New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Episodes

Eran Shalev, "The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation" (U Virginia Press, 2025)

August 24, 2026 • 34 mins
Why does the American flag use stars to represent the states? In The Star-Spangled Republic: Political Astronomy and the Rise of the American Constellation (U Virginia Press, 2025), Eran Shalev answers this and many other questions, considering the cosmic imagery—so familiar today but so peculiar on reflection—that suffused the United States’ early political culture. In this comprehensive study, Shalev...
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Steve Feldstein, "Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare" (St. Martin's Press, 2026)

August 23, 2026 • 45 mins
Steve Feldstein's Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare (St. Martin's Press, 2026) opens with a juxtaposition: China spending vast sums to reach the far side of the moon, and Ukraine using cheap drones to blunt a far larger military. Both are stories about technology and power, but they point in opposite directions. In our conversation, Feldstein argues that the outcome o...
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Sandeep Vaheesan, "Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

August 22, 2026 • 54 mins
In Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Sandeep Vaheesan recounts the rather overlooked story of how electricity spread across the U.S. economy during the 20th century. This book sheds careful light on the varied institutions and interests mediating the process, including investor-owned utilities and the rural electric cooperative. Vaheesan do...
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Jessica Riskin, "The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck" (Penguin, 2026)

August 21, 2026 • 70 mins
In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personall...
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Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

August 20, 2026 • 55 mins
Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine...
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A Succinct View of How AI is Changing Business and Work Right Now

August 20, 2026 • 28 mins
Does it seem like the business world is in its own version of an arms race to figure out AI? It’s a moment when even a little wisdom, grounded in experience and expertise, provides relief. But how do you get that wisdom? If you’re KPMG, you turn to your own secret weapon, Stephanie Kim, who leads Signals & Strategy, to combine the firm’s intelligence AND the steady stream of data from the outside INTO a cog...
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Jehnie Burns on Mixtape Culture

August 17, 2026 • 54 mins
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (Lexington, 2023). This conversation builds on earlier ones on music and technology, especially our earlier episode with Anthony Kwame Harrison about the ethnography of hiphop. Vinsel and Burns chat about the rise of mixtape culture, how it played out in different...
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Karen M'Closkey and Keith VanDerSys eds., "Media Matters in Landscape Architecture" (Applied Research & Design, 2025)

August 16, 2026 • 53 mins
Media Matters in Landscape Architecture (Applied Research & Design, 2025) goes behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged in recent decades are shaping the practices of artists, designers, engineers, and scientists. The media infrastructure of climate science and Earth remote sensing, coupled with the increased availability of spatial information and modeling software, provides the con...
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Aarthi Vadde, "We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia UP, 2026)

August 15, 2026 • 32 mins
We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing ...
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Ellery E. Foutch, "A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

August 14, 2026 • 60 mins
Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often categorize their subjects as being motivated by one of two opposing notions: a wholehearted embrace of progress or an antimodernist nostalgia. A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century (U Minnesota Press, 2026) centers a different kind of response to the period’s newly intensified awareness of temporality and history: an obsessio...
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The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine with Jonathan Fuller

August 13, 2026 • 45 mins
Jonathan Fuller’s The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine (Oxford UP, 2025) takes the reader on a philosophical tour through scientific medicine, visiting its distinctive problems, particularly problems brought about by the twentieth century fusion of medicine with epidemiology. Drawing on the author’s training in philosophy of medicine, history and philosophy of science, and c...
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Beyond Free Speech: Why AI Governance Demands Freedom of Thought

August 9, 2026 • 58 mins
Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instea...
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Hiroshima's Last Witnesses and Japan's Nuclear Future

August 8, 2026 • 33 mins
M. G. Sheftall has lived in Japan since 1987. He has a PhD in international relations and modern Japanese history from Waseda University in Tokyo. Since 2001, he has been a professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication at the Faculty of Informatics of Shizuoka University. He lives in Hamamatsu, Japan. Amy Chavez talks about Sheftall's books on the Asia Pacific War, in particular Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses...
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The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods

August 7, 2026
What role do microbes play in aquaponic farming and cultivated meat production, and how might such novel food technologies impact microbiomes? In this episode, Ishita Dey of Gastronomica hosts Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova in a conversation about their new article, “The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming.” In a d...
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Elizabeth Darling, "Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–32" (Lund Humphries, 2026)

August 3, 2026 • 57 mins
Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932 (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades, with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that these environments were as constitutive of the Corporation’s ident...
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Magdalena E. Stawkowski, "Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

August 1, 2026 • 56 mins
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear test site, despite the isolation and the radioactive environment, rather than face marginalization or the rigors of a neoliberal world. Atomic Collective: Ra...
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Devin Kennedy, "Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy" (Columbia UP, 2026)

July 31, 2026 • 56 mins
Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts would shape early comp...
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The Resurgence of War and the Collapse of Arms Control

July 30, 2026 • 34 mins
How the nuclear guardrails were dismantled. What arms control actually did (risk management, predictability, geography), how it unravelled from the 2000s onward, and why its collapse matters more now as we see a resurgence of strategic instability and armed conflict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technol...
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The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism in Asia and Beyond

July 30, 2026
How do authoritarian regimes silence critics across borders? And what are the repressive tools and strategies that authoritarian regimes use transnationally? In this episode we are joined by Arild Engelsen Ruud, Mubashar Hasan and Karin Zackari to discuss the role of digital surveillance, emotional blackmail, enforced family isolation, psychological harassment, and the imprisonment of relatives on fabricated charges by Asian author...
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Paul Langley and Andrew Leyshon, "Fintech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance" (Princeton UP, 2026)

July 28, 2026 • 51 mins
How is finance changing in the contemporary world? In FinTech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance (Princeton University Press, 2026), Paul Langley, a Professor of Economic Geography at Durham Universityand Andrew Leyshon, a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economy, Policy and Place, Nottingham Trent University and Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, char...
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