Phoebe Moore, "The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts" (Routledge, 2017)
Humans are accustomed to being tool bearers, but what happens when machines become tool bearers, calculating human labour via the use of big data and people analytics by metrics? Phoebe Moore's The Qu...
26 Dec 201958min
Xiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of course,...
21 Dec 20191h 3min
Chris Arnade, "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America" (Sentinel, 2019)
A lot of politicians like to say that there are “two Americas,” but do any of them know what life is really like for the marginalized poor? We speak with journalist and photographer, Chris Arnade, abo...
11 Dec 201924min
Simone Knox and Kai Hanno Schwind, "Friends: A Reading of the Sitcom" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
What does Friends mean to us now? In Friends: A Reading of the Sitcom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Simone Knox, an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television at the Universi...
10 Dec 201942min
Vicky Pryce, "Women vs. Capitalism: Why We Can't Have It All in a Free Market Economy" (Hurst, 2019)
Free market capitalism has failed women, and even the recent progress that had been made in closing the gender wage gap has leveled off in many rich democracies. Vicky Pryce helps us understand the ca...
10 Dec 201927min
Lundy Braun, "Breathing Race into the Machine" (U Minnesota Press, 2014)
“We cannot get answers to questions that cannot be asked.” Lundy Braun’s influential book, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (Univers...
4 Dec 201942min
Victoria Reyes, "Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines" (Stanford UP, 2019)
Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stan...
4 Dec 20191h 9min
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share...
3 Dec 201957min
