New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine (Verso, 2020) is an unflinching view into the calamities...

As a scientist and practicing Catholic, Dr. Sauer brings a unique perspective to several of the important issues related to finding a space for dialogue between the at times opposing fields of science and religion. Drawing on insights from Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Kuhn, and many others, Dr. Sauer presents a powerful and important framework for reconciling the historically changing divid...

Harmony Bench's Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Minnesota UP, 2020) traces the changing ways dance is distributed and created on the internet from the heady early internet of the 1990s to the ubiquitous social media platforms of today. Bench discusses how flash mobs reclaimed public space in the aftermath of 9/11, how "hyperdance" promised that every viewer would also be...

Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set it apart, such as impartiality, universality, and elegance. Far from incidental, these ideas prime mathematicians and the public to see in mathematics the answers—for example, an impartial arbiter, or a...

We often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations who are preyed upon by someone offering promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned in terms of "exploiting hope." These accusations are made in a range of contexts: human smuggling, employment relationships, unproven medical 'cures.' We hear this concept so often and in so many contexts that, with all its...

Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that l...

In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This book provides an ethnographic study of students and teachers at three Los Angeles schools utilizing instructional technology. We discuss the role of play in learning, how disciplinary dispositions are influenced by race and class, an...

While various systems theories have received rigorous treatments across the literature of the field, reliable and robust advice for systems practice can be somewhat harder to come by. Ray Ison has done much to remedy this state of affairs through his deeply theoretically grounded yet eminently practical book: Systems Practice: How to Act In Situations of Uncertainty and Complexity in a Climate-Cha...

Most of our discussions about how “technology will change the world” focus on the global cities that drive the world economy. Even when we talk about China, we focus on its major cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.  Xiaowei Wang corrects this metronormativity in their recent book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (FSG Originals: 2020), which explores how...

In 1996 Argentina adopted genetically modified (GM) soybeans as a central part of its national development strategy. Today, Argentina is the third largest global grower and exporter of GM crops. Its soybeans—which have been modified to tolerate being sprayed with herbicides—now cover half of the country's arable land and represent a third of its total exports. While soy has brought about moderniza...

“What are chromosomes? And what does it mean to treat them as visual objects?” asks Soraya de Chadarevian in her new book, Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Considering this question as she follows the history of microscope-based practices in chromosomal research across a variety of contexts—from the medical clinic to...

Common morality has been the touchstone of medical ethics since the publication of Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics in 1979. Rosamond Rhodes challenges this dominant view by presenting an original and novel account of the ethics of medicine, one deeply rooted in the actual experience of medical professionals. She argues that common morality accounts of medical ethics are u...

Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (Oxford University Press, 2020) focuses on the emerging scientific discipline of astrobiology, exploring many of the humanistic issues this multidisciplinary field is generating. Despite there being myriad scientific questions that astrobiologists have only begun to address, this is not a purely scientific enterprise. More research on the broader social...

The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, scientific thinking and regional geopolitics. In The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (D.S. Brewer, 2020), Dale Kedwards explores the plethora of meanings that medieval Icelandic mapmakers invested into t...

In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At the book’s center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manus...

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the book we are here to talk about today, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of H...

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the i...

Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. The Trump Administration has created a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-e...

Most people recognize that the internet is growing at an exponential rate. But few have thought as deeply as Laura DeNardis, a Professor and Interim Dean at the School of Communication at American University, about what those changes will mean for privacy, security, human rights, and democracy. In The Internet in Everything: Privacy and Security in a World With No Off Switch (Yale, 2020), Professo...

Monopoly, Solitaire, football and Minecraft are all games, but for C. Thi Nyugen they are also an art form – specifically, the art form of agency, our capacity to set goals and pursue them. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), Nguyen argues that a game designer sculpts agency by specifying the goals and abilities of the potential player – what the player should care about and what their abil...

Are robots going to be our overlords? In Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines (RosettaBooks, 2020), Jamie Merisotis says they don't have to be. We can make them our friends. Jamie Merisotis is a globally recognized leader in philanthropy, education, and public policy. Since 2008, he’s served as president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation committed to making opport...

Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (U Chicago Press, 2020), begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close fri...

In his book The Longest Line on the Map The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas (Scribner, 2019), Professor Eric Rutkow retraces the fascinating, decades-long history of the attempt to build the world’s longest highway. This seemingly chimerical project coincided with the era of Pan-Americanism, a 19th and 20th century movement that advanced a rhetoric of so...

This is the second episode of a two-part conversation with Hodgson, and in it we pick up our conversation on anticipatory systems and the role they play in ‘decision integrity’. Hodgson then talks about the second half of the book which focuses on “developing latent capacities beyond the analytical rational” and offers possibilities for more enlightened co-creation in these hyper-turbulent times....

After water, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world. It is beloved by consumers in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and it comes in a bewildering array of varieties: from the cheap sachet of finely ground English black tea to fermented bricks of pu’er from Yunnan province. This beverage also has a fascinating place in the global history of science and capitalism. At the turn of...