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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

69:43

Daniel K. Sodickson, "The Future of Seeing: How...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/03

Over the centuries, we have learned to peer into what was once invisible. Imaging devices like cameras, telescopes, microscopes, and MRI machines map the world around, beyond, and within us in ways the naked eye could never see. In so doing, these technologies have transformed our understanding of our place in the universe and our conception of our own bodies--and we may be on the cusp of an even greater revolution.Daniel K. Sodickson--a physicist and biomedical imaging innovator--explores the

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46:23

157 Mangrum's Comical Computation (JP)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/10/02

When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford UP, 2025), which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.” Comedy has provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them "collective repertoires") for responding to the looming

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35:02

Cass R. Sunstein, "Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/29

Imperfect Oracle is about the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is better than we are at making judgments. Its limits are evidenced by the fact that AI cannot always make accurate predictions--not today, not tomorrow, and not the day after, either. Natural intelligence is a marvel, but human beings blunder because we are biased. We are biased in the sense that our judgments tend to go systematically wrong in predictable ways, like a scale that

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80:13

Ashleigh Wade on How Black Girls Use Social Media

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/29

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Ashleigh Greene Wade, Assistant Professor of Digital Studies with a joint appointment in Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, about her book, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice. The book examines how black girls use social media posts to fashion self images that express the girls’ self-understandings, goals, and worldviews. Vinsel and Wade talk about the research methods and

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65:12

Mark Vellend, "Everything Evolves: Why Evolution...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/27

How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligenceEverything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More Than We Think, from Proteins to Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving

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49:41

Vanessa Warne, "By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/27

By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Vanessa Warne demonstrates how reading by touch not only changed the lives of nineteenth-century blind people, but also challenged longstanding perceptions about blindness and reading. Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of blind people learned how to read by touch. Using fiction, essays, letters, and speeches authored by blind readers, By Touch Alone traces the ways in which literacy

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59:09

J. Doyne Farmer, "Making Sense of Chaos" (Yale UP, 2024)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/25

We live in an age of increasing complexity--an era of accelerating technology and global interconnection that holds more promise, and more peril, than any other time in human history. The fossil fuels that have powered global wealth creation now threaten to destroy the world they helped build. Automation and digitization promise prosperity for some, unemployment for others. Financial crises fuel growing inequality, polarization, and the retreat of democracy. At heart, all these problems are rooted

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65:59

Jonas Enander, "Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/23

Humanity's relationship with black holes began in 1783 in a small English village, when clergyman John Michell posed a startling question: What if there are objects in space that are so large and heavy that not even light can escape them? Almost 250 years later, in April 2019, scientists presented the first picture of a black hole. Profoundly inspired by that image, physicist Jonas Enander has traveled the world to investigate how our understanding of these elusive celestial objects has evolved

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50:35

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, "More and More and More: An...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/23

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of

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45:53

Stephen A. Harris, "50 Plants That Changed the World"...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/17

Have you ever stopped to think about how your morning cappuccino came to be? From the coffee bush that yielded the beans, to the grass for the cattle – or perhaps the soya – that produced the milk, plants are an indispensable part of our everyday life.Beginning with some of the earliest uses of plants, in 50 Plants that Changed the World (Bodleian, 2025) Dr. Stephen Harris takes us on an exciting journey through history, identifying fifty plants that have been key to the development of the western

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37:20

Mark Seligman, "AI and Ada: Artificial Translation...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/16

Taking recent spectacular progress in AI fully into account, Mark Seligman's AI and Ada: Artificial Translation and Creation of Literature (Anthem Press, 2025) explores prospects for artificial literary translation and composition, with frequent reference to the hyperconscious literary art of Vladimir Nabokov. The exploration balances reader-friendly explanation (“What are transformers?”) and original insights (“What is intelligence? What is language?”) with personal and playful notes, and

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36:51

Lucy Sante, "Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/14

From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City’s ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry. West of the Hudson, it meant that twenty-six villages, with their farms, forest lands, orchards, and quarries, were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished,

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70:54

Samuel Arbesman, "The Magic of Code: How Digital...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/13

In the tradition of classics such as The Lives of a Cell, a bold reframing of our relationship with technology that argues code is "a universal force--swirling through disciplines, absorbing ideas, and connecting worlds" (Linda Liukas).In the digital world, code is the essential primary building block, the equivalent of the cell or DNA in the biological sphere--and almost as mysterious. Code can create entire worlds, real and virtual; it allows us to connect instantly to people and places around

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86:54

The High Frontier: Gerard O’Neill’s Space Utopia

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/13

This is the first episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). In the 1970s, Gerard O’Neill drew up detailed plans for large space colonies. The Princeton physicist claimed that these colonies could beam limitless energy back

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71:32

Simon James Copland, "The Male Complaint: The...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/12

Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities have orchestrated online campaigns of misogynistic harassment, with some individuals going as far as committing violent terrorist attacks. Although the Manosphere has become a focus point of the media, researchers and governments alike, discussions tend to either over-sensationalize the community or offer simplistic explanations for their

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46:16

Human Leadership for Humane Technology

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/09

In this episode, we spoke with Cornelia C. Walther about her three books examining technology's role in society. Walther, who spent nearly two decades with UNICEF and the World Food Program before joining Wharton's AI & Analytics Initiative, brings field experience from West Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to her analysis of how human choices shape technological outcomes.The conversation covered her work on COVID-19's impact on digital inequality, her framework for understanding how values get

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53:23

Jessica Urwin, "Contaminated Country: Nuclear...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/09

Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth century. From uranium extraction to nuclear testing, Australia’s lands became sites of imperial exploitation under the guise of national development. The continent was subject to rampant nuclear colonialism. However, this history is not just one of imposition. Aboriginal communities, bearing the brunt of these processes, have persistently resisted,

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53:59

Bénédicte Meillon, "Ecopoetics of Reenchantment:...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/05

Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2022) tackles the reenchantment process at work in a part of contemporary ecoliterature that is marked by the resurfacing of the song of the earth topos and of Gaia images. Focusing on the postmodernist braiding of various indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies, close readings of the animistic and totemic dimensions of the stories at hand lead to the theorizing of liminal realism—a mode that shares much with

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65:02

Dan Roche, "Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/05

Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing (MIT Press, 2025) is a book about artificial eyes—about the artisans and artists who make them, and about the life-changing and sometimes life-saving experience of wearing them, as author Dan Roche has done for 15 years. Eye making is done by hand, for one person at a time, by a very small number of ocularists (fewer than 200 in the US); it is a slow, intricate, and unusually intimate process of molding, fitting, and painting that brings ocularist and

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53:45

Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy...

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society ·

2025/09/04

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but

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2,243 results

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