Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did car culture become so masculine? In Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver's Seat (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Brockmole shares the untold history of women's relationship with automobiles: a journey marked by struggle, empowerment, and the relentless pursuit of independence. This groundbr...
The pernicious social impact of social media platforms is a matter of global concern, as this digital technology has become a breeding ground for the proliferation of various forms of online harassment and abuse.However, the majority of studies exploring this phenomenon have been conducted in Anglophone social contexts (particularly the US and UK). In light of this imbalance, in Hate speech and abusive behaviour on social media: A cross-cultural perspective (Vernon Press, 2024), Luiz Valério Tri...
As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to none. In Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge UP, 2024), Xiangli Ding provides a historical understanding of China's ever-growing energy demands and how they have affected its rivers, wild species, and millions of residents. River management has been an essential state responsibility througho...
Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, Enlightenment thinkers tried to sweep superstition away with reason, the modern welfare state sought to slay the “giant” of ignorance, and in today’s hyperconnected world seemingly limitless information is available on demand. But what about the knowledge lost over the centuries? Are we really any less ignorant than our ancestors? In Ignoran...
“Brain Rot,” the 2024 Oxford word of the year captures the essence of our new podcast that is being created as a special series on the New Books Network (NBN). The full title is “Brain Rot: What Our Screens Are Doing to Our Minds.” In this second podcast Dr. Karyne Messina, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author and NBN host discusses the problems the emerge when children watch screens and digital devices too much. Dr. Messina talked about this topic with Dr. Harry Gill, a well-known psychiatrist...
Dr. Dasgupta is a geneticist and internationally recognized anti-racism educator. In this book, she provides a powerful, science-based rebuttal to common fallacies about human difference. Well-meaning physicians, parents, and even scientists today often spread misinformation about what biology can and can’t tell us about our bodies, minds, and identities. In this accessible, myth-busting book, Dr. Dasgupta draws on the latest science to correct common misconceptions about how much of our social ...
Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age (ARC Humanities Press, 2024) explores the possibilities of archival objects. Investigating material as diverse as early modern printed books, death masks, a spirit photograph, and a manuscript choir book, Astrid J. Smith interrogates not only what the objects are now, but also asks what they were before taking material form, and what they can become as their format is transferre...
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, interview Gabriella Coleman, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, about her long career studying hacker cultures. Topics include how hacking has changed over time, the different colored “hats” used to describe different hacker ethoses, the aesthetic dimensions of hacking including how poorly written code leads to moral...
It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was released in 2022? When IBMs Deep Blue defeated Chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997? When Stanley Kubrick introduced us to HAL 9000 in 1968? Or perhaps you think it was much earlier. Maybe we have had the dream of AI since the development of the first computers by Von Neumann, or even earlier, by Babbage. Or maybe you think the dawning of the age of...
AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems,...
Everything to Play For: How Videogames Are Changing the World (Verso, 2024) by Marijiam Did asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead of fuelling hyper-materialist, reactionary agendas. Combining cultural theory and materialist critiques with accessible language and personal anecdotes, industry insider Marijam Did engages both novices and seasoned connoisseurs. From the innovations of Pong and Doom to the intricate multiplayer or narrative-driven games, the author highlights the m...
With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector. Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful (Polity, 2024) argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Dr. Madianou develops a new concept, tec...
Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning au...
How do we discern what is factual from what isn’t? In this episode, Dr. Colleen Sinclair joins us to discuss the functions of disinformation, and to unpack how our own biases, emotions and vulnerabilities influence what we are willing to believe. Our guest is: Dr. H. Colleen Sinclair, Associate Research Professor of Social Psychology at Louisiana State University. She takes a theory-grounded, multi-method approach to tackling social issues. She works on: understanding the hazards of the informat...
It’s the UConn Popcast, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, is a strange and profound text on human-AI relations. Centering on David, an artificial child who is embraced and then abandoned by his adoptive human mother, the movie has the structure of a fairy tale and the sensibility of a horror film. We found the text to have significant things to say about the ethics of creating, and rejecting, artificial life, as well as functioning as something of a meta-commentary...
Karenleigh Overmann discusses her book, which explores the material origins of numbers through archaeological evidence from the ancient Near East. She challenges purely mental explanations of numerical concepts, arguing that material devices like fingers, tallies, and tokens play a crucial role in shaping our understanding of numbers. Overmann also connects her research to Material Engagement Theory and its relevance to understanding cognitive development.
This conversation includes James Boyle, Duke University; Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, UPR-M; Héctor José Huyke, UPR-M, and Natalia Bustos, UPR-M. This is the first of two episodes about The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. The second, in Spanish, will appear on the New Books Network en español. The series is sponsored by the Encuentros descoloniales focal group at Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at UPRM, a group of scholars who consider how decolonial approaches can provide nuance in scientific kno...
Peoples and Things host, Lee Vinsel, is joined by guest host and Peoples & Things producer, Joe Forte, Media Projects Manager with Virginia Tech Publishing, in interviewing Marshall Poe, the founder and editor of the New Books Network, the largest academic podcasting platform in the world. The trio discuss how the New Books Network came to be; how digital technologies open up new tools for academic work; changing media landscapes, including the recent bursting of a podcasting bubble; and the fut...
The U.S. government, military, and industry once saw ocean incineration as the safest and most efficient way to dispose of hazardous chemical waste. Beginning in the late 1960s, toxic chemicals such as PCBs and other harmful industrial byproducts were taken out to sea to be destroyed in specially designed ships equipped with high-temperature combustion chambers and smokestacks. But public outcry arose after the environmental and health risks of ocean incineration were exposed, and the practice w...
Accurate information is at the heart of democratic functioning. For decades, researchers interested in how information is disseminated have focused on mass media, but the reality is that many Americans today do not learn about politics from direct engagement with the news. Rather, about one-third of Americans learn chiefly from information shared by their peers in conversation or on social media. How does this socially transmitted information differ from that communicated by traditional media? W...
Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (Oxford UP, 2023) is an account of the economic drivers and outcomes of the Cold War, told through the stories of seven international economists, who were all closely involved in theory and policy in the period 1945-73. For them, the Cold War was a battle of economic ideas, a fight between central planning and market allocation, exploring economic thinking derived from the battle between Marxist and Capitalist ide...
Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Shrouded within a labyrinth of oil fields, pipelines, and manufacturies, it tends to be known only through its magical effects: the thrill of the...
Led by Dr. Karyne Messina, a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author and host of NBN’s “New Books in Psychology” and “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Racism in America,” this podcast covers the effects of too much screen time. Dr. Messina talks about this topic with Dr. Harry Gill, a renown psychiatrist who also has a PhD. in neuroscience. They discuss one of the greatest difficulties they see in their child, adolescent and adult patients who contend with way too much screen time, the all-encompassin...
Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a novel ethnographic examination of archaeological practice within postcolonial India, focusing on the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as a site where scientific knowledge production intersects with state bureaucracy. Through granular analysis of ASI's quotidian operations, this monograph demonstrates how archaeological micro-practices materially influence the construction of political and ...
On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of the unchanging celestial realm, and it took observations through telescopes by Galileo and others to establish the rea...
This special episode features a discussion between Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society substack newsletter and Executive Director of the Christian Studies Center of Gainesville, Florida. In the first part, Sacasas gives a presentation - riffing on the title of Martin Heidegger’s famous essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” - on the question of the human, which may be more interesting than endless debates about the definition of “technolog...
If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experiments that help him—and his students—understand the nature of our computer-driven lives. In this episode, we feature an ext...
Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the mon...
This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories o...
What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the information you found — just as ordinary 15th and 16th century English people would have sifted through information in their almanacs, medical recipe collections, and astrological tracts. As Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (U Chicago Press, 2024) shows, ordinary English readers learned to assess and evaluate infor...
