New Books in Science, Technology, and...

Interviews with Scholars of Science, Technology, and Society about their New Books

Science
Social Sciences
1751
Donna Dickenson, "Me Medicine vs. We Medicine: ...
Personalized healthcare―or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"―is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-fits-all" model...
20 min
1752
Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History o...
Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments...
34 min
1753
David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bri...
Once a self-proclaimed dark green eco-pessimist, Dr. Montgomery finds this new hope as he travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health...
54 min
1754
Tita Chico, "The Experimental Imagination: Lite...
Chico’s new book upends the traditional, modern dichotomies which enforce strict separations between literature and science...
65 min
1755
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, “Automating Finance: I...
Pardo-Guerra explores the history of the finance industry to understand the role of markets and technologies in contemporary capitalism...
41 min
1756
John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing T...
Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human populations, and the challenge of rethinking anthropological science’s relationship with indigenous peoples and the general public...
30 min
1757
Ekaterina Svetlova, "Financial Models and Socie...
Svetlova looks at how quantitative models are actually used by investors and finds a whole space where human judgment, intuition and non-model based factors come into play as to when and how and to what degree financial models are actually implemented...
25 min
1758
Anthony Ryan Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret D...
Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs...
46 min
1759
Lina del Castillo, "Crafting a Republic for the...
Lina del Castillo’s book explores scientific, geographic, and historiographic inventions in nineteenth-century Colombia...
63 min
1760
Diana Pasulka, "American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion...
More than half of American adults and more than seventy-five percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life...
55 min
1761
Greta LaFleur, "The Natural History of Sexualit...
The book effectively historicizes categories that are often take for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but by inviting the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies...
77 min
1762
Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The Ameri...
Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history...
38 min
1763
Anna Rose Alexander, "City on Fire: Technology,...
Alexander examines the approaches to dealing with the ever-present threat of fire in Mexico City in an era in which technology and modernity were transforming the city in fundamental ways...
37 min
1764
David Beer, “The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power a...
What is the social role of data?
34 min
1765
Daniel Nemser, "Infrastructures of Race: Concen...
Nemser examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power...
60 min
1766
Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Envi...
Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition...
30 min
1767
Amy Lippert, "Consuming Identities: Visual Cult...
Lippert explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush...
115 min
1768
Matthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its ...
Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray...
56 min
1769
David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phyt...
The phytotron was not only at the center of post-war plant science, but also connected to the Cold War, commercial agriculture, and long-duration space flight...
31 min
1770
Paul Ramírez, "Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s E...
Ramirez explores how laypeople impacted the new medical techniques and technologies implemented by the imperial state in the final decades of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico...
54 min
1771
Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Refle...
Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped the way she practices medicine.
39 min
1772
Camisha Russell, "The Assisted Reproduction of ...
While there is a robust scientific consensus that there is no meaningful genetic basis for race, Russell’s analysis of the role of race in ARTs reveals that when it comes to producing kinship, race is still doing a great deal of work.
75 min
1773
Jeannette Eileen Jones, "Search of Brightest Af...
Jones talks about the many different groups, from naturalists and conservationists to African American artists and intellectuals, who begin to recast Africa in the America imagination in the early 20th century...
27 min
1774
Terence Keel, "Divine Variations: How Christian...
With trenchant analyses of Christian intellectual history and the founding figures of ethnology, Keel documents an infrastructure of  thought – about universalism, the supercession of knowledge, creation, and human dispersion – that shaped and still shapes the science of race...
51 min
1775
Heidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competiti...
Tworek explores how elites in academia, business, and government fought over the regulation of news at home and sought to use communications to extend German power abroad.
55 min