New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know it as today. As Ash explains, the marshes supported a population that took advantage of the lush grasses produced by the regular flooding to engage in animal husbandry, with flood control managed locally through appointed commissions of sewers. In the late 16th century, however, a combination of environmental change and political shifts led the royal government to support proposals for large-scale drainage projects that would turn the wetlands into farmlands. Though the plans’ advocates argued that drainage would improve the value of the lands in the region, the locals resisted such efforts to disrupt their ways of life through a variety of legal and extralegal means. In response the crown moved from efforts to develop consensus for the plans to asserting royal authority in environmental management in order to start the projects, beginning by the 1620s the first of a series of efforts that over the course of the next half-century drained many of the fens in the region. 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 do metrics rule the social world? In Metric Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) David Beer, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, outlines the rise of the metric and the role of metrics in shaping everyday life. The book outlines the core theoretical concepts, such as neo-liberalism, bio-power, and bio-politics, alongside the characteristics themes of metric power, including practices of making (in)visible, the social life of methods and data, and questions of agency. These theoretical discussions are set against the broad backdrop of the rise of big data, corporate power, social media, and algorithm based decision making. Metric Power is located within the study of broader social inequalities, meaning the book makes important reading for anyone concerned with how our daily experiences of technologies, organisations, and social institutions, are shaped, unequally, by the power of metrics. 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

Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had something that looked a lot like a disease or mental illness. The trouble was that doctors had no effective way to treat drug addiction. Their best idea–Federal “narcotics farms,” one in Kentucky and one in Texas–kept junkies clean, but only by keeping them away from the drugs those junkies craved. In that sense, they were no more effective than prisons, though in fairness drug farms offered various treatment regimens that enabled some addicts to get and stay clean. Other than locking them up, the medical establishment had no good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?” Essentially, then, junkies (who could not spontaneously “kick,” and a lot do) usually ended up in one of three places: on the street, behind bars, or dead. Enter Charles Dederich. In 1958, Dederich, a veteran of AA and ex-drug addict, decided that addicts should take their treatment into their own hands, much like Bill Wilson and Bob Smith had done with AA in the late 1930s. He took what he learned in AA, adapted it, and created a long-term residential “therapeutic community” expressly for addicts and run by addicts. He called it Synanon, and with it he started what Claire D. Clark calls “the recovery revolution.” In her terrific book, The Recovery Revolution: The Battle Over Addiction Treatment in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2017), Clark tells the story of Dederich and those who followed him (literally and chronologically) in trying to find a way to treat narcotics addiction. It’s a tale of ebbs and flows, successes and failures, enthusiasm and exhaustion lasting sixty years. Clark makes clear that the “recovery revolution” is not over by any means–we are still groping toward a good answer to the question “How do you cure someone of narcotics addiction?” 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

Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb account of the laying of submarine telegraph cables in the nineteenth century and the battles over them in the subsequent decades. Her book shows how expanding telegraph networks were instrumental in processes of capitalism, nation-building, and globalization. To track these grand developments, however, Muller reconstructs the network of people who built, managed, and fought over telegraph networks. She calls this eclectic collection of financiers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and politicians “actors of globalization.” Muller’s book is an historical kaleidoscope that shows the multi-faceted meaning of telegraphy. Her actors imbued telegraphy with hopes of world peace, of Weltcommunication (a predecessor of the global village idea), of a global electric union, and of bolstering the civilizing mission. Even if submarine telegraphy never achieved these aspirations, her book demonstrates just how culturally and socially significant this technology and these networks were to the pre-WWI world. Her book should be of interest to historians of capitalism, technology, international relations, Europe and the United States, along with anyone curious about the longer duree of globalization. Simone Muller is a principal investigator at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. 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 May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cleaning up this deactivated nuclear facility, once America’s largest producer of plutonium for atomic weapons, including the Nagasaki bomb. The U.S. government spends around $2 billion a year on cleanup efforts at Hanford, which have been the sole focus at the site since its reactors were shut down at the end of the Cold War. Melvin R. Adams was one of the first environmental engineers hired at Hanford as part of a small team focused on environmental issues. Beginning in 1979, his 24-year career at Hanford progressed alongside increasing government investment in more responsible management of nuclear waste and its disposal. In Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (Washington State University Press, 2016) Adams recounts engineering efforts to mitigate and control radioactive contamination and offers amusing anecdotes of the characters tasked with cleaning up the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the U.S. He also captures the paradox of Hanford, an artifact of the atomic age surrounded (and sometimes invaded by) wild terrain, natural beauty, and flourishing biodiversity. Atomic Geography offers personal and poetic insight into a complex, contested landscape. 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 better way to explore the history of media regulation than to go on a journey with the former chief economist of the FCC? Prior to introduction of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, the radio spectrum was in chaos. Broadcasters were attempting to drown out their rivals with powerful signals and the detrimental effect on the public interest was profound. Or was it? In The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone (Yale University Press, 2017), distinguished legal and economic scholar Thomas Hazlett challenges the notion that U.S. government intervention was vital to protect and save the industry. Hazlett argues that, for nearly a century, disruptive technologies, competition and alternative viewpoints have been quashed, by special interest groups claiming to know better. Hazlett blends his discussion on legislation with the rise of new technologies in a way that in accessible to everyone, even if you have no prior knowledge of media policy and the current landscape. This entertaining and fascinating read argues that, if you really want to achieve what is best for the public, you need to open the market to more competition. 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

Brian Clegg is one of England’s most prolific and popular writers on science. His latest work, The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe (Icon Books, 2017), covers Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and a whole lot more. Simply as an exposition of Einstein’s theories, the book is excellent its beautifully organized and delivered, with Clegg’s usual clarity and insight. But what makes the book transcend the usual work on this subject is that Clegg looks at relativity as a concept that can help us understand what distinguishes humanity as a species, and where our species fits into the Universe. Einstein himself would have enjoyed participating in a discussion of this fascinating topic, and may well have shared some of Clegg’s points of view. 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 summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. At first glance, these two events might appear to have little to do with one another. But in his new book, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017), Neil Maher examines the often contentious relationship between the NASA-led space program and the social movements of the era. Maher shows that civil rights activists questioned why the U.S. federal government spent billions on space exploration while many African Americans suffered in poverty and lived in dilapidated housing in the nation’s cities. He explains why New Left activists and environmentalists opposed NASA’s emphasis on big technology and the agency’s involvement with the military in Vietnam. And he describes how hippies with the counterculture rejected NASA’s techno-optimism and moved to communes to practice simpler living using smaller, appropriate technology. Neil Maher is associate professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of a previous book, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Rise of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press). Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and how to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books. 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 may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. In his new book Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hatchette Books, 2017), Lotto explains the mechanisms underlying our difficulty apprehending the world accurately, their implications for our relationships with one another and the world, and the creative potential that is unleashed when we embrace uncertainty and doubt. These issues come to life in our interview, as we discuss his discoveries in and out of the lab and their application to everyday experiences. Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist specializing in the biology and psychology of perception with more than 25 years experience conducting research on human perception and behavior and over 60 publications. He is Professor at University of London (Goldsmiths) and visiting scholar at New York University, as well as founder and CEO of the Lab of Misfits, a creative agency grounded in principles of perception. Follow Beau on Twitter. Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here. Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 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

Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York University Press, 2017), uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. The author chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields–from astronomy to physiology–to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. Britt Rusert received her Ph.D. in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on African American literature, American literatures to 1900, speculative fiction, the history of race and science, U.S. print cultures, and critical theory. She is currently working on a book-length research study of William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” a text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. She is also editing W.E.B. Du Bois short genre fiction with scholar Adrienne Brown. Their edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ fantasy story, “The Princess Steel,” was recently published in PMLA, the journal of Modern Language Association of America. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture is her first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. 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

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations (FAT), commonly known as face transplants, in order to offer a careful and fascinating study of the stakes for changing the face, and the changing stakes for the face. Troubling the indexical relationship between the face and character and reminding us that “[t]he self has always been a set of choices,” Pearl explores face transplantation as it relates to cosmetic surgery and whole-organ transplants, the cinema of the 1960s, television shows, and more. She carefully and sensitively takes us into the debates among surgeons, bioethicists, and journalists that circled the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005, and offers a way toward a philosophical approach that brings together Levinas with the kind of (Deleuzian) subjectivity that allows for individuality through constant change and understands the self to be constantly in a process of becoming. The final chapter of the book also situates the analysis within larger contexts of online subjectivities and work with facial and bodily manipulation by artists and performers. It’s sparklingly written and well worth a read! 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 we as consumers distinguish between the many different political medias? Eric Alterman is CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College. Eric is also a columnist for The Nation, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and the World Policy Institute in New York. He is the author of several books, including When Presidents Lie (Penguin 2004), Kabuki Democracy (Nation Books 2011), and most recently, Inequality and One City (Nation Books 2015). 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

Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, interest in maps waned while electronic coordinate systems emerged. But this was not solely a shift in technology, as William Rankin writes in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). The shift from maps to coordinate systems, and then eventually to GPS produced novel geographical subjectivities, navigational experiences and geopolitical arrangements. It was a shift in the meaning of territory itself. By day, William Rankin is an assistant professor of history at Yale; by night, he is an award-winning cartographer, whose work you can find here. Rankin has also set up a website to accompany the book, at which readers can see the books images, data, and bibliography. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. 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

Growing up in a geodesic dome is not a claim everyone can make, but author Kate Daloz can. Her book We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on a Quest for a New America (PublicAffairs, 2016) traces the path taken by many children of suburbia in the 1960s across the country who, like her parents, wanted to return to the land. Her subjects are Judy and Larry (her parents), the place they moved to, and the community they helped found. One of many interesting discoveries in this book is the fact that the back to the land movement took place around the country, within the same demographic, and during the same two-to three-year period in the 1970s. The causes? One was the growing concern with pollution described in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Another, which deserves fuller examination, is the apocalyptic mood stemming from the atomic threat of the 1960s. Baby boomers remember, with no small amount of incredulity, schoolroom bomb practice (“How would going under my desk protect me?”). The answers that adults had were not reassuring, or they were naive. The younger generation felt imperiled, and adults were responsible. Cities weren’t safe either. By returning to the land, a person could face an uncertain future in a community of like-minded people, in home they had built themselves and that expressed their values. So move this group did, but not all to become hippies. Some formed communes that rejected middle class baggage (monogamy, capitalism, child rearing). Others had advanced degrees, found professional work, and considered themselves “square.” Live in a rural setting and you adopt rural culture: community barn raising (even if it is a geodesic dome), self-generated work (Christmas trees farms, organic produce), shared resources. The author shows that the effects of these communities since the 1970s have permeated throughout American culture. A new kind of fresh food market like Whole Foods and community food co-ops got their starts in such settings. So did recycling (a mainstay of farming culture). Whatever the circumstances that brought them into being, the results have reached far beyond their boundaries and continue to expand our lives. Kate Daloz’s essays have been published in periodicals such as American Scholar. She is an adjunct professor in the MFA program at Manhattanville College and a consultant at the College Writing Center, Baruch College, CUNY. 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

Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on many years of ethnographic work, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a fascinating account of the changing relationship between making and understanding in the life sciences, and of the metamorphoses of life itself as an analytic object. The chapters of the book consider traditional ethnographic conventions as they manifest in the case of synthetic biology and reflect the forms of life being built by the synthetic biologists: religion, kinship, economy and property, labor, household, origin tales. Interludes between the chapters function as keyword entries, each probing earlier articulations of what it meant to be synthetic in different contexts, from the synthetic fabrics industry to Soviet synthetic dance to music, chemistry, and much more. It is a beautifully written and totally absorbing study. 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

Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his foundational contributions to cybernetics but led a career that spanned psychiatry, philosophy, neurophysiology, and engineering. Tara H. Abraham‘s new book Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (MIT Press, 2016) is the first scholarly biography of this towering figure of twentieth century American science. Abrahams careful tracing of McCulloch’s broad disciplinary traverses is grounded in explication of heady theories and mathematical models of the brain. The growing historical scholarship on cybernetics rests on a curious threshold: its subject matter, rife with outsized personalities and uncannily forward-looking ideas, is ever poised to remain more ineluctably fascinating than scholarly analysis can render. Rather than attempting to beat the cyberneticians at their own game–self-consciously or not becoming participant observers in the reflexive system described by “second-order” cybernetics–this rich portrait offers pointed and entertaining insight into the role of style, sociability, and mentorship in twentieth century scientific 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

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee, of the Burpee Seed Company, who sought to use radiation and chemical mutagens to accelerate the generation of new plant varieties, a process otherwise requiring painstaking, slow, and resource-intensive artificial selection. Helen Anne Curry‘s Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a fascinating history of biotechnology that documents the interplay between genetic research and agricultural production; genetic engineering avant la lettre, one is tempted to say, although botanist A. F. Blakeslee, who figures prominently in the narrative, made a failed attempt to promote the designation “genetics engineer” to describe his work. Through the lens of three different technologies–x-rays, the chemical colchicine, and atomic radiation–Curry shows how chromosomes and genetic mutations became sites of speculation for industrial agriculture and of experimentation for amateur plant breeders. She deftly restores the experimental station, the marketplace, and the garden to their proper place as sites of knowledge production, showing that landscape and lab were perhaps never so separable as our modern conceit might make them appear. This is part one of a series of new work on twentieth-century biotechnology–look out for further interviews featuring some great new work published by the University of Chicago 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

What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps us understand why that matters not just for how we understand outer space, but also for how we understand the Earth and ourselves. Based on 15 months of participant observation in 2009 and 2010 that included interviews, involvement in research projects, conferences, email exchanges, informal chats, and more, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016) guides readers through four different field sites in order to analyze the significance of four different activities of place-making therein: narrating, mapping, visualizing, and inhabiting. As we move from the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah (where Earth itself is transformed into a Martian place) to the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, to exoplanetary research at MIT, to Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, and more, we come to see how geological, digital, pedagogical, observational, and other tools help shape how we understand Mars, exoplanets, and the earth itself. It’s a fascinating study that will be of wide interest! 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 back cover of J. C. McKeown‘s new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather the discordant voices of the medical writers he excerpts. Speaking of Galen, Photius of Constantinople notes that the author tends to overload his writings with irrelevancies and digressions. Aristotle offers a characteristic caution, urging no one can become a doctor by reading books. These statements intimate the overall style and aims of this entertaining book: to approach the culture of antiquity through medical practice and belief. Though McKeown deliberately goes after the uncanny in selecting his excerpts to translate, one gets an overall impression of medicines remarkable continuity. Class, gender, and race were battlegrounds of medical legitimacy as much as they are now, and contemporary suspicion of medical advances was potent as ever. McKeown opts for evocation rather than scholarly interpretation of the medical cultures of antiquity, making this book entertaining reading for anyone interested in medicine’s long 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

Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language (University of Chicago Press, 2016) alternates between chapters that take us into the work and life of a fascinating scientist amid the Nazi rise to power, and bee vignettes that chart the transformations of bees in the popular and scientific imagination over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readers follow von Frisch from his early intimate connection with a small Brazilian parakeet that lived with the family while von Frisch was a boy, to his work on the sensory powers of fish and bees, to his work on bee communication and beyond. Munz introduces us not just to von Frisch’s texts, lectures, and experiments, but also to his work making films and his struggles to live and work under Nazi power. Munz’s book is both compellingly argued and a pleasure to read! 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

Joshua Cohen is a faculty member of Apple University, and is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the School of Law, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Political Science at Berkeley. He is the author of several influential academic articles, many of which are collected in Philosophy, Politics, Democracy(Harvard 2009), and The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (Harvard, 2011). Since 1991, Cohen has edited the Boston Review. 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

Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century earlier. In the new book, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Grace Davie shows that the poverty question was up for grabs even into the twenty-first century because of ongoing disagreements about how to measure poverty and to manage the racists assumptions that underwrote it. The book uses the idiom of co-production to show how scientists, activists and other knowledge-makers made and remade poverty in dynamic interaction with the people they sought to know. The book documents the thwarted efforts of scientists to accomplish their political goals as their expert knowledge was variously invoked, reinterpreted, and dismissed not only by white-supremacist governments, but also by social activists, black communities, and labor unions, which all used experts poverty knowledge for their own political ends. At issue was the question of what constituted credible evidence, and over more than a century debates continued to toggle between quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence, between statistics and stories. Through this analysis, Davie pushes back against the familiar claim that the technocratic state was on a steady march towards quantitative objectivity. Poverty Knowledge in South Africa is a serious, thorough book and it is indispensable for thinking through questions of social justice not only among historical actors but among scholars in the present day. 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 Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford University Press, 2017), Donna Freitas investigates the darker side of social media use and explains how pressure to appear happy and successful online can actually make people less happy in the real world. Using the stories of college students she interviewed as a framework, Freitas builds a dynamic argument and offers concrete tools for how teachers, parents, and society as a whole can help young people take control of their smartphones and of their own happiness. Donna Freitas is a Nonresident Research Associate at the University of Notre Dames Center for the Study of Religion and Society, and when she is not traveling for research she teaches in the Honors Colleges at Hofstra University. She is the author of Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as several novels for young adults. A regular contributor to Publisher’s Weekly, she has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 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

Amit Prasad is widely admired for using Postcolonial Studies to explore questions about science, technology and medicine. In Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT, 2014), Prasad looks at the linked histories of MRI research and development in India, UK, the USA to show how the patterns of exclusions created by imperialism continue to shape the topography of high-tech medicine. Pushing back against diffusion of science narratives, Prasad shows how the current story of the West (read: USA) as the center of MRI research and development was far from inevitable. The story was retrospectively, collectively created and has had the effect of obscuring the importance of transnational networks, idiosyncratic federal laws, corporate investments, and everyday habits of imagination in the production of medical technology. Prasad himself resists simple dichotomies because, as he writes, “The issue here is not simply the elision of the history of science in the non-West or its entrapment in within Eurocentric temporarily, but the very categories that the history of science takes as its objects of inquiry (80).” 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 did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the nature and significance of French auditory culture in the years between the two world wars? These are two of the central questions that Rebecca Scales pursues in her new book, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). This is not a book focused on the institutional history or content of French radio during this period, however. Rather, Scales examines closely a range of ideas about sound and the development of what she calls the “radio nation,” a space of listening, cultural identity, and citizenship. Access to the airwaves, the “right to listen,” and the question of whether radio did or did not reflect the nation and its different members became vital areas of discussion and debate in the 1920 and 30s. Radio and the Politics…explores the dynamic history of radio at a critical juncture in modern French political and cultural history. Its chapters explore the perspectives of sound producers and consumers, including broadcasters, politicians, educators, medical professionals, radio amateurs, disabled veterans, and a variety of other listeners throughout France. The book considers the broad space of the radio soundscape from Paris to the provinces, and the movement of sound waves beyond/across the borders of “metropolitan” France, in Algeria, and to and from other nations. Along the way, the book delves into a range of themes: postwar recovery, class and political differences, the relationship of individual bodies to the national body, tensions between public and private spaces and interests, and state control and surveillance. At once a history of the senses and technology, of French politics, culture and everyday life, this compelling book will be of great interest to readers (and listeners!) across multiple fields. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]). *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.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

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answers to these questions depend, apparently, on where you are, which is to say what culture you were born and raise in. Alcoholism and treatments for it in Country A might be very different from alcoholism and treatments for it in countries B, C, and D. Alcoholism is, well, relative. This is one of the many thing I learned from reading Eugene Raikhel‘s fascinating book Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic (Cornell University Press, 2016). An anthropologist, Raikhel tells us the tale of how the Soviet discipline of “narcology”–the diagnosis and treatment of addiction– evolved during Soviet times and how it adapted after the USSR fell. I won’t spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say that Russians treated and continue to treat alcoholism quite differently that we do in the U.S., though that’s changing (AA has arrived in Russia, something we also discuss). Listen in. 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

Social Media rewards snap judgments and blind conviction. Michael Lynch finds this troubling. Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Humanities Institute a University of Connecticut. His research concerns truth, public discourse, and the impact of technology on democratic society. 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

Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produced shadows and reflections. Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) beautifully places Kepler’s optics into conversation with the art and literature of the period. It looks carefully at the crucial ways that changing notions of visibility set Kepler’s optics up as the cornerstone to his radical Copernican astronomy as Kepler made three moves that helped him bridge the visual gap between the heavens and its observers: (1) He defined light as a mathematical body, (2) He showed how instruments of observation could be manipulated mathematically to achieve exact representation of distant and almost invisible heavenly occurrences, and (3) He helped develop a new language for scientific observation by reformulating the relationship of mathematics to phenomena. In the course of his elegant analysis of how and why this all played out, Chen-Morris also guides readers through the relationships between Kepler’s ideas, Shakespeare’s writings, Renaissance painting, and more. Its a fascinating 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

What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the criteria of the sciences amenable to healing practices that are touted for their focus on singularity, rather than uniformity? Colleen Derkatch‘s Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016) investigates how boundaries between traditional and novel are erected at the level of medical rhetoric. Derkatch analyzes both expert and popular literature on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), an umbrella term designed to encompass homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine, among other things. Demand for alternative treatments by patients has produced an uncertain situation in which clinical frameworks are used for practices traditionally seen as being outside the realm of biomedicine. Through concerted engagement with different genres of medical communication, Derkatch’s rhetorical cultural approach allows the reader to see the extent to which the boundaries of what counts as biomedicine or not rest on conceptions of evidence and categorization schemes promoted by allopathic medical professionals. With a keen eye turned to communication strategies and assumptions, Derkatch shows the subtle ways in which the norms of biomedicine are challenged and strengthened by attempts to reduce other treatments to processes that can be evaluated on the basis of standards of evidence and efficacy. This is the second of a pair of interviews on alternative medicine: for a historical consideration of naturopathy as an alternative to allopathic medicine, look out for my interview with Susan Cayleff on her book, Nature’s Path. 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 gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry by the 1970s? In Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Marie Hicks, an Assistant Professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology, offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of this radical social change. Based on rich and detailed archival and interview sources, packed with illustrations and individual narratives of the 1940s to the 1970s, the book demonstrates how the rigid class and gender hierarchies of British society were recreated and reproduced in attempts to modernise the state through technology. As the book’s conclusion notes, “all history of computing is gendered history,” meaning the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how we have the computing and technology industries we have today. The first chapter of the book can be read here, and you can learn more about the book and Dr. Hick’s work on her twitter and on the book’s twitter feed. 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

One of the most interesting, but largely overlooked silent films, is Haxan, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Using documentary methods as well as reenactments, he presented a study of witchcraft hysteria, particularly as it compared to post-World War I scientific and psychological studies. In their book, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (Fordham University Press, 2015), anthropologists Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers examine the film and its importance to the understanding of the concept of the witch. 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

Susan Cayleff’s Nature’s Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers a fascinating alternative to the development of allopathic orthodoxy in the twentieth-century United States. By following Naturopathy from its nineteenth-century origins in the popular health movement through debates in the 1970s, Cayleff sheds light on an enduring critique of the vision of medicine institutionalized by Progressive public health reformers. The holistic medicine proffered by naturopaths drew from a variety of sources and lacked a common theoretical basis; it required closer collaboration between practitioner and patient for gradual cures in the face of medical complexity, a scenario reminiscent of an increasing portion of today’s medical practice, as Robert Aronowitz points out in Risky Medicine. However, Cayleff shows not merely a transhistorical struggle of self-determination, but rather shifting cultural and political grounds on which such different ideological battles were waged and heterodox practices staged. Notably, she highlights how naturopathy empowered female practitioners to work in line with their politics, and gave them access to medical power precluded by the medical establishment. This book is a great read for historians of medicine, countercultural movements, and professionalization. This is the first of a pair of interviews on alternative medicine: for a rhetorical approach to how notions of evidence are invoked to demarcate between alternative and mainstream medical practice, look out for my forthcoming interview with Colleen Derkatch on her book, Bounding Biomedicine. 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 wish to transcend one’s mortality, and the anxiety associated with being unable to do so, are universal human experiences. People deal with these in their idiosyncratic ways, often by transgressing rules and boundaries that serve as the parameters of civilized human coexistence. Technological advances expand our capacities for transcending our limitations, especially when they allow us to objectify other humans and humanize our objects. Such forms of perversion are the subject of Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco’s new book, The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2016). In my interview with Knafo, we explore her redefinition of perversion and her view on its current and future manifestations and what it implies for the survival of humanity. Danielle Knafo is a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University and faculty member and supervisor in New York University’s postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She has lectured internationally and published extensively, including her prior book, Dancing with the Unconscious, published in 2012 also by Routledge. Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here. Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. 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

Kathleen McAuliffe‘s This is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society (Mariner Books, 2017) unveils the world of parasites. From the influence of parasites on the ability to transform rats brains to be easily susceptible to cat predation to altering web formation structures in spiders, parasites hold the power to control an animals behavior. McAuliffe illustrates the ways in which parasites have had influence in human cognition and behavior, as well, with examples of impulsivity and reckless driving. Parasites may have compounded influence in the greater dimensions of culture, where strong scientific research suggests the interplay between parasites and prejudice, political affiliation, sexual attraction, gender bias, and morality. The forgotten emotion of disgust and the avoidance of disease may be at the heart of this interplay as our innate mechanisms drive the impulse for survival. This book illuminates the role of parasites and challenges our behavioral responses to critically think and question social norms. Most importantly, McAuliffe offers the vantage point from a parasite-centric view, a voice that has been previously unheard-until now. Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree for Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. 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

Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively offer a fascinating window into the correspondence of two brilliant early modern writers and intellectuals. Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) traces the relationship between Sarrocchi, a Naples-born writer, famous for her salons and for writing an epic poem that emphasized the significance of women as knowers of the natural world, with Galileo. The letters feature three major themes: Sarrocchi consulting Galileo for writerly advice as she revised her epic poem, Sarrocchi’s efforts to defend Galileo’s discoveries to the scientific community in Italy, and Sarrocchi and Galileo’s shared interest in judicial astrology and natal charts or nativities. The slim volume will be a resource not just for readers and researchers but also for classroom discussion, where the letters could serve as great primary sources to feature in a number of course contexts. Enjoy! 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

On the frontier of feminist technoscience research, Ericka Johnson’s collaborative project Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explores how the gendered body is produced in and by medical technologies. From an Alzheimers disease study that relied on the process of sexing flies, to the pharamceuticalized prostate, to the medical experiences of transgender children, Part 1 uses the body as subject to disrupt the binaries of male/female, human/non-human and healthy/unhealthy. In Part 2, titled Creating Subjectivities for Patients in Advertising, the book expands its analysis to the commercial images and discourses used in marketing and prescribing relational subjectivities. Observing the way pharmaceuticals insert themselves into familial and romantic relationships, the HPV vaccine is used as an example of drugs as non-human participants in the parent-child partnership. Through an international lens, Part 3 provides three comparative case studies of the way that knowledge about HPV is produced in Columbia, the U.K. and Austria. In perhaps the most poignant contribution to feminist research agendas, across disciplines, Johnson concludes our interview by explaining her unique metaphor of refraction. Noting the notorious difficulty of seeing and articulating discursive power structures, Johnson recognises that the ability to articulate what is being said to us or about us, and identifying who is doing that saying, is a cornerstone to feminist scholarship as it allows us to identify against whom can we protest, deny, and challenge. Her metaphor of refraction is thus a way of thinking about material objects, once they have become tropes, such as the HPV vaccine across national contexts, and being able to see it as a prism that refracts the discourses within which it was originally entangled. This image of refraction forces us to think of a material object like the HPV vaccine as creating a spectrum of visible actors, concerns and values. And it is these visible things that help us to articulate discourses – which then allow us to protest and possibly erase their problematic power structures. Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. 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

Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century to control the cinchona tree and its bark, and traces the history of quina as a product of local, imperial, and commercial networks in [the] eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Science and empire were deeply intertwined in the Spanish Atlantic, and Crawford offers a window into the epistemic culture produced by Spanish colonial governance and resulting encounters across and within the Andean and Atlantic contexts. Part One of the book looks carefully at what it meant to know nature in the early modern Atlantic World. It traces the transformations of quina from a local Andean remedy into a botanical commodity and an imperial natural resource from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, showing how these transformations resulted from the bark’s integration into Andean, Atlantic, and imperial networks of circulation of people, texts, objects, and images. Part Two of the book explores several key conflicts in the late eighteenth century that emerged as the Spanish Crown tried to assert greater control over the tree and its bark. It’s a story that will be of interest to the histories of science, medicine, natural history, and early modernity! 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

Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. Through a range of examples as broad as the theoretical scope of the book, Alaimo analyzes political responses to climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, and plastic pollution, as well as the epistemologies that have shaped our understanding of these crises. Simultaneously, this series of essays also explores the intimacies and entanglements of human and non-human subjectivities in the Anthropocene, arguing for a new materialist engagement with the world. Despite the gravity of her subject matter, Alaimo’s examples and writing are often playful. This not only echoes the complexity and occasional contradictions of environmental politics but also makes Exposed a very enjoyable read. Drawing on examples from film, fiction, poetry, scientific writing, art, and activism, Alaimo considers the role pleasure has played and could play in various environmentalisms and environmental engagements. Though it bridges and contributes to scholarly work in the fields of environmental studies, feminism, materialism, and posthumanism, this book is much more than a theoretical exploration; it calls on us to rethink what it means to be human and act accordingly. Alaimo demonstrates interconnections between queer animals, naked protesters, melting glaciers, and interested scholars while providing thoughtful guidance on how to understand and respond to the environmental predicaments to which we are all, to varying degrees, exposed. 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 do we do sociology in the digital era? In Digital Sociologies (Policy Press, 2016) Jessie Daniels, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, Karen Gregory a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, have brought together a wealth of scholarship to explore the challenge of digital. The book engages with a range of theoretical questions, including challenging the digital/traditional sociology binary, the role of institutions, digital’s impact on eduction, the racialized practices of Twitch, the meaning of motherhood, the quantified self, the question of the body, and the digital sociological imagination. The eclectic range of scholars, offering perspectives from across the academic life course and deploying examples from across the world, create an important intervention into our understanding of this emerging, and perhaps as a result of this book, established, field of study. Ultimately the book is a call for a new community of scholars to engage with this most important element of contemporary 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

John Hadley’s Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals (Lexington Books, 2015) presents a novel approach to addressing habitat and biodiversity loss: extending liberal property rights to wildlife. Hadley argues that a guardianship system could effectively protect the rights of wild animals to resources in the territories they inhabit. In turn, the guardians of particular animals or a particular species could challenge land use plans that might threaten the ability of these animals to meet their basic needs. Though grounded in philosophical theory, Hadley’s focus is pragmatic. He is interested in producing an institutional design that could be effectively incorporated into policy and practice. His proposal also aims to solve some key problems in wildlife conservation. It bridges the seemingly divergent interests of environmentalists focused on the protection of the collective (e.g., ecosystems) and those of animal rights proponents focused on the survival of individuals. Here, common ground is found in habitat protection, a shared value that reconciles the differences between these groups. Hadley’s proposal also ensures animals become vocal stakeholders in land use and conservation initiatives, able to compete with agendas that might be incompatible with animal or habitat protection. It also begins to overcome the anthropocentrism that (perhaps inevitably) pervades conservation practice. By determining animal property rights boundaries on the basis of territorial behavior, Hadley’s proposal privileges animal actions and interactions over human-centric interests. Although their rights would be advocated by a human guardian in a person-centered legal system, if implemented, this theory would ensure the interests of wild animals are taken seriously. This is a book of critical relevance to those interested in issues of human-wildlife conflict, biodiversity protection, and human/nonhuman relationships. 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

Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured professor who resigned from his academic post to earn a degree from the world-renowned University of Southern California film school. As a documentary filmmaker, Olson has sought to fuse critical thinking and Hollywood storytelling. And as the author or co-author of three books, Olson has shown how scientists and academics in general can improve their communication skills and harness the power of narrative to improve their writing and presentations. Narrative is an indispensable tool that geographers and others can use to communicate with our students and the general public. Yet Olson also shows how we can hone our narrative intuition and use our story sense to write better abstracts, articles, and grant applications. Houston, We Have a Narrative has gems of wisdom for physical geographers, human geographers, and academics of all stripes. Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and ways to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books. 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

Matthew L. Jones’s wonderful new book traces a history of failed efforts to make calculating machines, from Blaise Pascal’s work in the 1640s through the efforts of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, incorporating an account of both the work and relationships of scholars and artisans, and their reflections on the nature of invention. Innovative in its approach and its form, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers a thoughtful and beautifully-written history of technology that offers an important perspective on a division between two poles of writing the history of technology: “the collective, deterministic account of inventive activity and the individualistic, heroic, creative account (7).” In Jones’s hands, we are offered a third way of understanding cultural production in early modernity, one that did not bifurcate between imitation and originality, social and individual making, or design and production. Central to the story is the history of efforts to mechanize the process of carrying ones in addition, and this fascinating problem persists as a thread through many of the projects discussed in the book. On the pages of Reckoning with Matter, readers will not only enjoy a compelling account of machine calculation through the nineteenth century, but will also find the story of a frog that tears out the eyes of a fish, a man who designed machines for making breakfast, and discussions of the significance of credit and intellectual property, modern programming, sketching, imitation, and debates over the nature of thinking. Highly recommended! 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

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-1930, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is structured around five case studies that each describe the incorporation of a particular technology into Ayurvedic practice, resulting in a braiding together of strands of sciences and the production of a new body image. Mukharji develops and engages a number of key concepts in the work, significantly introducing a notion of physiograms (materialized physiologies or materialized body metaphors, a development of John Tresch’s notion of cosmograms) and a way of thinking about the braiding of strands of science and medicine. It’s a beautifully written and compellingly argued work that will be of interest to a wide range of readers of the history of science and medicine! 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 year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has had record high temperatures, leading one climate researcher to warn the region is unraveling. Yet for the most part, these climate-related events and dire warnings from climatologists have fallen on deaf ears, especially in the United States, where climate-change denial is firmly entrenched, especially among Republican lawmakers. But why? In his recent book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (University of Washington Press, 2016), historian Joshua Howe seeks to answer this question. Howe traces the history of climate change from a scientific oddity in the late 1950s to a topic of fierce debate among politicians and environmental activists who fear that failure to tackle global warming will lead to stronger storms, fiercer wildfires, and rising seas. Scientists knew the most about the nuances of climate change, yet seemed unable to convince policy makers or the public to tackle the problem. Howe sees the climatologists narrow focus on the science of global warming as a partial reason for the inaction. Part history of science, part history of environmentalism, Behind the Curve is a provocative book exploring one of the most vexing issues of our time. Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson is also a former visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West and a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. 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

For the start of 2017, Dave Karpf is back on the podcast with his new book, Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Karpf is associate professor of media and public affairs at The George Washington University and author of The MoveOn Effect also published by Oxford. Much of the attention paid to digital politics is about speech. What did Donald Trump say on Twitter today? And who responded? Karpf’s book suggest that that attention has overlooked the other side of digital politics: listening. In Analytic Activism, Karpf focuses on how organizations use the digital footprints we all leave online to inform strategy. A/B testing and digital petitions allow political groups to hear what constituents care about and then later to use that information to mobilize and drive action. 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 The Age of Sharing (Polity Press, 2016), the sociologist and media scholar Nicholas A. John documents the history and current meanings of the word sharing, which he argues, is a central keyword of contemporary media discourse. John interrogates the rhetorical work that sharing does as a practice, a form of communication and a business model. He argues that in the last decade, sharing has come to dominate the way we think about our online activities, and indeed, the way we live. He demonstrates, how the therapeutic culture that defined the twentieth century, now shapes how we perceive and discuss our personal and economic interactions both online and offline. Moreover, it was the therapeutic discourse that informed and energized the shift from sharing as a distributive practice of material objects to the ethos of sharing as caring. John combines a close analysis of social media sites such as Facebook and businesses such Airbnb with a linguistic analysis of the genealogy of the concept of sharing, the unknown history of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the subculture of hackers to explain the ascent of sharing as a daily practice and coveted social currency. Nicholas A. John is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and the impact its activists had on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal 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 Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Scott Selisker offers readers a fascinating new history of American anxieties along the borderland between the machine and the human mind. Demonstrating the way that a variety of fields influence and coproduce one another, Human Programming follows the metaphor of the automaton through news media, fiction, psychology, cybernetics, film, law and back again. Along the way, Selisker engages academic work on labor automation, posthumanism, affect and emotion, and techno-Orientalism. Through careful interpretation of books on American soldiers returning from the Korean War, the trial of Patty Hearst, the narrative logic of Snow Crash and Blade Runner, the central conflicts of Homeland and the Manchurian Candidate, and the baffled news reports on John Walker Lindh, Human Programming “offers a new literary and cultural context for understanding the human automaton figure” as it has appeared and reappeared over the half century, and explores how the metaphor of the automaton has “shaped American conversations about the self and other, the free and unfree, and democracy and its enemies, since World War II” (7, 8). Beginning with a prehistory in WWII propaganda, this timely study comes up to a present in which we replace our employees with touchscreens, rely on machine learning to translate our conversations, use proprietary software to plot our routes, and deny the human freedom of our fellow citizens. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carls work at carlnellis.wordpress.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

Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though they were misled by numbers intended to lend a modicum of certainty to the complex calculus of modern life. But while election predictions come and go, the “empire of chance” lays siege to more and more aspects of daily life, alongside increasing possibilities for technological intervention–nowhere, perhaps, is this more clear than in medicine. Robert Aronowitz’s Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is both a nuanced and accessible exploration of the historical transformation of risk in modern biomedicine. Through a series of case studies and broader reflections on the ways in which modern medicine has become “risky,” Aronowitz teases out salient features of an increasingly complex system of interventions and indicators. In the book, Aronowitz defines three key aspects of our modern “risky medicine.” The first one discussed is a converged experience of risk and disease, exemplified in cancer screening in which bodies-at-risk can be subject to similar treatment and prevention regimes as those marked by a chronic condition or trying to prevent remission. Another aspect is the notion of risk reduction standing in place of efficacy for the psychological and social work it performs, which provides some explanation for the costliness of American medicine relative to the outcomes it achieves. Finally, Aronowitz argues that risk interventions have been driven by expansion of the medical market, and calls upon policymakers to become aware of the control pharmaceutical companies have in the generation of new health risks and the data to support them. One way of understanding Aronowitz’s contribution is to contextualize it within the trajectory of sociological work on risk in modern society. Originally published in 1986 (in German), Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity was a watershed book for the understanding of modernity and technological change. Much of Beck’s account is concerned with environmental risks; the book came out on the heels of the Three Mile Island and Bhopal disasters. However, Beck’s take on medicine is somewhat lacking. Beck presciently calls attention to the “reflexive market strategy” of pharmaceutical companies, in which they profit from self-produced risks–echoing the third aspect of “risky medicine’–but misses its more immediate social and psychological dimensions, stating merely that the rise of chronic disease is evidence of a divergence of diagnosis and therapy. Aronowitz’s case studies suggest even more immediate consequences at hand. The importance of Risky Medicine is evident in how it disaggregates the changing landscape of health and medicine from an inexorable creep of modernity, spelling out the logic subjecting more bodies to greater interventions and recovering the relationship between experience and an ambivalent, anticipatory social order. 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 it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fields ranging from history of medicine to East Asian history. It is easy to see why. Set in the Chinese treaty port of Tianjin, the book follows Chinese elites over the tumultuous decades that spanned the middle of the nineteenth century to World War Two. Chinese elites in Tianjin engaged British, French, and, importantly, Japanese imperialists and traders in their midst, creating what Rogaski thinks is best called a “hypercolony.” Simultaneously, Chinese elites pressed their own nation-building projects, working to distinguish themselves both from the foreigners and also from the masses they ruled. To do so, they adopted, adapted, and cultivated particular ways of building a modern nation in the final years of the Qing dynasty, which hung, importantly, on practices of hygiene. These ideal ways of being hygienic, thus modern, fundamentally rearranged the urban landscape of Tianjin and the practice of everyday life. Rogaski writes wonderfully and leads the way through tricky historical evidence, pointing out how Chinese elites modernizing projects were apparent in the changed meaning of weisheng. In the early nineteenth century, the term referred to individual ways of guarding health and a century later had come explicitly to refer to government-directed public hygiene measures–“hygienic modernity”–without ever shedding its earlier inflections. The book shows that modernity is not so much a time period, but an aspiration and a process–always incomplete, seemingly right around the washroom corner. Creatively designed and insightfully analyzed, this study defies any simple binaries of colonizer and colonized, or of indigenous and scientific medicine. Rogaski wears her theory lightly and has plenty new to show–not least to historians of medicine who may be most familiar with the stories of colonial medicine from Africa and India. Ruth Rogaski is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and generously agreed to a live faculty-student interview as part of a collaborative final project for Laura Starks course History of Global Health. To learn more about using the New Books Network for classroom projects, see Laura Stark’s essay “Can new media save the book?” in the Fall 2015 issue of Contexts. 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 is India’s burgeoning IT industry reshaping the country? What types of capital is IT attracting and what formations does it take? How are software engineers managed? What are their goals and aspirations? How are they perceived by their foreign clients? In her new book, Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (Oxford University Press, 2016), Carol Upadhya tackles these questions and many more. Based on extensive research in Bangalore – the large southern Indian metropolis that has led the IT buzz – the book explores the way capital, work and class are remade within the “new India.” Combining deep, rich and detailed accounts of life within “software factories” with a theoretical eclecticism and clear writing style, the book is a truly wonderful anthropological account of an offshore economy. Carol Upadhya is Professor in the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, India. 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