The MIT Press Podcast
Episodes
Jaap-Henk Hoepman, "Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths: Achieving Privacy Through Careful Design" (MIT Press, 2021)
05 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We are tethered to our devices all day, every day, leaving data trails of our searches, posts, clicks, and communications. Meanwhile, governments and ...
Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021)
28 Sep 2021
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...
Giorgio Vallortigara, "Born Knowing: Imprinting and the Origins of Knowledge" (MIT Press, 2021)
28 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Why do newborns show a preference for a face (or something that resembles a face) over a nonface-like object? Why do baby chicks prefer a moving objec...
Eric. S. Hintz, "American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D" (MIT Press, 2021)
28 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Wonder how America's individual inventors persisted alongside corporate R&D labs as an important source of inventions beginning at the turn of the ea...
Ruth Aylett and Patricia A. Vargas, "Living with Robots: What Every Anxious Human Needs to Know" (MIT Press, 2021)
21 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There's a lot of hype about robots; some of it is scary and some of it utopian. In this accessible book, two robotics experts reveal the truth about w...
Mariska van Sprundel, "Running Smart: How Science Can Improve Your Endurance and Performance" (MIT Press, 2021)
14 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Conventional wisdom about running is passed down like folklore (and sometimes contradicts itself): the right kind of shoe prevents injury—or running...
Collin Rice, "Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science" (MIT Press, 2021)
10 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us agree that science aims to tell us what is true about the world. But how do we get at the truth by using theories and models that deliberat...
Katy Borner, "Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures" (MIT Press, 2021)
10 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
To envision and create the futures we want, society needs an appropriate understanding of the likely impact of alternative actions. Data models and vi...
Silvia Casini, "Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology" (MIT Press, 2021)
09 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Make...
Audrey Watters, "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" (MIT Press, 2021)
07 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Contrary to the claims of many of today’s advocates of computerized instruction and online learning, efforts to use technology to improve the educat...
James W. Cortada, "IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon" (MIT Press, 2019)
18 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Retired from life after 38 years in several roles at IBM, the prolific academic production of James W. Cortada now continues telling his side of the s...
P. J. Boczkowski and E. Mitchelstein, "The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now" (MIT Press, 2021)
17 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic w...
Benjamin R. Cohen et al., "Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food" (MIT Press, 2021)
17 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers ...
Lee McIntyre, "How to Talk to a Science Denier" (MIT Press, 2021)
17 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change is a hoax--and so is coronavirus. Vaccines are bad for you. These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and pre...
Mark L. Johnson and Don M. Tucker, "Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing" (MIT Press, 2021)
17 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Plato's Allegory of the Cave trapped us in the illusion that mind is separate from body and from the natural and physical world. Knowledge had to be e...
Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey, "Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries" (MIT Press, 2020)
10 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sixteen of today's greatest unsolved mathematical puzzles in a story-driven, illustrated volume that invites readers to peek over the edge of the unkn...
John Horgan, "Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science" (MIT Press, 2020)
23 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller ...
Eugene T. Richardson, "Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health" (MIT Press, 2020)
22 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (MIT Press, 2020), physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson explores how pub...
John Troyer, "Technologies of the Human Corpse" (MIT Press, 2020)
19 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination--not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that...
John Troyer, "Technologies of the Human Corpse" (MIT Press, 2020)
19 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination--not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that...
Thomas D. Mullaney et al., "Your Computer Is on Fire" (MIT Press, 2021)
09 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking ...
Jessica Helfand, "Face: A Visual Odyssey" (MIT Press, 2019)
17 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Jessica Helfand about her new book Face: A Visual Odyssey (MIT Press, 2019) Helfand is a designer, artist, and author. She’s tau...
W. Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture" (MIT Press, 2020)
09 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural realms separated by impervious walls. But some fifty yea...
Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, "Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access" (MIT Press, 2020)
31 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, editors of Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Glob...
Philip Ball, "The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science" (MIT Press, 2021)
10 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Chemistry is not just about microscopic atoms doing inscrutable things; it is the process that makes flowers and galaxies. We rely on it for bread-bak...
Daniel Greene, "The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope" (MIT Press, 2021)
03 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that we need to learn to code--or else? In The Promise of Access: Technolo...
Lucas Richert, "Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture" (MIT Press, 2020)
05 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. Th...
Edward Ashford Lee, "The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines" (MIT Press, 2020)
02 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020),...
Jonas Peters and Nicolai Meinshausen, "The Raven's Hat: Fallen Pictures, Rising Sequences, and Other Mathematical Games" (MIT Press, 2021)
02 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Games have been of interest to mathematicians almost since mathematics became a subject. In fact, entire branches of mathematics have arisen simply to...
Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris, "Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation" (MIT Press, 2020)
26 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As we mark the one-year anniversary of the COIVD-19 pandemic, take the time to listen to this discussion of previous efforts to fight yellow fever, ch...
Gascia Ouzounian, "Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts" (MIT Press, 2021)
16 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As common as it is today to speak of the relative “height” of musical pitches or of the sense of “vocal space” as it opened up by particular r...
Paola Bonifazio, "The Photoromance: A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture" (MIT Press, 2020)
19 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Paola Bonifazio’s The Photoromance. A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture (MIT Press, 2020) is the first feminist reading of photoromances that ex...
Henry T. Greely, "CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans" (The MIT Press, 2021)
15 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What does the birth of babies whose embryos have gone through genome editing mean—for science and for all of us? In November 2018, the world was sho...
Jonas Staal, "Propaganda Art in the 21st Century" (MIT Press, 2019)
04 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How to understand propaganda art in the post-truth era—and how to create a new kind of emancipatory propaganda art. Propaganda art — whether a d...
Daniel Oberhaus, "Extraterrestrial Languages" (MIT Press, 2019)
06 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Extraterrestrial Languages (MIT Press 2020), Daniel Oberhaus tells the history of human efforts to talk to aliens, but in doing so, the book refl...
Robert Baker, "The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution" (MIT Press, 2019)
06 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded...
Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts, "Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging" (MIT Press, 2019)
05 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Everyone ages, and just about everyone uses language, making Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging (MIT Press, 2...
Howard Gardner, "A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory" (MIT Press, 2021)
30 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The synthesizing mind is one that identifies a program or asks a question, pulls together information from across disciplines or creates new data thro...
Johanna Drucker, "Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display" (MIT Press, 2020)
23 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the several decades since scholars in the humanities have taken up computational tools, they have borrowed many techniques from other fields, inclu...
Joshua Gans, "The Pandemic Information Gap and the Brutal Economics of Covid-19" (MIT Press, 2020)
17 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March, a self-isolating and easily distracted economist resolved to take himself in hand. "I decided I would do ...
Ido Hartogsohn, "American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century" (MIT Press, 2020)
13 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Are psychedelics invaluable therapeutic medicines, or dangerously unpredictable drugs that precipitate psychosis? Tools for spiritual communion or cog...
Jennifer S. Light, "States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945" (MIT Press, 2020)
04 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and n...
Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019)
22 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes ...
Jonathan Haber, "Critical Thinking" (The MIT Press, 2020)
15 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I speak with fellow New Books in Education host, Jonathan Haber, about his book, Critical Thinking (The MIT Press, 2020). This b...
David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020)
10 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (MIT Press), evolutionary biologist David Haig explains ho...
Katie Day Good, "Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education" (MIT Press, 2020)
17 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, boosters of digital educational technologies emphasized that these platforms are vital tools for cultivating global...
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, "The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance" (MIT Press, 2020)
14 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (MIT Press), by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, demonstrates that this technology – which is ...
Satyan Devadoss, "Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries" (MIT Press, 2020)
13 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There are very few math books that merit the adjective ‘charming’ but Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries (MIT Press, 2020) is one of th...
Nicole Piemonte, "Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice" (MIT Press, 2018)
07 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice (The MIT Press), Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with c...
Donna Drucker, "Contraception: A Concise History" (The MIT Press, 2020)
06 Aug 2020
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...
Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (MIT Press, 2020)
27 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of Civic Media...
Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures" (Princeton UP, 2020)
20 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate ...
Matto Mildenberger, "Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics" (MIT Press, 2020)
13 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Why do some countries pass legislation regulating carbon or protecting the environment while others do not? In his new book Carbon Captured: How Busin...
Ainissa Ramirez, "The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another" (MIT Press, 2020)
25 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, I talk to Dr. Ainissa Ramirez about her new book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (MIT Press, 2020...
Lee McIntyre, "The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience" (MIT Press, 2019)
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What can explain the success of science as an endeavor for getting closer to truth? Does science simply represent a successful methodology, or is it s...
Joshua Gans, "Economics in the Age of COVID-19" (MIT Press, 2020)
04 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a firehose of information (much of it wrong) and an avalanche of opinions (many of them ill-founded). Most of us a...
Simon Bowmaker, "When the President Calls: Conversations with Economic Policymakers" (MIT Press, 2019)
28 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
I spoke with Dr Simon Bowmaker, Professor of Economics at New York University, Stern School of Business. He has recently published When the President ...
Govind Gopakumar, "Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Mobility and Streets in Indian Cities" (MIT Press, 2020)
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Automobiles and their associated infrastructures, deeply embedded in Western cities, have become a rapidly growing presence in the mega-cities of the ...
Jathan Sadowski, "Too Smart" (MIT Press, 2020)
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The ubiquity of technology that collects massive volumes of all kinds of data lends itself to one overarching question: “What?” As in what is the ...
Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)
27 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant...
Alex Berke, "Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book about Math" (MIT Press, 2020)
22 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Berke's Beautiful Symmetry (MIT Press, 2020) is both a fascinating book and a concept -- it's like no other book I’ve ever read. It's a colorin...
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat....
Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018)
27 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep p...
Joseph Reagle, "Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents" (MIT Press, 2019)
26 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tip...
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "Data Feminism" (MIT Press, 2020)
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power su...
David J. Gunkel, "Robot Rights" (MIT Press, 2018)
27 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly import...
Kyle Devine, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music" (MIT Press, 2019)
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What is the human and environmental cost of music? In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019),Kyle Devine, an Associate Professor...
Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019)
03 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting...
Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)
24 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys―an ugly death awaitin...
Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019)
20 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars...
Neil McArthur, "Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications" (MIT Press, 2017)
09 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sexbots are coming. Given the pace of technological advances, it is inevitable that realistic robots specifically designed for people's sexual gratifi...
Axel Seemann, "The Shared World: Perceptual Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space" (MIT Press, 2019)
01 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Much of what we are able to accomplish in our day-to-day lives depends on the ability to act and think in concert with others. Often this involves no...
Elizabeth Otto, "Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics" (MIT Press, 2019)
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and E...
Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind, "Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business" (MIT Press, 2018)
19 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Small is beautiful, right? Isn't that what we've all been taught? From Jeffersonian politics to the hallowed family farm, from craft breweries to tech...
David Bissell, "Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities" (MIT Press, 2018)
20 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Li...
Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019)
02 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked with Chris Bernhardt about his book Quantum Computing for Everyone (MIT Press, 2019). This is a book that involves a lot of mathematics...
Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018)
18 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that...
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
19 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more de...
Rodrigo Zeidan, "Economics of Global Business" (MIT Press, 2018)
18 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
I spoke with Professor Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University, Shanghai. He has just published Economics of Global Business (MIT Press, 2018), a great ...
Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018)
15 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Much of the debate about the roles of nature vs. nurture in the development of individual people has settled into accepting that it's a bit of both, a...
Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters" (MIT Press, 2018)
08 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how informa...
Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
19 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a n...
Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018)
03 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas th...
Mark Polizzotti, “Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto” (MIT Press, 2018)
14 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The success of a translator may seem to lie in going unnoticed: the translator ducks out of the spotlight so that the original author may shine. Mark...
Nathan Kravis, “On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud” (MIT Press, 2017)
07 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato ...
Mike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear” (MIT Press, 2018)
05 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new fr...
Lee Humphreys, “The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life” (MIT Press, 2018)
19 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Physical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike so...
Wade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018)
18 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future...
Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017)
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and gove...
Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” (MIT Press, 2017)
15 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to en...
Ilene Grabel, “When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence” (MIT Press, 2017)
07 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We spoke with Ilene Grabel, Professor at the University of Denver and Co-director of the MA program in Global Finance, Trade & Economic Integration...
Eden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” (MIT Press, 2011)
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics. In th...
Stephen Monteiro, “The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender” (MIT Press, 2017)
06 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sewing, knitting, quilting, the crafts related to fabric making, are usually not what we think about when we consider our digital communications devic...
Alenka Zupancic, “What is Sex?” (MIT Press, 2017)
14 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Alenka Zupancic has done the unthinkable. She has managed to write a fun and exciting book about sex with only cursory mention of things naughty. What...
Molly Wright Steenson, “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape” (MIT Press, 2017)
27 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architect...
Karen Neander, “A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics” (MIT Press, 2017)
15 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the p...
Nick Montfort, “The Future” (MIT, 2017)
29 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a fu...
Thomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017)
09 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese i...
Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017)
21 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the In...
Daniel R. DeNicola, “Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know” (The MIT Press, 2017)
01 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge d...