Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise ... Show More
Yesterday
Steve Ramirez, "How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past" (Princeton UP, 2025)
As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones. In How to Change a Memory, Ramirez d ... Show More
50m 49s
Yesterday
Malcolm Harris, "Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World" (Little, Brown, 2023)
Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products ... Show More
1h 1m
Jan 18
Ines Prodöhl, "Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900–1950" (Routledge, 2023)
Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950 (Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soybean became a critical ingredient in industry and agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on Japanese-dominate ... Show More
51m 50s
May 2023
2390: NordicNinja - Deep Tech and Sustainable Transformation
In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I am joining forces with Rainer Sternfeld and Tomosaku Sohara, the powerhouse Managing Partners of NordicNinja. This unique joint venture between Japan and Estonia is at the forefront of cultivating an international, collaborative tech environ ... Show More
31m 31s
Apr 2021
Lisa Björkman, "Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai's Other World-Class Histories" (Association for Asian Studies, 2020)
Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in the Indian city of Mumbai, Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai's Other World-Class Histories (Association for Asian Studies, 2020) is an unconventional little book – experimental in form – about how we come to know the worlds a ... Show More
55m 49s
Jan 2020
Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019)
The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data? What importan ... Show More
33m 51s
May 2023
Colin Hoag, "The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy" (U California Press, 2022)
Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first "water-exporting country" when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subc ... Show More
59m 23s
Feb 2022
The Power of Green Hydrogen in Sharjah with Dr. Mustafa Khamis and Dr. Mehmet Egilmez(31.01.22)
The Sharjah Research, Technology, and Innovation Park (SRTI Park) revealed an ambitious plan to be executed in cooperation with the American University of Sharjah (AUS), targeting to launch an Applied Research Ecosystem for sustainable energy solutions to develop new technologies ... Show More
33m 55s
Dec 2023
Joanna Zylinska, "The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI" (MIT Press, 2023)
A provocative investigation of the future of photography and human perception in the age of AI.
We are constantly photographing and being photographed while feeding machine learning databases with our data, which in turn is used to generate new images. Analyzing the transformatio ... Show More
1h 2m