New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Over the last thirty years, humanity has discovered thousands of planets outside of our solar system. The discovery of extraterrestrial life could be imminent. This book explains how such a discovery might impact Islamic theology. It is the foundational reference on the subject, comprising a variety of different insights from both Sunni and Shi'i positions, from different Muslim contexts, and with...

Listen to this interview of Brandon Brown, Professor of Physics at the University of San Francisco. We talk about factoring in both message-sender and -receiver to your writing for STEM. Brown is the author of Sharing Our Science: How to Write and Speak STEM (MIT Press, 2023). Brandon Brown : "I've seen so many different scientists and communicators, including Nobel Laureates, all the way to grad...

Exploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Ruth A. Morgan reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organisations have engaged in diplom...

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the afterma...

Listen to Episode No.9 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois; and joining us, as well, is James Gee, Regents Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University...

How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players. Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump: The...

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (E...

Long before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content via informal networks that crisscrossed transnational boundaries. Eleanor Patterson’s fascinating cultural history explores the distribution of radio and TV tapes from the 1960s through the 1980s. Looking at bootlegging against the backdrop of mass med...

Are you into the end of the world? Well, have we got the guest for you. In this episode, Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel interviews Zachary Loeb, assistant professor of history at Purdue University, about his work. On his faculty page, Loeb describes himself as “interested in the idea that humanity’s romance with technology has the species (and the planet) on a course that may lead to catastrophe...

Are you into the end of the world? Well, have we got the guest for you. In this episode, Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel interviews Zachary Loeb, assistant professor of history at Purdue University, about his work. On his faculty page, Loeb describes himself as “interested in the idea that humanity’s romance with technology has the species (and the planet) on a course that may lead to catastrophe...

"Luddite" has become an insult and Brain Merchant wants to change that. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (Little, Brown, 2023) tells the story of when machines starting taking human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work--and how it explains the power, threat,...

Air conditioning aspires to be unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. From offices and libraries to contemporary art museums and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body that does not have to reckon with temperature. At the same time...

Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage (U California Press, 2023) explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from...

Maps go far beyond just showing us where things are located. All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mike Duggan is an exploration of how maps impact our lives on social and cultural levels. This book takes readers on a journey through the fascinating history of maps, from ancient cave paintings and stone carvings to the digital interfaces we rely on today. But it’s not just abou...

Infographics and data visualization are ubiquitous in our everyday media diet, particularly in news—in print newspapers, on television news, and online. It has been argued that infographics are changing what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century—and even that they harmonize uniquely with human cognition. In this first serious exploration of the subject, Murray Dick traces the cultura...

Showing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, Apples and Orchards since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Joanna Crosby takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the importance of the apple as a symbol of both tradition and innovatio...

In this episode, Peoples & Thing host Lee Vinsel interviews engineer, businessman, consultant, author, contributing editor at IEEE Magazine, and former P&T guest Bob Charette about his research method. Charette really excels at finding great and telling numbers for his pieces on technology, business, and public policy, including in his 12-part IEEE Magazine article series and now ebook, The EV Tra...

Can brands really support positive social change? In Big Brands are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture (U California Press, 2024), Francesca Sobande, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores this question by considering the morality of contemporary brands in contemporary, digitial, culture. The book offers a rich set of case studies, ranging...

Artificial intelligence may be the most transformative technology of our time. As AI's power grows, so does the need to figure out what--and who--this technology is really for. AI Needs You argues that it is critical for society to take the lead in answering this urgent question and ensuring that AI fulfills its promise. Verity Harding draws inspiring lessons from the histories of three twentieth-...

A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization's greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw's blade should make a cut, a p...

In Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke UP, 2023), Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions u...

After WAY too long a hiatus, Peoples & Things is back! GET EXCITED!! In this episode, host Lee Vinsel interviews Christy Spackman, Assistant Professor of Art/Science with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University, about her recent book, The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of...

Through a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commerci...

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have...

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry―the struggle to control artificial intelligence. A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives―and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, a...