DeNardis shows that the policy tools and normative constructs we have built around the internet are outdated...

Monopoly, Solitaire, football and Minecraft are all games, but for C. Thi Nyugen they are also an art form – specifically, the art form of agency...

Are robots going to be our overlords? No, we can make them our friends...

Cmiel and Peters provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google...

Rutkow retraces the fascinating, decades-long history of the attempt to build the world’s longest highway...

Liu’s book offers a fascinating new history of this ubiquitous beverage, leveraging its production, consumption, and global circulation to offer a fresh and compelling account of capitalist accumulation....

This is the second episode of a two-part conversation with Hodgson...

A compelling argument that the time has come to use what we know about the fascinating and diverse inner lives of other animals on their behalf...

Myers and Frumkin illustrate the interconnectedness of human health and the health of our planet...

In the last few decades, a wealth of new information has emerged about who animals are—intelligent, aware, and empathetic. Studies show that animals are astounding beings with intelligence, emotions, intricate communications networks, and myriad abilities...

Rahder offers a rich ethnography of knowledge-making practices in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest nature reserve in Central America...

The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern...

Medical marijuana laws have spread across the U.S. to all but a handful of states. Yet, eighty years of social stigma and federal prohibition creates dilemmas for patients who participate in state programs...

Zhang offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times...

Why Give a Damn About Strangers?

In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage the ear, eye, and intellect..,

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities...

What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it?

Lyons presents an ethnography of human-soil relations...

Almeling provides an in-depth look at why we do not talk about men’s reproductive health and this knowledge gap shapes reproductive politics today...

Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher...

In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and animal alike...

Hefferman explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty: ‘We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future...

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia...

Whysner offers an accessible and compelling history of toxicology and its key findings....

The first people to record their reactions to the falls in North America were fascinated by its beauty and power...

Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius...

In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles...

Tuchman describes the history of how the perception of diabetes has evolved over the past two centuries...

“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we....

van Dooren offers an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows...

What is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism?

We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies...

After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project...

Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society...

This is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease....

Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets, health concerns, and colonial warfare...

Davis offers a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they’re increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the “body/brain,” and what these encounters might tell us....

Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences...

Safina looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your life with the understanding that you are an individual within a particular community...

Posner explores the fascinating and complex history of pharmaceutical and bio-tech industries. It is an industry like no other and a story like no other...

How are algorithms changing journalism?

What obligations do we have to our pets?

Potter describes the efforts to use radio to promote global harmony and how they were eclipsed by nationalism and the weaponization of broadcasting as a propaganda tool...

Evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning...

Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields.

Modern humans are an indoor species.,.

Young proposes a new set of terms with which to understand the racialized imaginary inscribed in the scholarly texts that presented the peoples of the south as objects of an inquiring gaze from the north...

What you don't know can, in fact, hurt you...

Why Do Unnecessary and Often Counter-Productive Medical Interventions Happen So Often?

del Pilar Blanco and Page offer a wonderful and imaginative contribution to the fields of history of science, science and technology studies, and cultural studies....

Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases...

How has philosophy transformed human knowledge and the world we live in?

How is communicating virtually Is like eating Pringles forever?

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins...

Moore offers a stellar example of the significance and role of humanistic – and specifically ethnographic – inquiry regarding how climate change has, is, and will change human and human-nonhuman relations....

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They brought plants...

Kim and Maloney document major transformations at colleges and universities that have been quietly taking place, even amidst noise about crisis and disruption...

Polk examines how the shifting views of Black military through the first half of the 20th century, as the U.S. increased its global empire and warfare...

How can we understand computerization as a social process?

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global citizenship...

Choi-Fitzpatrick demonstrates that this technology – which is mostly associated with covert surveillance and remote warfare – has also served as a vital tool for activists, social movements...

From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans saw Polynesians as almost racially white...

How have we used twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound technologies to carve out sonic space out of the hustle and bustle of contemporary life?

Fischer explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers...

Kripal offers an ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars...

Most open-source code is not developed by big teams or equitable collaborations; it’s maintained by unseen individuals who work tirelessly to write and publish code that's consumed by millions....

Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,..

LSD is on your doctor's menu. At least not yet....

Scientists seek the truth, and we rely on them. Should we?

What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common?

How are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet?

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world....

Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy....

Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the opening of Dr. Jacobs's clinic to the present...

Beginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina’s low-wage economy...

Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable....

Wilde shows that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to white supremacist views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny....

In connecting these threads, McIlwain demonstrates the centrality of African Americans to both the history and future of the Internet...

Webel tells a history of colonial interventions among three communities of the Great Lakes region of East Africa...

This book sits right at the intersection of all three of these subfields and contributes to our understanding of the lived experience of religion, the lived experience of gender, ideas about ‘nature,’ and, of course, the history of medicine...

The book offers a comprehensive discussion of conducting research on online talk...

Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them....

In this New Books Network interview, we speak about the political, industrial, and scientific changes that need to occur by 2050 to solve climate change, as well as the importance of focusing on real solutions rather than wallowing in fear....

Drinot studies the interplay of sexuality, society, and the state in Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

Butler explores what might happen if Black people in the United States merged technology and spirituality in their fight towards materializing liberating realities...

Design justice demands a deep understanding of the community and its needs, engagement with community members, and a recognition of their expertise, along with reciprocation of value....

Kettler charts the impact that smell had on the making of race and justifications for enslavement in the Atlantic world....

To understand our past and provide hope for our future Sandra takes readers around the world to explore water projects....

What does the horizon of science look like? Who are the scientists that are making it happen?

Reid these vessels underwent considerable adaptation over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries in response to evolving technologies and the demands of their industry...

Will’s book is an ethnography of taxi-moto drivers in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city...

Dunbar-Hester investigates how open-technology communities are considering the question of diversity and inclusion.

By interrogating the Boasian intervention into the idea of biological race, Anderson shows how, despite their progressive and anti-racist intentions, Boas and ‘the Boasians’ naturalised the idea of the United States as a white nation...

Lean offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change....

Sáenz follows the trajectory of physicians in their quest for the professionalization of medicine in Mexico...

Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science....

Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist...

Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not?

Plotch discusses the problems of uneven funding, high costs, and political machinations that hobble the subway system-- and how, on Second Avenue, they were finally overcome...