New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Mar 08 2025 2539 ep. 56 mins 2k
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Science, Technology, and Society about their New Books

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Luis F. Alvarez Leon, "The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism" (U California Press, 2024)

Mar 08 2025 52 mins  
Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalis

Jeremy Black, "A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mar 08 2025 46 mins  
Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how people grew and made things to where and how they lived and moved. Railroads rewrote not only world geography but also the history of maps and mapping. Today, the needs of train companies and their users continue to shape the maps we consu

Daniel J. Solove, "On Privacy and Technology" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mar 07 2025 39 mins  
Succinct and eloquent, On Privacy and Technology (Oxford UP, 2025) is an essential primer on how to face the threats to privacy in today's age of digital technologies and AI. With the rapid rise of new digital technologies and artificial intelligence, is privacy dead? Can anything be done to save us from a dystopian world without privacy? In this short and accessible book, internat

Jorge Goldstein, "Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology" (Georgetown UP, 2025)

Mar 07 2025 67 mins  
In this episode, Jorge Goldstein, the author of Patenting Life: The Commercialization of Biology, delves into the critical junction where biotechnology meets patent law. With a background as a molecular biologist turned patent attorney, Goldstein offers unique insights into how commercial biology has evolved and its profound effects on patent regulations. The discussion takes liste

Eric Dienstfrey, "Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology" (U California Press, 2024)

Mar 07 2025 78 mins  
Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology (University of California Press, 2024) reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, a

Simona Valeriani, "The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences" (Brepols, 2024)

Mar 05 2025 60 mins  
The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences (Brepols, 2024) by Dr. Simona Valeriani takes one of London’s most iconic buildings and deconstructs it to offer new insights into the society that produced it. As part of the new cultural quarter built in South Kensington on the proceeds from The Great Exhibition of 1851, the Royal Albert Hall was originally intended to be a

Kyle Orland, "Minesweeper" (Boss Fight Books, 2023)

Mar 04 2025 20 mins  
If you had some free time and a Windows PC in the 1990s, your mouse probably crawled its way to Minesweeper, an exciting watch-where-you-click puzzle game with a ticking clock and a ton of “just one more game” replayability. Originally sold as part of a “big box” bundle of simple games, Minesweeper became a cornerstone of the Windows experience when it was pre-installed wit

Robert Houghton, "The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

Mar 03 2025 36 mins  
Games with a medieval setting are commercially lucrative and reach a truly massive audience. Moreover, they can engage their players in a manner that is not only different, but in certain aspects, more profound than traditional literary or cinematic forms of medievalism. However, although it is important to understand the versions of the Middle Ages presented by these games, how pl

Sonic AI

Mar 03 2025 37 mins  
Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how har

Webb Keane, "Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mar 03 2025 58 mins  
Revolutions in technology are fundamentally transforming what it means to be human. Or are they? As Webb Keane points out, before humans consulted ChatGPT, they propitiated oracles. Before they fell in love with robot boyfriends, they ventured into the forest to marry nature spirits. In his new book Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (Princeton UP, 2025) Ke