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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.
Historian of data
Michael's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Michael:

Science, Technology, and Society February 5, 2021

The Republic of Color

Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America

Michael Rossi

Hosted by Michael McGovern
The appreciation of color is considered universal among human societies, yet varies vastly according to cultural norms and material circumstances. In the nineteenth century, synthetic chemistry produced new hues like …
Science, Technology, and Society August 18, 2020

Life by Algorithms

How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World

C. Besteman and H. Gusterson

Hosted by Michael McGovern
How can we understand computerization as a social process? Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a timely and welcome edited volume …
Science, Technology, and Society August 6, 2020

News from Mars

Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910

Joshua Nall

Hosted by Michael McGovern
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 Mars: Mass Media and the …
Science, Technology, and Society April 30, 2020

Moving Violations

Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States

Lee Vinsel

Hosted by Michael McGovern
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 much as they have …
Science, Technology, and Society January 29, 2020

Scouting and Scoring

How We Know What We Know About Baseball

Christopher J. Phillips

Hosted by Michael McGovern
The so-called Sabermetrics revolution in baseball that began in the 1970s, popularized by the book—and later Hollywood film—Moneyball, was supposed to represent a triumph of observation over intuition. Cash-strapped clubs …
Science, Technology, and Society November 14, 2019

Engineering Rules

Global Standard Setting since 1880

JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy

Hosted by Michael McGovern
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 allow your computer and smart phone …
Science, Technology, and Society October 30, 2019

Looking Forward

Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America

Jamie L. Pietruska

Hosted by Michael McGovern
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 United States! Jamie Pietruska’s Looking …
Science, Technology, and Society April 17, 2019

Mapping AIDS

Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic

Lukas Engelmann

Hosted by Michael McGovern
What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge UP …
Science, Technology, and Society February 19, 2019

A People’s History of Computing in the United States

Joy Lisi Rankin

Hosted by Michael McGovern
We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers from the get-go; rather, earlier efforts to expand mainframe computing as …
Science, Technology, and Society October 31, 2018

Accounting for Slavery

Masters and Management

Caitlin C. Rosenthal

Hosted by Michael McGovern
The familiar narrative of American business development begins in the industrial North, where paternalistic factory owners, committed to a kind of Protestant ethic, scaled up their operations into ‘total institutions’—an …
Science, Technology, and Society September 13, 2018

Life Histories of Genetic Disease

Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics

Andrew J. Hogan

Hosted by Michael McGovern
How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes the subtle argument that a process …
Science, Technology, and Society July 27, 2018

Data-Centric Biology

A Philosophical Study

Sabina Leonelli

Hosted by Michael McGovern
Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who …
Science, Technology, and Society July 4, 2018

Life on Ice

A History of New Uses for Cold Blood

Joanna Radin

Hosted by Michael McGovern
Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History …
Science, Technology, and Society May 11, 2017

Rebel Genius

Warren S. McCulloch's Transdisciplinary Life in Science

Tara H. Abraham

Hosted by Michael McGovern
Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for …
Science, Technology, and Society May 8, 2017

Evolution Made to Order

Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America

Helen Anne Curry

Hosted by Michael McGovern
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, this was precisely …
Medicine April 29, 2017

A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities

Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome

J. C. McKeown

Hosted by Michael McGovern
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 quotes from contemporary scholars, but rather …
Medicine March 29, 2017

Bounding Biomedicine

Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine

Colleen Derkatch

Hosted by Michael McGovern
What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the …
Medicine March 28, 2017

Nature's Path

A History of Naturopathic Healing in the United States

Susan E. Cayleff

Hosted by Michael McGovern
Susan Cayleff's Nature's Path: A History of Naturopathic Healing in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) offers a fascinating alternative to the development of allopathic orthodoxy in the twentieth-century United …
Medicine December 9, 2016

Risky Medicine

Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty

Robert Aronowitz

Hosted by Michael McGovern
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 they were misled by …
Medicine November 12, 2016

The Pulse of Modernism

Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

Robert Brain

Hosted by Michael McGovern
"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life," Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde's waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time …
Science, Technology, and Society July 8, 2016

The Cybernetics Moment

Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age

Ronald R. Kline

Hosted by Michael McGovern
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 brothers and …
Medicine June 29, 2016

Through the Valley of Shadows

Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human

Samuel Morris Brown

Hosted by Michael McGovern
Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and personal context …
Medicine June 22, 2016

Listening for What Matters

Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care

Saul J. Weiner and Alan Schwartz

Hosted by Michael McGovern
When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a …
Medicine June 15, 2016

Under the Strain of Color

Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry

Gabriel Mendes

Hosted by Michael McGovern
In his 1948 essay, "Harlem is Nowhere," Ralph Ellison decried the psychological disparity between formal equality and discrimination faced by Blacks after the Great Migration as leaving "even the most …