New Books in Technology
846 episodes - English - Latest episode: 1 day ago - ★★★★★ - 1 ratingInterviews with Scholars of Technology about their New Books
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Episodes
David Nemer, “Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology” (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013)
June 05, 2014 06:00 - 39 minutesInherently problematic in most mainstream discussions of the impact of technology is the dominant western or global northern perspective. In this way, the impact of technology on societies in developing countries, the impact of these societies on technology, and how those technologies are used is often ignored or marginalized. In his book Favela Digital: The Other Side of Technology (GSA Editora e Grafica, 2013), David Nemer, a doctoral candidate in Social Informatics at Indiana University, a...
Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014)
May 29, 2014 15:18 - 38 minutesThe “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to save information remotely and access that information from anywhere. And an increasing number of organizations and individuals are using the cloud almost exclusively for their computing and storage purposes. The question remains, however, whether there is an actual understanding of what the cloud is, and the issues and implications that surround the growt...
Lawrence Goldstone, “Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies” (Ballentine, 2014)
May 18, 2014 10:23 - 49 minutesIn Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (Ballentine Books, 2014), Lawrence Goldstone recounts the discovery and mastery of aviation at the turn of the twentieth century–and all the litigation that ensued. Foremost amongst the legal battles in early aviation was the suits waged between the Wilbur and Orville Wright and Glenn Curtiss. Goldstone offers an in depth view of that struggle. From the publisher: “While the Wright brothers’ contributions to ...
danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014)
May 12, 2014 15:50 - 45 minutesSocial media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, educators, and legislators concerned with issues of privacy, harm prevention, and and cyberbullying. In her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP, 2014), danah boyd, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Research Assistant Professor at NYU, and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, demystifies ...
Michael Saler, “As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality” (Oxford UP, 2012)
May 12, 2014 11:35 - 54 minutesIn As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012), historian Michael Saler explores the precursors of the current proliferation of digital virtual worlds. Saler challenges Max Weber’s analysis of modernity as the disenchanting of the world, and demonstrates that modernity is deeply “enchanted by reason.” Saler demonstrates this argument by examining a new phenomenon: adult engagement with and immersion in fictional worlds. He argues that from the 1880...
Jennifer Stromer-Galley, “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford UP, 2014)
May 05, 2014 06:00 - 26 minutesThe Oxford University Press series on digital politics has produced several new books that we have featured on the podcast. Interviews with Dave Karpf, Dan Kreiss, and Muzammil Hussain are available in previous podcasts. One of the latest from the series is Jennifer Stromer-Galley new book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (OUP 2014). Stromer-Galley is associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. This excellent new book is a bit of a walk down m...
Jennifer Stromer-Galley, “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford UP, 2014)
April 18, 2014 06:00 - 33 minutesDigital Communications Technologies, or DCTs, like the Internet offer the infrastructure and means of forming a networked society. These technologies, now, are a mainstay of political campaigns on every level, from city, to state, to congressional, and, of course, presidential. In her new book, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (Oxford University Press, 2014), Jennifer Stromer-Galley, an associate professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University, discusses the impact of DCTs on pre...
Paul-Brian McInerney, “From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market” (Stanford UP, 2014)
April 14, 2014 06:00 - 34 minutesPaul-Brian McInerney is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is the author of From Social Movement to Moral Market: How the Circuit Riders Sparked an IT Revolution and Created a Technology Market (Stanford University Press 2014). McInerney’s book tells the fascinating history of the Circuit Riders and NPower, the leading organizations in the nonprofit information technology social movement of the late 1990s. He ties together excellent elite interviews wi...
Nick Yee, “The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-and How They Don’t” (Yale UP, 2014)
April 11, 2014 06:00 - 51 minutesThe image of online gaming in popular culture is that of an addictive pastime, mired in escapism. And the denizens of virtual worlds are thought to be mostly socially awkward teenaged boys. In his new book The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-and How They Don’t (Yale University Press, 2014), Nick Yee asserts that the common stereotypes of gaming and gamers are not, and have never been, based in fact. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs as ...
Adam Thierer, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom” (Mercatus Center, 2014)
April 04, 2014 14:15 - 49 minutesMuch of the progress in technology today has come about as a result of innovators who did not seek prior approval from regulatory bodies and such. Yet, even with the beneficial results from innovations like the commercial Internet, mobile technologies, and social networks, a disposition exists to be overly cautious with respect to new things. Adam Thierer calls this the “precautionary principle” in his new book Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Fr...
Andrew L. Russell, “Open Standards in the Digital Age” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
March 27, 2014 12:05 - 51 minutesWe tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possible because of standards. In his book Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dr. Andrew L. Russell examines standards and the standardization process in technology with an emphasis on standards in information networks. In particular, Russell examines the interdisciplinary historica...
Robert Neer, “Napalm: An American Biography” (Harvard UP, 2013)
February 13, 2014 12:06 - 47 minutesJust as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person. In recent years, the jettisoning of this tradition has led to a number of compelling explorations of the lives of commodities (such as salt or the banana), texts (Gone with the Wind, for example), diseases (including cancer or cancer cells), and even the Atlantic Ocean. The latest entry into this realm of biographical inquiry is Robert Nee...
Thomas Bey William Bailey, “Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society” (Belsona Books, 2012)
November 22, 2013 15:30 - 56 minutesThomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture. Thomas traces the history of self-released audio from its origins in mail-art networks of the 1970s to the present day practice of using antiquated media – the humble cassette tape – for the dissemination of experimental sounds. Net-labels, mp3 blogs, tape traders, and their many...
Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, “How to Watch Television” (NYU Press, 2013)
November 16, 2013 12:23 - 47 minutesWhat if there was an instruction manual for television? Not just for the casual consumer, but for college students interested in learning about the culture of television, written by some of the field’s top scholars? In How to Watch Television (New York University Press, 2013), editors Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell have put together a collection of 40 original essays from some of today’s top scholars on television culture. Each essay focuses on a single television show, and each is an exam...
William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012)
November 03, 2013 11:12 - 1 hourHow does conducting fieldwork on another planet, using a robot as a mobile laboratory, change what it means to be a scientist? In Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers (MIT Press, 2012), William J. Clancey explores the nature of exploration in the context of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions of the first decade of the twenty-first century. From 2002-2005 (and with additional interviews thereafter), Clancey led a group of computer and social...
Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)
October 26, 2013 11:21 - 1 hourWe tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), Aaron Stephen Moore critiques this account in a study of the relationship between technology and power in the context of Japanese fascism and imperialism. Moore traces the emergence of a “technological imaginary” in wartime Japan, exploring how different groups (including intellectual...
Jonathan Sterne, “MP3: The Meaning of a Format” (Duke UP, 2012)
October 10, 2013 16:12 - 1 hourMP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) is a fascinating study of the MP3 as a historical, cultural, conceptual, and social phenomenon. In the course of an account of the MP3 that has surprising connections to telephony and the economics of perception, Jonathan Sterne usefully shifts our attention from media-in-general to a more specific focus on material formats, “the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in.” MP3 explores the process by which AT&T lea...
Ian Samson, “Paper: An Elegy” (Harper Collins, 2012)
September 24, 2013 13:56 - 34 minutesIn our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches. Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from the internet than from newspapers. But how irrelevant has paper really become? As Ian Samson argues in his new book, Paper: An Elegy (Harper Collins, 2012), not only is paper still vital in our society, it pretty much dominates all our lives. From advertising to currency, to board games and origami, paper still revolves around most business and l...
David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012)
July 29, 2013 14:31 - 1 hourHow do you measure a star? In the middle of the 20thcentury, an interdisciplinary and international community of scientists began using radio waves to measure heavenly bodies and transformed astronomy as a result. David P. D. Munns‘s new book charts the process through which radio astronomers learned to see the sounds of the sky, creating a new space for Cold War science. A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy (MIT Press, 2012) uses the emergence ...
John O. McGinnis, “Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology” (Princeton UP, 2013)
July 10, 2013 15:40 - 1 hourThe advent of very powerful computers and the Internet have not “changed everything,” but it has created a new communications context within which almost everything we do will be somewhat changed. One of the “things we do” is governance, that is, the way we organize ourselves politically and, as a result of that organization, provide for the individual and public good. In his fascinating book Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology (Princeton UP, 2013), John O. McGi...
Nicco Mele, “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013)
June 24, 2013 06:00 - 37 minutesNicco Mele is the author of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). He is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard University. Mele writes as a technology expert and as a witness to history. He served as a campaign staffer for the Howard Dean for President Campaign in 2003. He and his colleagues implemented many of the web-based campaign innovations that resu...
Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013)
June 20, 2013 12:57 - 34 minutesIt’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble is we would have to cut back on all the good things that carbon emissions produce, like big houses, cool cars, and tasty food imported from far-away places. We don’t want to do that. So what’s a global citizen to do? One idea is to take control of the environment, engineering-wise. Why cut back when...
Dominic Pettman, “Human Error” (UMinnesota, 2011)/”Look at the Bunny” (Zero Books, 2013)
May 31, 2013 12:19 - 1 hour“The humans are dead.” Whether or not you recognize the epigram from Flight of the Conchords (and if not, there are worse ways to spend a few minutes than by looking here, and I recommend sticking around for the “binary solo”), Dominic Pettman‘s Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) will likely change the way you think about humanity, animals, machines, and the relationships among them. Pettman uses a series of fascinating case studies, from tele...
Douglas Rushkoff, “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” (Current, 2013)
May 21, 2013 16:11 - 34 minutesHumans understand the world through stories, some short and some long. But what happens when the stories become so short that they, well, aren’t stories at all? In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, 2013), Douglas Rushkoff explores this question. He points out that always-on, always “new” digital communications have essentially locked us into an ever-more data-rich “moment,” one from which we cannot really escape. The past becomes a few minutes ago; the future a few minutes ...
Joseph November, “Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012)
May 14, 2013 14:57 - 1 hourThere are pigeons, cats, and Martians here. There are CT scanners, dentures, computers large enough to fill rooms, war games, and neural networks. In Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Joe November mobilizes this ecology of instruments and objects, people and programs, in a story that maps out the early years of the introduction of computers to biology and medicine from 1955 to 1965. As computing technology was gradually integrat...
Paul Barrett, “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” (Broadway, 2013)
May 02, 2013 13:45 - 53 minutesHistory is in many respects the story of humanity’s quest for transcendence: to control life and death, time and space, loss and memory. When inventors or companies effectively tap into these needs products emerge that help define their times. The Kodak ‘Brownie’ allowed average consumers – without the knowledge of chemistry or math of a Matthew Brady – to capture powerful images. Ford’s Model T gave the ‘working man’ the ability to travel further and faster than wealthy aristocrats of previo...
David Hochfelder, “The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012)
April 23, 2013 13:11 - 44 minutesIn The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), David Hochfelder provides a taut and consistently intelligent history of the telegraph in American life. The book is notable for both its topical breadth—encompassing war, politics, business, journalism, and everyday life—as well as its focused, argument-driven chapters. Hochfelder describes how the telegraph’s important role in the Civil War set the stage for Western Union’s postwar dominance, which in turn provok...
Robert W. McChesney, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy” (The New Press, 2013)
April 04, 2013 15:10 - 47 minutesRobert W. McChesney, the celebrated political economist of communication, takes the Internet, industry and government head-on in his latest book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013). Digital Disconnect builds on McChesney’s previous works, spinning forward his scholarship to construct a remarkably current look at the Internet’s corporate and political landscape. “Almost all of the other books on the Internet, some of which are ver...
C.W. Anderson, “Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age” (Temple UP, 2013)
March 03, 2013 17:55 - 52 minutesSomewhere along the line, C.W. Anderson became fascinated with digital journalism and the culture that surrounds it: engaged publics, social networks, and the challenges to “legacy” media. Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Temple University Press, 2013) is the fascinating product of Anderson’s research into the Philadelphia journalism scene during the first decade-plus of the 21st Century. Once a thriving hub of traditional journalism, Philadelphia has become a...
Alec Foege, “The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great” (Basic Books, 2013)
January 17, 2013 16:13 - 51 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology
Alec Foege, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great" (Basic Books, 2013)
January 17, 2013 09:00 - 51 minutesFrom its earliest years, the United States was a nation of tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw. Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work, and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with the inventions that laid the foundations for America's economic dominance. Recently, Americans have come to question ...
Ines Mergel, “Social Media in the Public Sector: A Guide to Participation, Collaboration and Transparency in the Networked World” (Jossey-Bass 2012)
December 16, 2012 20:41 - 29 minutesInes Mergel, assistant professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the School of Information Studies (iSchool) at Syracuse University, is the author of Social Media in the Public Sector: A Guide to Participation, Collaboration and Transparency in the Networked World (Jossey-Bass 2012). This timely and insightful book can be read by a host of audiences, from the scholar to the practitioner. The book relates the development of social media tech...
David Wolman, “The End Of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers, and the Coming Cashless Society” (Da Capo Press, 2012)
June 08, 2012 12:31 - 58 minutesMany of us in the western world don’t rely on bills and coins as much as we used to, yet the idea of cash money is still an ever-present constant in our minds. How often have you stopped to consider the idea of what “money” actually is on a larger scale, or where our changing habits could lead us? In his book The End of Money – Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers, and the Coming Cashless Society (Da Capo Press, 2012), David Wolman examines our commitment to cash, its advantages and d...
Barry Kernfeld, “Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
May 17, 2012 14:43 - 1 hourHave you ever illegally downloaded a song from the internet? How about illicitly burned copies of a CD? Made a “party tape?” Bought a bootleg album? You may have done these things, but have you purchased a bootlegged song-sheet? In Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929 (University of Chicago, 2011) Barry Kernfeld fills us in on the history of disobedient music reproduction and distribution since, well, before the advent of recording technology. Along the way he discusses ...
Allen Buchanan, “Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves” (Oxford UP, 2011)
March 01, 2012 12:00 - 1 hourPopular culture is replete with warnings about the dangers of technology. One finds in recent films, literature, and music cautions about the myriad ways in which technology threatens our very humanity; most frequently, the lesson is that the attempt to harness technology for the betterment of the world always backfires. It’s no wonder, then, that when it comes to biomedical technologies that promise to enhance human physical and cognitive capacities, many people tend to express deep unease o...
Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
February 15, 2012 13:00 - 1 hour“Guns don’t kill people; people do.” That’s a common refrain from the National Rifle Association, but it expresses a certain view of our relations to the things we make that also affects our thinking about the scope of ethics. On this traditional view, human persons are moral agents, and artifacts, or products of technology in general, are just tools; they have no moral significance in and of themselves. In his new book, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Thin...
Daqing Yang, “Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)
November 15, 2011 22:01 - 1 hourDaqing Yang‘s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a gift to both historians of East Asia and scholars of science and technology studies (STS). Yang’s book dissects the body of the Japanese empire from 1853-1945 to reveal its pulsing “nerve system” in a network of communication technologies that extended well into Northeast and Southeast Asia. This extraordinarily rich and well-documented account moves fr...
Kimbrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, “Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling” (Duke University Press, 2011)
August 04, 2011 19:27 - 1 hourOne hallmark of important art, in any medium, is a thoughtful relation with artistic precursors. Every artist reckons with heroes and rivals, influences and nemeses, and the old work becomes a part of the new. In Adam Bradley’s seminal monograph on hip-hop lyrics, Book of Rhymes, legendary MC Mos Def describes his desire to participate in posterity: “I wanted it to be something that was durable. You can listen to all these Jimi records and Miles records and Curtis Mayfield records; I wanted t...
Siva Vaidhyanathan, “The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)” (U. California Press, 2011)
August 04, 2011 16:21 - 1 hourIn his new book The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press, 2011), Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, takes a close look at the powerful influence Google has on our society. He believes that by valuing popularity over accuracy, Google dictates what information is most useful to users, thereby changing societal perceptions of what information is relevant. In our interview, we talked about how Vaidy...
Louis Siegelbaum, “Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile” (Cornell UP, 2008)
July 22, 2011 20:28 - 1 hourA recent editorial in the Moscow Times declared that in Moscow “the car is king.” Indeed, one word Muscovites constantly mutter is probka (traffic jam). The boom in car ownership is transforming Russian life itself, and for some not necessarily for the better. “The joy of personal mobility — that is, automobile ownership — has completely eclipsed the value of community life. But the joy of car ownership has long ceased being a joy and has instead become a burden, with traffic jams causing fre...
Mark Stephen Meadows, “We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact” (Lyons Press, 2011)
July 06, 2011 13:39 - 56 minutesIf technology is the site of digital culture, then robots are the future platforms of our social projections and interactions. In fact, that future is already here in small but fascinating ways. Mark Stephen Meadows is one of a handful of curious authors who have begun to explore the social ramifications of robotic engineering and his book We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) is intended as a lively assessment of...
Scott Cleland with Ira Brodsky, “Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google” (Telescope Books, 2011)
June 20, 2011 18:26 - 47 minutesIn their new book Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google (Telescope Books, 2011), Scott Cleland, President of Precursor LLC, and Ira Brodsky, founder of Datacomm Research, aim to expose the unethical internet behemoth they believe to be hiding behind the motto “Don’t be Evil.” Cleland and Brodsky believe that Google has a hidden political agenda, and is attempting to shape the world to match this agenda by controlling your information, as well as who has access to that information. In...
Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
May 31, 2011 18:19 - 58 minutesIn her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor official in southern China, Song has earned a major reputation among scholars of Chinese history for writing the Tiangong kaiwu, a work on practical knowledge ...
Brian Christian, “The Most Human Human: A Defense of Humanity in the Age of the Computer” (Penguin, 2011)
May 23, 2011 19:44 - 49 minutesCan computers think? That was the question which provoked English mathematician Alan Turing to come up with what we call the Turing Test, in which a computer engages a human in conversation while a judge, unaware of who is who, looks on and tries to ascertain which participant is made of flesh and blood, and which of bits and bytes. Such a test is held every year in Brighton, England, where the most convincing human confederate is awarded a prize: The Most Human Human. There is also a prize f...
Robert Goldberg, “Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit” (Simon & Schuster, 2010)
March 18, 2011 20:34 - 40 minutesThis week New Books in Public Policy interviews Bob Goldberg about his new book Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit (Simon & Schuster, 2010). The book is a look at the way medical science is discussed and played out over the Internet. As Goldberg says on his website, tabloid medicine is “medical reporting or information based on or consisting of Internet material that sensationalizes and exaggerate the dangers of medical technology wi...
Joel Wolfe, “Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2010)
March 19, 2010 17:12 - 1 hourHere’s something I learned by reading Joel Wolfe’s terrific Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford, 2010): the United States and Brazil have a lot in common. Both hived off European empires; both struggled with slavery and its legacy; both are profoundly multiethnic and multiracial; both have spent much of their respective histories settling a vast “wild” frontier (though, to be fair, it was already “settled” by indigenous people); and, most importantly for our purpose...