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About Michael McGovern
Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and numbers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law.NBN Episodes hosted by Michael:
February 5, 2021
The Republic of Color
The appreciation of color is considered universal among human societies, yet varies vastly according to cultural norms and material circumstances. In …
August 18, 2020
Life by Algorithms
How can we understand computerization as a social process? Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, …
August 6, 2020
News from Mars
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mar…
April 30, 2020
Moving Violations
Cars are among our most ubiquitous technologies; one could say that the cultural lore of the postwar United States is written in tire marks. But as mu…
January 29, 2020
Scouting and Scoring
The so-called Sabermetrics revolution in baseball that began in the 1970s, popularized by the book—and later Hollywood film—Moneyball, was supposed to…
November 14, 2019
Engineering Rules
Standards are crucial to the way we live—just look around you. A no. 2 pencil, perhaps? That arrived in an 8x8.5x20 shipping container? Standards allo…
October 30, 2019
Looking Forward
A fortune teller, cotton prophet, and a weather forecaster walk into a bar—probably a more common occurrence than you might think in the Gilded Age Un…
April 17, 2019
Mapping AIDS
What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual His…
February 19, 2019
A People’s History of Computing in the United States
We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers f…
October 31, 2018
Accounting for Slavery
The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Pro…
September 13, 2018
Life Histories of Genetic Disease
How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes t…
July 27, 2018
Data-Centric Biology
Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening b…
July 4, 2018
Life on Ice
Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a pecul…
May 11, 2017
Rebel Genius
Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, War…
May 8, 2017
Evolution Made to Order
Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to "shock Mother Nature," or at least in bad taste. Yet,…
April 29, 2017
A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities
The back cover of J. C. McKeown's new book, A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities (Oxford University Press, 2017), is adorned not with review quote…
March 29, 2017
Bounding Biomedicine
What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their …
March 28, 2017
Nature's Path
Susan Cayleff's Nature's Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers a fascinating alternative to…
December 9, 2016
Risky Medicine
Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though…
November 12, 2016
The Pulse of Modernism
"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life," Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde's waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Niet…
July 8, 2016
The Cybernetics Moment
I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothe…
June 29, 2016
Through the Valley of Shadows
Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful c…
June 22, 2016
Listening for What Matters
When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Sau…
June 15, 2016
Under the Strain of Color
In his 1948 essay, "Harlem is Nowhere," Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks a…