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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Science
Social Sciences
2376
Lindsey Fitzharris, "The Butchering Art: Joseph...
oseph Lister changed the world of medicine...
45 min
2377
Paul A. Offit, "Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitam...
Is alternative medicine quackery?
49 min
2378
Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold...
Science’s self-concept as politically neutral and dedicated to empirical observation free of bias has often been at odds with its collaboration with the purposes of the Cold War state...
58 min
2379
Perrin Selcer, "The Postwar Origins of the Glob...
Having been born into a world in which people knew about anthropogenic global warming, I grew up in the “global environment.”
63 min
2380
Pamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A ...
At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance...
49 min
2381
Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, ...
Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire....
40 min
2382
Mark Rice, "Making Machu Picchu: The Politics o...
Speaking at a 1913 National Geographic Society gala, Hiram Bingham III, the American explorer celebrated for finding the “lost city” of the Andes two years earlier, suggested that Machu Picchu “is an awful name, but it is well worth remembering.”
61 min
2383
Paola Bertucci, "Artisanal Enlightenment: Scien...
Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment.
53 min
2384
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One ...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...
61 min
2385
Alireza Doostdar, "The Iranian Metaphysicals: E...
Thoroughly disrupting the common association of the Occult with popular religion and mystical enchantment, this book explores the complex and conflicting rationalities that inform varied metaphysical experimentations occupying a range of Iranian actors.
59 min
2386
Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in th...
Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global warming...
53 min
2387
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human...
58 min
2388
Michael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Deb...
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and...
36 min
2389
Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life F...
In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy takes us through a thirty year history of the legal debates around patents.
60 min
2390
Steven Shaviro, “Discognition” (Repeater Books,...
Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to be a bat, or a dog, a robot, a tree,
66 min
2391
Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, “A Fortuna...
If the universe was even slightly different in some of its fundamental physical properties, life could not exist – such is the claim of ‘fine tuning’ of the universe for life. The topic of fine tuning has received attention from physicists,
40 min
2392
David P. Barash, “Through a Glass Brightly: Usi...
Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. Barash calls this viewpoint a persistent paradigm of our...
80 min
2393
Andrew C. A. Elliott, “Is That a Big Number?” (...
Andrew C. A. Elliott‘s Is That a Big Number? (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a book that those of us who feast on numbers will absolutely adore, but will also tease the palates of those for whom numbers have previously been somewhat distasteful.
51 min
2394
Anindita Banerjee, “Russian Science Fiction Lit...
Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2018) offers a compelling investigation of the genre whose development was significantly reshaped in the second half of the 20th century.
41 min
2395
Raymond Boyle, “The Talent Industry: Television...
What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cul...
38 min
2396
Daniel Stolz, “The Lighthouse and the Observato...
Both a history of science and a history of Islam, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Daniel Stolz tells the story of Ottoman Egypt and astronomy,
55 min
2397
Mike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating...
In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time of significant change within the industry.
42 min
2398
J. Obert, A. Poe, A. Sarat, eds., “The Lives of...
What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert‘s and Andrew Poe‘s, and Austin Sarat‘s unique collection of essays, The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press,
31 min
2399
Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, “Redef...
Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining military professionalism and ethics in light of major change...
51 min
2400
Caitlin C. Rosenthal, “Accounting for Slavery: ...
The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an effort to forestall labor turno...
37 min