Alistair Knott, “Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax” (MIT Press, 2012)
When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsolete. These claims are often met with appropriate sc...
28 Jan 201451min
Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013)
“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most ...
14 Jan 20141h 13min
Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012)
We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht transf...
10 Nov 20131h 1min
William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012)
How does conducting fieldwork on another planet, using a robot as a mobile laboratory, change what it means to be a scientist? In Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Explora...
3 Nov 20131h 7min
Tadeusz Zawidzki, “Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition” (MIT Press, 2013)
Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t have, ...
15 Okt 20131h 8min
David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012)
How do you measure a star? In the middle of the 20thcentury, an interdisciplinary and international community of scientists began using radio waves to measure heavenly bodies and transformed astronomy...
29 Jul 20131h 9min
Anne Cutler, “Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words” (MIT Press, 2012)
One of the risks of a telephone interview is that the sound quality can be less than ideal, and sometimes there’s no way around this and we just have to try to press on with it. Under those conditions...
1 Jul 201350min
Patrick Hanks, “Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations” (MIT Press, 2013)
It’s tempting to think that lexicography can go on, untroubled by the concerns of theoretical linguistics, while the rest of us plunge into round after round of bloody internecine strife. For better o...
10 Jun 201354min
