New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

The contentious science of phrenology once promised insight into character and intellect through external ‘reading’ of the head. In the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, popular phrenologists — figures who often hailed from the margins — performed their science of touch and cranial jargon everywhere from mechanics’ institutions to pu...

In Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ari Ezra Waldman exposes precisely how the tech industry conducts its ongoing crusade to undermine our privacy. With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Waldman reveals that companies don't just lobby against privacy law; th...

Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn take such an ineffable thing — a tool for personal revelation, cosmic oneness, spiritual enlightenment, whatever people have called it — and make it just another product in late stage capitalism? From something that is potentially radical, to something that is brutally commodified, instrumentalized, hyped, and...

Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of...

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society. Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge proper...

On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways’ celebrated seaplane—the Yankee Clipper—took off from New York and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew.  In her new book, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper ...

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning a...

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. Gary Smith's book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, t...

What do computers, cells, and brains have in common? Computers are electronic devices designed by humans; cells are biological entities crafted by evolution; brains are the containers and creators of our minds. But all are, in one way or another, information-processing devices. The power of the human brain is, so far, unequaled by any existing machine or known living being. Over eons of evolution,...

The relationship between madness and video games has been notoriously tense. In an abundance of titles, stereotypes and stigmatisations can be found—not only regarding the mentally ill, but also psychiatry as a discipline. Sequences of electroshock therapy come to mind, mutated patients, and homicidal maniacs. But where do we go from here? And what lies beyond the criticism of how mental illnesses...

Avi Staiman, CEO of Academic Language Experts discusses the how advancements in artificial intelligence are shaping academic publishing. Avi offers various solutions and remedies to concerns around misuse, in addition to offering several tools that can support academics in their writing and research. Sci Writer Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your a...

The Nintendo Wii, introduced in 2006, helped usher in a moment of retro-reinvention in video game play. This hugely popular console system, codenamed Revolution during development, signaled a turn away from fully immersive, time-consuming MMORPGs or forty-hour FPS games and back toward family fun in the living room. Players using the wireless motion-sensitive controller (the Wii Remote, or “Wiimot...

Economist, historian, and author Marc Levinson talks about his book, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (Princeton UP, 2020), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Outside the Box traces the history of globalization from the early 19th century to the present and shows how its nature has shifted over time. Levinson argues that the most recent form of g...

Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In Net Smart, cyberculture expert Howard...

Long ago, in 1985, personal computers came in two general categories: the friendly, childish game machine used for fun (exemplified by Atari and Commodore products); and the boring, beige adult box used for business (exemplified by products from IBM). The game machines became fascinating technical and artistic platforms that were of limited real-world utility. The IBM products were all utility, wi...

Routledge Handbook of Rewilding (Routledge, 2022) provides a comprehensive overview of the history, theory and current practices of ‘rewilding’. Rewilding offers a transformational paradigm shift in conservation thinking, and as such is increasingly of interest to academics, policymakers and practitioners. However, as a rapidly emerging area of conservation, the term has often been defined and use...

Daily life is connected life, its rhythms driven by endless email pings and responses, the chimes and beeps of continually arriving text messages, tweets and retweets, Facebook updates, pictures and videos to post and discuss. Our perpetual connectedness gives us endless opportunities to be part of the give-and-take of networking. Some worry that this new environment makes us isolated and lonely....

Smartphones, skyscrapers, spacecraft. Modern technology seems mind-bogglingly complex. But beneath the surface, it can be beautifully simple. In Nuts & Bolts: Seven Small Inventions that Changed the World (in a Big Way) (W. W. Norton, 2023), award-winning Shard engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal deconstructs our most complex feats of engineering into seven fundamental inventions: the nail, spri...

Niko Pfund joins the podcast to discuss the value of scientific content for building out Large Language Models and some of the challenges around tracking the quality and ownership of aggregated content from unknown sources. We also discuss potential avenues for collaboration between Generative AI companies and scholarly publishers. Niko Pfund is Academic Publisher at Oxford University Press and P...

We live today in a global web of interdependence, connected technologically, economically, politically, and socially. As a result of these expanding and deepening interdependencies, it has become impossible fully to control--or foretell--the effects of our actions. The world is rife with unintended consequences. The first law of human ecology--which declares that we can never do merely one thing--...

Hello Avatar Or, {llSay(0, Hello, Avatar ); is a tiny piece of user-friendly code that allows us to program our virtual selves. In Hello Avatar, B. Coleman examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the "x-reality" that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither v...

Limited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In Privacy at the Margins (Cambridge UP, 2021), Scott Skinner-Thompson highlights why privacy is of acute importance for marginalized groups. He explains how privacy can serve as a form of expressive resistance to government and corporate surveillance reg...

Geologists in the field climb hills and hang onto craggy outcrops; they put their fingers in sand and scratch, smell, and even taste rocks. Beginning in 2004, however, a team of geologists and other planetary scientists did field science in a dark room in Pasadena, exploring Mars from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) by means of the remotely operated Mars Exploration Rovers (MER). Clustered...

Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Jieun Kiaer provides an in-depth discussion of emoji use in a global context, this volume presents the use of emoji as a hugely important facet of computer-mediated communication, leading Dr. Kiaer to coin the term 'emoji speak'. Exploring why and how emojis are born, and the different ways in which people use them...

Benjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University, and his work has appeared in Jacobin, Catalyst, and the New York Times. Previously, Ben’s work focused on the...