New Books in Science, Technology, and...

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

Science
Social Sciences
1926
Nick Prior, "Popular Music, Digital Technology ...
Prior explores the social, cultural and industrial contexts for the changes that have taken place in popular music since the widespread adoption of digital technology by creators, distributors, and listeners from the early 1980s onward...
68 min
1927
Kory Olson, "The Cartographic Capital: Mapping ...
Olson situates the urban geography of Paris and the very material of maps of the city at the heart of the story of Republican national consolidation, from the initial stabilization of the Third Republic to the 1930s...
57 min
1928
Paul Harkins, "Digital Sampling: The Design and...
How does technology shape music?
44 min
1929
Robert Sroufe et al, "The Power of Existing Bui...
Your building has the potential to change the world...
54 min
1930
John R. Gallagher, "Update Culture and the Afte...
Looking at wealth of case studies among Amazon reviewers, redditors, and established journals, "Update Culture" is a deep diver into the many factors that contribute to the circulation of a digital text
70 min
1931
Ayala Fader, "Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in ...
What would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known?
90 min
1932
Laurence Monnais, "The Colonial Life of Pharmac...
Monnais examines the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, looking at both circulation and consumption, considering access to drugs and the existence of multiple therapeutic options in a colonial context...
46 min
1933
Andre Brock, "Distributed Blackness: African Am...
Brock theorizes what it means to be Black online, particularly when the physical body can neither be understood nor constrained...
42 min
1934
Lee Vinsel, "Moving Violations: Automobiles, Ex...
Vinsel argues that automobiles have been shaped by government regulation through and through...
45 min
1935
Jathan Sadowski, "Too Smart" (MIT Press, 2020)
The ubiquity of technology that collects massive volumes of all kinds of data lends itself to one overarching question: “What?” As in what is the purpose(s) of this collection? What are the benefits? And, what are the impacts?
46 min
1936
Patrick M. Condon, "Five Rules for Tomorrow’s C...
How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet...
54 min
1937
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: ...
How involved with slavery were American universities? And what does their involvement mean for us?
56 min
1938
Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)
Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?
52 min
1939
A. B. Chastain and T. W. Lorek, "Itineraries of...
The essays in this volume reshape our understanding of Latin America's Long Cold War.
45 min
1940
Lloyd B. Minor, "Discovering Precision Health" ...
Our conversation covers innovative progress underway in replacing reactive medicine with precision and prevention...
55 min
1941
Jodi Hilty, "Corridor Ecology: Linking Landscap...
Hilty and her co-authors expand on concepts and practices important to maintaining and restoring land connectivity...
52 min
1942
Wenfei Tong, "Bird Love: The Family Life of Bir...
Tong looks at the extraordinary range of mating systems in the avian world, exploring all the stages from courtship and nest-building to protecting eggs and raising chicks...
51 min
1943
Carlo Caduff, "The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic E...
In this episode, we discuss the pandemic when it was a ‘perhaps’, unpack the blurring of reason and faith among expert interlocutors and draw out lessons on preparedness and its paradoxes for the present global coronavirus crisis...
47 min
1944
Thor Magnusson, "Sonic Writing: Technologies of...
Magnusson provides a sweeping overview of the tools and techniques of music-making both before and after the dawn of computing...
75 min
1945
Theodora Varbouli and Olga Touloumi, "Computer ...
This book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development...
56 min
1946
Brian A. Stauffer, "Victory on Earth or in Heav...
Stauffer reconstructs the history of Mexico's forgotten "Religionero" rebellion of 1873-1877, an armed Catholic challenge to the government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada...
58 min
1947
Amy Koerber, “From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhet...
Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women’s bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect...
61 min
1948
Paul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Pr...
Nahin offers a thorough study of the history and mathematics of the heat equation, which is not only important as an analysis of heat, its analysis marked the beginning of Fourier series...
49 min
1949
Owen Whooley, "On the Heels of Ignorance: Psych...
Whooley’s book is no anti-psychiatric screed; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving.
59 min
1950
Arthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Alge...
Asseraf examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War...
59 min