Roland Betancourt, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. Princeton University Press. 2026. ISBN: 978-0-691-25587-3. $35.00.

Roland Betancourt’s newest book Disneyland and the Rise of Automation, published by Princeton University Press, makes valuable contributions to industrial history and Disney studies. Theme parks in general, and Disney properties in particular, offer fertile ground for analyses at the intersection of automation and entertainment.

Disney studies has taken off in academia, leading to the launch of the International Journal of Disney Studies and numerous books including Why the Magic Matters: Discovering Disney as a Laboratory for Learning, an edited volume from Bloomsbury. Betancourt’s exploration of how Disney incorporated industrial technology into its theme parks positions the theme park as a factory, relating it directly to post-World War II automation and the development of operations research to optimize those processes. As with social media companies, traffic matters—the more efficiently you can move people through your attractions the more money you make and the more data you can collect.

After setting the analytical frame, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation builds a chronological history of technologies and techniques used to build Disney attractions, such as servomechanisms used on the assembly line Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant, through computerized programmable logic controllers used in contemporary systems. This analysis offers significant value to industrial and Disney historians, in no small measure because of Betancourt’s attention to detail and the bountiful historical record from Disney publications, employee recollections, and patent filings the author incorporates into the text.

Walt Disney viewed his parks as a form of edutainment, offering a glimpse into the workings of the parks’ attractions. Automata such as those used in The Hall of Presidents are one example, but putting attraction control systems in full view rather than hiding them behind set pieces is another. This effort to “denude” the technology of its mystery normalizes its place in popular culture and offers at least the appearance of accessibility and comprehensibility.

As someone who’s interested in the intersection of technology and society, I enjoyed Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. It’s not meant for a general audience but the broad interest in Disney studies and ongoing business and societal focus on efficiency through operations research expands its audience well beyond academic specialists. Highly recommended.

Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation. MIT Press. 2024. ISBN: 978-0-262-55101-4. $19.95.

Recently, many technologies have been branded as “inevitable”: 3D television, the Metaverse (the online environment with legless avatars from Facebook’s parent company, not Neal Stephenson’s conception from the novel Snow Crash), and vacuum-based transportation systems. The first two technologies in that list are no longer extant and the third, though allegedly implemented in Las Vegas as the Hyperloop, consists of human drivers piloting cars through underground tunnels instead of pneumatic tubes ferrying passengers in a high-speed subway system.

In his book Invention and Innovation, published by MIT Press, Dr. Vaclav Smil examines the history of technological hype within three categories of products: inventions that turned from welcome to unwelcome, inventions that were supposed to dominate but did not, and inventions we keep waiting for. The first category includes effective but harmful substances such as the insecticide DDT and lead as a fuel additive; the second features aircraft such as the zeppelin (lighter than air) and supersonic transport such as the Concorde, both of which fell out of favor when reasonable alternatives arose; and we’re still waiting for our flying cars, jetpacks, and vacuum-tube conveyances that have been promised for years but never delivered.

I was a bit surprised that Smil spends relatively little time on artificial intelligence (AI), but after a few paragraphs on the nature and expense of AI output and the cost of its training, he sums up his two pages on the subject this way:

“The conclusion is obvious: our quest for AI is an enormously complex, multifaceted process whose progress must be measured across decades and generations and whose impressive achievements on some relatively easy tasks coexist with the much larger realm of intelligence that remains well beyond the capabilities of programmed machines.”

Each of Smil’s cases provides important context for the current economic and technological environment. I read Invention and Innovation in its entirety and believe that’s the best way to take in his arguments and analysis, but I also think the book would be equally useful as a reference work for researchers and policy makers or as part of the readings for a course on the social impacts of technology and how it is marketed. Smil’s congenial writing style and comprehensive framework make it easy to appreciate his sensible approach to evaluating claims for products marketed now and in the future.

Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, Tudor Networks of Power. Oxford University Press. 2023. ISBN: 978-0-1988-5897-3. $45.99.

Information about individuals is often interesting and useful, but you gain important insights when you build a network describing the connections between those individuals. When those networks include the truly powerful, such as heads of state, the results can be quite interesting and informative.

In Tudor Networks of Power, published by Oxford University Press, academics Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert perform advanced network analysis based on letters exchanged among power players from England’s Tudor period. King Henry VIII is probably the most prominent person in the data set, but there are many powerful individuals, influencers, and other players to be accounted for.

The Ahnerts are well-positioned to take on this sort of project in the digital humanities. Ruth Ahnert is a professor of literary history and digital humanities at Queen Mary University, London, while Sebastian E. Ahnert is a university lecturer in chemical engineering at Cambridge. Sebastian has also developed expertise in network analysis, which complements Ruth’s skills well in this project.

I believe Tudor Networks of Power is best thought of as documenting a professional research project in the digital humanities. Working off an analog data source from an era before standardized spelling is a daunting prospect, even before one considers optical character recognition errors. Are Cecyll and Cesill the same person? Which James, Earl of Desmond is mentioned in this letter? There were four, after all. Name disambiguation alone took Ruth Ahnert and her assistants nine months of full-time work and a few more months part-time to complete.

Once the names were rounded into shape the Ahnerts could turn to their network analysis. Individual measures such as degree centrality (the number of incoming and outgoing connections from a network node), betweenness (the number of shortest paths between two network nodes that an individual appears on), and eigenvector centrality (proximity to a powerful node) provide useful data, but these measures provide more insight when combined into a network profile.

A network profile is the set of measures calculated for a specific node on the network. Each node represents a person, so you can identify people who make many connections, those who have a few connections but they are to high-level individuals, and ambassadors or merchants that create bridges between otherwise separated groups. I think of network profiling as a form of cluster analysis, where you identify network nodes that have many traits in common.

I enthusiastically recommend Tudor Networks of Power, especially for grad students and younger researchers in the digital humanities. The authors’ description of this project provides useful information for academics and other analysts who wish to perform network and link analysis, especially on data sets that require significant processing.

Martha Wells, Platform Decay. Tor. 2026 ISBN: 978-1-250-82700-5. $24.99.

If you’re a science fiction fan you’ve probably watched or at least seen advertisements for the Murderbot television series from Apple TV. The show is based on a book series by Martha Wells and I’m happy to say that Tor just released the eighth installment Platform Decay. tl;dr: Buy and read the entire series.

The main character of the Murderbot series is a SecUnit (security unit), a former human with cybernetic enhancements used for mission and personal security operations. The SecUnit’s specs are between that of a worker unit and a combat unit, which allows for a variety of matchups against unmodified humans, other SecUnits, more powerful foes, and combinations of adversaries varying in number and type. Importantly, SecUnit bypassed their control module and has free will, which they exercise to aid and protect a group of influential humans.

Murderbot’s independence and echoes of their human existence has allowed Wells to develop the character in interesting ways. As Murderbot grows as an individual, they experience meaningful (and stressful) human interaction, including with children, as part of the exfiltration operations central to the plot of Platform Decay. Murderbot also acts as a mentor to another SecUnit with a hacked control module, Three, so the reader gets to see how Murderbot relates to their own progress as an individual.

Like most of the other books in the Murderbot series, Platform Decay is of novella length and a fairly quick read. While you can read it by itself, I highly recommend reading the previous books in the series so you are familiar with the characters and understand the context for the action in this book. You can buy the first six installments of the series as ebooks from most major retailers.

I loved Platform Decay and can’t wait for the next Murderbot book. Highly recommended!

Kory Stamper, True Color. Alfred A. Knopf. 2026. ISBN: 978-1-5247-3303-2. $32.00.

Color is hard to define, both in the general sense and when specifying individual colors. Spare a thought for the lexicographers, editors, and subject matter experts in charge of updating color definitions for Webster's Third New International Dictionary. This unabridged monster was finally published in 1961, two years late and a million dollars over budget when a million dollars was still a million dollars.

Kory Stamper, a lexicographer who worked for Merriam-Webster for many years, weaves a compelling narrative of how editors of the Third wanted to bring its color definitions and definitional framework into the scientific age. They recruited I.H. Goodlove, a respected expert, to build out the framework and define individual colors within that new scheme. Experts are in constant demand and some have a hard time saying no to requests for their time, so everyone who has ever had a manage a project (especially one that involves producing a book) knows how this story goes.

Beyond the obvious concerns, though, Goodlove's eccentricities pushed the editors to their limit. Insisting on a specific color framework used by industrial colorists but not formalized as a standard, delivering definitions late or not at all, and extended absences due to health concerns all factor into this fascinating tale.

As the author of more than 40 books, I can attest that on some projects it seems like the book will never make it to the finish line and it would be better to accept that you have wasted tons of effort and quit throwing good money, time, blood, sweat, and tears after bad. Despite those temptations, the Third came out, albeit significantly late, and the tale of the struggle to get those bookplates to the printer with the color section included makes for riveting reading. And what happened after with the color definitions for a subsequent American Heritage Dictionary release offers valuable context for both the Third and how color work was performed and perceived in industry and society.

Brian Callaci, Chains of Command. University of Chicago Press. 2026. ISBN: 978-0-226-82870-1. $25.00.

Franchise businesses are everywhere in the United States and, especially over the past few decades, in the world. A cab driver in Inverness, Scotland told my wife and I that the nickname for the local McDonald’s is “The American Embassy.” There’s so much to love about Scottish humor: biting satire with a huge portion of truth.

In Chains of Command, author Brian Callaci examines the history of franchising in the United States, focusing on how franchisors sculpted their contracts and the surrounding legal environment powering the business model. The book’s subtitle, The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy, accurately depicts his findings.

Callaci, who earned his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is chief economist for the Open Markets Institute, unapologetically argues that contracts offered to franchisees greatly restrict the restaurant operators’ freedom and, in the best case for the franchisor, entail a rule-following operator working straight out of the manual and squeezing every possible penny out of their labor budget. This result maximizes revenue for the franchisor, helps generate a reasonable return for the franchisee, and denies workers the leverage required to improve their circumstances.

The first several chapters of Chains of Command review the business and legislative history of franchise operations in the United States, with substantial discussion of how the  International Franchise Association (IFA) fought on behalf of the franchisors it represented. It’s a bit ironic that Chains of Command was published by the University of Chicago Press given that so many of the IFA’s economic arguments for their business model came from the Chicago School, but that’s the joy of academic freedom. Some of those positions regarding independent contractor status, constructive employment, and business practices relate to businesses well beyond business model franchises. The Fight for Fifteen movement, which fought to secure a living wage for fast food workers, and unionization drives are additional elements that factor into Callaci’s analysis.

I recommend Chains of Command on the strength of its analysis. Callaci’s description of the IFA’s work and how they used various legal mechanisms (such as trademark law) to create their desired regulatory environment provides real insight into the evolution and current operation of franchised businesses. Also, as a member of a union household (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 28) who benefits from excellent health insurance earned through collective bargaining, I have great sympathy for the workers and franchisees who participate in the industry.