New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

How is the tool of Artificial Intelligence shaping the writing of fiction? Is AI emerging as more than just a potentially handy aid to an author—and, ominously, more like an actual author? I discuss these ripe questions and others with the literary critic Mark McGurl, professor of English at Stanford. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009) and Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Verso, 2021). As our conversation shows, McGurl is a nuanced, reasoned voice on an emotive subject that all too readily lends itself to apocalyptic or pollyannaish pronouncements.

Mark McGurl is a Professor of English at Stanford University.

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. His companion Substack newsletter, America and Beyond,” offers commentary and insights on the podcast. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024).
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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Yeong Ju Lee about her new book Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram (Routledge, 2025).

Lee, Y. J. (2025). Social Media and Language Learning: Using TikTok and Instagram. Taylor & Francis.

This book explores creative uses of social media for informal language learning. It focuses on the underexplored area of how informal language learning adapts to technological innovations in two multimodal media-sharing platforms: TikTok and Instagram.

Drawing on ecological perspectives of language learning and spatial understandings of digital technology and learning, the research reported in this book unpacks how social media technologies are used for language learning. It presents insights from a dual-level qualitative methodological design: a comparative study of public online data of social media posts collected from TikTok and Instagram, and a multiple case study based on ethnographic narrative data gathered from participants’ journal entries, stimulated recall interviews, and social media posts. This book reveals the dynamic landscape of digital language learning that is being integrated into learners’ everyday lives through multimodal content creation and networking.

This book enriches readers’ understanding of social media’s role in language learning, and offers pedagogical strategies for teachers to integrate newer technologies and multimodal materials into language classrooms to enhance students’ learning experiences.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here
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Jeffrey Whyte's book The Birth of Psychological War: Propaganda, Espionage, and Military Violence from WWII to the Vietnam War (Oxford UP, 2023) explores the history, politics, and geography of United States psychological warfare in the 20th century against the backdrop of the contemporary 'post-truth era'. From its origins in the Second World War, to the United States' counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam, Whyte traces how the theory and practice of psychological warfare transformed the relationship between the home front and theatres of war. Whyte interrogates the broader political mythologies that animate popular conceptions of psychological war, such as its claim to make war more humane and less violent. 
On the contrary, The Birth of Psychological War demonstrates the role of psychological warfare in expanding the scope and scale of military violence amidst ostensible efforts to 'win hearts and minds'. While casting a critical eye on psychological warfare, Whyte establishes its continued significance for the contemporary student of international relations.
Dr. Whyte earned his Ph.D. with the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia and before that a MA with School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, also in beautiful British Columbia. He is currently Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University.
Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.
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How Deeply Human Is Language? Chomsky, the Brain, and the AI Fantasy (MIT Press, 2026) is Yosef Grodzinsky’s exploration of the criticality of the linguistic theories to the design of LLMs. The book dwells on the significance of the marriage between computational and theoretical fields, specifically “engineering and science” on the development of unique Language Learning Models. Yosef maintains that leveraging linguistic theories for the development of Gen AI chatbots and training of Language Learning Models will help the growing Gen-AI revolution. In the book, LLMs are evaluated from the neurolinguistic perspective, comparing how the human brain works with different LLMs’ reactions to prompts, highlighting how a collaboration between the core linguists and the experts in the technology-related fields could make a change.

Yosef Grodzinzky’s positions in the book is grounded in contemporary linguistics, founded and inspired by Noam Chomsky, the father of the “mentalist” linguistic perspective to language acquisition. In the book, the author employs the historical approach to tell different significant stories to communicate multiple messages of success of interdisciplinary practices. While the main idea is to explore the centrality of linguistic science to other fields with specific emphasis on Engineering and sister’s technological fields, the book dwelled on specific pitfalls of the linguistics and way forward to promote novel interdisciplinary productions.

Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links here. | LinkedIn| here. |ORCID| and here. |Meta|
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Kate Brown, Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT joins Michael Stauch to discuss her new book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City (W. W. Norton, 2026) on the 300-year history of urban gardening, from feudal England to the Paris Commune, to Berlin’s green shantytowns, to contemporary Amsterdam, Chicago, and beyond. Equal parts history, memoir, and manifesto, Brown’s book weaves in her own gardening experience while exploring the political and practical, painting a picture of the necessity of self-provisioning in an increasingly chaotic world.

Highlights include:

How “tiny gardens” grew as a social practice among English peasants following the enclosure of the commons;

The politics of “tiny gardens,” including the difference between a “gardening” state and a gardeners state;

How Black “tiny gardeners” in DC’s East of the River neighborhood transformed structural racism into vegetable-powered wealth;

A short-but-scathing review of Yuvel Harari’s Sapiens;

How small changes to local ordinances in cities might allow us to reimagine a world of abundance amid contemporary fears of scarcity and instability.

Guest: Kate Brown is Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT and author of four previous prize-winning books, including A Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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