New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to prevailing sense of defeat and nostalgia that guides them.”

Her conversation with John, like the book itself, aims to narrate the history of Web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present and to explore how writers themselves have responded since 2008. (That means compression" so please Google Aarthi to learn more about her Duke professorship, earlier Levin-prize winning Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 , role as President of the Society for Novel Studies; and forthcoming co-edited Columbia University Press collection of conversations from podcast she co-founded, Novel Dialogue.) Aarthi is brimming with unexpected insights about writers responding in varied and unpredictable ways to textual production under digital conditions: Patricia Lockwood, Lauren Oyler, Tao Lin and even Sheila Heti, who early on experimented with LLM conversations in the New Yorker. She sees a new range of writers (Vauhini Vara, Meghan O'Gieblyn) maintaining a commitment to experimental writing, while engaging the power dynamics befalling them with this new tool, what she calls a new case of the "writer's hand at a distance."

Finally, when it comes to defining the "multi-front battle" university English departments will have to fight for their survival, Aarthi also wants to respond generously to students whose desire to write is as strong as their desire to read: why should we condemn that as a narcissistic impulse?

Read the episode here.

Mentioned in the episode

• Karen Hao, Empire of AI
• Sarah Wynne-Williams, Careless People
• Laurence Lessig Free Culture
• Xu Bing's Book from the Ground
• Fred Bennison's Emoji Dick.
• “glitch art”

Recallable Books

•  Elizabeth Eisenstein's 1970 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, as well as this AHR debate between Eisenstein and Adrian Johns.
• Ben Mangrum, The Comedy of Computation: also this excellent Recall this Book conversation about the feared obsolsence of the human knolwedge worker).

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Throughout Britain, all day, every day and in the dead of night, the secret listeners went about their solitary work. Hands on headphones, these men and women, drawn from all walks of civilian life, listened to the coded messages of German intelligence and passed hundreds of thousands of them on to Bletchley Park.

At the same time, men with firearms experience were recruited into secret patrols trained in sabotage and silent killing with knife or garotte. In June 1940, with a full-scale German invasion expected any minute, these auxiliary units were poised to undertake suicidal missions attacking enemy supply lines and assassinating anyone who helped the Nazis. In preparation for this, they dug operational bases in remote and hidden places – the ruins of many still exist today – and stashed them with supplies and weapons.

In Assassins and Secret Listeners: Britain's Invisible Armies, 1939-45 (Birlinn, 2026), Alistair Moffat tells the half-forgotten stories of immense bravery by thousands of ordinary men and women. Sworn to secrecy, their heroic work has long been overlooked, yet it played a crucial part in the Allied victory in 1945. This book finally pays them their due.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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How Do AI & Innovation Cohabitate?
 

Bryan Cassady is an author, professor, and all-around innovator, whether in book form or in classrooms, real and virtual, stretching from Europe to India.  He is a professor, consultant, and a serial entrepreneur now with a mission: to teach 1 million innovators by 2027.

He has built companies in 6 countries and trained 40,000+ leaders. He’s also a former professional racquetball player turned mathematician, a United Nations professional who speaks four languages. A researcher who has published on innovation, alignment, and social-media addiction. He’s co-created books with 50+ experts worldwide, including the international bestsellers CYCLES and The Generative Organization: AI Playbook for Exponential Leaders.

There’s the question before the formal questions begin, and then there’s adding humans into the loop—and all across the innovation process, AI has an instrumental role to play. That’s the verdict of this week’s guest, Bryan Cassady, who, true to his word, has put together an outside-the-box book that has brought into the fold multiple co-authors. One of Bryan's main points in both his book and this interview is that AI is a brilliant co-pilot, but a terrible pilot alone. Good prompts are vital for establishing context, role-playing scenarios, and using synthetic-user personas to create a Customer Avatar that helps you tell whether your innovation is likely to find buyers in the marketplace. If there’s a more charming, thoughtful guest than today’s, we’d be surprised. 

Bryan’s Offer

You can learn more about him at BryanCassady.com and take advantage of his offer to download a free book and toolkit here, helping him achieve his mission above!

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out the website here.  

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Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social crisis is just our way of merely dealing with the fallout?

So argues the political theorist James Poulos, who is my guest in Episode 7 of Season 6 on Madison’s Notes. Having earned his PhD in government at Georgetown University, he was a founding editor of The American Mind, Return, and Frontier, where he is currently editorial director. The author of The Art of Being Free (2017), Human, Forever (2021), I Know This Sounds Crazy (2024), and an upcoming book called, Golden Age Problems, he recently wrote a Palladium Magazine essay called, “The Dostoevskian Moment,” which we use along with Human, Forever to discuss the digital technology crisis.

Along the way we discuss media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Beaudrillard, the American political tradition, post-Cold-War civilizational states, cryptocurrency and AI, digital sovereignty, the modern camps fighting over technology among effective altruists, vitalists, gnostics and post-humanists, conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Pink Police State, why Mars colonies are safer for humanity than Lunar ones, and the genius of David Lynch.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Please share and enjoy.

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Could humanity’s most powerful invention become a threat to its survival? In this episode of The Survival Curve, we examine the disturbing prospect behind the “ten percent” debate: a risk of catastrophe that cannot be precisely calculated, but whose consequences demand serious attention.

We explore three routes to disaster: machines escaping human control, people using AI to unleash devastating cyber or biological attacks, and military systems accelerating a crisis towards nuclear war. What happens when a human still approves the decision, but no longer has the time or information to question the machine?

Can governments preserve meaningful control as technological competition intensifies—and who bears responsibility if they fail? 

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Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (RTP) emerged under the unique circumstances of a poor Southern state that needed to find a way to offset the declining industries of tobacco, furniture, and textiles in the 1950s. Through the sustained commitment of nearby universities, business leaders, and local and state officials, state leaders established the largest science and research park in the United States in an area that was nothing but “possums and pines.” Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park (Duke University Press, 2026) tells this story through the eyes of those at the center of it, like the local black leaders who convinced white officials to desegregate public schools with the justification that it would make the area more appealing to tech companies, or how a chance meeting between the governor and a Danish executive led to North Carolina becoming an epicenter for weight loss drugmakers decades later. Allen Paul and Mack Paul organize the story around major periods in RTP’s growth, showing how RTP came to define the region and the state by the 1990s as well as the major setbacks it encountered in the early 2000s. Breaking down the strategies that led to RTP’s success, like creating new institutions in targeted tech areas to spur activity and factoring quality of life into the regional planning of the area, Miracle Road demonstrates how the story of Research Triangle Park is a fascinating and important case study of urban development in the twenty-first century.

Mack Paul cofounded Morningstar Law Group, where he is a partner. He teaches land use law at North Carolina State University and North Carolina Central University. Mack served as chair of the Greater Triangle Regional Council and has written extensively about the development of the Triangle Region.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab. 

For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many. 

Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his book The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Simon and Schuster, 2026). From China's startlingly messy AI ecosystem to Singapore's government-led innovation, from South Korea's decades-old conglomerates still at the frontier to India's world-class talent that too often works abroad; from Europe's struggle to hold on to its best companies, to the deeper role of the state everywhere—including in Silicon Valley—and why the United States, far from declining, is extending its lead into a genuinely bipolar technological order.

Mehran is a winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize. He attended Yale where he was a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow. He has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum and an expert on Higher Education, Entrepreneurship, and Industrial Policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Before Yale, he studied at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has been a visiting scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Fellow with the Acumen Fund. 

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Geography of Innovation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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We are in a state of crisis. Democracy is under threat, authoritarian politics are on the rise, and digital media—once heralded as emancipatory technologies—are increasingly implicated in democratic erosion. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a critical framework for understanding the entangled relationships between discourse, digital media, and the hidden dynamics behind antagonism and polarisation.

The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces (Routledge, 2025) presents a fluid social ontology that theorises how discourses and digital communication technologies are inseparably entangled, and how this entanglement contributes to the formation of complex hierarchical relations. Drawing on discourse theory and new materialist perspectives, Dehghan maps how the various components of the discursive-digital link—users, collectives, identities, the medium’s design, underlying neoliberal capitalist logics, and structural power dynamics—together shape antagonistic frontiers in digital spaces. Through detailed case studies across multiple digital media, Dehghan demonstrates how these entanglements manifest through different articulatory logics that could transform societies towards either agonistic progress or disastrous polarisation.

By revealing the logics of discursive-digital alliances and active passivity, Dehghan provides critical insights for academics, activists, and anyone seeking to foster progressive togetherness. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a powerful theoretical framework and methodology for analysing digitally mediated communication. It challenges monolithic understandings of polarisation, technological solutionism, and symptom-focused approaches, instead advocating for radical structural interventions across all entangled components of the discursive-digital link—a necessary shift in both academic research and progressive political strategy to address the democratic crises of our time. 

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Library Technical Services: Future Forward (Bloomsbury, 2025) edited by Mary Beth Weber and Melissa De Fino looks at the future of technical services post-pandemic and at the brink of technological disruptions through a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility lens. Libraries have undergone a tremendous transformation that has been driven by multiple factors that include technological developments, and societal impacts such as declining college enrollment and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has introduced changes to how technical services professionals work and provide services. Whereas the library is often perceived by users as a building to house print books and journals, the reality is that the library encompasses both physical and virtual spaces. For many users, the library's online catalog and website are their first (and perhaps only) experience with the library. Our user community is global, and technical services work has evolved to serve users with a growing array of electronic resources, including e-books, databases, and e-journals. These resources differ from their print counterparts in that they cost more, require licenses and contracts that must continually need to be renegotiated and renewed, must comply with accessibility standards, and require different skill sets to catalog. The virtual spaces and services libraries provide are built on the foundation provided by technical services librarians. Assessment is an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of technical services work, and is addressed in this book. It is critical for collection development and acquisition of electronic resources. It is also an important component of the work of electronic resources librarians, who monitor usage and trends. Developing an appropriate skill set for technical services work is essential for success. This includes knowing the standards for the work performed, awareness of emerging standards, and remaining relevant.

Guests: Mary Beth Weber is the inaugural Coordinator for Training and Mentorship for Rutgers University Libraries. In this capacity, she serves as an advisor to the Faculty Mentoring Program, collaborates with colleagues to identify, develop, and implement a continuous program of enrichment activities to meet the needs of the Libraries' personnel. She previously served as the Head of Central Technical Services for 2008-2025, and her new role is the result of a large-scale reorganization undertaken by Rutgers University Libraries. Weber has had a long career in technical services, overseeing both resource description and acquisitions, and collaborating with collection development librarians. She representedRutgers on the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Heads of Cataloging Committee from 2014-2025. Other offices she has held include serving as editor-in-chief for Library Resources and Technical Services, one of ALA Core’s official journals, for nine years. In addition to three books she has published with Bloomsbury, she co-authored Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, 5th edition, with Peggy Johnson. She may be contacted via her LinkedIn profile.  She earned her MLS from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and earned my BA from Michigan State University, where I had a double major of English and Art History. 

Melissa De Fino is Team Lead for Cataloging and Metadata Services and Metadata Librarian for Special Collections and Audiovisual Materials at Rutgers University Libraries. She has worked at Rutgers for more than 20 years, beginning her career there as a Special Collections Cataloger. Her research focuses on the evolution of technical services librarianship. Melissa is the co-author, with Mary Beth, of Virtual Technical Services: A Handbook, has published several peer-reviewed articles, and served for five years as editor of the “Tech Services Online” column in Technical Services Quarterly. She holds a Master of Library and Information Science and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from Rutgers University, as well as a B.A. in English from Fordham University.

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is a Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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This inaugural podcast for the Voices of Discovery podcast from the University of Houston Clear Lake features a discussion of Team MAPPS, a federally-funded program that is available online to help people increase collaboration within teams. The Team Methods to Advance Processes and Performance in Science (Team MAPPS) training program was specifically designed to help scientific teams develop and master the skills of Team Science so that collaboration is more effective as scientific teams tackle the complex challenges of our world today. Listen as Dr. Kevin Wooten, professor at UHCL, and Cynde Ferris, adjunct professor at UHCL and director of educational technology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, explain the origins of TeamMAPPS and how the science of Team Science can be helpful for teamwork.  

Dr. Kay L. Colley is executive director of the Center for Faculty Development at the University of Houston Clear Lake and host of its Voices of Discovery podcast.

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