A new framework for understanding how algorithms influenceWeb applications offer us conclusions about science. Twitter bots generate art. Machine-learning systems satirize politicians. We live in an era where a substantial share of our private and public communication is machinic. Modern computing machines cannot yet speak for themselves—although the capacities of AI are rapidly expanding—but they generate rhetorical energies as they give advice, entertain, and proffer insight, speaking to human concerns in more-than-human ways and guiding human action. In Influential Machines Miles C. Coleman looks beyond human communication to interrogate the ways in which the machines and algorithms in our lives make meaning and the implications of their special modes of communication. Using the varied examples of an anti-vax "vaccine calculator," two Twitterbots, and the computational performances of virtual assistants, Coleman asks what machines mean to us as social agents and whether humans are the appropriate reference for designing machine communication. Coleman goes beyond the front and back ends of computing to describe the "deep end" of computing, a site of ambient rhetoric that is essential for understanding how machines move in today's digital world.

Though much has already been written on religious freedom in the United States, these treatments have come mostly from historians, legal scholars, and advocates, with relatively little attention from rhetorical critics. In The Rhetoric of Religious Freedom in the United States, fifteen scholars from this field address the variety of forms that free, public religiosity may assume, and which rhetorical techniques are operative in a public square populated by a diversity of religious-political actors. Together they consider the arguments, evidences, and strategies defining what religious freedom means and who is entitled to claim it in the contemporary United States.

Though much has already been written on religious freedom in the United States, these treatments have come mostly from historians, legal scholars, and advocates, with relatively little attention from rhetorical critics. In The Rhetoric of Religious Freedom in the United States, fifteen scholars from this field address the variety of forms that free, public religiosity may assume, and which rhetorical techniques are operative in a public square populated by a diversity of religious-political actors. Together they consider the arguments, evidences, and strategies defining what religious freedom means and who is entitled to claim it in the contemporary United States.