New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (RTP) emerged under the unique circumstances of a poor Southern state that needed to find a way to offset the declining industries of tobacco, furniture, and textiles in the 1950s. Through the sustained commitment of nearby universities, business leaders, and local and state officials, state leaders established the largest science and research park in the United States in an area that was nothing but “possums and pines.” Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park (Duke University Press, 2026) tells this story through the eyes of those at the center of it, like the local black leaders who convinced white officials to desegregate public schools with the justification that it would make the area more appealing to tech companies, or how a chance meeting between the governor and a Danish executive led to North Carolina becoming an epicenter for weight loss drugmakers decades later. Allen Paul and Mack Paul organize the story around major periods in RTP’s growth, showing how RTP came to define the region and the state by the 1990s as well as the major setbacks it encountered in the early 2000s. Breaking down the strategies that led to RTP’s success, like creating new institutions in targeted tech areas to spur activity and factoring quality of life into the regional planning of the area, Miracle Road demonstrates how the story of Research Triangle Park is a fascinating and important case study of urban development in the twenty-first century.

Mack Paul cofounded Morningstar Law Group, where he is a partner. He teaches land use law at North Carolina State University and North Carolina Central University. Mack served as chair of the Greater Triangle Regional Council and has written extensively about the development of the Triangle Region.
Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab.
For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many.
Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his book The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Simon and Schuster, 2026). From China's startlingly messy AI ecosystem to Singapore's government-led innovation, from South Korea's decades-old conglomerates still at the frontier to India's world-class talent that too often works abroad; from Europe's struggle to hold on to its best companies, to the deeper role of the state everywhere—including in Silicon Valley—and why the United States, far from declining, is extending its lead into a genuinely bipolar technological order.
Mehran is a winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize. He attended Yale where he was a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow. He has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum and an expert on Higher Education, Entrepreneurship, and Industrial Policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Before Yale, he studied at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has been a visiting scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Fellow with the Acumen Fund.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Geography of Innovation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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We are in a state of crisis. Democracy is under threat, authoritarian politics are on the rise, and digital media—once heralded as emancipatory technologies—are increasingly implicated in democratic erosion. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a critical framework for understanding the entangled relationships between discourse, digital media, and the hidden dynamics behind antagonism and polarisation.
The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces (Routledge, 2025) presents a fluid social ontology that theorises how discourses and digital communication technologies are inseparably entangled, and how this entanglement contributes to the formation of complex hierarchical relations. Drawing on discourse theory and new materialist perspectives, Dehghan maps how the various components of the discursive-digital link—users, collectives, identities, the medium’s design, underlying neoliberal capitalist logics, and structural power dynamics—together shape antagonistic frontiers in digital spaces. Through detailed case studies across multiple digital media, Dehghan demonstrates how these entanglements manifest through different articulatory logics that could transform societies towards either agonistic progress or disastrous polarisation.
By revealing the logics of discursive-digital alliances and active passivity, Dehghan provides critical insights for academics, activists, and anyone seeking to foster progressive togetherness. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a powerful theoretical framework and methodology for analysing digitally mediated communication. It challenges monolithic understandings of polarisation, technological solutionism, and symptom-focused approaches, instead advocating for radical structural interventions across all entangled components of the discursive-digital link—a necessary shift in both academic research and progressive political strategy to address the democratic crises of our time.

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Library Technical Services: Future Forward (Bloomsbury, 2025) edited by Mary Beth Weber and Melissa De Fino looks at the future of technical services post-pandemic and at the brink of technological disruptions through a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility lens. Libraries have undergone a tremendous transformation that has been driven by multiple factors that include technological developments, and societal impacts such as declining college enrollment and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has introduced changes to how technical services professionals work and provide services. Whereas the library is often perceived by users as a building to house print books and journals, the reality is that the library encompasses both physical and virtual spaces. For many users, the library's online catalog and website are their first (and perhaps only) experience with the library. Our user community is global, and technical services work has evolved to serve users with a growing array of electronic resources, including e-books, databases, and e-journals. These resources differ from their print counterparts in that they cost more, require licenses and contracts that must continually need to be renegotiated and renewed, must comply with accessibility standards, and require different skill sets to catalog. The virtual spaces and services libraries provide are built on the foundation provided by technical services librarians. Assessment is an important, yet often overlooked, aspect of technical services work, and is addressed in this book. It is critical for collection development and acquisition of electronic resources. It is also an important component of the work of electronic resources librarians, who monitor usage and trends. Developing an appropriate skill set for technical services work is essential for success. This includes knowing the standards for the work performed, awareness of emerging standards, and remaining relevant.
Guests: Mary Beth Weber is the inaugural Coordinator for Training and Mentorship for Rutgers University Libraries. In this capacity, she serves as an advisor to the Faculty Mentoring Program, collaborates with colleagues to identify, develop, and implement a continuous program of enrichment activities to meet the needs of the Libraries' personnel. She previously served as the Head of Central Technical Services for 2008-2025, and her new role is the result of a large-scale reorganization undertaken by Rutgers University Libraries. Weber has had a long career in technical services, overseeing both resource description and acquisitions, and collaborating with collection development librarians. She representedRutgers on the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Heads of Cataloging Committee from 2014-2025. Other offices she has held include serving as editor-in-chief for Library Resources and Technical Services, one of ALA Core’s official journals, for nine years. In addition to three books she has published with Bloomsbury, she co-authored Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management, 5th edition, with Peggy Johnson. She may be contacted via her LinkedIn profile. She earned her MLS from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and earned my BA from Michigan State University, where I had a double major of English and Art History.
Melissa De Fino is Team Lead for Cataloging and Metadata Services and Metadata Librarian for Special Collections and Audiovisual Materials at Rutgers University Libraries. She has worked at Rutgers for more than 20 years, beginning her career there as a Special Collections Cataloger. Her research focuses on the evolution of technical services librarianship. Melissa is the co-author, with Mary Beth, of Virtual Technical Services: A Handbook, has published several peer-reviewed articles, and served for five years as editor of the “Tech Services Online” column in Technical Services Quarterly. She holds a Master of Library and Information Science and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from Rutgers University, as well as a B.A. in English from Fordham University.
Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is a Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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This inaugural podcast for the Voices of Discovery podcast from the University of Houston Clear Lake features a discussion of Team MAPPS, a federally-funded program that is available online to help people increase collaboration within teams. The Team Methods to Advance Processes and Performance in Science (Team MAPPS) training program was specifically designed to help scientific teams develop and master the skills of Team Science so that collaboration is more effective as scientific teams tackle the complex challenges of our world today. Listen as Dr. Kevin Wooten, professor at UHCL, and Cynde Ferris, adjunct professor at UHCL and director of educational technology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, explain the origins of TeamMAPPS and how the science of Team Science can be helpful for teamwork. 
Dr. Kay L. Colley is executive director of the Center for Faculty Development at the University of Houston Clear Lake and host of its Voices of Discovery podcast.

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