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•1 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
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...
Feb 16, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 111
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...
Feb 15, 2025•49 min•Ep. 230
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...
Feb 15, 2025•42 min•Ep. 107
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...
Feb 14, 2025•46 min•Ep. 240
“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...
Feb 13, 2025•47 min•Ep. 234
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 ...
Feb 10, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 380
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...
Feb 10, 2025•43 min•Ep. 85
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...
Feb 10, 2025•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 90
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...
Feb 08, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 22
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,...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 22
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...
Feb 03, 2025•56 min•Ep. 32
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...
Feb 01, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 28
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...
Jan 31, 2025•56 min•Ep. 402
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...
Jan 30, 2025•56 min•Ep. 251
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...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 15
