Hector Vera, "Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/25

Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its preference for practicality has not adopted the most practical, scientific, and innovative system of measurement? Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America (Vanderbilt UP, 2025) by Dr. Hector Vera answers these questions by analyzing the political, economic, and international factors that determined the trajectory of the United States as a nation

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2,283 results

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