Alex Berke, "Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book about Math" (MIT Press, 2020)
Alex Berke's Beautiful Symmetry (MIT Press, 2020) is both a fascinating book and a concept -- it's like no other book I’ve ever read. It's a coloring book about math, inviting us to engage with mathem...
22 Apr 202050min
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbi...
30 Mar 202051min
Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018)
The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence t...
27 Mar 202054min
Joseph Reagle, "Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents" (MIT Press, 2019)
Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and ...
26 Mar 20201h 16min
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "Data Feminism" (MIT Press, 2020)
The increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power surrounding and undergirding data. The impacts of th...
3 Mar 202034min
David J. Gunkel, "Robot Rights" (MIT Press, 2018)
We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality―self-driv...
27 Feb 20201h 28min
Kyle Devine, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music" (MIT Press, 2019)
What is the human and environmental cost of music? In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019),Kyle Devine, an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University...
5 Feb 202042min
Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019)
Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting internet service providers from discriminating betwee...
3 Feb 202039min
