Brendan Keogh, "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production" (MIT Press, 2023)
The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American, European, and East Asian cities. But most videoga...
11 Jun 202359min
The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable
Humans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became eno...
11 Jun 20237min
Ida Yoshinaga et al., "Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction" (MIT Press, 2022)
Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough...
11 Jun 202354min
Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through
Myra Strober became a feminist on the Bay Bridge, heading toward San Francisco. It is 1970. She has just been told by the chairman of Berkeley's economics department that she can never get tenure. Dri...
10 Jun 202318min
Turing’s Vision: The Birth of Computer Science
In 1936, when he was just twenty-four years old, Alan Turing wrote a remarkable paper in which he outlined the theory of computation, laying out the ideas that underlie all modern computers. This grou...
9 Jun 202317min
Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media
What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual--when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving. New media--we are told--exist at the...
8 Jun 202321min
Drone: Remote Control Warfare
Drone Warfare is the first comprehensive analysis of one of the fastest growing--and most secretive--fronts in global conflict: the rise of robot warfare. In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty ae...
7 Jun 202317min
Tobias Ide, "Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts" (MIT Press, 2023)
Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have in...
7 Jun 202354min
