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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

61:04

Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/23

Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable,

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39:40

Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/23

Once used extensively in schools, hospitals, and housing, asbestos has taken the lives of millions. Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster (Repeater, 2025) by Tom White traces the international history of the asbestos disaster — from mining operations in apartheid South Africa to the factories and shipyards of the UK – and tells the story of the activists and workers who took on a once indomitable industry.Illegal for the past quarter century, much asbestos still remains in place today,

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44:53

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, "Videotape" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/22

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the

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50:32

Ivan Franceschini et al., "Scam: Inside Southeast...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/20

“If I had been enslaved for a year or two, I might not be able to believe in humanity any more.” “I am a victim of modern slavery.”These chilling words come from a Taiwanese female lured by a fake job offer, only to be sold into a scam compound in Cambodia. She is not alone. She is one of thousands deceived into this industry—people who left home hoping for a better life, only to find themselves trapped in a living nightmare. Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds (Verso Books,

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54:29

Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology,...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/19

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers

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96:34

Cory Doctorow on Enshittification: Why Everything...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/17

In this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things, host Lee Vinsel and very special guest host, danah boyd, formerly of Microsoft Research, presently Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, chat with writer and activist, Cory Doctorow, about his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. The book tracks how and why companies degrade their digital platforms and products and argues especially for the role that monopoly power plays in

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52:13

Hilary Allen, "Fintech Dystopia: A Summer Beach Read...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/11/11

Silicon Valley wants to disrupt finance, and it might just succeed. In FinTech Dystopia, professor Hilary Allen offers an accessible, irreverent, and occasionally furious account of how tech elites are quietly taking over the financial system and making it worse in the process.Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of conversations with policymakers, journalists, and regulators, Allen explains how fintech and crypto have failed to deliver on their promises and why so much of

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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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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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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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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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2,290 results

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