Episodes

  • Raiford Guins, "King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions" (MIT Press, 2026)

    Raiford Guins, "King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions" (MIT Press, 2026)
    Feb 20 2026
    PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch. Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions (MIT Press, 2026) is the first book dedicated to an unassuming game that changed the world. Through the prisms of product positioning, market development, and category creation, Professor Raiford Guins answers the question of why Atari’s inaugural product succeeded and why it endures.The author of Game After and Atari Design, and an excavator of the “Atari landfill” in New Mexico, Professor Guins brings us a unique history that reconsiders the launch of Atari’s PONG through the lens of the company’s business practices. He follows the young Silicon Valley startup from its early days of positioning its new product within the existing coin-op amusement industry to its establishment of a consumer industry for home video games—a story of remarkable market development innovation. Written with a passion for video games and a historian’s insight, the book animates the business exploits of one of the fastest growing and most influential companies ever. 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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    1 hr and 15 mins
  • W. Patrick McCray, "README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines" (MIT Press, 2025)

    W. Patrick McCray, "README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines" (MIT Press, 2025)
    Feb 19 2026
    In README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (MIT Press, 2025), historian Dr. Patrick McCray argues that in order for computers to become ubiquitous, people first had to become interested in them, learn about them, and take the machines seriously. A powerful catalyst for this transformation was, ironically, one of the oldest information technologies we have: books. The author uses a carefully chosen selection of books, some iconic and others obscure, to describe this technological revolution as it unfolded in the half-century after 1945. The book begins with a fundamental question: How does a new technology become well known and widespread? Dr. McCray answers this by using books as a window into significant moments in the history of computing, publishing, and American culture.README offers a literary history of computers and, more broadly, information technologies between World War II and the dot-com crash of the early 21st century. From the electronic brains and cybernetics craze of the 1940s to the birth of AI, the rise of the personal computer, and the internet-driven financial frenzy of the 1990s, books have proven a durable and essential way for people to learn how to use and think about computers. By offering a readable half-century of bookish history, README explains how computers became popular and pervasive. 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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    48 mins
  • Javiera Barandiaran, "Living Minerals: Nature, Trade, and Power in the Race for Lithium" (MIT Press, 2026)

    Javiera Barandiaran, "Living Minerals: Nature, Trade, and Power in the Race for Lithium" (MIT Press, 2026)
    Feb 13 2026
    A sobering investigation of the rush for lithium for electric vehicles, the problematic history of lithium mining, and the consequences for sustainability. Consumers today are buying electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries motivated by the belief that they are doing good and decarbonizing society. But is sustainable lithium extraction possible? In Living Minerals, Javiera Barandiarán examines the history of lithium mining and uses during the twentieth century, with a specific focus on the two oldest brine-lithium mines: Silver Peak, Nevada, and Salar de Atacama, Chile, where lithium is found as one more element in a liquid mix of salts, minerals, and organisms. For six decades, mining experts have failed to ask about water usage, about waste or brine leakage, and about the ecosystem impacts in delicate deserts. Instead, they have relied on various fictions about the size of reserves, the fate of leaked brine, or the value of waste in facilitating mine development. These fictions, rooted in brine-lithium’s material qualities, could be sustained thanks to powerful mining memories that celebrated resource nationalism. Unique in its historical and multidimensional approach to minerals and mining, based on the novel Rights of Nature paradigm, and using new archival materials from both Chile and the US, the book argues that decarbonizing society requires that we reckon with these realities—or risk deepening our dependency on an unsustainable mining industry. Javiera Barandiarán is Associate Professor in the Global Studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Sandra Elizabeth is a graduate student enrolled at the Department of Sociology in Shiv Nadar University, Delhi- NCR. Her research relates to water- control projects implemented in a low- lying, deltaic region in South- West Indian state of Kerala called Kuttanad– which is dubbed as the state’s rice granary. She can be reached out on X
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    54 mins
  • Robert Dorschel, "The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism" (MIT Press, 2025)

    Robert Dorschel, "The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism" (MIT Press, 2025)
    Jan 20 2026
    Who are the people staffing the digital economy? In The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism (MIT Press, 2025) Robert Dorschel an Assistant Professor in Digital Sociology at the University of Cambridge, explores an occupation that has emerged as central to modern economies and societies. Drawing on an extensive range of interview fieldwork, the book offers a compelling picture of the working lives, along with the social and cultural interests of these workers, giving details on a section of the tech profession that is neglected in discussions that focus on the billionaire founders and owners in the sector. The book is also theoretically rich, considering the nature of work in modern society, the question of where these workers fit within social class structures, and crucially how they experience and understand both work and class. A significant addition to research on the tech sector, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, and is available open access here.
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    41 mins
  • Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer, "Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior" (MIT Press, 2025)

    Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer, "Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior" (MIT Press, 2025)
    Jan 13 2026
    In Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior (MIT Press, 2025), Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer reveal how scientists studying animal behavior have long projected human norms and values onto animals while seeking to understand them. When scientific studies conclude that these norms and values are natural in animals, it makes it easier to think of them as natural in humans too. And because scientists, historically and to this day, largely belong to elite, powerful segments of society, the norms and values embedded in animal behavior science match those of the already powerful. How can animal behavior science escape this trap of naturalizing dominant culture? Drawing from decades of feminist, antiracist, queer, disability justice, and Marxist contributions—including those of biologists—Kamath and Packer break down persistent assumptions in the status quo of animal behavior science and offer a multitude of alternative approaches. Core concepts in animal behavior science and evolutionary biology—from sex categories and sexual selection to fitness, adaptation, biological determinism, and more—are carefully contextualized and critically reexamined. This unique collaboration between an animal behavior scientist and a feminist science studies scholar is an illuminating and hopeful read for anyone who is curious about how animals behave, and anyone who wants to break free from scientific approaches that perpetuate systems of oppression. Ambika Kamath is trained as a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She lives, works, and grows community in Oakland, California, on Ohlone land. Melina Packer is Assistant Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, on Ho-Chunk Nation land. She is the author of Toxic Sexual Politics: Toxicology, Environmental Poisons, and Queer Feminist Futures (NYU Press, 2025). Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University, on Mississauga Anishnaabeg land. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)

    Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)
    Jan 6 2026
    A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond. In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively known as “Star Wars,” a space-based missile defense program aimed at protecting the US from nuclear attack. In Weapons in Space, Aaron Bateman draws on recently declassified American, European, and Soviet documents to provide an insightful account of SDI, situating it within a new phase in the militarization of space following the collapse of superpower détente in the 1970s. In doing so, Bateman reveals the largely secret role of military space technologies in late–Cold War US defense strategy and foreign relations.In contrast to existing narratives, Weapons in Space shows how tension over the role of military space technologies in American statecraft was a central source of SDI's controversy, even more so than questions of technical feasibility. By detailing the participation of Western European countries in SDI research and development, Bateman reframes the militarization of space in the 1970s and 1980s as an international phenomenon. He further reveals that even though SDI did not come to fruition, it obstructed diplomatic efforts to create new arms control limits in space. Consequently, Weapons in Space carries the legacy of SDI into the post–Cold War era and shows how this controversial program continues to shape the global discourse about instability in space—and the growing anxieties about a twenty-first-century space arms race. Our guest is Aaron Bateman, an Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at GWU. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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    21 mins
  • Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)

    Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)
    Jan 1 2026
    Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society. Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership. Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order. The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent developments in the emerging field of the global history of knowledge—as science, as economy, and as culture. The case studies reveal how notions of knowing and owning emerge because they reciprocally produce and determine each other's limits and possibilities; that is, how we know inevitably affects how we can own what we know; and how we own always impacts how and what we are able to know. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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    42 mins
  • Sharon Sliwinski, "An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed" (MIT Press, 2025)

    Sharon Sliwinski, "An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed" (MIT Press, 2025)
    Dec 18 2025
    Borrowing from the traditional alphabet book genre for children, An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Sharon Sliwinski provides adult readers with a new grammar for dreams, or what neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro calls “oracles of the night.” In this book, Dr. Sliwinski restores dreaming to its proper place as an important worldmaking activity, one that offers a gateway to another way of seeing. Each of the short chapters engages a dream from the historical record—from both the recent and distant past—to show how these experiences can help make sense of profound social conflicts and transform our shared reality.Thinking alongside the dreams of powerful exemplars—from Harriet Tubman to contemporary Indigenous activist Abigail Echo-Hawk—readers come to understand how dream life is a crucial resource for generating new worlds and new ways of being. The book brings together urgent concerns from the domains of critical theory, visual culture, and mental health to show how dreaming serves as a vital source of knowledge and a critical mode of thinking.As with traditional alphabet books, illustrations provide an integral voice. Each chapter of the book is accompanied by an original watercolor painting by Melinda Josie that visually underscores the way dreams serve as a unique medium for processing our lived experience. Together, the images and text form a delicate dialogue, drawing attention to the details of the central scenes, extending the book’s special mode of thinking in painted form.By working alongside dreamers from the past and present, An Alphabet for Dreamers begins a new and much-needed conversation about the social and political importance of dream life. 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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    30 mins