New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Odcinki

• David I. Waddington, "The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026) 22.07.2026 42min

  Despite decades of inflammatory rhetoric, the real risk of video games lies not in their violent imagery but in the ethical and political sensibilities they normalize. Video games reward speed, efficiency, control, and meritocratic mastery, training players to align with a technolibertarian worldview - one that celebrates individual will, technological power, and skepticism toward collective forms of governance. Rather than asking whether games produce violent individuals, we might more productively ask how they contribute to a commitment to radical capitalism and a belief in highly individualistic worldviews. In this unsettling work David Waddington traces the philosophical roots of technolibertarianism, founded on faith in technological progress and personal freedom. He identifies a darker turn in this thinking, animated by the ideals of Ayn Rand and her archetype of the "tech hero of capitalism." Many games, Waddington argues, invite players to inhabit this archetype, treating mastery, control, and relentless striving as moral virtues. While educational research often praises games for motivating students and fostering problem-solving, Waddington asks a deeper question: What kinds of people do games help us become? Drawing on Martin Heidegger and other thinkers, he explores whether gameplay expands human possibility or narrows it by habituating players to efficient yet restrictive systems. The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026) critiques mainstream game design and educational technology, offering hopeful alternatives and examining reflective games that resist dominant gameplay logics. Written with clarity, passion, and philosophical depth, this thought-provoking work opens new horizons on technology, education, and the moral imagination of play. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Mark Crinson, "Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape" (Yale UP, 2026) 22.07.2026 1godz 16min

  Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape (Yale University Press, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastructure and enclosure, from the common land of Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century to the global transport hub of the present day.  The book explores the different forces that have shaped the airport’s environment: the remaking of landforms, the design of terminal buildings, and the surrounding sprawl of hotels, schools, factories, and business parks. At the same time, it shows how the Heathrow area has been moulded by wider shifts in energy, mobility, and the economy, and how the airport has in turn left a lasting mark on its surroundings, both materially and ecologically. Drawing on previously unpublished material, Aviationland includes close studies of key sites, as well as figures who shaped how we see the airport today, including Richard Rogers, Patrick Abercrombie, and J. G. Ballard. Bringing together architectural, landscape, and infrastructural histories that are seldom read in tandem, this volume makes the case for Heathrow as a distinctively modern landscape. The result is a nuanced account of how local places become entangled within global systems, and what happens when they do. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Daniel L. Gardner, "Thresholds of Digital Gameplay" (MIT Press, 2025) 21.07.2026 1godz 2min

  Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account logins, controllers, and an assortment of menus, settings, and other peripheral-to-gameplay elements support a range of practical and necessary functions that result from the transformation of gameplay into digital gameplay, as well as broader shifts toward an increasingly networked and data-driven world. The games industry has adopted usability testing on top of play testing to evaluate how these interfaces may influence the accessibility and success of their game software, but how embedding gameplay within webs of software, hardware, and platform infrastructures impacts the medium, players, and production has not yet been fully explored. In Thresholds of Digital Gameplay (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Gardner demonstrates how a series of interfaces and other elements on the periphery of digital gameplay fundamentally alter the phenomena of gaming. This book examines non-gameplay-centered material or mechanical attachments that surround and enclose gameplay while directing or mediating our experience of it—for example, access controls, character configuration, and microtransactional storefronts. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Stefan Höltgen et al., "Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer" (Projekt Verlag, 2026) 20.07.2026 27min

  The Commodore 64 is the most significant computer of its era. From 1982 to 1994, a total of 27 million units were sold—more than any other computer from a single manufacturer afterwards. Due to its widespread use as well as its techni­cal features, the C64 has a huge international following—even to this day. The 19 contributions compiled in Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer (Projekt Verlag, 2026) illustrate the significance of the platform for the digitalization of society, the general public’s computer science knowledge, as well as digital art and culture—both in the past, present, and also in the future. Volume 5 of the »Computer Archaeology« series is partly based on the confer­ence of the same name held in 2024 at the University of Bonn and has here been supplemented with additional contributions from the fields of artificial intelli­gence, quantum computing, and digital humanities. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Hector Amaya, "The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification" (Stanford UP 2026) 18.07.2026 56min

  We use avatars to play video games. We use pseudonyms on social media. We use VPNs to mask our identities and activities. In the digital realm, anonymity is everywhere, a persistent option for those who wish to hide, experiment, and deceive. But we are anonymous in more contexts than the digital. In urban settings, we routinely experience the anonymity of the crowd, and routinely use anonymity to participate in political life and social protests. Anonymity matters. This book is a wager that we can learn much about society, humanity, and power by analyzing the structural tensions and possibilities of anonymity, and by analyzing how the economy of anonymity is changing in a modernity defined by computation. While many have explored the connections between surveillance, datafication, and privacy, relatively little has been done to theorize anonymity and its critical role in our lives. The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification (Stanford University Press, 2026) rebalances our intellectual investments by expanding our understandings of anonymity. Putting the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Bernhard Siegert into conversation, Hector Amaya examines the contours of anonymity in different social domains—in relationship to individuals, institutions, and contexts; to epistemology and ontology; and to history and society. As the book shows, anonymity entails paradoxical possibilities—sometimes anonymity is experienced as freedom and other times as powerlessness, or subjugation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Gretchen Heefner, "Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments" (U Chicago Press, 2025) 18.07.2026 50min

  Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions the US military had navigated during World War II, the United States defense establishment took a keen interest in these places, dispatching troops to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, the South Pacific, and beyond. To preserve the country’s status as a superpower after the war, to pave runways and build bridges, engineers had to understand and then conquer dunes, permafrost, and even the surface of the moon. Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Gretchen Heefner explores how the US military generated a new understanding of these environments and attempted to master them, intending to cement America’s planetary power. Operating in these regions depended as much on scientific and cultural knowledge as on military expertise and technology. From General George S. Patton learning the hard way that the desert is not always hot, to the challenges of constructing a scientific research base under the Arctic ice, to the sheer implausibility of modeling Martian environments on Earth, Dr. Heefner takes us on a wry expedition into the extremes and introduces us to the people who have shaped our insight into these extraordinary environments. Even decades after the first manned space flight, plans for human space exploration and extraplanetary colonization are still based on what we know about stark habitats on Earth. An entertaining survey of the relationship between environmental history and military might, Sand, Snow, and Stardust also serves as a warning about the further transformation of the planet—whether through desertification, melting ice caps, or attempts to escape it entirely. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Fenwick McKelvey, "SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers" (MIT Press, 2026) 17.07.2026 51min

  This book is available open access. For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers (MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet. Drawing on novel archival and historical research, Dr. McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Spirituality, Science and Environmentalism in Taiwan 16.07.2026

  Who is Shennong, the Divine Farmer? And how can he help us understand the intricate relationships between spirituality, science and environmentalism in Taiwan today? These questions are at the heart of new research by the University of Oslo’s Koen Wellens and Mette Halskov Hansen. In this episode, we are joined by Koen Wellens for a conversation on religious responses to environmental change, community temples, and reconnecting to nature via the Divine Farmer in the context of contemporary Taiwan. You can read more about the research discussed in this episode in the book Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia, published by Leiden University Press. Koen Wellens is Professor of China Studies at the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for South Asian Democracy at the University of Oslo. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Adam Geczy, "Glasses" (Bloomsbury, 2026) 15.07.2026 34min

  Glasses are among the oldest and most commonplace prosthetics we have invented. But what does it mean to wear glasses? There is more to the answer than correcting vision. Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us. Everyone has encounters with glasses, passively or actively, from reading glasses to sunglasses. At times they are the main identifiers in a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and brainy to cool and sleazy. They are alternately the most mundane of things on our bodies and potentially the most glamorous. In this edition of the Object Lessons series, Glasses (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Adam Geczy explores this most pervasive and accessible accessory and shows that it is both a conduit to and a barrier between ourselves and the world outside. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026) 14.07.2026 1godz 6min

  Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Soraya Murray is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• The Emerging Anocracy: AI, Tech Oligarchs, and the Future of Democracy with Alexis Cruz 12.07.2026 1godz

  In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director Eli Karetny sits down with Alexis Cruz, founder of Enough Consulting and former strategic advisor for governance at Meta. Cruz explores how the proliferation of AI and digital platforms has shifted global politics into an "anocracy"—a precarious gray zone situated between traditional democracy and authoritarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Ali Fard, "Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data" (U Minnesota Press, 2026) 10.07.2026 43min

  Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments. Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses, Dr. Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the growing economies of data extraction. Breaking down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Kit Chapman, "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry" (Profile Books, 2026) 09.07.2026 1godz 18min

  The first chemists were Sri Lankan forgers who crafted unimaginably strong steel millennia before it should have been possible. They were alchemists in Roman Egypt, who designed apparatus still in use today. They were Stone Age leatherworkers, Tang Dynasty herbalists and Mayan stoneworkers.  The Enlightenment is usually credited with the origins of chemistry, but in truth, the science blossomed gradually. As early innovators distilled, smelted, forged and fermented their way through the centuries, they blurred science and mysticism in search of answers to life's greatest mysteries. In reading The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry (Profile Books, 2026), join Kit Chapman on a global quest to achieve immortality, cure all disease and transmute lead into gold as he reveals the illuminating stories of how the alchemists first broke new ground and shaped the scientific method. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Roberta J. Magnusson, "Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026) 08.07.2026 1godz 10min

  In the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society. In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed, and sustained their defenses, bridges, streets, water systems, and harbors. Dr. Magnusson reveals how even modest communities, like the Warwickshire town of Atherstone, boldly pursued projects that reshaped their futures. Grants of tolls and taxes funded paving initiatives, bridge repairs, and fortified walls, while enterprising lords and abbots sponsored sluices, conduits, and quays. These efforts were not confined to England's great cities; small towns with limited means also sought to enhance their competitive edge, even when such investments strained their resources. Drawing on royal records, municipal archives, and archaeological evidence, Dr. Magnusson situates these civic undertakings in their broader social and environmental contexts. She shows how townsmen adapted traditional obligations of labor and charity alongside innovative fiscal tools to sustain projects that could span generations. Yet the balance was fragile. The crises of the fourteenth century—famine, plague, and the harsher climate of the Little Ice Age—undermined local resources, leaving many communities to struggle with maintenance or watch their infrastructures decline. At once a history of engineering, economy, and community, this study illuminates how medieval people conceived of security, health, and prosperity through the material fabric of their towns. By tracing the rise, transformation, and survival of these infrastructures, Dr. Magnusson demonstrates how urban communities navigated centuries of change while shaping the very landscapes in which they lived. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Meena Khandelwal, "Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women's Technology in India" (U Arizona Press, 2026) 08.07.2026 1godz 1min

  Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options? Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India (University of Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Meena Khandelwal argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology. Dr. Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies (STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior. Cookstove Chronicles critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of the chulha persists. It offers an important new framework for looking at development, technology, environmental change, and human behavior. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Aswin Punathambekar, Adrienne Shaw and Jonathan Gray eds., "Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader" (NYU Press, 2026) 07.07.2026 1godz 1min

  In the three decades since the rise of the global internet, digitalization has transformed how media are made, circulated, and consumed, reshaping culture on a planetary scale. Yet the story of global media is not one of seamless connection or cultural homogenization. Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader (NYU Press, 2026) challenges the myth of a “global village,” revealing instead how regional histories, infrastructures, economies, and power relations shape the uneven terrains of our digital world. Edited by the series editors of Critical Cultural Communication, this field-defining anthology gathers leading scholars to examine the texts, genres, platforms, and industries that define today’s global entertainment landscape. From TikTok to Squid Game, K-Pop to Marvel, Bluey to Nollywood, each chapter offers a focused case study that illuminates how digital media both reflect and remake global cultural life. Spanning influencer culture, streaming platforms, esports, and beyond, Planet Digital shows how digital technologies and global media flows continually reshape one another, producing hybrid forms of creativity, circulation, and control. Together, these essays provide a vital framework for understanding how the world’s screens, sounds, and networks are rewriting the relationship between culture and power in the twenty-first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Hayagreeva Rao and Henrich R Greve, "Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk" (Oxford UP, 2026) 05.07.2026 1godz 7min

  Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions, that is as stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, Rao and Greve show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of bricolage. People tinker with cultural fragments to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat. New conspiracy beliefs are most likely to take hold when they are linguistically close to beliefs people already hold. The book traces how conspiracy theories spread through superspreaders, fear-laden language, bots, and shared hashtags, revealing conspiracy theorizing as a form of proto-coordination that generates community, amplifies outrage, and enables collective sensemaking among opponents of social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Bjørn Berge, "Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense" (Reaktion Books, 2026) 03.07.2026 35min

  The sense of smell is often linked to the dark, the antisocial, the primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. Today we live in an almost odorless world, where everything is reduced to images. Yet smell plays a vital role in how we relate to others and our surroundings, forming our experiences and our memories. Tracing a history of smell from the first ancient cities, through medieval plagues and the Industrial Revolution to the present day, Smell: The Tale of a Fading Sense (Reaktion, 2026) is a tribute to the sense of smell in all its beauty and disgust. Along the way, Bjørn Berge introduces us to twenty iconic scents—from blood and soil to the ocean—and invites readers to reflect on and reawaken their senses. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Joseph Turow, "The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age" (U Chicago Press, 2026) 03.07.2026 1godz 7min

  A respected voice on technology shows how seemingly simple ads help dismantle democracy and public discourse. Whether you’re intentionally shopping or casually browsing social media, something is following you: ads. Their creators seem to know your income bracket, politics, age, location, medical conditions, and tastes in clothing, food, and romantic partners. As advertising firms use predictive AI to discover your hot buttons and generative AI to push them, your online world becomes an increasingly bespoke—and isolated—place. The fervid competition around personalization in digital marketing has given rise to an ecosystem of advertisers, media outlets, tech companies, and retailers who monetize your data while threatening the health of our media, discourse, and sense of community. In this urgent book, award-winning author Joseph Turow shows how we got here, and how to change direction.The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age (University of Chicago Press, 2026) shatters common beliefs about advertising history by showing that individualized ads are not new. Today’s AI-enabled advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization while weaponizing data in unprecedented ways that drive social fragmentation and the disappearance of shared social reality. Informed by interviews with marketing insiders and covering the latest technology advances, Turow accessibly explains how artificial intelligence sifts through our data to tag and target us wherever we go with personalized videos, pictorial billboards, audio messages, and more. A logical next step for advertiser support is tailored entertainment and news, a shift that further destroys the common ground necessary for a functioning democracy. A must-read for all who care about the future of public discourse, The Problem with Personalization reveals how targeted advertising has altered how we’re seen and what we see in return. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
• Christian Martinez, "NYC Open Data Student Gallery" (Brooklyn College CUNY, 2026) 02.07.2026 1godz

  About NYC Open Data During the Fall 2025 semester, students in the M.S. program in Psychological Research at Brooklyn College completed the inaugural offering of Reproducible Psychological Research. Using the R programming language, students developed weekly R Markdown documents to solve simulated real-world analytical problems using authentic datasets, with an emphasis on transparency, documentation, and reproducibility. For their final projects, students were tasked with conducting independent, original research using open data related to New York City. Rather than working with pre-cleaned or artificial datasets, students engaged directly with messy, real-world data and were responsible for every step of the analytical workflow—from data acquisition and cleaning to analysis, visualization, and interpretation. A majority of projects utilized data from the NYC Open Data Portal, though students were encouraged to explore any open NYC-based data source that aligned with their research questions. Each project in this volume represents a complete, reproducible research artifact. Students were required to meet the following criteria: The data must be openly available The data must meaningfully relate to New York City The research question, analysis, and interpretation must be original Collectively, these projects demonstrate not only technical proficiency in R, but also the ability to ask meaningful questions about the city students live in, evaluate real-world data critically, and communicate findings in a clear, reproducible manner. This volume serves both as a showcase of student growth and as an example of how open data and open-source tools can be used to conduct rigorous, socially relevant research. Chapters are organized in alphabetical order of the student’s last names. This volume is designed for students, educators, and practitioners interested in applied data analysis, reproducible research, and open data. Each chapter represents an independent research project and can be read on its own. Readers are encouraged to explore the accompanying code, reproduce analyses, and adapt methods for their own work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society