New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated p...

After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety an...

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton UP, 2020), Durba Mitra shows how deviant female s...

Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where...

Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the bio...

In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ingested them. By investigating the different contexts and practices associated with the British long-distance trade in patent medicines, Zachary Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets...

Some people insist that culture is strictly a human accomplishment. What are those people afraid of? Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Henry Holt and Co.) looks into three cultures of other-than-human beings in some of Earth’s remaining wild places. It shows how if you’re a sperm whale, a scarlet macaw, or a chimpanzee, you too experience your lif...

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the...

A life shared with pets brings many emotions. We feel love for our companions, certainly, and happiness at the thought that we’re providing them with a safe, healthy life. But there’s another emotion, less often acknowledged, that can be nearly as powerful: guilt. When we see our cats gazing wistfully out the window, or watch a goldfish swim lazy circles in a bowl, we can’t help but wonder: are we...

Today’s guest is investigative journalist and author, Gerald Posner. His new book, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (Simon and Schuster), explores the fascinating and complex history of pharmaceutical and bio-tech industries. It is an industry like no other and a story like no other. Gerald Posner is an award-winning journalist who has written twelve books, including the Pulitzer...

How are algorithms changing journalism? In Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press), Angèle Christin, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, explores the impact of metrics and analytics on the newsrooms of New York and Paris. Using an ethnography of two organisations, the book demonstrates the comple...

In the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote understanding across national boundaries. In his book Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939 (Oxford UP, 2020), Simon J. Potter describes these efforts to use radio to p...

In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the ill...

In his book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (MIT Press), evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection is a process without purpose, yet gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. Haig proposes that the key to this is the or...

Modern humans are an indoor species. We spend 90 percent of our time inside, shuttling between homes and offices, schools and stores, restaurants and gyms. And yet, in many ways, the indoor world remains unexplored territory. For all the time we spend inside buildings, we rarely stop to consider: How do these spaces affect our mental and physical well-being? Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors?...

Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices of early modernity brings to light the emergence of the early modern global south. In The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Differ...

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for...

Why Do Unnecessary and Often Counter-Productive Medical Interventions Happen So Often? Today I talked to Paul Offit about his book Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (HarperCollins, 2020) Offit is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. A prolific author, he’s also well known f...

Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (University of Florida Press 2020), a collection edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page is a wonderful and imaginative contribution to the fields of history of science, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. This volume assembles a broad and varied collection of chapters that span from the colonial period...

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mass Vaccination. Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell University Press), Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million peop...

How has philosophy transformed human knowledge and the world we live in? Philosophical investigation is the root of all human knowledge. Developing new concepts, reinterpreting old truths, and reconceptualizing fundamental questions, philosophy has progressed―and driven human progress―for more than two millennia. In short, we live in a world philosophy made. In this concise history of philosophy's...

How is communicating virtually Is like eating Pringles forever? Find out as I talk to Nick Morgan about his new book Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Morgan is one of America’s top communication theorists and coaches. He’s written for Fortune 50 CEOs as well as for political and educational leaders, and coached people for events...

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. Steven Shapin is...

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They brought plants, in particular grain and fodder crops, trees and shrubs, as well as weeds. Following their example, and drawing on the expertise of émigré Russian-Jewish scientists, the US Department of Agriculture introduced more plants, agricultural scien...

Despite stereotypes of colleges and universities still stuck in the age of the blackboard and sage-on-stage lectures, a quiet revolution has been taking place on America’s campuses led by a diverse group of learning innovators. Digital technology is one catalyst for this “turn to learning,” but professionals leading the charge include instructional designers, media specialists, and experts in data...