The years 1945 to 2020, from the testing of the first atomic bomb to the rise of artificial intelligence, constitute the “American century,” which coincides with the rise and fall of the United States as a global power. Arnold Thackray’s pioneering expertise in the history of science provides a unique perspective from which to tell this story.

Imperfect Oracle is about both the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is a lot better than we are at making judgments, while its limits are evidenced by the fact that AI cannot always make accurate predictions—not today, not tomorrow, and not the day after, either.

By analyzing ethnographic interviews with the youth of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Susanna Trnka reveals the emotional, financial, and deeply personal ideas at stake as understandings of health shift in the minds of young people, who are often at the vanguard of new trends in mental health, physical fitness, and digital health technologies.

Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge explores paradoxes of technology over two centuries to underscore why things so often turn out—for worse but also for better—so differently from futurists’ forecasts. By celebrating the complexity of reality, it counters the cycles of utopianism and doomsaying so often provoked by technological change.

Lingua Ex Machina investigates the role communication technologies played in shaping the reemergence of modern Hebrew speech, arguing that technologies such as the phonograph, typewriter, and telegraph—whose development paralleled the revitalization of Hebrew—were an active force in shaping the language as a modern medium of communication.