New Books in Science, Technology, and...
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.
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2526
Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an Ameri...
Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to ensure the technological security of this important infrastructure.
20 min
2527
Yves Citton, “The Ecology of Attention” (Polity...
We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a result. But how is this happening, what are the consequences,
68 min
2528
Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Mi...
The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infection, disease, and pandemic they have helped shape human culture and civilization.
48 min
2529
Casey Walsh, “Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs,...
Water politics have long figured prominently in Mexico, and scholars have addressed such critical topics as irrigation, dam and canal building, and resource management, but few have examined how everyday people think about and use the waters in the dai...
55 min
2530
Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: T...
The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century,
35 min
2531
Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philo...
Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sen...
39 min
2532
Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creat...
Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritual practitioners in the Caribbean claimed knowledge abou...
51 min
2533
David Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social...
While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also true that the vast majority of the popular literature on the systems view has taken place within a busine...
44 min
2534
Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of ...
Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity,
42 min
2535
Eli Maor, “Music by the Numbers: From Pythagora...
Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 2018) is THE book that explains what that connection is, and how both math and music connect to both phy...
54 min
2536
Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science”...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperature (given current trends) of 1.5- 4.
65 min
2537
Ari Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Ae...
Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology.
45 min
2538
Gary Bruce, “Through the Lion Gate: A History o...
In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the University of Waterloo, provides the first English-language history of the Berlin Zoo from its inception in 184...
58 min
2539
Christopher G. White, “Other Worlds: Spirituali...
In the modern world, we often tend to view the scientific and the spiritual as diametrically opposed adversaries; we see them as fundamentally irreconcilable ways of understanding the world, whose epistemologies are so divergent that they espouse radic...
78 min
2540
Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Us...
Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press,
46 min
2541
Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Natio...
Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India (Harvard University Press, 2018),
48 min
2542
Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Compani...
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals.
54 min
2543
Joy Rohde, “Armed with Expertise: The Militariz...
In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions.
47 min
2544
Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: Peo...
Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the contexts, programs, and ethics of medical experimentation in the British and Frenc...
40 min
2545
Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in...
Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France. Focusing on the years in and around 1668,
51 min
2546
Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism...
When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press,
58 min
2547
Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Scie...
As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time.
48 min
2548
Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The In...
Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, takes a data-based approach to examine how actions can affect violence in asymmetric conflicts.
53 min
2549
Larry Cuban, “The Flight of a Butterfly or the ...
In The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital technologies in K–12 classrooms,
32 min
2550
Hala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Cultu...
In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill,
49 min