New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
New Books Network
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetworkSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society
Episodes
Mentioned books
Feb 12, 2026 • 45min
Yi-Ling Liu, "The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet" (Knopf, 2026)
Yi-Ling Liu, author and journalist who covers technology and the Chinese internet, discusses creators and platforms that shaped early online life in China. Short scenes cover queer apps like Blued, hip hop and artistic communities, the shift from porous openness to tightened controls, and the ramifications of AI and regulation. The conversation traces hopes, constraints, and why the internet alone did not guarantee freedom.
Feb 11, 2026 • 55min
Tom Bolton, "Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations" (Strange Attractor, 2025)
Tom Bolton, writer and researcher of landscape and culture, tours Britain’s sixteen nuclear power stations. He describes traveling coast to coast, the architecture and security of reactors, and the tangled links between power, weapons, waste, and place. Conversations range from decommissioning and waste communication to site selection, near-misses, and visions for small modular reactors.
Feb 11, 2026 • 58min
Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo, "Governing Digital China" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Ting Luo, an expert on Chinese digital governance and AI, and Daniela Stockmann, a scholar of internet governance and digital policy, discuss China’s distinctive state-company-citizen governance model. They outline popular corporatism, platforms’ mediating role, commercial versus political credit systems, limits to data integration, and how competition and user behavior shape platform-state relations.
Feb 8, 2026 • 36min
Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)
Jacob Mchangama, founder of the think tank Justitia and author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, maps freedom of thought from ancient Athens to social media. He traces recurring themes like decentralization fostering tolerance and how censorship often backfires. Conversations span medieval Islamic skeptics, the printing press, Milton, and modern debates about speech and social order.
Feb 7, 2026 • 39min
Jon R. Lindsay "Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Jon R. Lindsay, associate professor at Georgia Tech and author of Age of Deception, explores how trust in digital systems enables espionage and subversion. He traces cases from Bletchley Park to Stuxnet and Israel’s 2024 pager operation. He reframes cyber incidents as secret statecraft, explains cooperation’s paradoxical role, and previews links between deception and AI.
Feb 6, 2026 • 27min
Rob Gallagher, "Artgames after GamerGate" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
Rob Gallagher, Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London and author of Artgames after GamerGate, explores how independent art games responded to Gamergate and cultural backlash. He discusses reusing classic game assets for critique. He links 1990s nostalgia to wider social decline and shows how autobiographical play reshapes who counts as a gamer.
Feb 6, 2026 • 1h 3min
Polina Dimova, "At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism" (Penn State UP, 2024)
Polina Dimova, comparative literature scholar of Russian and European modernism, explores synaesthesia as a cultural phenomenon. She traces its rise in fin-de-siècle Europe, links Wagner and multimedia experiments to abstract art, and discusses Scriabin’s color-organ and modern neuroscience. Conversations range from archival research to a digital companion that mixes music, images, and sensory visualizations.
Feb 4, 2026 • 1h 9min
Tom Griffiths, "The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind" (Henry Holt and Co., 2026)
Tom Griffiths, cognitive scientist and head of Princeton’s AI Lab, explores three mathematical approaches to thought: rules and symbols, neural networks, and probability. He traces the history from Boole and Turing to modern deep learning. The conversation touches on behaviorism, language, graded mental spaces, and why current AI systems differ from human minds.
Feb 3, 2026 • 34min
Jennifer Vail, "Friction: A Biography" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Jennifer Vail, a tribologist who studies friction across scales, explains why this everyday force shaped technology and culture. She traces ancient lubricants to modern nanoscale solutions. Short segments cover friction in fluids, space, the body, and climate impacts. There’s fun physics about curling and why bridging macro and nano laws remains unsolved.
Feb 1, 2026 • 53min
Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)
Andreas Killen, historian and professor at City College, CUNY, and author of Nervous Systems, explores 1950s brain science and its cultural fallout. He traces breakthroughs like EEGs and awake surgery. He links Cold War paranoia, brainwashing claims, MKUltra, and pop culture portrayals. He follows threads from clinical cases to later continuities in interrogation and the War on Terror.
