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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

59:41

Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich, "The Mask: A...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/13

The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air (Yale UP, 2025) by Dr. Bruno J. Strasser and Dr. Thomas Schlich presents a history of masks protecting against bad air—in cities, factories, hospitals, and war trenches—exploring how our identities and beliefs shape the decision to wear a mask.For centuries, humans have sought to protect themselves from harmful air, whether from smoke, dust, vapors, or germs. This book offers the first history of respiratory masks—ranging from simple pieces of cloth to

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45:19

Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/10

Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim that the hand gave humans dominion over all other species? Why did psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff climb into the primate cages of the London Zoo, taking hundreds of delicate palm prints? Why did Francis Galton, the father of fingerprinting, take palm prints too? And why did world-leading geneticists study the geometry of palm lines in their search for

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73:36

Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/09

An astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoir.On April 10, 2019, award-winning astrophysicist Heino Falcke presented the first image ever captured of a black hole at an international press conference—a turning point in astronomy that Science magazine called the scientific breakthrough of the year. That photo was captured with the unthinkable commitment of an intercontinental team of astronomers

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33:54

Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/08

Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and environment, with a special emphasis on the natural environment. He has devoted his life to studying it. If you sometimes feel drained, distracted, or depressed, Dr. Berman has identified the elements of a “nature prescription” that can boost your energy, sharpen your focus, change your mood, and improve your mental and physical health. He also reveals

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53:45

Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/07

The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force behind the development and decline of civilizations across the centuries. The author, Peter Frankopan, takes readers on a journey through history, showcasing how natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and solar flare activity have shaped the course of human events. Frankopan's extensive research, coupled with his accessible writing

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41:39

Rachel Midura, "Postal Intelligence: The Tassis...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2026/01/07

Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP, 2025) connects and situates histories of the post and government intelligence alongside print technology and state power in the wider context of the early modern communications revolution. In the sixteenth century, postal services became central to domestic governance and foreign policy enterprises, extended government reach and surveillance, and

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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2,322 results

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