R. Joshua Scannell, "The Carceral Surround" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communitie...
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New Books in Technology
Interviews with Scholars of Technology about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member!
Episodes
20 of 1,129 episodesViolaine Roussel, "Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing...
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, "Artificial Historians" (Routledge, 2025)
I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka...
Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Ar...
Special Episode: Accounting for Computing, or Why We So Badly Need a New Social and Economic History of Everyday Digital Technology Use
This special episode features a short talk Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, gave at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville,...
Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, "Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination" (Polity, 2027)
What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for? In this episode, Jo...
Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnifi...
Jehnie Burns on Mixtape Culture
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and...
Aarthi Vadde, "We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia UP, 2026)
We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaki...
Beyond Free Speech: Why AI Governance Demands Freedom of Thought
Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher...
Leopoldina Fortunati, "The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital" (Verso, 2025)
The definitive feminist analysis of reproductive and ‘caring’ labor to emerge from Italian feminism of the 1970s. Emerging from the great so...
James W. Cortada, "Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times (Bloomsbury, 2025) describes tacit knowledge, what it...
Devin Kennedy, "Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big....
The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism in Asia and Beyond
How do authoritarian regimes silence critics across borders? And what are the repressive tools and strategies that authoritarian regimes use...
Re-Evaluating CX in the AI Era
Michael Brand is a CX strategist and trainer, based in Switzerland, who has been named a Thinkers 360 Top 50 Global Thought Leader on Custom...
Paul Langley and Andrew Leyshon, "Fintech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance" (Princeton UP, 2026)
How is finance changing in the contemporary world? In FinTech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance (Princeton U...
Building A Freedom Infrastructure in the Age of Networked Control
Host Licia Cianetti talks to Venezuelan democracy activist and co-founder of the World Liberty Congress Leopoldo López. As part of PPP’s ong...
David I. Waddington, "The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026)
Despite decades of inflammatory rhetoric, the real risk of video games lies not in their violent imagery but in the ethical and political se...
Daniel L. Gardner, "Thresholds of Digital Gameplay" (MIT Press, 2025)
Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account log...
Stefan Höltgen et al., "Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer" (Projekt Verlag, 2026)
The Commodore 64 is the most significant computer of its era. From 1982 to 1994, a total of 27 million units were sold—more than any other co...