What Was Contemporary Art?
Contemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as if the very idea of art that is contemporary is new. Yet all works of art were once contemporary. In What Was Contemporary Art?...
9 Jul 202319min
Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information
The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations...
8 Jul 202316min
Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send...
7 Jul 202320min
Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation
Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie and Buzz Lightyear, between ping pong and PONG. It be...
6 Jul 202318min
Robin Steedman, "Creative Hustling: Women Making and Distributing Films from Nairobi" (MIT Press, 2023)
What is the future of the global creative economy? In Creative Hustling: Women Making and Distributing Films from Nairobi (MIT Press, 2023), Robin Steedman, a postdoc in the Department of Management, ...
6 Jul 202337min
Alelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities
The vast majority of American college students attend two thousand or so private and public institutions that might be described as the Middle—reputable educational institutions, but not considered eq...
5 Jul 202315min
The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us
Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, thi...
4 Jul 202316min
Why Photography Matters
Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works--not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and ...
3 Jul 202312min
