Angela Creager generously made time to talk with me recently about her impeccably researched and elegantly written new history of radioisotopes as military and civilian objects, for experimentation and therapeutic use, from the 1930s through the late twentieth century. It’s a fabulous book, and you can find our conversation about it here. Continue reading Life Atomic: An Interview
Eduardo Kohn and I recently spoke about his great new ethnography, a book that attempts an “anthropology beyond the human,” and that involves discussions of dreaming dogs and falling peccaries, and that I really, really loved. You can find our conversation here. Continue reading How Forests Think: An Interview
It was a pleasure to talk with Conevery Bolton Valencius about her new book on the making and forgetting of knowledge surrounding a series of earthquakes that rocked the Mississippi Valley in the 19th century. It’s a great story about the history of early American science, with particularly awesome footnotes, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes: An Interview
I recently spoke with Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott about their new edited volume full of great essays that each look at the history and ethnography of addiction from a fresh and interesting perspective. You can find our conversation here. Continue reading Addiction Trajectories: An Interview
Bill Clancey’s great new book explores the nature of exploration itself, in the context of a rich ethnographic study of the scientists and engineers of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. It was a pleasure to talk with him, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading Working on Mars: An Interview
Ian Bogost’s wonderful book introduces readers to the field of object-oriented ontology by asking us to consider a fundamental question: why do we ignore “stuff” in scholarship, poetry, science, or business as anything more than a way to continue talking about humans? Is there a way to think and live with stuff in the world that doesn’t reduce it to that which concerns people, but instead … Continue reading Alien Phenomenology: An Interview
Marga Vicedo’s new book explores the emergence of the science of children’s emotional needs in the twentieth century, contextualizing the work of British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907-1990) within a broader history of scientific studies of human and animal behavior. She was kind enough to talk with me about it, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading The Nature and Nurture of Love: An Interview
I had the pleasure of talking with Jonathan Sterne about his fascinating new study of the MP3 as a historical, cultural, conceptual, and social phenomenon. You can find our conversation here. Continue reading MP3: An Interview
Adam Shapiro recently visited UBC and generously made time to talk with me about his new book, a careful study that looks beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both. You can find our conversation here. Continue reading Trying Biology: An Interview
Tim Maudlin and I talked about his new introduction to the philosophy of physics, a wonderfully approachable book that blends historical and philosophical approaches and focuses on fundamental notions of space and time. You can find our conversation here. Continue reading Philosophy of Physics: An Interview
Carla Nappi 