New Books in Communications

If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experiments that help him—and his students—understand the nature of our computer-driven lives. In this episode, we feature an extended chat with David about his recent book, Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press). It’s a book about the eternal impossibility of communication and the texture of that impossibility in our current computer-mediated age. David says we live in the afterlife of data, by which he means we know that our data-driven representations of the world don’t really capture the reality of our inner or outer lives, and we know that algorithms perpetuate injustices of all sorts—and yet, we still live our lives as if we do believe in the data. And this is where his engagements come in, the sonic experiments that confront the distortions and fallacies and textures of a data-driven life. David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, he’s President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He wrote the book Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (2013) and he’s co-authored and edited several others.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Take funny music seriously! Though often dismissed as silly or derivative, funny music, Lily E. Hirsch argues, is incredibly creative and dynamic, serving multiple aims from the celebratory to the rebellious, the entertaining to the mentally uplifting.Music can be a rich site for humor, with so many opportunities that are ripe for a comedic left turn. Taking Funny Music Seriously (Indiana UP, 2024) includes original interviews with some of the best musical humorists, such as Tom Lehrer, "the J. D. Salinger of musical satire"; Peter Schickele, who performed as the invented composer P. D. Q. Bach, the supposed lost son of the great J. S. Bach; Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome of the funny music duo Garfunkel and Oates; comedic film composer Theodore Shapiro; Too Slim of the country group Riders in the Sky; and musical comedian Jessica McKenna, from the podcast Off Book, part of a long line of "funny girls." With their help, Taking Funny Music Seriously examines comedy from a variety of genres and musical contexts--from bad singing to rap, classical music to country, Broadway music to film music, and even love songs and songs about death.In its coverage of comedic musical media, Taking Funny Music Seriously is an accessible and lively look at funny music. It offers us a chance to appreciate more fully the joke in music and the benefits of getting that joke--especially in times of crisis--including comfort, catharsis, and connection.Lily E. Hirsch is a musicologist and author most recently of Can't Stop the Grrrls: Confronting Sexist Labels in Music from Ariana Grande to Yoko Ono; Weird Al: Seriously; and Insulting Music: A Lexicon of Insult in Music.Lily on Twitter and Bluesky.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).Bradley on Twitter and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the information you found — just as ordinary 15th and 16th century English people would have sifted through information in their almanacs, medical recipe collections, and astrological tracts. As Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (U Chicago Press, 2024) shows, ordinary English readers learned to assess and evaluate information through ordinary, everyday interactions with inexpensive and practical books. By tracing the creation, proliferation, and reading of such 'practical books,' Melissa Reynolds explores changing attitudes towards medicine and science as well as how readers navigated uncertainty and the unknowable. Through its focus on the production of practical books, Reading Practice also charts changing attitudes towards books, first as manuscripts became less expensive and then as print became imbued with authority.  Vivid and precise, Reading Practice should be read by those interested in the history of the book, the history of science, and anyone who has ever consulted Dr. Google (which, let's be honest, is probably everyone). In addition to centering the reading practices of ordinary people, Reading Practice also does a fabulous job explaining exactly what it looks like and takes to work with medieval manuscripts and early printed texts, making it perfect reading for graduate students and those heading into library research. Listeners should also check out the companion website, which contains bibliographic information about the manuscripts and prints used in the project, network analysis of the relationship between printers and book, and data visualizations.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts.Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour.About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui’s research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women’s writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation’s literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan.Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2024), Beretta E. Smith-Shomade contends that Black spirituality and Black church religiosity are the critical crux of Black popular culture. She argues that cultural, community, and social support live within the Black church and that spirit, art, and progress are deeply entwined and seal this connection. Including the work of artists such as Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Prince, Spike Lee, and Oprah Winfrey, the book examines contemporary Black television, film, music and digital culture to demonstrate the role, impact, and dominance of spirituality and religion in Black popular culture. Smith-Shomade believes that acknowledging and comprehending the foundations of Black spirituality and Black church religiosity within Black popular culture provide a way for viewers, listeners, and users not only to endure but also to revitalize.This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that quickly evolved into a meal, spawned a legion of imitators, and gained a large share of the global poultry market. Yet, almost as soon as the McNugget made its North American debut, it quickly became the subject of opprobrium and ridicule, taking on a symbolic status among serious food connoisseurs as an indication of Americans’ culinary decline and a growing disconnection between diners and the origins of the food that they ate.During a time of rising beef prices and growing health concerns regarding red meats, the Chicken McNugget was received as a lighter alternative to traditional burger meals, clean and easy to consume, popular with children, and adaptable to busy “on-the-go” lifestyles of working parents. Consumers understood that they were not purchasing a premium product made from the finest cuts but selected the McNugget as a rational economic purchase that represented a new way of dining.In reassembling the rise of poultry in the United States, Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Patrick Dixon presents a multilayered approach, connecting the entwined stories of workers and industrialists with restauranteurs and consumers, the former geographically moored within the South, the latter diverse and nationwide. Dr. Dixon centers further processed chicken within an analysis of the U.S. food system that demonstrates that consumers did not unwittingly succumb to a “junk food” diet but made deliberate and aspirational decisions based on conceptions of leisure, lifestyle, and bodily needs.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Shortwave Collective describe themselves as “an international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.” I was first intrigued by their piece Receive-Transmit-Receive, an exquisite corpse of audio, in which members each contributed their own recordings of sounds from across the radio spectrum. But what really affected me was their ongoing public education project of teaching people to make their own no-power, low-budget radios called open-wave receivers. They’ve held radio-making workshops in Portugal, France, and the UK and they’ve published a how-to in Make magazine.I wanted to talk to the Shortwave Collective because they are presenting a radically different vision of what radio is and can be. Radio’s history can be thought of as an extended expression of military, political, commercial, and cultural dominance. But the Collective embraces play, experimentation, failure, community, and open listening in their feminist radio practice. So, let’s talk to the Shortwave Collective and see if we can rethink radio–what it’s for and what it can do.  And in the second half of the show, we’ll hear an audio documentary in which the Shortwave Collective teaches you how to make your own open-wave receiver.Special thanks for appearing on the show to Shortwave Collective members Lisa Hall, ​Alyssa Moxley, Georgia Muenster, and Maria Papadomanolaki. The other Collective members are Sally A. Applin, Kate Donovan, Brigitte Hart, and Hannah Kemp-Welch. Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood with technical assistance from Craig Eley. Today’s music is by Graeme Gibson with additional sound design elements by Cris Cheek and Shortwave Collective. Phantom Power’s production team includes Craig Eley, Ravi Krishnaswami, and Amy Skjerseth. Our Production Coordinator and transcriber is Jason Meggyesy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Have you ever wanted to protect your books from forgetful borrowers, merciless page-folders or outright thieves? Perhaps you have even wished harm on those who have damaged your books, but would you threaten them with hellfire, hanging or the plague?Book Curses (Bodleian, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Baker contains a collection of some of the most ferocious and humorous book curses ever inscribed, from fearsome threats discovered emblazoned on stone monuments from the ancient Near East, to elaborate manuscript maledictions and chilling warnings scribbled in printed books. Book curses are entertaining writings in themselves, but they also offer a tantalising insight into how passionately texts and books have been valued by their owners and readers over the centuries. Here you will find an engaging introduction to the history and development of the book curse and perhaps some inspiration to pen a few of your own.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) engages with a multitude of unconventional approaches throughout the history of motion pictures to offer insight into a range of largely ephemeral and site-specific projects that consciously assimilate viewers into their production. Through an exploration of radically inventive approaches to the medium, many of which emerged out of socio-political crises and periods of historical transition, Interactive Cinema works to by considering it in both technological and phenomenological terms.Author Marina Hassapopoulou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies, at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is also the interim director of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. She is the founder of open-source and collaborative initiatives including: Interactive Media Archive, ExpressiveAI.net, and Weird Wave Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The early twentieth century was a particularly tumultuous time in Chinese history, complete with new conflicts, new technologies, and — as Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China: Redefining Female Identity through Modern Design and Lifestyle (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) shows — new ways to represent women. Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China by Sandy Ng looks at how women were portrayed in advertisements, photographs, and film in Republican China, all against the backdrop of the rise of print and visual media and debates over the role and image of “modern” women. This book argues that visual portrayals of women not only displayed women, but that such modern images of women allowed women to assert their own individual identities. Filled with images from collections in the UK, Hong Kong, and the United States, this book is sure to interest readers curious about modern Chinese history and the history of design, as well as anyone looking to be inspired by art and material culture. Interested listeners should also keep an eye out for Sandy's next project: The Dynamics of Modern Asian Design-Material Culture and Social Agency, co-edited with Dr.Megha Rajguru (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025): “Focusing on the 20th century onwards, this book brings to light the ways in which design as a material form has underscored cultural, social and economic changes across Asia. The Dynamics of Modern Asian Design provides a deeper and more enhanced understanding of material culture in Asia through analysis of examples of ceramics, electronic items, fashion, furniture, interior design, architecture and ornaments from across countries such as China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and South Korea. Authors explore the production of objects as agents in modern material life, moving beyond their roles as commodities and addressing their values in a range of contexts and subjectivities. Early chapters explore how ceramics and found objects are given innovative forms and meanings in their reincarnation, and how the reinvention of material is critical when design is produced and valued. Authors look at the intricate correlation between materials, design practice and social change, highlighting issues of cultural authenticity and tensions between local and global contexts. They then interrogate the significance of visual appearance in material representations of modern women and religious artefacts, exploring gender and religious representation through the analysis of magazines, statues and objects of adornment. The final section includes analysis of concrete, urban design and electrical appliances, specific to particular cultural and social contexts across modern and contemporary Asian cultures.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications