Edward Ashford Lee, "The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines" (MIT Press, 2020)
Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020), Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are l...
2 Apr 20211h 10min
Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris, "Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation" (MIT Press, 2020)
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, cholera, and plague pandemics. Lukas Engelmann and C...
26 Mar 20211h 28min
Gascia Ouzounian, "Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts" (MIT Press, 2021)
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 recording techniques, we did not always understand sound to...
16 Mar 20211h 16min
Paola Bonifazio, "The Photoromance: A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture" (MIT Press, 2020)
Paola Bonifazio’s The Photoromance. A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture (MIT Press, 2020) is the first feminist reading of photoromances that examines both its industry and its fandom, arguing for t...
19 Feb 202159min
Henry T. Greely, "CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans" (The MIT Press, 2021)
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 shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China...
15 Feb 20211h 1min
Jonas Staal, "Propaganda Art in the 21st Century" (MIT Press, 2019)
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 depiction of joyous workers in the style of socialist rea...
4 Feb 20211h 5min
Daniel Oberhaus, "Extraterrestrial Languages" (MIT Press, 2019)
In Extraterrestrial Languages (MIT Press 2020), Daniel Oberhaus tells the history of human efforts to talk to aliens, but in doing so, the book reflects on the relationship between communication and c...
6 Jan 202156min
Robert Baker, "The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution" (MIT Press, 2019)
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 as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love,...
6 Jan 20211h 9min
