New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

This book is available open access.

For
more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will
revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers
(MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of
politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how
programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace
activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build
simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet.

Drawing
on novel archival and historical research, Dr. McKelvey recounts the
history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections,
voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United
States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international
affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the
two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of
exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while
presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes.

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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Who is Shennong, the Divine Farmer? And how can he help us understand the intricate relationships between spirituality, science and environmentalism in Taiwan today? These questions are at the heart of new research by the University of Oslo’s Koen Wellens and Mette Halskov Hansen. In this episode, we are joined by Koen Wellens for a conversation on religious responses to environmental change, community temples, and reconnecting to nature via the Divine Farmer in the context of contemporary Taiwan.

You can read more about the research discussed in this episode in the book Religion and Ecological Crisis: Responses from Asia, published by Leiden University Press.

Koen Wellens is Professor of China Studies at the University of Oslo.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for South Asian Democracy at the University of Oslo.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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Glasses are among the oldest and most commonplace prosthetics we have
invented. But what does it mean to wear glasses? There is more to the
answer than correcting vision. Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the
way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us.

Everyone has encounters with glasses, passively or actively, from
reading glasses to sunglasses. At times they are the main identifiers in
a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and
brainy to cool and sleazy. They are alternately the most mundane of
things on our bodies and potentially the most glamorous.

In this edition of the Object Lessons series, Glasses (Bloomsbury,
2026) by Adam Geczy explores this most pervasive and accessible
accessory and shows that it is both a conduit to and a barrier between
ourselves and the world outside.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
(MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies
classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about
advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech,
military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is
about the changing imagination of technology within an American context
and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of
modern life.

Soraya Murray
is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual
culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as
imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central
role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC.
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In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director Eli Karetny sits down with Alexis Cruz, founder of Enough Consulting and former strategic advisor for governance at Meta. Cruz explores how the proliferation of AI and digital platforms has shifted global politics into an "anocracy"—a precarious gray zone situated between traditional democracy and authoritarianism.
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