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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2651
Lisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media...
“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…” From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelman‘s new book, the reader is introduced to a way of thinking about documents as tools for creating bodily experi...
64 min
2652
Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (Uni...
Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural His...
68 min
2653
Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narc...
“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fascinating narrative of how this came to be,
69 min
2654
Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope...
Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research,
72 min
2655
David Nemer, “Favela Digital: The Other Side of...
Inherently problematic in most mainstream discussions of the impact of technology is the dominant western or global northern perspective. In this way, the impact of technology on societies in developing countries,
37 min
2656
Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching th...
In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press,
67 min
2657
Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Tur...
The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to save information remotely and access that information from anywhere.
36 min
2658
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860...
The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating w...
58 min
2659
Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothe...
In Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (Ballentine Books, 2014), Lawrence Goldstone recounts the discovery and mastery of aviation at the turn of the twentieth century–and all the litigation that ensued.
47 min
2660
Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and ...
During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then ...
69 min
2661
danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives...
Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, educators, and legislators concerned with issues of privacy, harm prevention, and and cyberbullying.
43 min
2662
Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University o...
Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold War American politics, education, and society. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human N...
66 min
2663
Robert Mitchell, “Experimental Life: Vitalism i...
Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of dry ice. In Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Sci...
70 min
2664
Paul-Brian McInerney, “From Social Movement to ...
Paul-Brian McInerney is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is the author of From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market (Stanford Universi...
32 min
2665
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Sear...
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madagascar. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Af...
70 min
2666
David Kaiser, “How the Hippies Saved Physics” (...
David Kaiser‘s recent book is one of the most enjoyable and informative books on the history of science that you’ll read, full-stop. The deservedly award-winning How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (W.W.
71 min
2667
Andrew L. Russell, “Open Standards in the Digit...
We tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possible because of standards. In his book Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology,
49 min
2668
Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (Unive...
The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London.
71 min
2669
Sarah Franklin, “Biological Relatives: IVF, Ste...
Sarah Franklin‘s new book is an exceptionally rich, focused yet wide-ranging, insightful account of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the worlds that it creates and inhabits. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells,
64 min
2670
Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and E...
So much of Science Studies, of STS as a field or a point of engagement, is deeply concerned with objects. We create sociologies and networks of and with objects, we study them as actors or agents or actants,
69 min
2671
Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psyc...
Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as a pseudoscience. And indeed it is.
53 min
2672
Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Ant...
When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams of dogs and men, dreams about policemen and peccaries,
69 min
2673
Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-D...
Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the biological sciences.
74 min
2674
Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: D...
In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?
60 min
2675
Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neu...
“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electr...
73 min