New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

A sadist. A madman. A sociopath seduced by the terrible allure of nuclear weapons. These are but a few of the pejoratives commonly used to describe United States Air Force General Thomas S. Power, Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Air Command (SAC) from 1957 to 1964. Power’s remit as CinCSAC was twofold: deter the Soviet Union from launching a nuclear first strike on the United States and plan to unleash Armageddon if they did. Neither was easily achieved. Effective deterrence hinged upon the actual possession of qualitatively superior weapons systems combined with the perception that the United States was willing to use them. Loosing the nuclear dogs of war, in turn, depended on the exacting coordination of those weapons systems under combat conditions. Further complicating matters was the incredible compression of time and space brought on by the advent of new delivery systems like the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). SAC's mission was truly a Gordian Knot—one Power was determined to cut. Power approached the problem with an alacrity that transformed SAC into a formidable nuclear instrument, but which simultaneously earned him a less than flattering reputation. Within the Kennedy administration and among many members of the media, Power was seen as fatally unhinged, obsessed with nuclear weapons, violently anti-communist, and liable to start a nuclear war with the Soviets of his own volition. Whether accurate or not, this view dominated popular and historiographical appraisals of Power for the better part of seven decades. In To Rule the Skies: General Thomas S. Power and the Rise of Strategic Air Command in the Cold War (US Naval Institute Press, 2021), historian Brent Ziarnick takes aim at this mainstream historiographic narrative. Telling in detail for the first time the story of Power’s personal and professional life, Ziarnick refocuses our attention away from the hyperbole and onto Power’s substantive contributions to the development of America’s strategic air and aerospace capability. Brent D. Ziarnick is an assistant professor at the Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He has been published in Wired, Politico, and The Hill. He is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Scott Lipkowitz holds a MA in History, with a concentration in military history, and a MLIS, with a concentration in information technology, from Queens College, City University of New York 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

Math circles defy simple narratives. The model was introduced a century ago, and is taking off in the present day thanks in part to its congruence with cutting-edge research in mathematics education. It is a modern approach to teaching—or facilitation—that resonates and finds mutual reinforcement with traditional practices and cultural preservation efforts. A wide range of math circle resources have become available for interested instructors, including the MSRI Math Circles Library, now in its 14th year of publication by the AMS. I was excited to talk with three editors and contributors to a recent volume in the series, Inspiring Mathematics: Lessons from the Navajo Nation Math Circles (American Mathematical, 2019). Drs. Dave Auckly, Amanda Serenevy, and Henry Fowler have been instrumental to the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project, along with co-editors Tatiana Shubin and Bob Klein and a broader contact and support network. Their book showcases scripts developed and facilitated in Navajo Nation, including an introduction to modular arithmetic through bean bag tossing, prefix sorting in the guise of pancake flipping, and a tactile use of limiting behavior to folding a necktie. We discussed the origin and expansion of math circles, their potential to indigenous mathematics educators and students, and the content of and stories behind a selection of the scripts. Dr. Fowler's foreword and the editors' introduction situate the math circles movement and the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project in history, geography, and culture. Each script begins with a (minimal!) list of the necessary materials and a student handout that invites explorations with them. A short survey of connections to deeper mathematics precedes each handout, and each is followed by an extensive teacher's guide with (illustrative) solutions and presentation suggestions. The scripts vary in complexity and are suitable for student- and teacher-focused math circles. I hope the text becomes widely adopted for science-based and culturally conscious mathematics education and helps introduce others like myself to the greater math circles project. Suggested companion works: -James Tanton -The Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival -Gordon Hamilton and Lora Saarnio, MathPickle -Robert Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free -Rachel and Rodi Steinig, Math Renaissance Dave Auckly is a research mathematician at Kansas State University and Co-founder and Director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project. Amanda Serenevy is Co-founder and Director of the Riverbend Community Math Center. Henry Fowler is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Navajo Technical University and Co-director of the Navajo Nation Math Circles Project. Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. 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

Believers: Faith in Human Nature (Norton, 2019) is a scientist's answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers. It is a firm rebuke of the "Four Horsemen"--Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens--known for writing about religion as something irrational and ultimately harmful. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but has lived his adult life without such faith, explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution, and even genetics of the varied religious impulses we experience as a species. Conceding that faith is not for everyone, he views religious people with a sympathetic eye; his own upbringing, his apprenticeship in the trance-dance religion of the African Bushmen, and his friends and explorations in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other faiths have all shaped his perspective. Faith has always manifested itself in different ways--some revelatory and comforting; some kind and good; some ecumenical and cosmopolitan; some bigoted, coercive, and violent. But the future, Konner argues, will both produce more nonbelievers, and incline the religious among us--holding their own by having larger families--to increasingly reject prejudice and aggression. A colorful weave of personal stories of religious--and irreligious--encounters, as well as new scientific research, Believers shows us that religion does much good as well as undoubted harm, and that for at least a large minority of humanity, the belief in things unseen neither can nor should go away. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her 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 his new book Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Douglas O’Reagan describes how the Western Allies gathered teams of experts to scour defeated Germany, seeking industrial secrets and the technical personnel who could explain them. Swarms of investigators invaded Germany's factories and research institutions, seizing or copying all kinds of documents, from patent applications to factory production data to science journals. They questioned, hired, and sometimes even kidnapped hundreds of scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel. They studied technologies from aeronautics to audiotapes, toy making to machine tools, chemicals to carpentry equipment. They took over academic libraries, jealously competed over chemists, and schemed to deny the fruits of German invention to any other land—including that of other Allied nations. Drawing on declassified records, O'Reagan looks at which techniques worked for these very different nations, as well as which failed—and why. Most importantly, he shows why securing this technology, how the Allies did it, and when still matters today. He also argues that these programs did far more than spread German industrial science: they forced businessmen and policymakers around the world to rethink how science and technology fit into diplomacy, business, and society itself. Douglas M. O'Reagan is a historian of technology, industry, and national security. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. 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

Join naturalist and science writer Leigh Calvez on her adventures into science and spirit of animals, as we discuss her two recent books: The Hidden Lives of Owls, and The Breath of the Whale (Sasquatch Books, 2016 and 2019, respectively). Calvez makes the science and research entertaining and accessible, describing the social behavior of owls and whales while exploring the questions about the human-animal connection. Our conversation highlights the impressive resilience and intelligence of the animals we have the pleasure to share the world with, the role of research and intuition in field work studies, in addition to the complexity of ethical decisions we humans must make to ensure and perpetuate a diverse and healthy ecosystem for every creature. Leigh Calvez has worked with whales and dolphins as a scientist, naturalist and nature writer, her work featured in Smithsonian Magazine, High Country News, The Ecologist, Ocean Realm, The Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Bainbridge Island Magazine. She also teaches private writing classes and lives near Seattle, Washington, with her daughter Ellie and their two cats. Sarah (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread. 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

Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research. James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes. Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer. Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her book about acupuncture as a tool of medical, social, and political revolution in the United States is under contract with University of Michigan 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 first in-depth study of the All World Gayatri Pariwar, a modern Indian religious movement. The All World Gayatri Pariwar is a modern religious movement that enjoys wide popularity in North India, particularly among the many STEM workers who joined after becoming disillusioned with their lucrative but unfulfilling private-sector careers. Founded in the mid-twentieth century, the Gayatri Pariwar works to popularize practices inspired by ancient religious texts and breaks with convention by framing these practices as the foundation of a universal spirituality. The movement appeals to science in its advocacy of these practices, claiming that they have medical benefits that constitute proof that rational people around the world should find persuasive. Should these practices become sufficiently widespread, the belief is that humanity will enter a new satyug, or “golden age.” In The Science of Satyug: Class, Charisma, and Vedic Revivalism in the All World Gayatri Pariwar (SUNY Press, 2021), Daniel Heifetz focuses on how religion and science are objects of intense emotion that help to constitute identities. Weaving engaging ethnographic anecdotes together with readings of Gayatri Pariwar literature, Heifetz interprets this material in light of classic and contemporary theory. The result is a significant contribution to current conversations about the globalized middle classes and the entanglement of religion and science that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding these aspects of life in modern India. Daniel Heifetz teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. 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

Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (U California Press, 2010) is an incisive and provocative study of the figures and tropes of “savagery” in Japanese colonial culture. Through a rigorous analysis of literary works, ethnographic studies, and a variety of other discourses, Robert Thomas Tierney demonstrates how imperial Japan constructed its own identity in relation both to the West and to the people it colonized. By examining the representations of Taiwanese aborigines and indigenous Micronesians in the works of prominent writers, he shows that the trope of the savage underwent several metamorphoses over the course of Japan's colonial period--violent headhunter to be subjugated, ethnographic other to be studied, happy primitive to be exoticized, and hybrid colonial subject to be assimilated. Dr. Robert Tierney is professor of Japanese literature in the Departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative and World Literatures in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 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

Today I talked to Mathew Sweezy about his new book The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media ( Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). Mathew Sweezey is Principal of Marketing Insights for Salesforce. His work has appeared in leading publications such as AdAge, Forbes, Brand Quarterly, The Economist, and The Observer. He’s also the author of Marketing Automation for Dummies. On June 24, 2009, we entered the era when private individuals became the largest producers of media in the world, eclipsing businesses and traditional media outlets. A perfect case-in-point is Tesla, which follows a market-sell-build-market (some more) model that engages customers with a greater purpose (weaning us off fossil fuels) and invites customers to co-create the cars they want. Tesla spends about $6 on advertising per car it sells, versus the nearly $1,000 that Mercedes-Benz spends per car sold. This episode explores the Tesla example, how Gen I members want to be “influencers” as their dream job, and what it means to have conversations with consumers rather than interrupt them with ads. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. 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

How did Japanese academics study their "fields" in places like Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the transwar decades? How did they transform in the postwar, under the US Occupation, and after? Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan (Stanford UP, 2019) is the first monograph on the collective biography of this cohort of professional Japanese intellectuals, or in Miriam L. Kingsberg Kadia's words, "the men of one age." Kadia observes that during the transwar decades (1930s-1060s), these "men of one age" jointly embraced a set of unchanging assumptions regarding epistemology that was anchored in the ideal of "objectivity." The scholarship, or gakujutsu, that they aimed to produce were concerned with the quest of universal laws governing human society and the natural world, the use of a comprehensively delineated method to assure rigor in pursuit of "truth," and impartiality. Those who studied the human sciences applied the ideal of "objectivity" to the study of Self and Others in Japanese colonized and occupied lands. Following the lives of these transwar human scientists into the fields, Kadia reveals that these "men of one age," such as Izumi Seiichi, were both creators and creations of imperial epistemology. Kadia points out that although the duration of Japanese imperial control was too short to apply their academic findings to policy in much of the empire, Izumi and his colleagues "enjoyed outsized influence in justifying the empire as a hierarchy of confraternal races ruled for their own benefit by the putatively superior Japanese." The US Occupation in the postwar allowed the continuation of the pursuit of "objective" knowledge for the Japanese human scientists, as well as opening new avenues for them. Kadia argues that "what changed after 1945 were the values understood to constitute objectivity," namely ideals vaunted as characteristically American: democracy, capitalism, and peace. During the Cold War, Kadia reminds us, the US saw strategic potential in Japan's studies of East Asia and Oceania, and the Japanese academics largely "upheld the convenient fiction of their reluctant cooperation with and quiet opposition to the former government." To rehabilitate Japan's scholarly reputation, the Japanese academics were integrated into a new transnational intellectual community that both reflected and supported US hegemony, although some Japanese academics resisted the subordination of domestic progress to grand strategy. Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. 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

Digitization is reshaping creative industries. Old gatekeepers in music, publishing, television, movies, and other industries no longer play such an important role, and digital piracy makes it easy for consumers to avoid paying companies, artists, and writers for what they produce. On the other hand, independents can now cheaply produce and distribute creative works both to niche and mass market audiences. In Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture (Princeton UP, 2020), Economist Joel Waldfogel uses data about the quantity, quality, and mass appeal of these works to make the case that this has on balance made us all better off, resulting in a digital renaissance. In this interview, we discuss the findings in his book and how he arrives at them. I also get his perspective on some developments since his book came out, like the rise of Spotify, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the impact of the pandemic on digitization. He also unwittingly gives me the opportunity to tell everyone with an Amazon device in the house to say “Alexa, Beethoven’s pathetic!” and enjoy the result. If you want to buy the NFT for Waldfogel’s famously Scroogey paper “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” he is open to bids and promises to donate the proceeds to charity, unlike Scrooge. You can also follow him on Twitter. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. 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 COVID19 pandemic has profoundly changed the landscape of K-12 education in our society. Last March, many states closed their brick-and-mortar schools and shifted to remote education. The massive shift is historic and unprecedented. Until now, while we see the light at the end of the tunnel in our battle against the coronavirus, millions and millions of students are still learning at home via online platforms. It is also because of this shift that digital learning all of a sudden has drawn attention from not only educators but also the general public from families to policy makers. Over the past months we have seen concerted efforts to invest in digital learning and improve the required infrastructure. In spite of this unexpected yet much welcomed attention from the society at large, digital teaching and learning a field has existed for a long time. Experts in the field have been documenting and exploring the best practice of digital teaching and learning. Today I am going to talk with three researchers who have been working in this field for a long time, Carolyn Heinrich from Vanderbilt University, Jennifer Darling-Aduana from Georgia State University and Annalee G. Good from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Last year, they published their new book with Harvard Education Press, titled Equity and Quality in Digital Learning: Realizing the Promise in K-12 Education (2020). It systematically studies the implementation and best practice of using digital tools to reduce inequities in educational opportunities and improve student outcomes. Although the book was out right before the start of the pandemic, the lessons, best practice and insights they highlighted in their book have so much to offer for educators, policy makers and families to navigate a teaching-and-learning landscape during and after this pandemic. Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy and Education and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, and an affiliated Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. Jennifer Darling-Aduana is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies in the Department of Learning Sciences, College of Education and Human Development, at Georgia State University. Annalee G. Good is co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative and Director of the Clinical Program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pengfei Zhao is a critical researcher and qualitative research methodologist based at the University of Florida. 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 episode, I interview Kas Saghafi, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, about his book The World After the End of the World, published through SUNY Press in 2020. In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of “the end the world” in Derrida’s late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida’s work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida’s thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy’s. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a “spectro-poetics” devoted to and assigned to the other’s singularity. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. 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

Plastic: An Autobiography (Nightboat Books, 2021) explores how technology, sprung from desire, draws all beings into its net, and asks how to live justly within its grasp. In Plastic: An Autobiography, Allison Cobb’s obsession with a large plastic car part leads her to explore the violence of our consume-and-dispose culture, including her own life as a child of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were made. The journey exposes the interconnections among plastic waste, climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism. Using a series of interwoven narratives ― from ancient Phoenicia to Alabama ― the book bears witness to our deepest entanglements and asks how humans continue on this planet. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her 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

The Art of Experiment: Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design (Routledge, 2020) is a handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times. In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. Hughes and Armstrong search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself, examining how we have manipulated these historically through an anthropocentric focus. Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes speak with Pierre d'Alancaisez about their approach to knowledge-making and organa paradoxa as an apparatus for incorporating the unexpected into research and practices. They also talk about sending cockroaches into space, living Shakespearean bricks, and about the value of experimentation in establishing productive cross-disciplinary collaborations. Some of the works discussed in the interview are described and illustrated in a Nature article. Caustic Ophelia from Brick Dialogues is on Bandcamp. The Hanging Gardens of Medusa can be seen here. They were also a subject of a study by the British Interplanetary Society. Hughes' and Armstrong's earlier collaboration with Espen Gangvik The Handbook of the Unknowable is available in full here. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. 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

Economist, data journalist, and best-selling author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz uses data from the internet to gain new insights into the human psyche. In his new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (HarperCollins, 2017), Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics. In this interview he explains how web searches are a kind of digital truth serum that reveals our hidden desires, insecurities and biases. He also explores other ways economists have used the explosion of new data created by the digitization of the economy to shed new light on old questions. Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he created and leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. 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 episode, I interview David Wills, professor of French Studies at Brown University, about his book, Prosthesis, recently republished for its 25th anniversary by University of Minnesota Press. A landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, the book promotes the idea that the human body is open to supplementation by artificial addenda that operate both internally or externally and engage it in an unceasing arbitration with the environment. Questioning the opposition between animate and inanimate along with the logic of the automatic prioritization of living flesh, Prosthesis undertakes these assumptions by studying thematics of artificiality through the writings of Freud, Derrida, William Gibson, Peter Greenaway, and others. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. 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

Apps have transformed dating from a mysterious adventure into a daily chore. Young, single, college-educated women are sick and tired of competing for a shrinking supply of guys. And marriage-material men, long expected to take the lead when it comes to asking women out, are suddenly balking at making the first move, fearing they'll come across as creepy or inappropriate. Society is changing, which means it's time for dating to evolve. Millennial and Gen Z women are more than capable of seeking out what—and who—they want. They're standouts in the classroom and champions on the playing fields. They're leaders in the workplace and trailblazers in city halls, state houses, and Congress. So why would we tell a generation of badass women that they're not allowed to be bold when it comes to finding love? Why should they have to sit back and wait (and wait and wait) for men to find them? In Make Your Move: The New Science of Dating and Why Women Are in Charge (Benbella, 2021), Jon Birger, author of Date-onomics, offers women bold new strategies for finding the one. Backed by research showing that women can win at romance by making the first move with the men of their choice, Birger explains why: It's better to choose than to be chosen The "play hard to get" method is not only outdated but grounded in bad science The first move does not have to be a big move It's time to log off of dating apps and date men you actually know The workplace can be a terrific place to meet a long-term romantic partner . . . and more! Make Your Move is an honest, solution-based guide to finding love that lasts. If you're tired of playing by old rules, look no further: Make your move and win Jon Birger is an award-winning writer, a contributor to Fortune, and the author of Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. A former senior writer at both Fortune and Money, Jon's work has also appeared in Barron's, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, New York Magazine, Time, and Washington Post. He was included on AlwaysOn Network's list of "Power Players in Technology Business Media." A familiar face and voice on television and radio, Jon has been a guest on ABC's Good Morning America, BBC World Service, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News-discussing a wide range of topics from the dating market to the stock market to oil market. Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website. 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 an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Christopher A. Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton University Press, 2021) challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves. Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit “reset” and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research. Providing data-driven recommendations for strengthening our social media connections, Breaking the Social Media Prism shows how to combat online polarization without deleting our accounts. 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

Jürgen Melzer’s Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation (Harvard UP, 2020) traces the history of Japanese aviation from its origins with hot-air balloons in the 1870s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Melzer’s narrative centers around three themes: transnational technology transfer and Japan’s efforts to attain technological independence, domestic efforts to mobilize public enthusiasm for aviation development (what Melzer calls “air-mindedness”), and the complicated interplay of aviation with military and diplomatic history. The first chapters take us to the end of World War I, which was a turning point for Japanese aviation. Until that time, Japan had been most interested in French technologies, but the settlement of the Great War at Versailles provided an opportunity to take advantage of German aviation advancements. Parts 2 and 3 contrast the development of aviation in the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, exposing crucial differences not only between the two services but within each one. Part 4 begins with Japan’s turn to American civil aviation technologies in the wake of the 1931 Manchurian Incident, and the subsequent impact of Japanese aggression and US retaliatory sanctions leading up to Pearl Harbor. The final chapter covers the fevered development of rocket- and jet-propelled aircraft during the war, and therefore in the context of resource shortages and a fast-ticking clock. Melzer, a former Lufthansa pilot, has written a book that will appeal to readers interested in STS, military history, international relations, and Western history, in addition to Japanese history aficionados. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya 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

Listen to this interview of Christopher Thaiss, author of Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century (Broadview Press 2019). We talk about the research article, about writing styles, and about the uses of rhetoric to scientists. Interviewer: "Too many students learning to write in the sciences lack helpful feedback on their writing, and this causes them to experience, quite personally, that disconnect we were talking about, between doing science and writing science." Christopher Thaiss: "Feedback is one of the things I return to again and again in the book. And in my teaching, I think that one of the ways that feedback is used––I think that the most effective way that feedback is used is not so much the feedback that I give students about their writing, although the students will always say, 'We love your feedback!' But what's really important is the feedback that they learn to give and get in peer response workshops. I'm very careful in designing peer response so that students feel that sense of responsibility to give good feedback to one another, but also how to ask for feedback on the work that they're doing themselves. I think that peer response is so important in the scientific context, but it is, you know, in any writing context, and so I really try to foreground that within the course. The way I talk about it in writing in STEM is actually in the context of how research is done and how scientific discoveries and advancements are made: It's through the process of peer review. And if we can teach students early on to become good readers and then careful, conscientious givers of feedback to one another, we have achieved so much in terms of their ability to become contributing members of the scientific community." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write [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

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms. While such strategies may at times be no more than a profitable lure, the most probing and powerful instances of sexual provocation serve to illuminate, question, and transform our understanding of sex and sexuality. In Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media (Indiana UP, 2021), award-winning author Maria San Filippo looks at the provocative in films, television series, web series and videos, entertainment industry publicity materials, and social media discourses and explores its potential to create alternative, even radical ways of screening sex. Throughout this edgy volume, San Filippo reassesses troubling texts and divisive figures, examining controversial strategies--from "real sex" scenes to scandalous marketing campaigns to full-frontal nudity--to reveal the critical role that sexual provocation plays as an authorial signature and promotional strategy within the contemporary media landscape. A trailer for the books is available on YouTube. Both of San Filippo's IUP books are 30% off (through May) using code SANFILIPPO at iupress.org Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. 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

Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (Yale UP, 2020) is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives--including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down. As dangerous as things are now, they will only get worse; the enormous flood of data coming from the so-called Internet of Things, along with the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence, will make disinformation easier to generate and disseminate and much harder to spot and remove. Howard tackles the tough task of suggesting the changes that are needed to create a radically redesigned social media ecosystem that would reinforce, rather than erode, democracy. Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her [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

Today on New Books in History, Mark A. Waddell, Associate professor of History, Philosophy & Sociology of Science in the Department of History at Michigan State University in beautiful East Lansing Michigan, talks about his recent book, Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2021). From the recovery of ancient ritual magic at the height of the Renaissance to the ignominious demise of alchemy at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Mark A. Waddell explores the rich and complex ways that premodern people made sense of their world. He describes a time when witches flew through the dark of night to feast on the flesh of unbaptized infants, magicians conversed with angels or struck pacts with demons, and astrologers cast the horoscopes of royalty. Ground-breaking discoveries changed the way that people understood the universe while, in laboratories and coffee houses, philosophers discussed how to reconcile the scientific method with the veneration of God. This engaging, illustrated new study introduces readers to the vibrant history behind the emergence of the modern world. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. 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 late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, an astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization. In Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (Houghton Mifflin, 2021), Loeb takes readers inside the thrilling story of the first interstellar visitor to be spotted in our solar system. He outlines his controversial theory and its profound implications: for science, for religion, and for the future of our species and our planet. A mind-bending journey through the furthest reaches of science, space-time, and the human imagination, Extraterrestrial challenges readers to aim for the stars--and to think critically about what's out there, no matter how strange it seems. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her 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

"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of disruptions in the 1970s, and among the rattled fixtures of American society was mainstream psychiatry. A "Radical Caucus" formed within the psychiatric profession and the "antipsychiatry" movement arose. Critics charged that the mental health establishment was complicit with the military-industrial complex, patients were released from mental institutions, and powerful antipsychotic drugs became available. Meanwhile, practitioners and patients experimented with new approaches to mental health, from primal screaming and the therapeutic use of psychedelics to a new reliance on quantification. In Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture (MIT Press, 2020), Lucas Richert investigates the radical challenges to psychiatry and to the conventional treatment of mental health that emerged in the 1970s and the lessons they offer for current debates. Drawing on archives and government documents, medical journals, and interviews, and interweaving references to pop (counter)culture into his account, Richert offers fascinating stories of the decade's radical mental health practices. He discusses anti-Vietnam War activism and the new diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder given to some veterans; the radical psychiatrists who fought the system (and each other); the entry of New Age-style therapies, including Esalen's Human Potential Movement, into the laissez-faire therapeutic marketplace of the 1970s; the development of DSM III; and the use of LSD, cannabis, and MDMA. Many of these issues have resonance today. Debates over medical marijuana and microdoses of psychedelics echo debates of the 1970s. With rising rates of such disorders as anxiety and depression, practitioners and patients continue to search for therapeutic breakthroughs. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. 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 Value of Science in Space Exploration (Oxford UP, 2020) provides a rigorous assessment of the value of scientific knowledge and understanding in the context of contemporary space exploration. It argues that traditional spaceflight rationales are deficient, and that the strongest defense of spaceflight comes from its potential to produce intrinsically and instrumentally valuable knowledge and understanding. It engages with contemporary epistemology to articulate an account of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge and understanding. It also parleys with recent work in science policy and social philosophy of science to characterize the instrumental value of scientific research, identifying space research as an effective generator of new knowledge and understanding. These values found an ethical obligation to engage in scientific examination of the space environment. This obligation has important implications for major space policy discussions, including debates surrounding planetary protection policies, space resource exploitation, and human space settlement. Whereas planetary protection policies are currently employed to prevent biological contamination only of sites of interest in the search for extraterrestrial life, it contends that all sites of interest to space science ought to be protected. Meanwhile, space resource exploitation and human space settlement would result in extensive disruption or destruction of pristine space environments. The overall ethical value of these environments in the production of new knowledge and understanding is greater than their value as commercial or real commodities, and thus, exploitation and settlement of space should be avoided until the scientific community adequately understands these environments. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. 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

From ecology to fermentation, in pop culture and in medicine—mushrooms are everywhere. With an explorer’s eye, author Doug Bierend guides readers through the weird, wonderful world of fungi and the amazing modern mycological movement. In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms (Chelsea Green, 2021) introduces us to an incredible, essential, and oft-overlooked kingdom of life—fungi—and all the potential it holds for our future, through the work and research being done by an unforgettable community of mushroom-mad citizen scientists and microbe devotees. This entertaining and mind-expanding book will captivate readers who are curious about the hidden worlds and networks that make up our planet. Bierend uncovers a vanguard of mycologists; growers, independent researchers, ecologists, entrepreneurs, and amateur enthusiasts exploring and advocating for fungi’s capacity to improve and heal. From decontaminating landscapes and waterways to achieving food security, In Search of Mycotopia demonstrates how humans can work with fungi to better live with nature—and with one another. 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

Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020), Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet. Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do--be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored--may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a "dataist" faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans--and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. 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 World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets. Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began. In War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2021), Gershom Gorenberg tells the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war. Gershom Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, as well as an Adjunct Faculty at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. 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

Agnes Arnold-Forster's book The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2021) offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding the Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. The Cancer Problem argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present. Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. 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

Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (Indiana UP, 2021), Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists--experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators--not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities. Jill Massimo is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. 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 push for a Universal Healthcare system in the United States becomes more and more popular among the American people, we’re beginning to have more public conversations about access to and affordability of medical care. While many of us may not consider our health insurance until we need it, for those with chronic conditions, the American medical system can be a nightmare of insurance claims bureaucracy and that prevents patients from getting the care they need at a cost they can afford. Worse, the rising prices of drugs and treatments developed in this for-profit system mean that some patients receive more medical care than they want or need, sometimes at the expense of their quality of life. When a young Katherine E. Standefer was suddenly diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome—the same congenital heart condition as her younger sister—she was faced with what felt like an impossible choice: implant a cardiac defibrillator and be forever tied to the American Medical System, or take a chance with death. In her stunning debut, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown, Spark, 2020) Standefer explores this system as both a patient and a consumer, visiting factories in California as well as mining communities in Rwanda and Madagascar where the metals in her defibrillator were sourced to learn more about the true human cost of the device that was meant to save her life. Throughout, Standefer wonders whether her life is worth this price, and asks us to reimagine approaches to care—both in medical and environmental. 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 compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her 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

A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. In The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One (University of Toronto Press, 2021), William Max Nelson argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. 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

We are here today with Sara Ritchey, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, about her new book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health, out with Cornell University Press this year, 2021. The author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and numerous articles, including “Caring by the Hours: the Psalter as a Source of Gendered Healthcare,” “Health, Healing, and Salvation: Hagiography as a Source of Medieval Healthcare,” “The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence: The Experience of God in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript,” Dr. Ritchey discusses her profound understanding in the intersection of religious practice (writ large) and the practice of medicine (writ large) in the Medieval era. In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical. The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns. Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. 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

Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. Action at a Distance (Meson Press, 2020) this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often 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

As we mark the one-year anniversary of the COIVD-19 pandemic, take the time to listen to this discussion of previous efforts to fight yellow fever, cholera, and plague pandemics. Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris’s Sulfuric Utopias: A History Maritime Fumigation (MIT Press, 2020) tells the story of the international dream of stopping the spread of infectious disease in global shipping networks. Their work shows how the interests of capitalism clashed with the efforts of public health officials. At the center of their narrative lies the Clayton, a machine which combined technocratic enthusiasm and necropolitical logic. Sulfuric Utopias brings together the history disease, capitalism, public health, and science. It is both a contribution to maritime history and urban history. Personally, I was so excited to interview two authors who know more about the history of rat killing than I do. Lukas Engelmann is a Chancellor's Fellow in the History and Sociology of Biomedicine, in the department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Christos Lynteris is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, 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

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020) unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet. Beginning with the Islamic State’s claim that the smashed objects were idols of the “age of ignorance,” Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage. Finally, he compares the Islamic State’s production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often 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

An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. 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

Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz have edited an outstanding volume that breaks important new ground in the history of early modern science and religion. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the long-standing discussion of natural theology gave way in the mid-seventeenth century to a new conversation about physico-theology, a distinctive genre of science and religion writing that emphasised the goodness and the predictability of the divine being. Emerging first in the immediate aftermath of the crisis of the English civil wars, this discourse emphasised order and causality, and subjected the being of God to the science of order that was emerging in the same period. But, constructed to explain the benevolence of the creator and creation, physico-theology struggled to make sense of creaturely suffering, and eventually was understood as undermining its own presuppositions. Just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Physico-Theology: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650-1750 will be a landmark text in early modern intellectual history. 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 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. Alisha Rankin's The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (U Chicago Press, 2021) sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power. 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

Normally we write blogposts that try to convince you to listen to a conversation with an author about their fascinating book. In the time of COVID-19, it doesn't seem necessary to have to sell you on why you should listen to this podcast. Suffice it to say that Mitchell Hammond’s excellent survey of a dozen deadly diseases is a must-read primer to make sense of epidemic history. In Epidemics and the Modern World (University of Toronto Press, 2020), he balances the science of disease etiology and disease cycles with political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. Read this book! Mitchell L. Hammond, an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria in beautiful British Columbia. Dr. Hammond studied at Yale, where he earned a BA in Political Science and a MA in Religious History before getting another MA and a PhD in European History at the University of Virginia. His dissertation was entitled “The Origins of Civic Health Care in Early Modern Germany”. He has published several articles and book chapters on the intersection of medicine and religion in 16th and 17th century Germany. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, 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

Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke University Press, 2018) presents a multi-species ethnography of orangutans and humans that probes the shared susceptibilities of both species in the face of future extinction. In a series of provocative chapters, the book interweaves intimate entanglements in the workings of an orangutan rehabilitation centre with reflection on the work of care that draws on queer theory and feminist conceptions of welfare. By centralizing such rehabilitation efforts, the book reveals the contradictions inherent in such a system. The practice of rehabilitation, it shows, is underpinned by violence. Parreñas demonstrates the colonial origins of such an approach to conservation biology and how care within enclosures traps both humans and endangered primates alike. As such, we should urgently question how we could divest ourselves from the need for security that is dependent on cruelty and seek instead a decolonial era of co-existence which welcomes and finds joy in our moments of brief, mutual vulnerability. In this conversation, we discuss models of orangutan care, coerced copulations, the concept of “arrested autonomy” and how we as a species could love better. Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests centre on human-animal relations and the institution of environmental justice. This book received the 2019 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize, biennially awarded by the Association for Feminist Anthropology for a first book as well as honourable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Prize, the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. For more on orangutans in Borneo, check out the following: SSEAC Interview with conservation scholar Dr. June Rubis here. NBN Interview with historian Prof. Robert Cribb here. Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or Twitter @laurelinarien. 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

How did telecommunications shape Victorian London? In Serving a Wired World London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital Katie Hindmarch-Watson, an Assistant Professor in history at Johns Hopkins University, tells the history of London through the lenses of technology, gender, class, and sexuality. The book offers a rethinking of liberal subjectivity and the city at the end of the nineteenth century, showing how the Victorian obsessions with privacy and respectability intersected with technology to create the urban and social fabric of London. The book also draws on queer history, demonstrating the importance of sex scandals in the Victorian and Edwardian eras for understanding urban, technology, and gender histories. A fascinating read, the book will be an essential text across the humanities and social sciences. 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 David Payne, who is Chief Careers Editor at Nature. We talk about high quality writing, about the gracious community of scientists, and about diversity, diversity, diversity. Interviewer : "What is the one thing you hope, for sure, that every piece of Careers content will achieve?" David Payne : "Oh, that's a question, isn't it? You know what, I think it is about emotion. And I just want it to––not tug at your heartstrings, that sounds cheesy––but I feel, we spend so much time at work, and work does define us, rightly or wrongly, actually. So much of what we do is mediated through the jobs that we do. We spend so much time with our colleagues, and probably more than we do with family members often. So, I just hope that every piece we publish resonates. We can't resonate with everybody, of course, because it's a very diverse workforce in science. But, whenever I read any piece of content, I always think, how many boxes are we ticking here. You know, who is going to be interested in this. Of course, the target audience is currently the early career researcher, but of course you have all sorts of halo effects, as well. You want to think that funders are reading it, that they're finding it a useful take; people like yourself, who train people to write as a scientist; lab leaders; policymakers; thought leaders; and all the way down the line." 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

Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system. Liat Ben-Moshe (https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/) provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom. Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. 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

John Heilbron, professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of our most distinguished - and prolific - historians of science. His latest book, The Ghost of Galileo In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2021), records how, during a tour of an English country house, he stumbled across what might be the earliest visual reference to Galileo outside portraiture. Heilbron's quest to understand this reference has resulted in a long and extraordinary account of debates in early modern science, religion, and medicine. Heilbron explains that there are reasons why a jobbing artist, working in the royalist base of Oxford during the first English civil war, might include in a double portrait of a tutor and his melancholy pupil this reference to recent trends in cosmology. In this lavishly illustrated and copiously argued book, Heilbron sets new agendas for our understanding of the politics of royalism, the material contexts of portraiture, and the religious significance of science. 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 Anthropocene, the thawing of frozen earth due to global warming has drawn worldwide attention to permafrost. Contemporary scientists define permafrost as ground that maintains a negative temperature for at least two years. But where did this particular conception of permafrost originate, and what alternatives existed? The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (University of Toronto Press, 2021) provides an intellectual history of permafrost, placing the phenomenon squarely in the political, social, and material context of Russian and Soviet science. Pey-Yi Chu shows that understandings of frozen earth were shaped by two key experiences in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. On one hand, the colonization and industrialization of Siberia nourished an engineering perspective on frozen earth that viewed the phenomenon as an aggregate physical structure: ground. On the other, a Russian and Soviet tradition of systems thinking encouraged approaching frozen earth as a process, condition, and space tied to planetary exchanges of energy and matter. Aided by the US militarization of the Arctic during the Cold War, the engineering view of frozen earth as an obstacle to construction became dominant. The Life of Permafrost tells the fascinating story of how permafrost came to acquire life as Russian and Soviet scientists studied, named, and defined it. Pey-Yi Chu is an associate professor of history at Pomona College, where she teaches courses in modern European history. 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

Of all forms of alternative medicine, chiropractic is the one that is most generally accepted. In the UK, for instance, chiropractors are regulated by statute and even have their own ‘Royal College of Chiropractic’. In the US, chiropractic’s country of origin, most chiropractors carry the title ‘doctor’ and many consumers believe they are medically trained. Despite this high level of acceptance, chiropractic is wide open to criticism. The claims and assumptions made by chiropractors are far from evidence based. Chiropractic manipulations are of doubtful effectiveness and have regularly been associated with severe adverse effects, including multiple fatalities. The advice issued by chiropractors to patients and consumers is often less than responsible. The behaviour of chiropractors and their organisations is frequently less than professional. Edzard Ernst's Chiropractic:' Not All That It's Cracked Up to Be (Springer, 2020) presents and discusses recent evidence in and around chiropractic in a factual and unemotional manner. It amounts to an evidence-based critique of this profession and discloses the often dangerously misleading information published for the lay audience. It thereby contributes to advancing public health and critical thinking. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her 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