Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMyka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Episode 347
The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic …
1 year, 5 months ago
Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia MacDonald, "The Rise of Unmanned Warfare: Origins of the Us Autonomous Military Arsenal" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 131
The Rise of Unmanned Warfare: Origins of the Us Autonomous Military Arsenal (Oxford UP, 2023) tells the fascinating story of the people, processes, a…
1 year, 5 months ago
Nicole C. Nelson, "Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
Episode 388
Mice are used as model organisms across a wide range of fields in science today--but it is far from obvious how studying a mouse in a maze can help u…
1 year, 5 months ago
Brain Rot: What Our Screens Are Doing to Our Minds (8)
Episode 247
In Episode 8, Dr. Messina and Dr. Gill, the host and co-host of this podcast, talked about the emotional toll that is associated with lost time---tim…
1 year, 5 months ago
Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)
Episode 2585
How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil liberties, …
1 year, 5 months ago
Beaty Rubens, "Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home" (Bodleian Library, 2025)
Episode 169
Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by w…
1 year, 5 months ago
Darryl Campbell, "Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software" (W. W. Norton, 2025)
Episode 2583
A tech insider explains how capitalism and software development make for such a dangerous mix.
Software was supposed to radically improve society. Ou…
1 year, 5 months ago
Sandra Matz, "Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior" (HBRP, 2025)
Episode 142
A fascinating exploration of how algorithms penetrate the most intimate aspects of our psychology—from the pioneering expert on psychological targeti…
1 year, 5 months ago
Brain Rot: What Our Screens Are Doing to Our Minds (7)
Episode 246
Drs. Messina and Gill discussed the concept of technoference, which refers to the interference of technology with human connection and its impact on …
1 year, 5 months ago
Peter Krapp, "Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation" (MIT Press, 2024)
Episode 88
We're pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Krapp, the author of Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (MIT Press, 2024), to the New Books Networ…
1 year, 5 months ago