How do new things happen? This was the deceptively simple question Hugh Aitken asked when laying out what we do in our field. It implies, of course, the question how do they not happen? But mainly it opens up everything: the role of inventors, scientists, engineers, businesses, corporations, the state, regulations, and users and consumers in shaping the emergence and uses of technologies.

In looking for sociological insight into how humans interact with the largely invisible world of technology that is often called infrastructure—things like sanitary systems, power grids, roads, or, increasingly, the internet—we may need to mine different veins of scholarship than we have commonly worked thus far. One place to start is with Erving Goffman.

With an overheated plot, striking set designs, and innovative special effects, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is about the transforming effects of science and technology—the transformation of the city into a marvel of modernity, of workers into robotic slaves, and of the saintly Maria into a diabolical and destructive femme fatale.

By its physical nature, space exploration has a resonance beyond national borders—at a fundamental level, it is a project that transcends national claims and appeals to the global, perhaps even to the universal. Yet our understanding of the half-century of space travel is still firmly rooted in the framework of the national imagination.

Nuclear weapons during the cold war provide a compelling test case for the idea that technology drives history. Did nuclear arsenals call forth the national-security state, what some have called the military-industrial complex, and what David Edgerton has recently called the “warfare state”? Were the politics and economics of the cold war driven by the nuclear arms race?

The essays collected by Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa in Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities look at the diffusion of technologies in different historical, institutional, social, and cultural settings and the transforming impact of large-scale technologies over time.

Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik’s edited volume The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming takes up and extends Pickering’s argument that scientific practice emerges over time in an open-ended way as scientists, engineers, machines, instruments, and other materials accommodate and resist each other.

New works by Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, J. L. Anderson, and Christopher Henke explore the reciprocal and interdependent relationships among living and nonliving components of environmental and technological systems.

New books by Jeffrey H. Matsuura and Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine ring more alarm bells about today’s system of patents and copyrights.

In The Rise and Decline of Dutch Technological Leadership Karel Davids looks at the burst of technological innovation that happened in the Netherlands between about 1580 and 1680, and why it petered out in the eighteenth century.