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.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
2026
Ernest Freeberg, "A Traitor to His Species: Hen...
In Gilded Age America, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to man and animal alike...
59 min
2027
Margaret Heffernan, "Uncharted: How to Map and ...
Hefferman explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty: ‘We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future...
33 min
2028
Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall ...
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...
56 min
2029
John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbi...
Whysner offers an accessible and compelling history of toxicology and its key findings....
47 min
2030
Anthony Hodgson, "Systems Thinking for a Turbul...
In the view of Anthony Hodgson, fragmentation of local and global societies is escalating, and this is aggravating vicious cycles...
46 min
2031
Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons ...
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...
37 min
2032
Daniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Envir...
The first people to record their reactions to the falls in North America were fascinated by its beauty and power...
59 min
2033
Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race an...
Tuchman describes the history of how the perception of diabetes has evolved over the past two centuries...
54 min
2034
Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How The...
“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....
96 min
2035
Thom van Dooren, "The Wake of Crows: Living and...
van Dooren offers an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows...
66 min
2036
Robert M. Geraci, "Temples of Modernity: Nation...
What is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism?
42 min
2037
Yves Citton, "Mediarchy" (Polity Press, 2019)
We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies...
63 min
2038
James L. Nolan, Jr., "Atomic Doctors: Conscienc...
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...
38 min
2039
Durba Mitra, "Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and th...
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...
43 min
2040
Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside The ...
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....
43 min
2041
Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Com...
Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets, health concerns, and colonial warfare...
58 min
2042
Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyd...
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....
56 min
2043
Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable ...
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...
95 min
2044
Carl Safina, "Becoming Wild: How Animal Culture...
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...
62 min
2045
Angèle Christin, "Metrics at Work: Journalism a...
How are algorithms changing journalism?
55 min
2046
Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of ...
What obligations do we have to our pets?
70 min
2047
Gerald Posner, "Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Po...
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...
78 min
2048
S. J. Potter, "Wireless Internationalism and Di...
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...
45 min
2049
David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Ge...
Evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning...
42 min
2050
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, "NeuroScience Fiction" (...
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.
58 min