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Interviews with historians of science about their new books.
Mainstream psychology has long accepted that some people (like those with autism) are naturally more logical and unemotional, while others (like so-ca…
The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Deirdre Loughridge & Dr. Thomas Patteson is a guided tour through centuries of ins…
In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facil…
Today, I interview Vin Nardizzi, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, about his new monograph Marvellous Vegetables in the Engl…
Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-Natio…
Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract an…
The South American coca plant was established in 19th-century Britain as a medical product before it became a globally restricted drug. Drawing on bot…
In Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke UP, 2026), Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define s…
Europe's Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cornell UP, 2025) is a history of eighteenth-century naturalists and physicians …
Naming new discoveries is central to science, and for centuries, Latin dominated this process. The resulting terminology still shapes modern science, …
The Origins of the New (Princeton University Press, 2026) presents a revolutionary approach to evolutionary success in all realms of life. In this gro…
Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings (Zone Books, 2026) is a compelling and wide-ranging analysis of pneumatic phenomena in modern cu…
We often think of medieval medicine as strange, unhygienic and unscientific, but The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Katherin…
Hypochondria: In Sickness and in Story (Reaktion, 2026) proposes a bold reimagining of a frequently dismissed condition. Dr. Susannah B. Mintz reframe…
We all understand that knowledge shapes the fate of business and the growth of nations, but few of us are aware of the principles that govern its moti…
From Aztec sun stones to satellite launches, from muralist visions to dark sky parks, Mexico's engagement with outer space is fundamental to its ident…
In Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connect…
In Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2026), philosopher Jacob Stegenga breaks with the most dominant …
We're so pleased to welcome Dr. Amelia Acker, author of Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms (MIT Press, 2025) to the New Books Network! …
From the beginning of Galileo’s career, well before the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, his contemporaries took pains to shape his reputation and…