New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

With a reputation as the hot-air balloon capital of the world and the home of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the southwestern desert city of Albuquerque frequently showcases the magic and adventure of ballooning. This legacy links back to the 1880s and a man by the name of Park Van Tassel. Through his pioneering flight, Van Tassel not only opened the skies to future generations across New Mexico, but he also opened minds to the possibility of manned flight throughout the American West. A charismatic, P. T. Barnum–like showman, Van Tassel rose from obscurity to introduce the new science of ballooning and parachuting throughout the West. Van Tassel toured extensively—from California to Utah, Colorado, and Louisiana and later embarking on an international journey that took him to Hawaii, Australia, Southeast Asia, India, Africa, and beyond. Sky Rider: Park Van Tassel and the Rise of Ballooning in the West (U New Mexico Press, 2021) weaves together the many threads of Van Tassel’s extraordinary life journey, situating him at last in his rightful place among the prominent aerial exhibitionists of his time. Gary B. Fogel is an adjunct professor of aerospace engineering at San Diego State University and the CEO of Natural Selection, Inc. He is also the author or coauthor of Quest for Flight: John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West and Wind and Wings: The History of Soaring in San Diego. Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The Religion of Life: Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) examines the interconnections and relationship between Catholicism and eugenics in early twentieth-century Chile. Specifically, it demonstrates that the popularity of eugenic science was not diminished by the influence of Catholicism there. In fact, both eugenics and Catholicism worked together to construct the concept of a unique Chilean race, la raza chilena. A major factor that facilitated this conceptual overlap was a generalized belief among historical actors that male and female gender roles were biologically determined and therefore essential to a functioning society. As the first English-language study of eugenics in Chile, The Religion of Life surveys a wide variety of different materials (periodicals, newspapers, medical theses, and monographs) produced by Catholic and secular intellectuals from the first half of the twentieth century. What emerges from this examination is not only a more complex rendering of the relationship between religion and science but also the development of White supremacist logics in a Latin American context. Sarah Walsh is the Hansen Lecturer in Global History at the University of Melbourne. She specializes in the history of the human sciences in Latin America with an emphasis on race and ethnicity. Claudia Monterroza Rivera is a PhD candidate in Latin American History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley has been one of the most disputed territories in history. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinians and Israelis have each sought to claim the national identity of the land through various martial, social, and scientific tactics, but no method has offered as much legitimacy and national controversy as that of the map. In The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2020), Dr. Christine Leuenberger and Dr. Izhak Schnell delve beneath the battlefield to unearth the cartographic strife behind the Israel/Palestine conflict. Blending science and technology studies, sociology, and geography with a host of archival material, in-depth interviews and ethnographies, this book explores how the geographical sciences came to be entangled with the politics, territorial claim-making, and nation-state building of Israel/Palestine. Chapters chart the cartographic history of the region, from the introduction of Western scientific and legal paradigms that seemingly legitimized and depoliticized new land regimes to the rise of new mapping technologies and software that expanded access to cartography into the public sphere. Maps produced by various sectors like the "peace camps" or the Jewish community enhanced national belonging, while others, like that of the Green Line, served largely to divide. The stories of Israel's many boundaries reveal that there is no absolute, technocratic solution to boundary-making. As boundaries continue to be controversial and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains intractable and unresolved,The Politics of Maps uses nationally-based cartographic discourses to provide insight into the complexity, fissures, and frictions within internal political debates, illuminating the persistent power of the nation-state as a framework for forging identities, citizens, and alliances. Unfortunately, due to technical issues, Dr. Izhak Schnell was not able to join the audio interview about this book. His written answers to the questions are here. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring homeowners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, and voters in liberal democracies? Authored by experts in fields ranging from computer science and law to philosophy and cognitive science, A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press, 2022) offers a concise overview of moral, political, legal and economic implications of AI. It covers the basics of AI's latest permutation, machine learning, and considers issues such as transparency, bias, liability, privacy, and regulation. Both business and government have integrated algorithmic decision support systems into their daily operations, and the book explores the implications for our lives as citizens. For example, do we take it on faith that a machine knows best in approving a patient's health insurance claim or a defendant's request for bail? What is the potential for manipulation by targeted political ads? How can the processes behind these technically sophisticated tools ever be transparent? The book discusses such issues as statistical definitions of fairness, legal and moral responsibility, the role of humans in machine learning decision systems, “nudging” algorithms and anonymized data, the effect of automation on the workplace, and AI as both regulatory tool and target. Dr John Zerilli is a philosopher with particular interests in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the law. He is currently a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Research Associate in the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, and an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to bestselling author and University of Oxford law professor Charles Foster on how the coronavirus pandemic reveals how so many of us—including so many scientists—have replaced rigorous scientific skepticism with an alarming cult of "scientism." Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Digital connections permeate our lives-and so do data breaches. Given that we must be online for basic communication, finance, healthcare, and more, it is alarming how difficult it is to create rules for securing our personal information. Despite the passage of many data security laws, data breaches are increasing at a record pace. In Breached!: Why Data Security Law Fails and How to Improve It (Oxford UP, 2022), Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog, two of the world's leading experts on privacy and data security, argue that the law fails because, ironically, it focuses too much on the breach itself. Drawing insights from many fascinating stories about data breaches, Solove and Hartzog show how major breaches could have been prevented or mitigated through a different approach to data security rules. Current law is counterproductive. It pummels organizations that have suffered a breach but doesn't address the many other actors that contribute to the problem: software companies that create vulnerable software, device companies that make insecure devices, government policymakers who write regulations that increase security risks, organizations that train people to engage in risky behaviors, and more. Although humans are the weakest link for data security, policies and technologies are often designed with a poor understanding of human behavior. Breached! corrects this course by focusing on the human side of security. Drawing from public health theory and a nuanced understanding of risk, Solove and Hartzog set out a holistic vision for data security law-one that holds all actors accountable, understands security broadly and in relationship to privacy, looks to prevention and mitigation rather than reaction, and works by accepting human limitations rather than being in denial of them. The book closes with a roadmap for how we can reboot law and policy surrounding data security. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

When Communication Became a Discipline (Lexington, 2021) argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the concept of communication between 1964 and 1982. They changed the names of their scholarly societies and journals and revised their academic curricula. Five “strands” of scholarship became and remain central to this transformation. Communication is not a traditional academic discipline, but its scholars convinced their colleagues to understand and embrace it. When Communication Became a Discipline presents an argument with historical evidence that illustrates scholarly creativity at its finest. William F. Eadie is professor emeritus of journalism and media studies and director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University. William F. Eadie was former director of the School of Communication at San Diego State University, where he was responsible for leadership of a large program that encompassed all aspects of communication, media and journalism. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus (MIT Press, 2022) follows Mildred Dresselhaus (or Millie, as everyone calls her) from her childhood in New York City to her final years in Cambridge. It focuses on her scientific achievements, but also rightfully presents her as a multi-hyphenate: being a resilient student, an adaptive researcher, a professor, an administrator, an advocate, a fundraiser, a patent owner, a book author. The accolades are plentiful and her involvement in science seemingly boundless. Maia Weinstock masterfully blends anecdotes and scientific explanations into the life story of a truly phenomenal scientist. In this episode of the podcast, we discuss Millie’s multifaceted career, as well as the process of putting the book together, and Maia’s history course on women in science. Ana Georgescu studied astrophysics and physics at Harvard University and is now a science consultant and writer based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

It’s no secret that the United States has the most expansive prison system of any nation in the world. And the US carceral system overwhelmingly and unjustly impacts Black and Brown individuals and communities. With postwar efforts to dismantle Jim Crow policies, our era of mass incarceration reproduced the old logics of white supremacism that uphold racist capitalism in this new setting. These are the things we know. But in his book, Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (U Minnesota Press, 2019), Professor Anthony Hatch observes a feature of mass incarceration essential to its everyday function that many of us had never considered: the large-scale, persistent use of psychotropic drugs, including antipsychotics and antidepressants, not for medical care but rather to control the behavior of incarcerated people. Making a persuasive claim drawn from his training in STS and sociology, Hatch observes how the drugs are used at the level of individual brain chemistry to commit “soul murder” with enormous systemic implications and political stakes. What’s more, the carceral elites’ use of psychotropic drugs for the purposes of pacification, not care, of their wards extends to other (often state-backed) settings of “captive America,” including the military, foster care, elder care, and international detention centers. “Is it possible for the US carceral state to exist without psychotropics,” Hatch asks. “I think we can say the answer is no.” Silent Cells accomplishes more than the (important) tasks of documentation and analysis. It is a work of liberatory social science. The book is of a piece with Hatch’s abolitionist agenda that he pursues through his generous and generative scholarly and activist engagements, including his work as director of the Black Box teaching laboratory and chair of the Program in Science in Society at Wesleyan University. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “Prison. Medicine” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: [email protected] . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (UNC Press, 2017), Rana Hogarth shows that familiar histories, though excellent, fail to explain how and why medicine and slavery became fused in the first place. No doubt, defenders of slavery used medicine to justify the corrupt practice once it was under threat. But Hogarth shows how science and medicine grafted during times and in places where slavery was secure—where white elites had no need to justify the violent practice with medical ideas because slavery was taken for granted. How and why did medicine and slavery fuse, Hogarth asks, in the Atlantic World of the newly invented United States and ascendant imperial Britain? Understanding the answer helps us grasp the valences and impacts of racialized national and social identities, then as well as today. White physicians inflated their value—financial as well as reputational—by locating medical reasons for already existing racist tropes. Circa 1800, white physicians were a disreputable and loosely aligned lot. They had many rivals (Black healers), rich skeptics (plantation owners), and no professional organization until the mid-nineteenth century under which they could rally. Before then, a wide-spread, active white belief in an innate difference between Black and white bodies was the foregone conclusion that white physicians worked to explain in order to appear of use. White physicians in the English-speaking Caribbean developed medical theories of innate difference in the etiology, progress and experience of illness in Black and white bodies—evidence to the contrary be damned. As a consequence, they ignored immense Black suffering, exposed Black workers to deadly diseases, and policed Black people through the hospital system, all the while seeing Black people as appropriate for service in the military and as objects for teaching dissection, that is to say, in projects of imperial and professional expansion. Medicalizing Blackness broadens the story of medicine in the Atlantic World with a lens that perceives more than the institution of slavery. It also demonstrates the emergence of the Caribbean as a locus—not an outpost—of trustworthy medical knowledge circulated through an array of genres, including journals articles, plantation guides, hospital advertisements, and other media of “textual subjugation” that Hogarth reads with great insight. In short, medicine needed the racist logics of slavery in order to gain power before slavery needed racist medicine to defend its own might. July 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the exposure of the abusive and unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in the US media. Engaging the roots of white supremacist ideas and practices is essential for better understanding and for stronger political action against racism, as important fifty years ago as it is in our ongoing racialized pandemic. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned UC San Diego neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland about the importance of communicating science, the wonders of the biological world and the dangers of wishful thinking. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Has the internet really been the main culprit behind the upheaval of the contemporary media industries? In Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars (MIT Press, 2021), Professor Amanda Lotz provides a rebuttal to persistent myths about disruption across the mediascape of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Through a granular reading of four media industries – newspapers, recorded music, film and television – Lotz demonstrates that the internet has had diffuse and divergent effects in each, none of which are adequately explained through simplistic narratives of piracy or cannibalism. Lotz suggests that the speed and scale of reconfiguration in these industries has stemmed more from built up consumer demand and business (mal)practices, often with deep historical roots, which have only then been catalysed by the advent of the internet. Alongside laying out what we often get wrong about the internet and the media industries, Lotz provides detailed analyses of those media businesses which managed to negotiate this tumultuous period successfully. Media Disruption helps us understand how the media industries got to where they are today and provides valuable lessons for those seeking to weather disruptions to come. Professor Amanda Lotz works at the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

A lot can be learned from scientific twin studies about the relative contributions of nature versus nurture to human experience. However, when such studies do lasting harm to its participants, what does it teach us about the dangerous power of scientific zeal? This is the subject of Dr. Nancy Segal’s latest book, Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), in which she documents the controversial methods employed by the Louise Wise Services-Child Development Center Twin Study of the 1960s and 1970s. In our interview, she addresses the fallout of such methods for twins that were studied but kept unaware of each other for years and what it says about the unique bond shared by twins. This discussion of a tragic but fascinating and important moment in scientific history is relevant for anyone interested in questions about the roles of genes versus the environment or about the uniqueness of twin relationships. Nancy L. Segal, Ph.D. is professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton and director of the Twin Studies Center. She has authored over 250 scientific articles and six books on twins and twin development. She lives in Southern California. She can be followed on Twitter at @nlsegal. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), Gavin Mueller provides a bracing and wide-ranging study of the fractious relationship between workers and technology under capitalism. Mueller traces the thought and actions of ordinary people past and present – including hackers, dockers, musicians and the titular textile workers - who have recognised that technological ‘progress’ too often comes at the expense of their autonomy and dignity. The book pushes back against visions of machine-driven utopia that have continually re-emerged on both the right and the left, arguing instead that resistance to technology is a key site of struggle throughout modernity, and that a Marxist neo-Luddism is crucial to understanding, and changing, the world today. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do. Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Media Hot and Cold (Duke UP, 2021) attunes the reader to temperature as a crucial but often overlooked terrain of control, communication and contestation. The book skilfully unpacks the complex technical operations of a vast array of heat-based communication technologies in parallel with a close analysis of the cultural and political resonances of these media, taking in early experiments in heat ray technologies, the development of the thermostat, undersea fibre optic cables and torture sweatboxes from the US plantation. Today’s thermal media are framed as politically neutral and scientifically objective technologies of personalised comfort and climate mitigation. However, Starosielski pushes back against this reading, arguing that the manipulation of temperature as a means of coercion and domination has been integral to the construction, normalization and maintenance of unequal relations of power. The book is a timely and significant call for an unflinching analysis of the sociocultural function of temperature in a period of unprecedented thermal volatility. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil (MIT Press, 2022), David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom. David Nemer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and Princeton University's Brazil Lab. His research and teaching interests cover the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Technology, ICT for Development (ICT4D), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Nemer is an ethnographer whose fieldworks include the Slums of Vitória, Brazil; Havana, Cuba; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia. Nemer is the author of Technology of the Oppressed (MIT Press, 2022) and Favela Digital: The other side of technology (Editora GSA, 2013). Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2021), Deborah Gordon shows that no two oils or gases are environmentally alike. Each has a distinct, quantifiable climate impact. While all oils and gases pollute, some are much worse for the climate than others. In clear, accessible language, Gordon explains the results of the Oil Climate Index Plus Gas (OCI+), an innovative, open-source model that estimates global oil and gas emissions. Gordon identifies the oils and gases from every region of the globe–– along with the specific production, processing, and refining activities–– that are the most harmful to the planet, and proposes innovative solutions to reduce their climate footprints. Global climate stabilization cannot afford to wait for oil and gas to run out. No Standard Oil shows how we can take immediate, practical steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the crucial oil and gas sector while making sustainable progress in transitioning to a carbon-free energy future. Deborah Gordon is a senior principal in the Climate Intelligence Program at RMI where she leads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. Gordon also serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and the principal investigator for the Oil Climate Project. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of our pandemic and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities. Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and Other Catastrophes (Oxford UP, 2022) is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how. Jeff Sebo is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, and Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program at New York University. He is also on the executive committee at the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection and the advisory board for the Animals in Context series at NYU Press. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Internet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media platforms like Twitter spontaneously spark protests around the world, the book takes a longer and wider view of how the internet challenges information scarcity in authoritarian regimes, which, consequently, creates conditions for citizens to carefully consider their sympathies for a protest movement and defy their fears about state control. In this podcast, Kris discusses the reasons why the Malaysian government is unable to successfully control the digital public sphere in the same way it controlled the information environment of traditional media. He makes a case for going beyond what he considers to be technologically deterministic debate between cyber-pessimists and cyber-optimists. Instead, Kris foregrounds the importance of context – how different social conditions result to different outcomes. Kris Ruijgrok is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Aim Sinpeng, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (U Michigan Press, 2021) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was produced in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Black Earth, White Bread: A Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dr. Susanne A. Wengle shows how agrotechnology served—and undermined—Soviet and Russian political projects. “The book emphasises a tight connection between political change, technological change in food systems, and the transformation of everyday lives - a connection that we can grasp and understand through the lens of technopolitics.” Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate—or, in some years, didn’t eat—underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually understood in terms of advances in farming methods. Dr. Susanne A. Wengle’s important interdisciplinary history of Russia’s agriculture and food systems, however, documents a far more complex story of the interactions between political policies, daily cultural practices, and technological improvements. “A central augment of this book is that politics and technologies together drive a change in food systems and that we should think of food systems as technopolitical regimes. Technopolitics refers to the support of and reliance on agricultural technologies - from tractors to CRISPR techniques - in policy regimes that seek to realise particular political goals and utopias. A technopolitical regime is forged by privileged agents of change and the technologies they employ to grow crops and raise animals.” Examining governance, production, consumption, nature, and the ensuing vulnerabilities of the agrifood system, Dr. Wengle reveals the intended and unintended consequences of Russian agricultural policies since 1917. Ultimately, Black Earth, White Bread calls attention to Russian technopolitics and how macro systems of government impact life on a daily, quotidian level. “Food systems can be a lens to track interactions between domains of life that are too often seen as discrete and disconnected, such as rural production and urban consumption. They can also tell us about the interactions between human realms and the nonhuman realms of crops, livestock, climate and soil conditions.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021) Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression-language, image, music, communication-into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech (Duke University Press, 2022), Jennifer Petersen constructs a genealogy of how legal conceptions of “speech” have transformed over the last century in response to new media technologies. Drawing on media and legal history, Petersen shows that the legal category of speech has varied considerably, evolving from a narrow category of oratory and print publication to a broad, abstract conception encompassing expressive nonverbal actions, algorithms, and data. She examines a series of pivotal US court cases in which new media technologies—such as phonographs, radio, film, and computer code—were integral to this shift. In judicial decisions ranging from the determination that silent films were not a form of speech to the expansion of speech rights to include algorithmic outputs, courts understood speech as mediated through technology. Speech thus became disarticulated from individual speakers. By outlining how legal definitions of speech are indelibly dependent on technology, Petersen demonstrates that future innovations such as artificial intelligence will continue to restructure speech law in ways that threaten to protect corporate and institutional forms of speech over the rights and interests of citizens. Jennifer Petersen is an Associate Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is the director of the graduate certificate program in Science and Technology Studies and is affiliated with the Center for Law, History, and Culture. Before arriving at USC, she worked at the University of Virginia, where she was an affiliate with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also a former Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals, 2020), Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising--the beating heart of the internet--is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers' attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself--much like subprime mortgages--is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet--and its free services--will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it. Tim Hwang is a writer, researcher, and currently the general counsel for Substack. He is the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative and previously served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Listen to this interview of Dashun Wang, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and also with Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University. We talk about their new book The Science of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2021) and science, squared. Albert-László Barabási : "There is, of course, the need that you grow professionally. If you're a mathematician, you need to perfect your math. If you're a physicist, you need to do your physics. If you're a biologist, you need to develop your lab techniques. But no matter the magnitude of any discovery you might make, it's not impactful unless you can actually communicate it. And I think that this is where science lacks significantly. I would even go so far as to say, there is a counter-selection: People who are not necessarily the best communicators tend to prefer science because there's the impression that that is not the skill that you need — you just need to be able to solve problems in a meaningful way. But if you're not able to write your ideas down, if you're not able to share your ideas with your community, then it's really as if you didn't have the ideas at all. And you know, I have experienced this in my own career. When I got interested in network science back in 1994/95, for the first few years my papers got rejected one after the other, and not because it wasn't good science (as I would later realize) — no, my papers were getting rejected because I could not communicate to the community at large and to my referees in particular why we should care about networks. And it took me about five years to find the way into people's minds, to learn how they write papers about networks. I needed to learn the hard way about how the community of scientists appreciated and did not appreciate research on networks. And it took me so long because I'd never been offered the opportunity to study the communication of science." Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Environmental restoration is a global pursuit and a major political concern. Governments, nonprofits, private corporations, and other institutions spend billions of dollars each year to remove invasive species, build wetlands, and reintroduce species driven from their habitats. But restoration has not always been so intensively practiced. It began as the pastime of a few wildflower enthusiasts and the first practitioners of the new scientific discipline of ecology. Restoration has been a touchstone of United States environmentalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. Diverging from popular ideas about preservation, which romanticized nature as an Eden to be left untouched by human hands, and conservation, the managed use of natural resources, restoration emerged as a “third way.” Restorationists grappled with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? In Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (Harvard University Press, 2022), Laura J. Martin shows how, over time, amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that powerfully influenced what we understand the wild to be. In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more—a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just. Laura J. Martin is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. She is a past fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She has written for Scientific American, Slate, Environmental History, Environmental Humanities, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and other publications. Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. She is also the creator and host of Drafting the Past, a podcast on the craft of writing history. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Robert Jacob’s book Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale UP, 2022) re‑envisions the history of the Cold War as a slow nuclear war, fought on remote battlegrounds against populations powerless to prevent the contamination of their lands and bodies. Jacobs’s book put these “nuclear bodies” and the legacy of our eighty years history of nuclear weapon and power use at the center of his inquiry. The contaminated bodies of the hibakusha and the contaminated grounds on which they live (or in many cases lived. As many lost their homes), Jacobs argues, are largely invisible because of the colonial and post -colonial power relations that made these communities a target to begin with. Nuclear weapon tests and power stations usually were set at remote places, and the harm was done to people with no political power. Furthermore, it is not just contemporary communities that were harmed, but also future generations. “Plutonium will remain dangerous for over two hundred thousand years, and uranium particles for more than one million years”. Eighty years of tests and nuclear power have saddled our future descendants with radiative waste, most of which is still not safely stored, “a global legacy currently sitting in spent fuel pools and dry storage casks, waiting.” The invisibility of the problem and people affected by it, Jacobs argues, is manufactured in science and politics. Furthermore, the way we study the problem historically further obscured its scope. Different sites have been studied through different national historical “silos,” Jacobs, however, takes a global approach, and look at sites from Nevada to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kazakhstan to Xinjian, and the various Pacific sites that were sites of nuclear tests and accidents since 1945 to make the invisible global hibakusha visible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of perennial conflict or warfare between the two—is part of our modern self-understanding. As the story goes, John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) constructed dramatic narratives in the nineteenth century that cast religion as the relentless enemy of scientific progress. And yet, despite its resilience in popular culture, historians today have largely debunked the conflict thesis. In Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019), James Ungureanu argues that Draper and White actually hoped their narratives would preserve religious belief. For them, science was ultimately a scapegoat for a much larger and more important argument dating back to the Protestant Reformation, where one theological tradition was pitted against another—a more progressive, liberal, and diffusive Christianity against a more traditional, conservative, and orthodox Christianity. By the mid-nineteenth century, narratives of conflict between “science and religion” were largely deployed between contending theological schools of thought. However, these narratives were later appropriated by secularists, freethinkers, and atheists as weapons against all religion. By revisiting its origins, development, and popularization, Ungureanu ultimately reveals that the “conflict thesis” was just one of the many unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation. James C. Ungureanu is a Historian in Residence in the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland and in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The human brain undergoes massive changes during its development, from early childhood and the teenage years to adulthood and old age. Across a wide range of species, from C. elegans and fruit flies to mice, monkeys, and humans, information about brain connectivity (connectomes) at different stages is now becoming available. New approaches in network neuroscience can be used to analyze the topological, spatial, and dynamical organization of such connectomes. In Changing Connectomes: Evolution, Development, and Dynamics in Network Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2020), Marcus Kaiser provides an up-to-date overview of the field of connectomics and introduces concepts and mechanisms underlying brain network changes during evolution and development. Drawing on a range of results from experimental, clinical, and computational studies, Kaiser describes changes during healthy brain maturation and during brain network disorders (including such neurodevelopmental conditions as schizophrenia and depression), brain injury, and neurodegenerative disorders including dementia. He argues that brain stimulation is an area where understanding connectome development could help in assessing the long-term effects of interventions. Changing Connectomes is a suitable starting point for researchers who are new to the field of connectomics, and also for researchers who are interested in the link between brain network organization and brain and cognitive development in health and disease. Matlab/Octave code examples available at the MIT Press website will allow computational neuroscience researchers to understand and extend the shown mechanisms of connectome development. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022) , Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, such as a free speech entropy: the perception of rulers or governments that if speech is not restricted then social or political decline or disorder is inevitable. Mchangama also notes how restrictions usually have the unintended effect of emboldening the speakers and making the forbidden speech even more attractive to potential listeners. This history also reveals advocates of free speech less familiar to Western readers, such as the ninth-century Persian scholar Ibn al-Rawandi, a theologian and later skeptic whose life illustrates the debates possible in medieval Islam. Mchangama reviews the modern debates regarding freedom of thought and the latest iterations of arguments about whether free speech will lead to social decline and chaos. Mchangama is a champion of free speech but his history provides a fair minded account of the concerns of speech restrictionists throughout history. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Andy Hoffman, the dynamic and innovative business professor at the University of Michigan, about what the pandemic has brought to light to effectively address our many pressing global problems. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other. Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society (Princeton University Press, 2021) offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists' judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial "science court" to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies. Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically. Zeynep Pamuk is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been called “the most innovative square mile on the planet.” It's a life science hub, hosting Biogen, Moderna, Pfizer, Takeda, and others. It's a major tech center, with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all occupying big chunks of pricey office space. Kendall Square also boasts a dense concentration of startups, with leading venture capital firms conveniently located nearby. And of course, MIT is just down the block. In Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub (MIT Press, 2022), Robert Buderi offers the first detailed account of the unique ecosystem that is Kendall Square, chronicling the endless cycles of change and reinvention that have driven its evolution. Buderi, who himself has worked in Kendall Square for the past twenty years, tells fascinating stories of great innovators and their innovations that stretch back two centuries. Before biotech and artificial intelligence, there was railroad car innovation, the first long-distance telephone call, the Polaroid camera, MIT's once secret, now famous Radiation Laboratory, and much more. Buderi takes readers on a walking tour of the square and talks to dozens of innovators, entrepreneurs, urban planners, historians, and others. He considers Kendall Square's limitations—it's “gentrification gone rogue,” by one description, with little affordable housing, no pharmacy, and a scarce middle class—and its strengths: the “human collisions” that spur innovation. What's next for Kendall Square? Buderi speculates about the next big innovative enterprises and outlines lessons for aspiring innovation districts. More important, he asks how Kendall Square can be both an innovation hub and a diversity, equity, and inclusion hub. There's a lot of work still to do. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The accusation “you’re deluded” is often used as something of a cheap shot intended to silence an opponent in debate. But what is the nature of a delusion and how can we assess rationality and irrationality? In this podcast, Owen Bennett-Jones talks to Professor Lisa Bortolotti who studies the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry at Birmingham University and is the author of among many other things, Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (Oxford UP, 2010) and most recently edited Delusions in Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we don't understand. Depending the news of the day, we inhabit either a technological utopia or Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge surveys the uses of science fiction. Sherryl Vint's Science Fiction (MIT Press, 2021)focuses on what is at the core of all definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities might flow from such otherness. Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. She is also a drummer who has studied Gamelan in Bali, Berber in Morocco, and most traditional Ga patterns with master drummers in Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era (University of California Press, 2022), Natali Valdez examines research trials that enroll pregnant people in the United States and England. These research trials aim to lower the health risks to future generations by intervening in and studying the diet and exercise of pregnant people. As an ethnographer, Valdez enrolled pregnant participants into the studies, met with them to administer the intervention, and observed the processes of the trials. Valdez argues that these studies focus on the pregnant individual without accounting for the social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors that present risk factors to their pregnancies. Structural factors such as racism, pollution, and poverty are not acknowledged, studied, or tracked. And this focus on the individual forecloses addressing issues, such as unstable housing, childcare, immigration, and racism. In the book, Valdez discusses how pregnancy trials have changed very little since the 1950s, the politics of recruiting participants to the trials, and how they handle racial diversity. Valdez asserts that these trials use race as an unstable and inconsistent marker of identifying participants, but they do not address racism, which is an underlying cause of health disparities. In the episode we discuss Valdez’s arguments, ethnographic work, and experience of writing the book. Weighing the Future would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, science and technology studies, as well as women and gender studies. Weighing the Future is the first book of its kind, and it contributes much to our understandings of the increasingly salient issues of maternal health, research, and race. Natali Valdez is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

I spoke with Hannah Star Rogers, one of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2021). Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science has played the role of muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) as the interdisciplinary exploration of art–science. This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics, and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge-making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world. This book provides scholars and practitioners already familiar with the themes and tensions of art–science with a means of connecting across disciplines. It proposes organizing principles for thinking about art–science across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Encounters with art and science become meaningful in relation to practices and materials manifest as perceptual habits, background knowledge, and cultural norms. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, a variety of STS tools can be brought to bear on art–science so that systematic research can be conducted on this unique set of knowledge-making practices. Hannah Star Rogers is Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies (STIS) and lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies. Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University, where she studied in the Science and Society Program. She is also a drummer who has studied Gamelan in Bali, Berber in Morocco, and most traditional Ga patterns with master drummers in Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Vagina Obscura: an anatomical voyage by Rachel E. Gross A myth-busting voyage into the female body. A camera obscura reflects the world back but dimmer and inverted. Similarly, science has long viewed woman through a warped lens, one focused narrowly on her capacity for reproduction. As a result, there exists a vast knowledge gap when it comes to what we know about half of the bodies on the planet. That is finally changing. Today, a new generation of researchers is turning its gaze to the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making—the uterus, ovaries, and vagina—and illuminating them as part of a dynamic, resilient, and ever-changing whole. Welcome to Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage (W.W. Norton, 2022), an odyssey into a woman’s body from a fresh perspective, ushering in a whole new cast of characters. In Boston, a pair of biologists are growing artificial ovaries to counter the cascading health effects of menopause. In Melbourne, a urologist remaps the clitoris to fill in crucial gaps in female sexual anatomy. Given unparalleled access to labs and the latest research, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes readers on a scientific journey to the center of a wonderous world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves. This paradigm shift is made possible by the growing understanding that sex and gender are not binary; we all share the same universal body plan and origin in the womb. That’s why insights into the vaginal microbiome, ovarian stem cells, and the biology of menstruation don’t mean only a better understanding of female bodies, but a better understanding of male, non-binary, transgender, and intersex bodies—in other words, all bodies. By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, and shocking, Vagina Obscura is a powerful testament to how the landscape of human knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone. Sine Yaganoglu: Having trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer, I switched to industry following my PhD at ETH Zurich and have been working in innovation management and diagnostics. Besides reading about science, innovation and entrepreneurship, I have become interested in the scientific and cultural aspects of parenting and motherhood since welcoming my first child. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2021), Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace changes leading to the computer becoming a ubiquitous technology. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific super tool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music, and movies, communicate, and count their steps. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smartphones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing. Dr. Thomas Haigh is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Comenius Visiting Professor at Siegen University. He has been researching the history of computing for more than twenty years and is a past chair of SIGCIS, the group for historians of information technology. He is the lead author, with Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope, of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, about the design, construction, and use of the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer, the ENIAC. His new book, with Paul Ceruzzi, is New History of Modern Computing: a comprehensive history of computing from ENIAC to the Covid-19 pandemic. Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and proposes a new national broadband plan. He examines how broadband policies are enacted and implemented, explores business models for broadband providers, surveys the technologies of rural broadband, and offers case studies of broadband use in the rural Midwest. Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access. For example, existing policies favor large telecommunication companies, crowding out smaller, nimbler providers. Lack of competition drives prices up—rural broadband can cost 37 percent more than urban broadband. The federal government subsidizes rural broadband by approximately $6 billion. Where does the money go? Ali proposes democratizing policy architecture for rural broadband, modeling it after the wiring of rural America for electricity and telephony. Subsidies should be equalized, not just going to big companies. The result would be a multi-stakeholder system, guided by thoughtful public policy and funded by public and private support. Dr. Christopher Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and is also the author of Media Localism: The Policies of Place. He is a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and former Fellow with the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more important than ever. Yet the challenge to rationality comes not only from social media driven myths becoming accepted truths, but also bias and randomness in decision-making. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

As the US contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this timely study considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country’s politics and society. In Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life (Bristol University Press, 2021), Dr. Scott Timcke provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. He looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world. Offering bold new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the US and beyond. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Basic Books, 2022) is a fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom. Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun. Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Tens of thousands of characters. Countless homonyms. Mutually unintelligible dialects across an entire country. This is what faced the Chinese thinkers, inventors and technicians who had to figure out how to standardize, translate, and adapt the Chinese language for a new country, and for new technologies. Professor Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Riverhead Books, 2022) tells the stories of those who worked to transform Chinese for the 20th century. In this interview, Jing and I talk about thinkers and technicians: those who toiled to make the Chinese language work for typewriters, telegraphs, and other important technologies. Jing Tsu is the John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale. She specializes in Chinese literature, history, and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, and received her doctorate in Chinese studies from Harvard. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has held fellowships and distinctions from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton institutes. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Kingdom of Characters. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises--and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox. "Should we eat animals?" was, until recently, a question reserved for moral philosophers and an ethically minded minority, but it is now posed on restaurant menus and supermarket shelves, on social media and morning television. The recent surge in popularity for veganism in the UK, Europe, and North America has created a rupture in the rites and rituals of meat, challenging the cultural narratives that sustain our omnivory. In The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat (Pegasus Books, 2022), Rob Percival, an expert in the politics of meat, searches for the evolutionary origins of the meat paradox, asking when our relationship with meat first became emotionally and ethically complicated. Every society must eat, and meat provides an important source of nutrients. But every society is moved by its empathy. We must all find a way of balancing competing and contradictory imperatives. This new book is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our empathy, the psychology of our dietary choices, and anyone who has wondered whether they should or shouldn't eat meat. Rob Percival is Head of Policy at the Soil Association, Britain's leading food and farming charitable organization. He has been shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Prize as well as the Thompson Reuters Food Sustainability Media Award. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

It is slowly becoming clear that we are heading towards a deep ecological catastrophe. Our societies carbon footprint and its impact have been known for some time, and already we are starting to see the effects in terms of melting ice, warming oceans and more frequent extreme weather. This will contribute to food and water shortages, political unrest and migration crises that we are ill-prepared for. In a context such as this, it has become urgent that we rethink the natural world and our relationship to it, but knowing where to start is difficult. Fortunately, John Bellamy Foster has stepped forward with just such a book. Picking up where his book Marx’s Ecology left off 20 years ago, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2021) starts with the funerals of both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, kicking off a story of the many people who worked in their combined shadow. Foster guides us through a century of scientific development in the relatively new field of ecology, showing how many of it’s founders were influenced by the socialist critique of capitalism, and vice-versa. What readers will find are a collection of texts and figures who understood that an economic model that prioritizes profit above all else will eventually have to start asking more of the earth than it can afford to give, incurring long and deep debts that we are now starting to pay. On the one hand, many ecologists have found Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism helpful for thinking dynamically about nature and scientific practice. On the other hand, ecologists have offered socialists a number of theoretical concepts and frameworks for their own thinking. In between are a number of other characters who make their own contributions to discussions on economics and nature, as well as literature, history, epidemiology, race, oppression and emancipation. The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way, that a more sustainable world is possible. John Bellamy Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of a number of books, including Marx’s Ecology. With The Return of Nature he won the 2020 Isaac Deutscher Memorial prize. He is also the editor and a frequent contributor at the socialist periodical The Monthly Review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Nick Enfield’s book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022), argues that language is primarily for social coordination, not precisely transferring thoughts from one person to another. Drawing on empirical research, Enfield shows that human lexicons the world over are far more coarse-grained than our perceptual faculties. Yet, at the same time, languages vary in the structure and sophistication of their representations. This means that, for instance, how different languages carve up the world influences not only how their speakers talk about the world, but also how they think about it. The book explores a range of linguistic phenomena, from lexical diversity to linguistic framing to the effects of narrative. As a result of understanding how language shapes our understanding of reality, Enfield argues that we can make more informed—and more ethical—decisions about our own language use, as individuals and communities. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Howard Burton has been talking to very wise people for decades--scientists, historians, political thinkers, philosophers, etc. When Covid "hit" he was, like many of us, puzzled. Where did it come from? How should we respond to it? What does it say about us? So he did what he does: Had conversations with 32 very wise people about Covid. He filmed the discussions, and you can watch them here. Some of them will be released as podcasts on the Ideas Roadshow Podcast, which you can find here. He also wrote a book about his conversations: Pandemic Perspectives: A Filmmaker's Journey in 10 Essays (Open Agenda, 2022) . You can buy it here. Today I talked to Howard about the book, and what he learned in his discussions with these people. Enjoy. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford UP, 2022), Cambridge academic Helen Thompson gets beyond the ephemeral and analyses instead the role of more fundamental drivers of events – including the energy markets and the international monetary system. That’s one way in which her book is distinctive. It’s also a very broad book. While much of academic output has a very narrow focus, this book is unusual in attempting a sweeping overview of what’s happening in the world. What role has energy played in disrupting politics especially since the 1970s? How has the US dominance of the international financial system impacted international relations? And how has the EU influenced democratic development in Europe? Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Listen to this interview of Stephen Heard, Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick. We talk about his book The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 2022), we talk about writing when it's a verb, we talk about writing when it's a choice, and we talk about writing when it's the science. Stephen Heard : "Especially for early-career scientists there's a risk of their writing entering into a positive feedback loop with the writing as it is in the literature. And really, we do this to them, we professors and instructors. We say, 'Next week, you're going to hand in a lab report. Write out this experiment you did,' and we say, quote, 'and write like the scientific literature,' unquote. Well, that's a horrible thing to tell anyone to do, because unfortunately, much of our literature isn't particularly well written. We love our acronyms, we love really long noun phrases, we love the passive voice, and so on. And so, people who don't make conscious choices and just sort of model what they're writing on what's already out there — I think they sort of get locked into some of those bad decisions, like the five-noun noun phrase. So being aware of what you're doing, thinking about the language you're using, and being willing to use the language to its fullest — that's not an invitation to write your own Finnegans Wake — but it is an invitation to think carefully about the way of constructing your point that will resonate best with the reader." Readers may be interested in Heard's webpage for the book. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society