New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that modern technologies of sound reproduction and transmission have had profound—and often underappreciated—social, economic, and political effects. Observing that the “materialities of media transform people, institutions, and societies,” Yasar traces the early histories of sound reproduction in modern Japan and their consequences. Electrified Voices examines the development of media technologies—including the telegraph and telephone, phonograph, broadcast radio, and film—and their attendant oralities, auralities, and effects on language, nation, the performing arts, and even intellectual property law. As Yasar shows, sound reproduction changed language and attitudes about language, collapsed time and space, and shaped both individual and collective identities and practices. The impact of these technologies is indispensable to a clear understanding of modernity, and Yasar’s book is a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on not just Japan, but histories of media and modernity as well. 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

Whether in space colonies or through geo-engineering, the looming disaster of climate change inspires no shortage of techno-utopian visions of human survival. Most of such hypotheses remain science fiction, but in Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), Gökçe Günel explores the United Arab Emirates’s planned Masdar City, an experimental attempt at designing an emissions-free society. The first parts of Masdar City opened beside the Abu Dhabi airport in 2010 as an oil-wealth funded initiative to establish the UAE as a leader in the renewable energy sector and to begin to prepare the emirates for a low or post-oil economy. Masdar attracted students and researchers from around the world to test, and be test subjects, for innovations including personal rapid transit, energy currencies, carbon capture and storage, and closed-loop resource circuits. Quickly, however, the master plan was abandoned as unworkable; but Masdar City has also not been a failure. Rather, Günel explores the interconnected social, technical, and political ramifications and adaptations involved in this attempt to design a potential fossil fuel-free future. She shrewdly criticizes the limitations of climate change strategies intended to protect the political economic status quo. Yet also, through deep ethnographic fieldwork with participants, Günel demonstrates the valuable role of anthropological insight in social and technological adaptations to a changing climate. Gökçe Günel is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. 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

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, “Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture?” In her new book, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Temple University Press, 2017), Heike Bauer answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century. Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence-including persecution, death and suicide-shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism. The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. 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 easy to take for granted that one can pick up a cell phone and call someone on the other side of the planet. But, until very recently, this had been a mere dream. Martin Collins’ A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) explores how Motorola tried—and eventually failed—to turn this dream into a reality. Collins, curator of the civilian applications satellite collection at the Smithsonian Institution, tells a remarkable story, one that is deeply relevant to our interconnected present. Using Motorola as a case study, A Telephone for the World tracks how U.S. businesses navigated the end of the twentieth century, a moment marked by the rise of neoliberalism, the economic challenge of Japan, and the end of the Cold War. Most significantly, the book shows how businesspeople at Motorola responded to global conditions, sought to create a global firm, and even constructed “the global as a way of life.” The book is therefore a deep dive into the mechanics of globalization, as seen from the inside of a global company. A Telephone for the World will interest historians of technology, communications scholars, business historians, and anyone who wants to know more about globalization. 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 seems logical that would NASA select military test pilots to be the first astronauts, right? They were used to risk. They were good with machines. They already explored extreme environments. But these skills were not unique to test pilots. There were also mountaineers, scuba divers, and explorers. They too were considered. So why did NASA choose test pilots? Matthew Hersch, assistant professor of history at Harvard University and author of Inventing the American Astronaut (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), talks about this and other aspects of the astronaut program. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. 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 spoke with Francesco Grillo (co-authored with Raffaella Nanetti) about his latest book, Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Despite the title, it is not strictly a book on China or Italy. It is a visionary contribution to both economics and political theory that reflects on the crisis of the West and the paradoxical success of China. Is democracy still the best political regime for countries to adapt to economic and technological pressures and increase their level of prosperity? While the West seems to have stagnated in an environment of political mistrust, increasing inequality and low growth, the rise of the East has shown that it may not be liberal democracy that is best at accommodating the social mutations that technologies have triggered. The cases of China and Italy form the research focus as two extremes in growth performance. China is the star of globalisation in the East, while Italy is the laggard of globalisation in the West and a laboratory of creeping political meltdown now shared by other major Western economies. But is this forever? Introducing the ‘innovation paradox’ as the main challenge to the West and the notion of ‘knowledge democracy’ as key to sustainable growth, this book presents a new side to the debate on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or fifth as the authors argue). It is a vital reading for all those questioning what kind of democracy positively impacts innovation as the force whose speed and direction transforms societies and economies. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management 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

What kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (MIT Press, 2018), geographer David Bissell contends that to commute is to enter a highly eventful domain, an atmosphere in which new “capsular collectives” form and reform, opening onto new political and ethical possibilities for being in public. With Sydney, Australia, as its setting, Transit Life develops a non-representational geography on the move, attentive to the blockages and flows that give infrastructural life its contours. Dwelling on embodiment, temporality, sound and other senses, and a broadly Deleuzian vision of micropolitics, Bissell makes the case that the commute should be understood as anything but an empty interval of time, passively submitted to and upheld only through the force of habit. Rather, he contends, out of its repetition emerges a richly differentiated palette of urban encounters, subjectivities, and agencies. If urban life is increasingly spent in transit, Bissell suggests, geographers’ interventions should begin with an interest in its rhythms. Peter Ekman teaches in the departments of geography at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2016, and is at work on two book projects on the cultural and historical geography of urban America across the long twentieth century. 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

The first wealth is health, according to Emerson. Among health’s riches is its political potential. Few know this better than environmentalists. In her debut book, The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (UNC Press, 2019), historian Jennifer Thomson revisits canonical figures and events from the environmental movement in the United States and finds everywhere talk of health. At its best, viewing the environment through the lens of health encouraged decentralized organizing and a sense of collective responsibility. At its worst it supported technocracy and uninspired paeans to green consumerism. With shrewd analysis, Thomson gives the movement its own check-up as she reassess the careers and political imaginations of many of the its luminaries, including David Brower, Wendell Berry, Dave Foreman, and Bill McKibben. Dispensing with the habit of thinking of environmentalism as responding only and ever to itself, Thomson sets its history within the larger context of American political development. So the book is full of unexpected historical crossovers, such as Love Canal residents responding to the Mariel boatlife or the OPEC embargo-era U.S. oil industry championing the Gaia hypothesis. Few books on environmentalism’s past are a better guide for envisioning its future. Jennifer Thomson is Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell History. She also hosts the radio program Bucknell: Occupied, which airs Thursday at 6:00 pm on WVBU. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. 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 development of a whole suite of new reproductive technologies in recent decades has contributed to broad cultural conversations and controversies over the meaning of family in the United States. In Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Diane Tober analyzes how sperm donation fits into this larger landscape of reproductive choices, politics, and policies. Drawing on a rich body of interviews conducted in the 1990’s with people who worked at sperm banks, people who donated sperm, and people who sought to become pregnant by using donated sperm, she illuminates the many motivations that lead people to become involved in alternative processes of family formation. She also demonstrates that a certain kind of “romance” – that is, the imaginative creation of a romantic ideal – can still permeate people’s ideas and experiences of creating children with donor sperm, despite the medicalization of the process. This book will be useful not only for those who are interested in medical anthropology and the anthropology of reproduction, but also anyone who wants to rethink traditional notions of family formation. Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist who studies citizenship, nationalism, and social media, primarily in Nepal. You can find her work at her website and her random musings on 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

Regular listeners of this podcast will, no doubt, be familiar with the name of Raul Espejo, former Director of Operations of Stafford Beer’s famed Cybersyn Project under the Chilean government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970’s. This episode, the esteemed Dr. Espejo joins us in his role as co-editor of the volume, Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions out from Routledge in 2019. By extension, this work is also a reflection of Espejo’s role as former Director-General and now President of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) as this book is, essentially, a collection of extended abstracts and mini-papers encapsulating the vast spectrum of cyber-systemic investigations on offer at that organization’s 2017 Congress in Rome focused largely on policy options across the domains of what contributor Elias G. Carayannis, extending the work of Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, has dubbed the “quadruple helix” of innovation; namely, education, industry, government and the media. Grouping the contributions within nine thematic streams including Human Aspects of Managing Systems, Sustainability and the Anthropocene, Smartness and Big Data, and Democracy, Transparency and Social Dynamics, the 600 plus pages of this volume provide a panorama of the field of cyber-systemics composed of vivid snapshots of rigorous case studies and bold theoretical advances that will surely do much to fire the imaginations and ambitions of researchers and practitioners around the world as they develop their own boundary defying research agendas. 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

Karin Rosemblatt’s new book, The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), traces how U.S.- and Mexican-trained intellectuals, social and human scientists, and anthropologists applied their ethnographic field work on indigenous and Native American peoples on both sides of the Rio Grande to debates over race, national culture, and economic development. The book’s backdrop—the rise of populist movements and governments in both countries in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the onset of the Great Depression, and the instabilities of the interwar period in both countries—provides an excellent opportunity to explore how scientific thought inflected the social construction of race and influenced policy in the Americas. Rosemblatt’s transnational methodology moves beyond accepting race in terms of comparison by tackling the longstanding notion that race and racial categories tended to be more fluid in Latin America and more rigid in the U.S. She shows how figures such as Manuel Gamio, John Collier, and Laura Thompson participated in transnational scholarly networks where the relationship between indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities to culture and nationalism was questioned and debated. In highlighting these collaborations, she shows how Latin American expertise on indigenous peoples bestowed political capital to social scientists for developing indigenous policies in Mexico, and unexpectedly, the United States in the case of Collier and the “Indian New Deal.” The books firm commitment to taking seriously these scholars’ ideas and social contexts allows it to see the limitations of seemingly pseudoscientific or racist paradigms and the ways fieldwork forced them to rethink their own notions of backwardness and civilization. Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on 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

Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magazines, as well as an influential community of German sexologists and psychoanalysts. In his new book, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945 (Harrington Park Press, 2016), Clayton Whisnant describes these events in detail, from vibrant gay social scenes to the Nazi persecution that sent many LGBT people to concentration camps. This study recounts the emergence of various queer identities in Germany from 1880 to 1945 and the political strategies pursued by early activists. Drawing on recent English and German-language scholarship, Whisnant enriches the debate over whether science contributed to social progress or persecution during this period, and he offers new information on the Nazis' preoccupation with homosexuality. The book's epilogue locates remnants of the pre-1945 era in Germany today. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. 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 has lost its humanity. Doctors no longer have the time to make personal connections with their patients. In his new book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (Basic Books, 2019), Eric Topol explores how AI can help to fix many of the issues medicine is facing today. AI has the potential to transform almost everything doctors do, allowing them more time to make the human connection with patients. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him 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

Democratic political adviser Peter Daou has long toggled between the world of presidential campaigns and online activism. He worked for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008, and he has built a large social media presence with which he wages battles for progressive causes. Now he has channeled his experiences into Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace (Melville House, 2019), in which he analyzes the daily political skirmishing that rages online, urges progressives to engage on the “digital battlefield.” While acknowledging the deepening polarization of American politics, he argues that the polarization is “asymmetric,” with Republicans becoming more “extreme” than Democrats. And he warns against characterizing conservative “red America” as more reflective of the “real America” than the liberal “blue.” 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

With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (Open Book Publishers, 2018), Professor Nikolai Krementsov’s recent history of Russian eugenics, reflects on a broad problem: How to acknowledge what eugenics movements worldwide have had in common, while doing justice to local differences that, for example, make the late Victorian eugenics of Francis Galton comparatively quite different from Russian eugenicists of the same period. Krementsov takes this story from the 1860’s to the present day, and in so doing, provides a fascinating analysis of the vicissitudes of Russian attempts to improve the human species. This history is of the utmost relevance for the present day. Eugenics is neither gone nor forgotten, and Krementsov’s account does much to explain why that is the case. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. 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 with Chris Bernhardt about his book Quantum Computing for Everyone (MIT Press, 2019). This is a book that involves a lot of mathematics, but most of it is accessible to anyone who survived high school algebra. Even a math-phobic can read the book, skip the math, and then more than hold his or her own in any but the highest-level discussion of quantum computing. For those of us who love math, the underlying math is elegantly simple and beautifully presented – and the same can be said of the non-mathematical material. as well. 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

What does it mean to be famous on the Internet? How do people become Internet celebrities, and what can that celebrity be used to do? Dr. Crystal Abidin offers anthropological insight into these questions in her book Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018). Drawing on case studies from around the world, Dr. Abidin identifies the qualities that contribute to the making of internet celebrity. She explains how some internet celebrities become professional influencers and explores the global implications of the influencer industry. This accessibly written book is aimed at popular audiences and will be indispensable for undergraduate courses about digital culture, for academics who want a clear and cogent introduction to internet celebrity, and for anyone who wants to understand the online worlds in which we increasingly live. Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis. 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 estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million people every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in Africa. In The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa (Reprint edition; Cambridge University Press, 2016), James L. A. Webb explains the disproportionate impact that malaria has on the African continent by examining the evolution of parasites, vectors, and human hosts and the different attempts at controlling and eradicating the disease. The author investigates these histories in the context of colonialism, independence, population movement, demographic growth, economic development, urbanization and violent conflict. This book is a contribution to the emerging field of historical epidemiology and makes use of archival sources previously unavailable to historians. It offers important insights to historians of Africa, as well as to students of medicine and public health. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011). 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

Christof Spieler, PE, LEED AP, is a Vice President and Director of Planning at Huitt-Zollars and a lecturer in Architecture and Engineering at Rice University. He was a member of the board of directors of Houston METRO from 2010-2018, where he oversaw a complete redesign of the bus network that has resulted in Houston being one of the few US cities that are increasing transit ridership. His Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit (Island Press, 2018) is a fascinating book about “How To” develop better transportation modes for US cities and urban areas. Christof has put assembled a dense amount of research with maps, diagrams, and images to demonstrate the successes and lessons learned from US transit. This is a must read book for anyone interested in urban planning, landscape architecture, and the design of our cities. 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 cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the initial reports of doctors that were concealed by Soviet officials to a careful examination of the way radioactive isotopes move through ecosystems, Brown’s research suggests the official death toll of 54 is an undercount—perhaps by more than three orders of magnitude. Even more haunting is her contentious claim that we still know too little about the ecological and health consequences of chronic exposure to low-dose radiation. Nuclear states were, in Brown’s view, insufficiently interested in studying such consequences in Chernobyl’s wake, at a time when they were being sued for reparations by communities living on landscapes on which they had spent decades dropping atomic weapons. In the end, Brown calls not for the shuttering of nuclear power plants or a moratorium on the construction of new ones. Instead, she hopes if we exact full look at Chernobyl’s worst, we can better plan for how to live in our contaminated world full of uncertainty and risk. Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her three previous books are Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (2013), and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2004). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. 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 Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene -- our period in time where there are no longer places on Earth untouched by humans -- is not only how much impact humans have had, but how much deliberate shaping humans will do. To help us understand the Synthetic Age, Dr. Preston details the emerging fields of study and accompanying technologies that may allow for a world designed by humans. He walks us through the advent of nano-scale technologies to the possibilities of deliberate marco-level ecosystem and atmospheric management. What’s more, we’re not only faced with a plethora of possibility, but journey through historical and ongoing debates regarding the ethics of it all. In fact, The Synthetic Age, is part history of emerging technologies, part mini-biography of all the key persons involved, and part window into the continued ethical debate among enthusiasts and precautionary voices. By the end, the reader is well informed on what lies ahead and is left with a charge – become engaged. After all, as Dr. Preston offers, the thing that should scare us the most about the Synthetic Age, is not the technologies themselves, but prospect of these world-shaping decisions not being made democratically. The questions that arise are too important to be left to the engineers. Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making. 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

Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Dawson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, introduces the idea of everyday science learning to critically engage with our understandings of science and the role of institutions in that understanding. The book challenges science centres and museums to move from participation policies and schemes, which have failed to significantly change the institution and its audience, to offer recognition and respect to diverse social groups. The need for change is grounded in detailed empirical work across a range of communities and organisations in London, with lessons that go well beyond science education and debates over the role of the museum. The book is essential reading for all social science and humanities scholars, as well as offering important insights for scientists too. 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

What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge UP, 2018), Lukas Engelmann uses AIDS atlases to show how different kinds of visualization mapped on to different ideas of how to control the disease. By retelling the history of the most important epidemic of the twentieth century—which persists to this day—through clinical photographs, epidemiological maps, and the icon of the HIV virus, Engelmann reminds us that what often gets referred to in a monolithic sense as “knowledge production” is leveraged in local epistemic, cultural, and political contexts with major consequences. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America. 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

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreens. In his excellent new book The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Robert A. Voeks explains that while rainforests may indeed have much to offer in the way of medically useful compounds, the fanfare for tropical miracle medicines and superfoods has been largely in err, counterproductive, and at times prejudicial. The jungle medicine narrative – the idea that indigenous shamans of the virgin rainforst hold the antidotes to many of humankind’s most pernicious woes – grew widespread in the 1970s after childhood leukemia was all but cured with the Madagascar periwinkle. But the subsequent efforts of pharmaceutical companies to accelerate innovation through bioprospecting had a much deeper historical precedent. Christopher Columbus earmarked West Indian medicinal plants on his first voyage and European imperialists attempted to more systematically appropriate native medical knowledge though the Enlightenment. By tracing this long colonial history, Voeks emphasizes that the hype of the last 50 years has been mostly just that; rather than reflecting the advancement of science, the jungle medicine narrative derives instead from racial ideologies in which indigenous peoples are associated with wild, virgin nature. It is little surprise, then, that blockbuster drugs have proven allusive. If the profits of appropriating medical knowledge have been overblown, so too, writes Voeks, has been the criticism. Examples of exploitative biopiracy can be found, but these are exceptions in what are mostly more complex and dynamic interactions between researchers and healers. We have much to gain from abandoning the jungle medicine narrative. Without its simplicities, stereotypes, and essentialisms perhaps we can come to a better appreciation the variety of ways that humans make knowledge about the natural world and without its promises of panaceas perhaps we can better understand how this knowledge has and can yet sustain communities in the face of environmental and political changes. Robert A. Voeks is Professor of Geography and the Environment at California State University, Fullerton. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. 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 easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of communication networks when President Obama appointed him to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 2013. Wheeler went from writing history to participating in it, making consequential decisions about net neutrality, cybersecurity, privacy, and the 5G mobile network. Wheeler is a former President of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and former CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. He was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame in 2003 and the Cable Television Hall of Fame in 2009. After leaving the FCC at the end of President Obama's second term, Wheeler finished his book, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future (Brookings Institution Press, 2019). He is currently a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Wheeler’s previous books include Leadership Lessons from the Civil War: Winning Strategies for Today's Managers (Doubleday Business, 1999) and Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War (HarperBusiness, 2006). 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 can feminist theory help address the climate crisis? In Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (Springer Verlag, 2019), Tina Sikka, a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Newcastle, considers the limitations of our current approach to climate change, and the means through which we can respond in more open, and thus more effective, ways. The book uses the example of geoengineering as a case study in responses to climate change, highlighting the closed nature of the discussions and decision making processes associated with the methods, modelling, and policy for this approach. Drawing on Longino’s Feminist Contextual Empiricist theory, the book offers both a critique of current practice and points to ways in which this could be reorientated towards a wider and more inclusive range of human needs and capabilities. Given the nature of the climate crisis the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the species survives. 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 information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. 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

Many have read and debated “How Political Science became Irrelevant” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of that piece is Michael C. Desch and much it comes from his recent book Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton University Press, 2019). Desch is the Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations at University of Notre Dame. In Cult of the Irrelevant, Desch traces the history of the relationship between the Washington and the academy across the 20th century. He shows that social science research became most oriented toward national security problem-solving during times of war and that scholars shifted to other topics during peacetime. This pattern has caused tension between national security planners and university-based researchers over independence, resources, and rewards. 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

Open conflict between religion and science may not be inevitable, but a germ of discord resides in some of the fundamental commitments of both; in this sense, war is always, potentially, just around the corner. In Galileo and the Conflict between Religion and Science(Routledge, 2016), Gregory Dawes uses the famous Galileo affair as a case study in the profoundly different attitudes to knowledge exhibited by religious and scientific communities—differences that will make conflict highly likely whenever scientific claims contradict the revealed truths of scripturally-based faiths. Dawes argues that these faiths postulate a divine source of knowledge distinct from human reason; hold that the knowledge derivable from this source is certain, not merely probable; and because of this, allow apparent conflicts between science and religion to be resolved in science’s favor only when conclusive justification for scientific claims is available—a condition that science does not, and arguably cannot, ever satisfy. The implications are clear: insofar as Christians hold to the traditional epistemic commitments of their faith, they will brook no criticism of their revealed truths, and under certain conditions may even seek to suppress science on God’s authority. 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 guest today is Kartik Hosanagar, the author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control(Viking, 2019). This is one of those rare books that I think everyone can read and I think everyone should read. In fact, knowledge of algorithms can in some sense be considered to be the literacy of the 21st century, and the author has written a book which can greatly held advance this type of literacy. If you want to become 21st-century literate, you should read this instructive and immensely enjoyable book. 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 crisis of global warming overwhelms the imagination with its urgency, yet more than ever we need patient, clear-sighted. and careful assessments of the possibilities for transforming the global political economy. Carbon(Polity, 2018) is an excellent addition to our evolving efforts to understand clearly where we are and where we need to go. Here, Kate Ervine provides an accessible and trenchant introduction to the severity of our situation and the international climate politics of the past 30 years. With critical insight and deep experience in the field, she describes how and why politics as usual has so far failed to prevent disaster as oil, gas, and coal interests continue to win the better ears of political leaders. Ervine delves deep into the technological fixes that will and must be part of the human response to climate change, but argues that ultimately preventing full-scale disaster will require more fundamental changes to global politics and economy. In this way, we can aspire not only to meet this challenge, also to achieve greater environmental justice and stronger democratic practices. Kate Ervine is Associate Professor of International Development Studies and Faculty Associate of the School of the Environment at Saint Mary’s University. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. 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

If you are reading this, you have probably run into the "Chicago" model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finance, macro or micro economics, or any other arena where theoretical abstractions about human behavior (generally but not exclusively about or derived from economics) have been turned into specific and often highly rigid and mechanistic policy guidelines. That's the Chicago model. In Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism(Princeton University Press, 2018), David Colander and Craig Freedman track the transition from the great Classical economists, who went to great lengths to make clear that their abstractions had little direct relevance to policy or would-be policy, to the 20th-century giants at the University of Chicago (Friedman, Stigler, Director), who found themselves responding to aggressive claims from other economists engaged in policy and politics, as well the broader context of ideological challenges to the free market system championed in the West. Their answer was a robust defense of the market and rejection of government involvement in almost all human affairs. Colander and Freedman stay more or less neutral on the ideology; their topic is the methodology. Is abstract economic thought fit for specific policy application or not? John Stuart Mill thought not. David Ricardo and Adam Smith engaged the issue. The Chicago School said sure to policy prescriptions, especially if they countered government involvement championed by economists of different leanings. Whether or not you are an admirer of the Chicago model, you will want to make sure you understand the methodological transition that brought their Ivory Tower views into your everyday affairs. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.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

Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 as part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series, is a genealogy of “psychiatric modernity,” of the invention and reinvention of modern mental illness in Beijing, 1901-1937. Focusing on the pivotal roles of the city’s police-run municipal asylum and the Peking Union Medical College, Baum chronicles the transition from eclectic but largely family-centered premodern apprehensions and treatments of “mad behaviors” to a more unified, biomedical, institutionalized view of madness that was intimately linked to questions of social control, political legitimacy, and the rubric of “mental hygiene.” Along the way, this history of neuropsychiatry’s penetration of the administrative and social fabric of modern China examines topics including disjunctures between state and civil actors concerning new understandings and practices around mental illness, as well as the “psychiatric entrepreneurs” who profited from—and sometimes helped to invent or define—new psychiatric conditions. Baum’s careful unearthing of these tensions and innovations sheds informative light on the ways in which madness was invented not just as a top-down administrative or biomedical-neuropsychiatric project but in negotiation with a wide range of actors. 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 climate change politics abound, Dr. Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (University of Georgia Press, 2019) cuts through it all to get to the core. What matters? People’s experiences with climate forces and how they are managing them now and planning to do so in the future. In his newest book, Van Noy decided not to follow the well-trodden path of trying to prove climate change science, nor did he bark about an irreversible tipping point. Instead, he provides us with a much-needed focus on communities and their responses, even if those communities dare not utter the words “climate change.” Van Noy treks across the beautiful southern landscape encountering unique culture and ecosystems, even coming face-to-face with an alligator. The best part, we get to go along with him. Throughout the book, we hear people talk about technology in different ways. For example, Van Noy discovers that creating oyster reefs off the Outer Banks of North Carolina may be more effective in slowing the rate of shoreline erosion than traditional technologies like dredging and installing hard structures like bulkheads, jetties, and groins. It’s hearing these experiences and stories that will help to shape the solutions of the future. Just as Van Noy ends with his son taking the wheel, soon another generation will come face-to-face with their own treacherous monsters. Thankfully, Van Noy makes a compelling case for learning and adapting. We can all find beauty—and perhaps new hope—in this wonderfully documented journey of adaptation to a changing climate. Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making. 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 been called the first Internet. In the nineteenth century, the telegraph spun a world wide web of cables and poles, carrying electronic signals with unprecedented speed. In order to connect the entire American continent, however, the telegraph had to cross western territory, which brought a host of challenges, conflicts, and uncertainties. What happened when the telegraph crossed the Mississippi River? What natural obstacles had to be overcome? What role did the telegraph play in the displacement of native tribes? James Schwoch answers these questions in Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier (University of Illinois Press, 2018). Schwoch is a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. He is also the author of The American Radio Industry and Its Latin American Activities, 1900-1939 and Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69, both also published by University of Illinois Press. Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nathanbierma.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

Is the existence of truth coming to a screeching halt? Does truth still exist? In Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. Thomas F. Gieryn takes time to explain how place informs truth. During this interview Dr. Gieryn offers an in-depth explanation of how history and biography have fed the narratives told about truth-spots. Dr. Gieryn presents us with the beliefs and claims that have developed Mount Parnassus, Delphi, Walden Pond, Seneca, Selma, Stonewall, courthouses, laboratories, and several other places across the globe as truth-spots. The advancement of technology has improved human travel and allows humans access to almost anywhere around the globe. An improvement in human mobility allows more people to access truth-spots that would otherwise be unavailable. This access paired with mass media has heightened human awareness to claims humans make about their accounts of truth-spots. Dr. Gieryn provides an account of how he views the automobile and other modes of transportation contributing to the creation and conservation of truth-spots. Dr. Tom Gieryn is Rudy Professor of Sociology Emeritis at Indiana University. Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the continuous process that occurs with placemaking at farmers’ market. 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

What accounts for the antagonism between Christianity and Darwinism? For Michael Ruse, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, the answer is simple: Darwinism is not just a robust empirical science, but also a secular religious perspective—hence, a clear rival to Christianity. In The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict(Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruse provides a concise intellectual history of that rivalry as it played out in their multifaceted and conflicting responses to war. With wide-ranging erudition, analytical acuity, and passionate moral engagement, Ruse surveys Christian thinking about war from Augustine to Barth and beyond, and Darwinian views from Darwin himself to Steven Pinker and Franz de Waal. Highlighting the ways in these which these traditions have evolved over the course of the 20th century, Ruse shows how their interaction has become increasingly complicated, making any simple narrative of straightforward antagonism inadequate. With the problem of war as pressing as ever, The Problem of War helps us better understand how both secular and religious attitudes towards war fundamentally reflect our conceptions of human nature and value, and offers a way for Christian and Darwinian perspectives to potentially find common ground. 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

Birth control, and the access to it, has continued to be a divisive issue in American political and social life. While birth control has almost become shorthand for “the pill,” a wide range of birth control methods have been in the American lexicon for the better part of its history. In his new book, Birth Control and American Modernity: A History of Popular Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Trent MacNamara explores the ways in which birth control was talked about, debated, and eventually accepted in the 20th century. Rather than having one centralized movement and leadership structure, MacNamara traces the multiple avenues in which birth control entered the lives of everyday Americans and gained social acceptance. Talking in conjunction with established historiography while also adding important perspectives, MacNamara’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in the birth control movement, social change, and large historical change. 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 Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race. Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences. In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression. Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home. A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States. 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 know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers from the get-go; rather, earlier efforts to expand mainframe computing as a public utility made elite information technology accessible to a wide audience. In A People's History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2018), Joy Lisi Rankin seeks to restore this broader perspective by situating the history of educational computing within the arc of U.S. social politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The result is a new perspective that challenges the business-dominated historiography of computing by explaining the convergence between the technical and social through efforts that began locally. As these projects expanded in scope, their advocates articulated a vision of "computing citizenship" throughout the rise of what we now call the "information age." Through a series of cases, beginning with timesharing at Dartmouth and the development of the BASIC programming language, through efforts by the state of Minnesota to make the fruits of its high-tech industry available to all, and ending with perhaps the most successful early computing network, the University of Illinois's PLATO project, Rankin makes a compelling case for a social history of computing. Historians of technology, education, and U.S. social history will all find a new resource—and perhaps a new timeline—in this beautifully researched and written book. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America. 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

With recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a considerable period of time. Among the most important dimensions of this are the changes that have occurred in the kind of information North Koreans have access to, and this is the subject of Jieun Baek's excellent North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press, 2016). Based on interviews with North Koreans who have settled in the South, Baek shows how everything from television programs to foreign affairs coverage and fashion has made its way into the country from the outside world. DPRK citizens today live in a much more informationally open society than the all-too-common ‘hermit kingdom’ label would imply. As well as getting a rich sense of the very personal stories that often underlie the movement of information, goods and cash into the country, we also come from Baek's work to understand the elaborate networks of smugglers, traders and intermediaries who facilitate its passage. Appreciating all of the complexity around North Korea's involvement in global flows, and how the Pyongyang government is responding to this, will surely be crucial whatever course this state and its people take over the coming months and years. 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

Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has long been disproven, but it is still a belief held onto by the anti-vaccine movement. This puts Dr. Hotez in a particularly powerful position to speak out. As the anti-vaccine movement grows and vaccine-preventable diseases continue to spread due to the misinformation spread by the movement, Dr. Hotez is on a mission to spread the truth. In the book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Dr. Hotez uses his knowledge of vaccine science and experiences as a parent of a child with autism to dispel the dangerous myths the ani-vaccine movement spread. This deeply personal and passionate book is a must read for any parent who is vaccine hesitant, parents of a child with autism, as well as health and science policy experts. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him 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 first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by the MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life―and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, “life through craft.” Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley. In Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Dr. Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life and reveals how some of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth. Adrienne Mayor is a Research Scholar in Classics and History and Philosophy of Science and Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is a folklorist and historian of ancient science who investigates natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions. Her research looks at ancient "folk science" precursors, alternatives, and parallels to modern scientific methods. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, the History Channel, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and National Geographic. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec 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

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is not simply about the border because, as the book makes clear, borders are in no way simple, and what Longo has pursued in his work is the complexity that encompasses the theoretical idea of the border but also how and why borders are more diverse in understanding than we often ascribe to them. Longo interrogates what a border actually is, noting that the space itself is not quite the thin line between states that we often assume it to be, but a physical area that is co-administered by bordering nations, often collaboratively, thus blurring the line or space of sovereignty. Threaded throughout the book is the ongoing question of what constitutes citizenship, since borders and citizenship are braided together though the structures of the state, and the considerations of who is and is not permitted membership within a state. Longo has also included a substantial exploration of the role of technology and data in the actual understanding of how border security works in practice. This section of the analysis is particularly important to consider because, according to Longo, the focus on the individual and their data profile, shifts the understanding of state sovereignty and the responsibility for definitions of citizenship. This book is incredibly topical in a variety of areas, not least in the way that it contributes to our thinking about the border itself as a space and as a concept, the role of the state, and the growing domain of data and technology and how they are shaping ideas of citizenship. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj. 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

Since its initial postulation by Karl Jaspers, the concept of an “axial age” in the development of human thought and religion has exerted enormous influence in the fields of history and sociology. In The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (Rutgers University Press, 2017), John Torpey develops the concept further by identifying two additional axial points in human history following upon the first, “moral” age. Torpey identifies the second of these ages the “material” age, which lasted from approximately 1750 until 1970. Characterized by unprecedented advances in economic development, it fueled enormous population growth and fostered a hedonistic attitude towards the very idea of consuming material goods. This was subsequently superseded by the final axial age, one in which the focus shifted towards thinking about thinking, and a greater emphasis upon sustainability rather than just consumption. As Torpey concludes, whether this age will address successfully the problems of our time remains to be seen, though success will be defined by drawing upon the achievements of the axial ages that preceded our current one. 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

Silicon Valley is understood to be one of the most fast-paced regions on earth, where innovation and upheaval are part and parcel of daily life. Imagine the challenge, then, when it’s your job to document and analyze the complex, intersecting, ever-changing cultures that comprise this famous region. In 2002, Dr. Jan English-Lueck tackled that very task in her book Cultures@SiliconValley. Now, fifteen years later, she has released a new edition that traces the decade and a half since that book came out, documenting what has changed in Silicon Valley and what has remained the same. In this episode I speak with Dr. English-Lueck about the revised Cultures@SiliconValley: Second Edition (Stanford University Press, 2017) discussing the original project as well and why and how she went about updating this important work. Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press, 2011). Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To suggest a recent title or to contact her, please send an email to [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

Regia Rini is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at the York University. Her research resides at the intersections of moral philosophy, psychology, and political epistemology. She also publishes popular work on topics concerning the social and political impacts of technology. She is currently working on a book about social media and democracy. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. 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

While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise (University of California Press, 2017), Nicholas Bauch explores the digestive system as a sociomaterial landscape developed from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as run by Dr. John Kellogg. Bauch wants to focus less on Kellogg the man, but rather on Kellogg’s ability to enroll actants (a la Latour) in his geographical digestive network. Kellogg’s religious background as a Seventh-Day Adventist, and his scientific and medical training, made purity and cleanliness his central goals at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Responding to the social and personal problems of indigestion and stagnation, Kellogg instituted a regime of tests, procedures and strict dieting (amongst other restrictions) to cure such prevalent ills. Kellogg thought that natural food was too impure a diet, so instead he turned to highly processed foods as developed in his experimental kitchen, which incidentally was how the first cereal flakes were made. Even with such plain and processed dieting, Kellogg found the human digestive system unable to process substances efficiently on its own. This problem led Kellogg to conceptualize an extended digestive system by developing a sewage system. Eventually, Kellogg became reliant upon industrial farming in rural Michigan. New developments in industrial equipment, such as grain-threshing machines, and industrial chemicals, to enrich the soil, provided a relatively clean and efficient food production process to fulfill the sanitarium’s needs. Before his death, Kellogg thus purified the nature/culture binary of food in favor of scientific approach, and engineered a collective digestive system across Battle Creek and nearby areas. While some of Kellogg’s ideas seem antiquarian to today’s standards, Bauch makes a compelling argument for why we can see Kellogg’s paradoxical influence on today’s US food production and consumption. While Kellogg railed against the dominant “natural” cuisine of his day in favor of a new approach to processed foods, the new food movements of today are decidedly critical of processed foods; while Kellogg wanted zero bacteria in the gut, today there are numerous products that are probiotics. What the new food movements gain from Kellogg is not his precise views, but rather his focus on the gut and the potential medicinal properties of food. A Geography of Digestion presents not only a geographical history, but a methodology for exploring sociomaterial processes as landscapes for future researchers to use in other contexts. As such, scholars interested in the relation between science and space, food studies, and materialist approaches to the body will find much use of this recently published work. Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek. 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

Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how information infrastructures shape the ways that survivors and observers know and learn about disasters. Finn uses three historical case studies – major earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989 – to reflect upon the development of private and public information services and how these succeed and fail to inform local and distant audiences about disaster realities. Infrastructure breakdowns make visible the material bases of information systems, from telegraph to newsprint to internet, and how this materiality shapes access relative to social and geographical boundaries. Documenting Aftermath is a very timely book, for as global warming promises more frequent catastrophes, large-scale social media and government information systems increasingly dictate how information moves. More than ever it is necessary to question this arrangement and the oversights, inequalities, and possibilities for abuse of power therein. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. 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 evolutionary success, according to co-authors Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, lies in our ability to acquire cultural wisdom and teach it to the next generation. Today, we follow social media bots as much as we learn from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. In The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (MIT Press, 2017), Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an internet of people and devices, after millennia of local, ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children learn more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could help solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast milieu of digitally stored information. Professor Alex Bentley is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. Follow him on Twitter @ralexbentley. Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @degreenot. 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