Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global citizenship, connecting students across borders, and creating a participatory learning environment. In Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (MIT Press), Katie Day Good amply illustrates that there is little new about these promises of tech-enhanced education. She demonstrates that already at the tu...
Aug 17, 2020•39 min•Ep. 259
The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (MIT Press), by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, demonstrates that this technology – which is mostly associated with covert surveillance and remote warfare – has also served as a vital tool for activists, social movements, and defenders of human rights to effect pro-social campaigns. Through stories of exemplar initiatives and analyses of thousands of civil uses of drones, Choi-Fitzpatrick argues that scholars and others interested in the imp...
Aug 14, 2020•40 min•Ep. 258
There are very few math books that merit the adjective ‘charming’ but Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries (MIT Press, 2020) is one of them. Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey have chosen a truly unique, creative and charming way to acquaint readers with some of the unsolved problems of mathematics. Some are classic, such as the Goldbach Conjecture, some are fairly well known, such as the Collatz Conjecture. Others are less well known but no less fascinating – and all are intriguing and bo...
Aug 13, 2020•58 min•Ep. 51
In Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice (The MIT Press), Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with cure over care, arguing that the traditional focus on biological intervention keeps medicine from addressing the complex realities of patient suffering. Although many have pointed to the lack of compassion and empathy in medical practice, few have considered the deeper philosophical, psychological, and ontological reasons for it. Piemonte fills that...
Aug 07, 2020•48 min•Ep. 81
The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In Contraception: A Concise History (The MIT Press, 2020), Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception, outlining the development, manufacturing, and...
Aug 06, 2020•24 min•Ep. 82
In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock , an associate professor of Civic Media at MIT, builds the case for designers and researchers to make the communities they impact co-equal partners in the products, services, and organizations they create. This requires more than eliciting participation from community members, particularly if the goal is extraction. On the contrary, design justice demands a deep understanding of the com...
Jul 27, 2020•37 min•Ep. 50
In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester , an associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, explores the world of open technology – communities centered on knowledge sharing. In particular, she investigates how these communities are considering the question of diversity and inclusion. Using ethnographic methods – interviews, participant observation, and deep readings...
Jul 20, 2020•35 min•Ep. 49
Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not? In his new book Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Press, 2020), Matto Mildenberger (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) uses a comparative analysis of Norway, Australia, and the United States to explain differences in climate policy-making . Mildenberger concludes that despite variation in policy preferences...
Jul 13, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 453
In this interview, I talk to Dr. Ainissa Ramirez about her new book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (MIT Press, 2020) Dr. Ramirez examines eight inventions―clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips―and reveals how they shaped the human experience. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies. Ainissa Ramirez , Ph.D. i...
Jun 25, 2020•40 min•Ep. 48
What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it something more? In The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019), Lee McIntyre addresses recent attacks on science in areas such as climate change, vaccination, and even belief that the world is flat by explaining why science is a culture built around a “scientific attitude” that embraces evidence...
Jun 24, 2020•28 min•Ep. 108
The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a firehose of information (much of it wrong) and an avalanche of opinions (many of them ill-founded). Most of us are so distracted by the everyday awfulness that we don't see the broader issues in play. In this "hastily written" guide to the pandemic economy penned during self-isolation after a flight from Australia, economist Joshua Gans steps back from the short-term chaos to take a clear and systematic look at how economic choices are being made in response...
Jun 04, 2020•37 min•Ep. 38
I spoke with Dr Simon Bowmaker , Professor of Economics at New York University, Stern School of Business. He has recently published When the President Calls: Conversations with Economic Policymakers (MIT Press, 2019). His book is a very original and timely contribution on the relationship between US presidents and their economic advisers. The book, 674 pages, is divided into nine sections (one for each president from Nixon to Trump) and 35 chapters (one for each economic adviser of those nine pr...
May 28, 2020•24 min•Ep. 37
Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the Global South. Streets, once crowded with pedestrians, pushcarts, vendors, and bicyclists, are now choked with motor vehicles, many of them private automobiles. In Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities (MIT Press, 2020), Govind Gopakumar examines this shift, analyzing the phenomenon of automobility in Be...
May 27, 2020•54 min•Ep. 250
The ubiquity of technology that collects massive volumes of all kinds of data lends itself to one overarching question: “What?” As in what is the purpose(s) of this collection? What are the benefits? And, what are the impacts? In his new book, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (MIT Press, 2020), Jathan Sadowski explores this question and those related in an investigation of the expansion of “smart” technologies – networked devi...
Apr 29, 2020•46 min•Ep. 46
Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets? This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulat...
Apr 27, 2020•55 min•Ep. 19
Alex Berke 's Beautiful Symmetry (MIT Press, 2020) is both a fascinating book and a concept -- it's like no other book I’ve ever read. It's a coloring book about math, inviting us to engage with mathematical concepts visually through coloring challenges and visual puzzles. We can explore symmetry and the beauty of mathematics playfully, coloring through ideas usually reserved for advanced courses. The book is for children and adults, for math nerds and math avoiders, for educators, students, and...
Apr 22, 2020•51 min•Ep. 48
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook...
Mar 30, 2020•52 min•Ep. 46
The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past? In Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences (MIT Press, 2018), Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies and techniques at their disposal, and that this g...
Mar 27, 2020•55 min•Ep. 246
Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool. They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Dis...
Mar 26, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 238
The increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power surrounding and undergirding data. The impacts of the creation, use, collection, and aggregation of data are such that individuals from various communities face disparate, negative impacts. In their new book, Data Feminism (MIT Press, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein , call for changing the way we think about data and how it is communicated, part...
Mar 03, 2020•35 min
We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality―self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various forms and functions. Although considerable attention has already been devoted to the subject of robots and responsibility, the question concerning the social status of these artifacts has ...
Feb 27, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 234
What is the human and environmental cost of music? In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019) , Kyle Devine , an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, tells the material history of recorded music, counting the impact of music from the 78 to digital streaming. The book has a rich and detailed analysis of music’s contribution to our current environmental crisis, along with the human impact of making the materials that make our modern co...
Feb 05, 2020•43 min•Ep. 151
Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting internet service providers from discriminating between content – by the Federal Communications Commission, a need to holistically understand the net neutrality debates still exists. How can we make sense of the intensification of controversy, the advocacy and protests, and the political and corporate wrangling? In his new book, The Paradoxes of Networ...
Feb 03, 2020•40 min•Ep. 44
For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys―an ugly death awaiting social deviants―neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020), Nancy D. Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix f...
Jan 24, 2020•41 min•Ep. 18
The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data? What important data is ignored when it is not easily translated into 1s and 0s? In his new book, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future , critical data scientist Ben Green , an Affiliate an...
Jan 20, 2020•34 min•Ep. 43
Sexbots are coming. Given the pace of technological advances, it is inevitable that realistic robots specifically designed for people's sexual gratification will be developed in the not-too-distant future. Despite popular culture's fascination with the topic, and the emergence of the much-publicized Campaign Against Sex Robots, there has been little academic research on the social, philosophical, moral, and legal implications of robot sex. Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press, 2...
Jan 09, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 227
Much of what we are able to accomplish in our day-to-day lives depends on the ability to act and think in concert with others. Often this involves not only the capacity to perceive together the surrounding world—we must also know that we perceive together. In other words, there must be perceptual common knowledge . Philosophical questions mount quickly: How is this kind of knowledge possible? How does it arise? What does its possibility show us about our sociality? What does it suggest about the...
Oct 01, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 201
In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto , Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Buffalo about her forthcoming work, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019). The MIT press release appropriately notes that Otto “liberates Bauhaus history” with this work, drawing the focus from the handful of mal...
Aug 06, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 566
Small is beautiful, right? Isn't that what we've all been taught? From Jeffersonian politics to the hallowed family farm, from craft breweries to tech start ups in the garage. Small business is the engine and the soul and the driver of the American system. That's the dominant narrative. And according to Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind , it is really wrong. In their new book, Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018), the authors review the empirical evidence and c...
Jul 19, 2019•47 min•Ep. 12
What kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (MIT Press, 2018), geographer David Bissell contends that to commute is to enter a highly eventful domain, an atmosphere in which new “capsular collectives” form and reform, opening onto new political and ethical possibilities for being in public. With Sydney, Australia, as its setting, Transit Life deve...
May 20, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 17
