We spend our 50th episode (the last of this season) with communication theorist Amit Pinchevski . Amit’s recent book Echo (MIT Press) explores its topic through mythology, etymology, history, technology, and philosophy. The book challenges the notion that echo is mere repetition. Instead, Pinchevski argues, echo is a generative medium that creatively expresses our relations to others and the world around us. Just as a baby first learns to speak by repeating the sounds of others, a philosophy of ...
Mar 17, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 50
The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025) Dr. Mia Consalvo, Dr. Marc Lajeunesse, and Dr. Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers a...
Mar 14, 2025•41 min•Ep. 42
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 c...
Mar 10, 2025•56 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 hig...
Mar 10, 2025•51 min•Ep. 367
Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT Press, 2024) is an imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose. What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials, but a place to pursue our formation as whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose? In Undeclared , Chris Higgins confronts the contemporary university in a bid to reclaim a formative mission for higher education. In a ...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 250
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 15 min•Ep. 34
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•21 min•Ep. 36
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 orga...
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 91
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•57 min•Ep. 22
The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be fun . The Commodore 64 (C64) is officially the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, according to The Guinness Book of World Records . It was also, from 1985 to 1993, the platform for which most video games were made. But although it sold at least twice as many units as other home computers of its time, such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, or...
Jan 14, 2025•35 min•Ep. 31
An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience...
Jan 12, 2025•38 min•Ep. 20
The recent retreat from globalization has been triggered by a perception that increased competition from global trade is not fair and leads to increased inequality within countries. Is this phenomenon a small hiccup in the overall wave of globalization, or are we at the beginning of a new era of deglobalization? Former Chief Economist of the World Bank Group Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg tells us that the answer depends on the policy choices we make, and in The Unequal Effects of Globalization (MI...
Dec 22, 2024•50 min•Ep. 165
A guide to the fascinating legal history of the videogame industry, written for nonlawyers. Why did a judge recall FIFA 15, a nonviolent soccer game, from French shelves in 2014? Why was Vodka Drunkenski, a character in Nintendo-Japan’s Punch-Out!, renamed Soda Popinski in the US and then in Western Europe, where the pun made no sense? Why was a Dutch-American company barred by US courts from distributing a clone of Pac-Man? Julien Mailland answers all these questions and more in The Game That N...
Dec 21, 2024•39 min•Ep. 28
Data has become a defining issue of current times. Our everyday lives are shaped by the data that is produced about us (and by us) through digital technologies. In Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2023), Luci Pangrazio and Neil Selwyn introduce readers to the central concepts, ideas, and arguments required to make sense of life in the data age. Bringing together cutting-edge thinking and discussion from across education, sociology, psychology, and media and...
Dec 19, 2024•38 min•Ep. 246
To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as quickly as possible. But there are many unknowns when it comes to moving from theory to implementation for such a large-scale energy transition, to say nothing of whether this transition will be “just.” In A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future (MIT Press, 2024), J. Mijin Cha—a seasoned climate policy rese...
Dec 05, 2024•27 min•Ep. 196
Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernisation, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) e xamines the history of the computer industry in socialist Bulgaria. Combining the histories of technology and political economy with that of the Cold War and the modern Balkans, Balkan Cyberia challenges the notions of backwardness, the importance of small states in large geopolitical systems, the nature of the Iron Curtain, and the concept of 1989 as a convenient end-...
Nov 18, 2024•58 min•Ep. 215
From the U.S. lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015—and where the international climate effort needs to go from here. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was one of the most difficult and hopeful achievements of the twenty-first century: 195 nations finally agreed, after 20 years of trying, to establish an ambitious, operational regime to address one of the greatest civilizational challenge...
Nov 08, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 195
Technology has surpassed religion as the central focus of our lives, from our dependence on smartphones to the way that tech has infused almost every aspect of our lives including our homes, our relationships, and even our bodies. Beyond these practical matters, Tech has become a religion with multiple sects who follow their own beliefs, practices, hierarchies, and visions of heaven and hell. There are zealous prophets and humble servants, messiahs and visions of a coming apocalypse. In Tech Agn...
Oct 30, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 80
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). In addition to being a professor, Alper is also an educational researcher who has worked over the past 20 years to make inclusive and accessible learning products with media organizations such as Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and PBS KIDS. Vinsel and Alper...
Oct 21, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 83
Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (MIT Press, 2021) by Dr. Anna Lora-Wainwright digs deep into the paradoxes, ambivalences, and wide range of emotions and strategies people develop to respond to toxicity in everyday life. An examination of the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and of the varying forms of activism that develop in response. Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live with pollution every day. Villagers drink obviously tain...
Oct 20, 2024•49 min•Ep. 329
Francisco Aboitiz is a professor at the Medical School and the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness (MIT Press, 2024) tells the story of life and nervous systems. It introduces the conceptual framework and terminology of evolution, gives a great overview of our current knowledge and a thorough discussion of open questions. The first part defines two ba...
Oct 19, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 138
Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and the chapbooks The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming (2018) and Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (2016). Her research is on ...
Oct 14, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 261
Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn’t happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional—doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here? In Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI (MIT Press, 2024), Alan...
Oct 06, 2024•53 min•Ep. 373
An expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging. Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024), photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal...
Oct 02, 2024•41 min•Ep. 35
What is it about Times Square that has inspired such attention for well over a century? And how is it that, despite its many changes of character, the place has maintained a unique hold on our collective imagination? In Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change (MIT Press, 2023), which comes twenty years after her widely acclaimed Times Square Roulette , Dr. Lynne Sagalyn masterfully tells the story of profound urban change over decades in the symbolic space that is New York City's Times...
Sep 30, 2024•59 min•Ep. 34
Why do we assume that computers always get it right? Today’s book is: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press, 2019), in which Professor Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our tec...
Sep 26, 2024•48 min•Ep. 233
When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man's-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024), introduced by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, you will find this worl...
Sep 23, 2024•39 min•Ep. 426
Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and consequence. In Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe (MIT Press, 2021), Brian Clegg explores the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationships between space and time to the quantum behaviors that rule the way that matter and light interact, Clegg shows how ...
Sep 02, 2024•50 min•Ep. 82
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Cyrus Mody, Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation and Director of the STS Program at Maastricht University, about his book, The Squares: US Physical and Engineering Scientists in the Long 1970s (MIT Press, 2022). Many narratives about contemporary technologies, especially digital computing and the Internet, focus on the influences of 1960s counter-cultures. In _The Squares_, Mody takes the opposite approach and asks how sq...
Aug 26, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 79
In The People of the Ruins (originally published in 1920), Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neo mediaeval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, he eventual...
Aug 06, 2024•59 min•Ep. 162
