“Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish [darkness] as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own.” According to Dark Sky International, 99% of people in the US live under the influence of skyglow. With each artificial light we install, we grow more unfamiliar with darkness and its riches. But what if darkness, instead of being a source of danger and discomfort, ...
Mar 11, 2025•45 min•Ep. 383
Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and conveniences allow us to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Using examples from the hottest places on earth, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet (U California Press, 2024) shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to clima...
Mar 10, 2025•43 min•Ep. 138
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Eleni Kalantidou, Assistant Professor at the Queensland College of Art and Design, about the volume of essays, Design/Repair: Place, Practice, and Community (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), which Eleni co-edited with Abby Mellick Lopes, Alison Gill, Guy Keulemans, and Niklavs Rubenis. The volume examines both the relationship of design practices to repair and repairability and the kinds of cultures needed to develop sustainable repair practices the world ...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 91
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common part of everyday life. Powerful AI tools are now integrated into our work, our schools, our creative industries, and our experiences of dating and companionship. This is a disorientating experience, one that changes not only our views of technology, but of ourselves. Can we look to a past technological revolution for help? We revisit Sherry Turkle's cl...
Mar 10, 2025•58 min•Ep. 26
This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a high...
Mar 10, 2025•53 min•Ep. 367
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 Capitalism (U California Press, 2024), Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise...
Mar 08, 2025•52 min•Ep. 123
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 consume and consult. Featuring full-color maps primarily from the British Library's distinguished collection--many of the...
Mar 08, 2025•47 min•Ep. 1548
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, internationally renowned privacy expert Daniel J. Solove draws from a range of fields, from law to philosophy to the humanit...
Mar 07, 2025•40 min•Ep. 382
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 listeners on a journey from the early days of recombinant DNA technology to the cutting-edge advancements of CRISPR. Gold...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 241
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, and argues that their endurance owes primarily to the longstanding battles between stereo and mono technologies. Thro...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 147
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 ‘Central Hall of Arts and Sciences’. Prince Albert’s overarching vision was to promote technological and industrial pr...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 159
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 with every copy of Windows 3.1 and decades of subsequent OS updates. Alongside fellow Windows gaming staple Solitaire, Mineswee...
Mar 04, 2025•20 min•Ep. 39
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) Keane combines anthropology and philosophy to show us what is new and what is not in our current technological moment. ...
Mar 03, 2025•58 min•Ep. 349
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 hard the post-shutdown adjustment has been for many of us and how that might be feeding into the current AI hype. For our P...
Mar 03, 2025•38 min•Ep. 48
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 players engage with these medievalist worlds, and why particular representational trends emerge in this most modern me...
Mar 03, 2025•36 min•Ep. 38
How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pandemic.” In Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography (MIT Press, 2022), Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even pri...
Mar 02, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 34
My guest today Sam Srauy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University, Her research examines race, video games, and the political economy of the video game industry. Srauy’s work appears in various academic journals including Social Media + Society, First Mondays, Games and Culture, and Television and New Media. She teaches courses on identity, race/racism, digital media production, and video game studies/production. Prior t...
Mar 01, 2025•55 min•Ep. 37
Factual misinformation is spread in conflict zones around the world, often with dire consequences. But when is this misinformation actually believed, and when is it not? Seeing is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Daniel Silverman examines the appeal and limits of dangerous misinformation in war, and is the go-to text for understanding false beliefs and their impact in modern armed conflict. Dr. Silverman e...
Feb 28, 2025•46 min•Ep. 146
Clean water, paved roads, public transit, electricity and gas, sewers, waste processing, telecommunication, even the Internet – all this infrastructure is what makes cities work and powers our lives, often seamlessly and silently. Virtually everything we do and consume depends on infrastructure. Yet, most people have little to no idea how these systems work. How is water treated? How do cities manage rainwater? Why do traffic jams exist? How is electricity generated and distributed? What happens...
Feb 27, 2025•39 min•Ep. 44
Can experimenting with game design increase our chances of finding a cure for cancer? Cancer is crafty, forcing us to be just as clever in our efforts to outfox it—and we’ve made excellent progress, but is it time for a new play in the playbook? In Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery (MIT Press, 2025), Jeff Yoshimi proposes a new approach to fighting an increasingly exhausting war. By putting the work of cancer research into the hands of nonspe...
Feb 27, 2025•22 min•Ep. 36
As the second Trump administration reshapes the U.S. government and its role in the world, how do technology, media, and political power intersect? In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey speaks with Zeynep Tufekci—New York Times columnist, Princeton professor, and author of Twitter and Tear Gas—about the evolving relationship between social media platforms, political movements, and democracy. From the shifting role of the internet in global protests to Elon Musk’s interventi...
Feb 26, 2025•46 min•Ep. 161
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Aure Schrock, an interdisciplinary technology scholar and writing coach and editor at Indelible Voice, about their book, Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America (MIT Press, 2024) Politics Recoded examines the history and culture of Code for America, an organization that, as one of its leaders put it, aimed “to promote ‘civic hacking,’ and to bring 21st century technology to government.” The book describes how the organiza...
Feb 24, 2025•2 hr 36 min•Ep. 91
It’s the UConn Popcast, and “The Beast” is a 2023 sci fi / romance movie by French director Bertrand Bonello, in which artificial intelligence has determined that human emotions are a danger, and must be surgically controlled. In this deep dive, we ask whether this is really a film about AI, a transhistorical love story, a narrative of societal decline, or something else entirely. The Beast stars Lea Seydoux and George McKay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...
Feb 22, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 25
Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. In Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (Bloomsbury, 2021), Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously foundational certainties and opens entirely new spaces of opportunity. Rather than turning exclusively to cognitive science and contemporary ethical theori...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 137
When we think of the sixteenth-century arrival of European missionaries in East Asia, there is a tendency to imagine this meeting as a civilizational clash, a great meeting of two fixed cultures. This clash is symbolized in the ‘Ricci map(s)’: a map created by a Jesuit missionary to bring scientific cartography to East Asia. Remapping the World in East Asia: Toward a Global History of the “Ricci Maps” (Hawai’i University Press, 2024) rethinks these maps and this encounter. By taking a global app...
Feb 20, 2025•50 min•Ep. 556
Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in reposit...
Feb 19, 2025•57 min•Ep. 157
In this episode of Madison's Notes, Jonathan Haidt, renowned social psychologist and author, dives deep into the impact of digital saturation on today's youth, drawing insights from his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane, 2024). The discussion explores how growing up immersed in social media, video games, and smart technology is reshaping young people’s sense of self and influencing their political engagem...
Feb 19, 2025•57 min•Ep. 138
In the third podcast of this series, “Brain Rot: What Our Screen Are Doing to Our Minds,” host Dr. Karyne Messina, psychologist, psychoanalyst and author talked about the problems that can emerge in Erik Erikson’s Identity versus Identity Diffusion stage of development along with Dr. Harry Gill, a psychiatrist who has a PhD in neuroscience. The two mental health professionals discussed major difficulties they see in their young patients when they are exposed to too much screen time. For one thin...
Feb 19, 2025•41 min•Ep. 235
X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason, then, that our relationship with X-rays would be a complicated one of fear and fascination, acceptance and resistance, confusion and curiosity. In X-Ray (Bloomsbury, 2024), Nicole Lobdell explores when, where, and how we use X-rays, what meanings we give them, what metaphors ...
Feb 19, 2025•50 min•Ep. 381
As Americans increasingly depend upon their phones, computers, and internet resources, their actions are less private than they believe. Data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell something, political actors who want to analyze behavior, and law enforcement who seek to monitor and limit actions. In The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (NYU Press, 2025), law professor Ray Brescia explores the failure of existing legal system...
Feb 17, 2025•59 min•Ep. 759
