This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture
Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; t...
19 Jun 202319min
Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art
Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event ...
18 Jun 202314min
Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web
Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In Readi...
17 Jun 202318min
Chris Impey, "Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity" (MIT Press, 2023)
The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home. Planet Earth, it turns out, may...
16 Jun 202332min
The Outsourcer: The Story of India's IT Revolution
The rise of the Indian information technology industry is a remarkable economic success story. Software and services exports from India amounted to less than $100 million in 1990, and today come close...
16 Jun 202317min
Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity
Prehension is a hymn to the hand. In Prehension, Colin McGinn links questions from science to philosophical concerns to consider something that we take for granted: the importance of the hand in every...
15 Jun 202320min
Make it New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design c...
14 Jun 202320min
Nate G. Hilger, "The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis" (MIT Press, 2023)
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers--parents--labor in isolatio...
13 Jun 202355min
