It’s a rare academic history book that tempts me to binge-read.  Wendy Kline’s Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth is one of those special finds. Admittedly, Kline writes about a topic I find inherently fascinating: the re-emergence of home birth in the United States in the latter decades of the twentieth century and early decades of the twenty-first.  Kline’s approach is typical of nuanced, heavily-researched academic history in many ways, with topical chapters that prov

Should I post a tough parenting question on Twitter, ask my Facebook community, or email a few friends who are most likely to have useful suggestions? What would be the best place to reach people to share an intriguing job announcement? These days, we have a multitude of network options, and we assume that computers will facilitate our networked communities. Until I read Joy Lisi Rankin’s new book, A People’s History of Computing in the United States (Harvard University Press

Are all of our “smart” devices training us to be “dumb” humans, too-often indistinguishable from mere machines? As click-through contracts and “like” buttons increasingly channel our social and personal relationships into algorithm-guided paths, are we losing something crucial about ourselves and our relationships? Is our very humanity at stake? In their new book, Re-Engineering Humanity, law scholar Brett Frischmann and philosopher Evan Selinger sound the alarm. I share thei

I was born into 1970s feminism. I came into the world in 1972, the year Free to Be You and Me came out. It must have made a big impression on my elementary school teachers, because I saw the filmstrip version of it in school at least three times. I loved it at least as much as my teachers did. I loved the skit in which two babies, played by Marlo Thomas and Mel Brooks, try to figure out which of them is the boy and which is the girl. After much deliberation, they decide that