The MIT Press Podcast
Episodes
E. and H. Heron, "Flaxman Low: Occult Detective" (MIT Press, 2026)
15 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Flaxman Low, literature’s first professional, full-time “occult detective”—that is, an intrepid investigator who deploys the scientific method...
Carlin Wing, "Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play" (MIT Press, 2026)
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play (MIT Press, 2026) follows an array of bouncing balls through the histories of nonelectronic and e...
Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan eds., "Autotheories" (MIT Press, 2025)
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A transdisciplinary array of authors offering a new frame of reference for autotheory and its genre-bending synthesis of autobiography and critical th...
Amelia Acker, "Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms" (MIT Press, 2025)
04 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We're so pleased to welcome Dr. Amelia Acker, author of Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms (MIT Press, 2025) to the New Books Netw...
Victor Navarro-Remesal, "Zen and Slow Games" (MIT Press, 2026)
03 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A deep dive into the reflective modes of playfulness in video games. Slowness and reflectiveness have always been part of the video game medium, thoug...
Catherine Elgin, "Epistemic Ecology" (MIT Press, 2025)
03 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Humans are highly inquisitive, yet fallible and cognitively limited. How can we improve our epistemic lot despite our limitations? In Epistemic Ecolo...
Miguel Sicart, "Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture" (MIT Press, 2023)
02 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The play element at the heart of our interactions with computers—and how it drives the best and the worst manifestations of the information age. Whe...
Honghong Tinn, "Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan's Computing Industry" (MIT Press, 2024)
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How Taiwan rose to global prominence in high tech manufacturing, from computer maker to the world's leading chip manufacturer. How did Taiwan, a for...
Raiford Guins, "King PONG: How Atari Bounced Across Markets to Make Millions" (MIT Press, 2026)
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hoste...
W. Patrick McCray, "README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines" (MIT Press, 2025)
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (MIT Press, 2025), historian Dr. Patrick McCray argues that ...
Javiera Barandiaran, "Living Minerals: Nature, Trade, and Power in the Race for Lithium" (MIT Press, 2026)
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A sobering investigation of the rush for lithium for electric vehicles, the problematic history of lithium mining, and the consequences for sustainabi...
Robert Dorschel, "The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism" (MIT Press, 2025)
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Who are the people staffing the digital economy? In The Social Codes of Tech Workers: Class Identity in Digital Capitalism (MIT Press, 2025) Rob...
Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer, "Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior" (MIT Press, 2025)
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior (MIT Press, 2025), Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer reveal how s...
Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond...
Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)
01 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of...
Sharon Sliwinski, "An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed" (MIT Press, 2025)
18 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Borrowing from the traditional alphabet book genre for children, An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed (MIT Press, 2025) b...
Matthew A. Tattar, "Innovation and Adaptation in War" (MIT Press, 2025)
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An analysis of advances in military technology that illustrates the importance of organizational flexibility in both an attacker’s innovations and a...
Thomas Princen, "Fire and Flood: Extreme Events and Social Change Past, Present, Future" (MIT Press, 2025)
29 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Princen explores issues of social and ecological sustainability at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michiga...
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An important critic of modern culture, American economist Thorstein Veblen is best known for the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” the ostenta...
Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021)
09 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rura...
Nora Kenworthy, "Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare" (MIT Press, 2024)
30 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare (MIT Press, 2024), Dr. Nora Kenworthy presents an eye-opening investigation into charitabl...
Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)
23 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how.AI’s impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated...
Lily Hsueh, "Corporations at Climate Crossroads: Multilevel Governance, Public Policy, and Global Climate Action" (MIT Press, 2025)
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Lily Hseuh is trained as an economist and public policy scholar, and is an associate professor in Economics and Public Policy in the School of Pu...
Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko "In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos" (MIT Press, 2023)
15 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023) is an absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstra...
Carlotta Daro, "The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication" (MIT Press, 2025)
05 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of t...
Susan Erikson, "Investable! When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance" (MIT Press, 2025)
20 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Investable! When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Susan Erikson presents a critical and sobering look at how internat...
Julien Mailland on "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry"
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Julien Mailland, Associate Professor of Media Management, Law, and Policy at The Media School of Indiana...
Stephanie K. Kim, "Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul" (MIT Press, 2023)
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popul...
Dan Roche, "Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing" (MIT Press, 2025)
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing (MIT Press, 2025) is a book about artificial eyes—about the artisans and artists who make them, and ab...
Jamie Wang, "Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore" (MIT Press, 2024)
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imag...
Hannah Star Rogers, "Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022)
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
'Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022)' by Hannah Star Rogers When I sat down with Hannah Star Rogers to discuss her new book...
Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)
10 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The human mind has the curious, even mysterious, ability to generate thoughts about things with which we are not in causal contact, such as when we th...
Paul Thagard, "Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?" (MIT Press, 2021)
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favo...
Cat Dawson, "Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape" (MIT Press, 2025)
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled bot...
Chris Bernhardt, "Beautiful Math: The Surprisingly Simple Ideas behind the Digital Revolution in How We Live, Work, and Communicate" (MIT Press, 2024)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us know something about the grand theories of physics that transformed our views of the universe at the start of the twentieth century: quantu...
Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, "Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France" (MIT Press, 2025)
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the m...
Matthew Wisnioski on the History of the Idea and Culture of “Innovation” in the United States
30 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Wisnioski, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, about his new book, Eve...
David Zweig, "An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions" (MIT Press, 2025)
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, 2025) is a devastating account of the decision-making...
Elliot Lichtman, "The Computer Always Wins: A Playful Introduction to Algorithms through Puzzles and Strategy Games" (MIT Press, 2025)
22 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In The Computer Always Wins: A Playful Introduction to Algorithms through Puzzles and Strategy Games (MIT Press, 2025), Elliot Lichtman will teach ...
Jeremy Stolow, "Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography" (MIT Press, 2025)
20 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Jeremy Stolow is the first book of its kind: an extended historical, anthropological, and...
Trans Technologies
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can technology creates new possibilities for transgender people? How do trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology? Tran...
Jean J. Ryoo and Jane Margolis, "Power On!" (MIT Press, 2022)
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An interview with Jean Ryoo and Jane Margolis about Power On! A diverse group of teenage friends learn how computing can be personally and political...
John Horn, "Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success" (MIT Press, 2023)
31 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success (MIT Press, 2023) offers a roadmap to help leaders...
Ann McCallum Staats, "Fantastic Flora: The World's Biggest, Baddest, and Smelliest Plants" (MIT Kids Press, 2025)
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In our lovely interview, we celebrate Ann McCallum Staats' brand new book (just launched this week!), Fantastic Flora: The World’s Biggest, Baddest...
Mitchell Thomashow, "To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental Learning" (MIT Press, 2020)
28 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why we must rethink our residency on the planet to understand the connected challenges of tribalism, inequity, climate justice, and democracy. How can...
Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith, "Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter" (MIT Press, 2025)
27 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, how did people secure their private letters? The answer is letterlocking—the ingenious pro...
Eric Heinze, "Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left" (MIT Press, 2025)
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that peopl...
Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil libe...
Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber, "The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully" (MIT Press, 2025)
09 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How players evoke personal and subjective meanings through a new theory of player response. In The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully (MIT P...
Samuel Jay Keyser, "Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts" (MIT Press, 2025)
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' ref...
Peter Krapp, "Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation" (MIT Press, 2024)
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We're pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Krapp, the author of Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (MIT Press, 2024), to the New Books Netw...
Jessica Smith on Engineering and Public Accountability in Energy Industries
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Jessica Smith, Professor in the Engineering, Design, and Society Department and Dean’s Fellow for Earth ...
Peter B. Kaufman, "The Moving Image: A User's Manual" (MIT Press, 2025)
22 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is vid...
Jennifer Clapp, "Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters" (MIT Press, 2025)
19 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although...
James Boyle Draws the Line Between Humans and AI
05 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press,...
A Philosophy of Echoes
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We spend our 50th episode (the last of this season) with communication theorist Amit Pinchevski. Amit’s recent book Echo (MIT Press) explores its...
Mia Consalvo et al., "Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch" (MIT Press, 2025)
14 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstream...
Lessons on Living with AI from the Home Computer Revolution: Revisiting Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self”
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common p...
M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Maz...
Chris Higgins, "Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education" (MIT Press, 2024)
04 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT Press, 2024) is an imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a plac...
Christos Lynteris, "Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography" (MIT Press, 2022)
02 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pa...
Jeff Yoshimi, "Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery" (MIT Press, 2025)
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Can experimenting with game design increase our chances of finding a cure for cancer? Cancer is crafty, forcing us to be just as clever in our efforts...
Aure Schrock on Politics Recoded: The Infrastructural Organizing of Code for America
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Aure Schrock, an interdisciplinary technology scholar and writing coach and editor at Indelible Voice, a...
Daniel Oberhaus, "The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum" (MIT Press, 2025)
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access tr...
Jesper Juul, "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" (MIT Press, 2024)
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be ...
James Malazita, "Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine" (MIT Press, 2024)
12 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studie...
Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, "The Unequal Effects of Globalization" (MIT, 2023)
22 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The recent retreat from globalization has been triggered by a perception that increased competition from global trade is not fair and leads to increas...
Julien Mailland, "The Game That Never Ends: How Lawyers Shape the Videogame Industry" (MIT Press, 2024)
21 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A guide to the fascinating legal history of the videogame industry, written for nonlawyers. Why did a judge recall FIFA 15, a nonviolent soccer game...
Luci Pangrazio and Neil Selwyn, "Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data and Everyday Life" (MIT Press, 2023)
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Data has become a defining issue of current times. Our everyday lives are shaped by the data that is produced about us (and by us) through digital tec...
J. Mijin Cha, "A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future" (MIT Press, 2024)
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occu...
Victor P. Petrov, "Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain" (MIT Press, 2023)
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernisation, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) examines the history ...
Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)
08 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the U.S. lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 201...
Greg Epstein, "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation" (MIT Press, 2024)
30 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Technology has surpassed religion as the central focus of our lives, from our dependence on smartphones to the way that tech has infused almost every ...
Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Meryl Alper, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, about her recent b...
Anna Lora-Wainwright, "Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China" (MIT Press, 2021)
20 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (MIT Press, 2021) by Dr. Anna Lora-Wainwright digs deep into the paradoxes, ambivalences, and...
Francisco Aboitiz, "A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness" (MIT Press, 2024)
19 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Francisco Aboitiz is a professor at the Medical School and the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience at Pontificia Universidad Ca...
Jackie Wang, "Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood" (Semiotext(e), 2023)
14 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California....
Alan F. Blackwell, "Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI" (MIT Press, 2024)
06 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs a...
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, "The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places" (MIT Press, 2024)
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
An expressive book of prose and photographs that reveals the powerful ways our everyday places support our shared belonging. Where would you take some...
Lynne B. Sagalyn, "Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change" (MIT Press, 2023)
30 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What is it about Times Square that has inspired such attention for well over a century? And how is it that, despite its many changes of character, the...
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we assume that computers always get it right? Today’s book is: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press,...
Francis Stevens, "The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories" (MIT Press, 2024)
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimens...
Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021)
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and conseque...
Cyrus Mody on the Importance of Square (as in NOT COOL) Scientists and Engineers
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Cyrus Mody, Professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation and Director of the STS Progra...
Edward Shanks, "The People of the Ruins" (MIT Press, 2024)
06 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The People of the Ruins (originally published in 1920), Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neo mediaeval society wh...
Robert Baker, "Making Modern Medical Ethics: How African Americans, Anti-Nazis, Bureaucrats, Feminists, Veterans, and Whistleblowing Moralists Created Bioethics" (MIT Press, 2024)
02 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The little-known stories of the people responsible for what we know today as modern medical ethics. In Making Modern Medical Ethics: How African Amer...
Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert, "The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2024)
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What is data, and why does it matter for us to care about the data traces we leave behind? What are the implications for our lives of how this data is...
Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020)
08 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding o...
Anna Abraham, "The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths" (MIT Press, 2024)
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A nuanced, science-based understanding of the creative mind that dispels the pervasive myths we hold about the human brain—but also uncovers the tru...
Ann Johnson and Johannes Lenhard, "Cultures of Prediction: How Engineering and Science Evolve with Mathematical Tools" (MIT Press, 2024)
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A probing examination of the dynamic history of predictive methods and values in science and engineering that helps us better understand today's cultu...
More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s book is: More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2024), by Meredith Broussard. When technology ...
Elena Kochetkova, "The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology" (MIT Press, 2024)
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (MIT Press, 2024), Elena Kochetkova examines...
Iris Moon, "Melancholy Wedgwood" (MIT Press, 2024)
26 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024) is an experimental biography of the ceramics entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood that reveals the tenuous relationshi...
Catherine D'Ignazio, "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" (MIT Press, 2024)
17 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What isn't counted doesn't count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and g...
Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia, "The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice" (MIT Press, 2024)
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a “normative” learner does. In The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Ju...
Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trere, "Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power" (MIT Press, 2024)
10 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What are the tactics needed for a world of platforms and algorithms? In Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power (MIT Pre...
The Scientific Attitude
07 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science (Boston University) and Senior Advisor ...
Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, "The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games" (MIT Press, 2024)
04 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How games are built on the foundations of rules, and how rules—of which there are only five kinds—really work. Board games to sports, digital game...
Diana Chapman Walsh, "The Claims of Life: A Memoir" (MIT Press, 2023)
21 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The engaging memoir of a legendary president of Wellesley College known for authentic and open-hearted leadership, who drove innovation with power and...
Matthew H. Hersch, "Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle" (MIT Press, 2023)
30 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Matthew Hersch challenges the existing narrative of the most significant hum...