Daniel Greene, "The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope" (MIT Press, 2021)
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: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope (...
3 Mai 20211h 5min
Lucas Richert, "Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture" (MIT Press, 2020)
"Antipsychiatry," Esalen, psychedelics, and DSM III: Radical challenges to psychiatry and the conventional treatment of mental health in the 1970s. The upheavals of the 1960s gave way to a decade of d...
5 Apr 202146min
Jonas Peters and Nicolai Meinshausen, "The Raven's Hat: Fallen Pictures, Rising Sequences, and Other Mathematical Games" (MIT Press, 2021)
Games have been of interest to mathematicians almost since mathematics became a subject. In fact, entire branches of mathematics have arisen simply to analyze certain games. The Raven's Hat: Fallen Pi...
2 Apr 202153min
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
