How did gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry by the 1970s? In Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Marie Hicks , an Assistant Professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology, offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of this radical social change. Based on rich and detailed archival and interview so...
Mar 28, 2017•30 min
Psychological and philosophical theories of the emotions tend to take the adult emotional repertoire as the paradigm case for understanding the emotions. From this standpoint, the emotions are usually distinguished into two categories: the basic emotions, like fear or happiness, and the higher cognitive emotions, like shame or pride. In her new book, Becoming Human: The Ontogenesis, Metaphysics, and Expression of Human Emotionality (MIT Press, 2016), Jennifer Greenwood challenges this standard d...
Jan 18, 2017•1 hr 10 min
In White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa (MIT Press, 2015), Sharon Rotbard , Senior Lecturer in the Architecture Department at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, examines the dual histories of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. He offers a nuanced and compelling deconstruction of the myth of the White City and the erasure of what he deems the Black City. This book is a compelling contribution, bringing critical urban studies into conversation with critical histories of Zionism in innova...
Dec 26, 2016•40 min
This is a book about the future – the historical future as three interconnected generations of atmospheric researchers experienced it and envisioned it in the first part of the twentieth century. James Rodger Fleming’s new book is a big picture history of atmospheric science that follows the lives and careers of three men who worked at the center of meteorological research in roughly the first half of the 20th century: Vilhelm Bjerknes, Carl-Gustav Rossby, and Harry Wexler. Though it takes these...
Aug 26, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Something we might think of as the Soviet internet once existed, according to Benjamin Peters ‘ new book, and its failure was neither natural nor inevitable. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016) traces the history of early efforts to network the Soviet state, from the global spread of cybernetics in the middle of the 20th century (paying careful attention to the different ways that cybernetic thought was articulated in different international s...
Jul 16, 2016•1 hr 2 min
The British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell claimed it is a truism that there are facts: the planets revolve around the sun, 2 + 2 = 4, elephants are bigger than mice. In Against Facts (MIT Press, 2015), Arianna Betti argues that not only is it not a truism that there are facts, but that on either of the basic views of what facts are, there aren’t any. Betti, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, argues that we don’t need to posit facts as truthmakers or as the...
Jul 15, 2016•1 hr 6 min
Thanks to mobile phones, getting online is easier and cheaper than ever. In After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet (MIT Press, 2015), Jonathan Donner challenges the optimistic narrative that mobile phone will finally close the digital divide. How we log on, how long we stay, what we choose to do, what we can do – all are shaped by our environments, resources and digital literacies. After Access examines the implications of the shift to a more mobile, more available Inte...
Mar 14, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Symbols have meanings that change depending upon the cultural context. But how do we discuss symbols, their meanings, and their cultural contexts without an adequate vocabulary? Phillip Penix-Tadsen , assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Delaware and author of the new book Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America (MIT Press, 2016), offers insight in to how culture is signified in video games, with a particular emphasis on Latin America. In Cultural Code, Penix-Tadsen examines ...
Mar 14, 2016•45 min
What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts that metadata powers our digital society. After defining metadata-data that has the potential to provide information about an object-Pomerantz considers the various kind of metadata. This raw material provides descriptions about individuals and most every other thing in the world. This data allows people, places, and things to be found. Ac...
Feb 22, 2016•41 min
Finn Brunton ‘s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press, 2013) is a cultural history of those communications that seek to capture our attention for the purposes of exploiting it. From pranks on early computer networks in the 1970s to commercial nuisances in the 1990s to the global criminal infrastructure of today driven by botnets and algorithms, spam’s history surfaces and shifts with the Internet itself. Spam is a lively book packed with tales of the people responsible for sharing an...
Feb 16, 2016•1 hr
Nothing seems so obviously true as the claim that pains feel bad, that pain and suffering go together. Almost as obviously, it seems that the function of pain is to inform us of tissue damage. In What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain (The MIT Press, 2015), Colin Klein denies both apparently obvious claims. On his view, pain is a “protective imperative” whose content is to protect the body or body part: for example, “Don’t put weight on that left ankle!” Klein, Lecturer in the Dep...
Jan 15, 2016•1 hr 4 min
When we consider the television, we think not only about how it’s used, but also it’s impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in the West in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was seen as a form of entertainment and enjoyment for the family. Other “technology” that assists with leisure include things like rubber-soled shoes, books, and other digital devices. In their new book, Enjoying Machines (MIT 2015), Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin , both scholars in the Stockhol...
Jan 06, 2016•33 min
The genre of “platform studies” offers both researchers and readers more than an examination of the technical machinations of a computing system. Instead, the family of methodologies presents a humanist exploration of digital media from the perspective of the platform itself. That is, this approach contemplates the social, economic and cultural influence and significance of the technology. Although more formally identified by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort in 2007 at the Digital Arts and Cultures ...
Dec 23, 2015•39 min
By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed individuals to access masses of information faster than ever before. What, then, has been the effect of digital tools on research practices? In their new book Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press, 2015), Eric T. Meyer , Associate Professor and Senior Res...
Nov 15, 2015•37 min
What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to material created by others? Joseph M. Reagle , assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, examines these online pontificators and provocateurs in his new book Reading the Comments: Likers,...
Oct 02, 2015•31 min
What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don’t have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Col...
Sep 15, 2015•1 hr 6 min
How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015). Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing on hi...
Aug 14, 2015•1 hr 3 min
In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent University examine how the findings of cognitive science can and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the rationality of religious belief. They examine the types and role of the cognitive processes at work in these arguments, such as cause and effect and inference to the best explanation. They also c...
Jun 15, 2015•1 hr 3 min
Charis Thompson ‘s Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013) is an important book. Good Science explores the “ethical choreography” of the consolidation of human embryonic stem cell research in the first decade of the twenty-first century, drawing important implications for the possible futures of stem cell research by looking carefully at its past and developing an approach to what Thompson calls “good science.” The book compellingly argues that “a high leve...
Jun 08, 2015•1 hr 14 min
That games, particularly video games, could be viewed as art should come as no surprise. And yet, a debate exists over what is and should be considered art with respect to games. In his new book, Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art (MIT Press, 2015), John Sharp offers context for the discussion of games and art. To do so, Sharp presents case studies of “Game Art,” “Art Games,” and “Artists’ Games” in an explication of three communities of practice that provide the foundation for th...
Jun 01, 2015•38 min
I must admit that my relationship to philosophy of language is a bit like my relationship to classic literature: I tend to admire it from afar, and rely on the opinions of people who have read it. The danger is that the received wisdom can sometimes be unreliable, for one reason or another, either making something accessible sound rarefied, or making something subtle and elusive sound banal, or both. In his book, Philosophy of Language: the Classics Explained (MIT Press, 2015), Colin McGinn sets...
May 28, 2015•1 hr 2 min
What happens when you allow human materials to become property? More specifically, how does granting monopoly rights over genetic material affect the potential for innovation and research on treatments of disease related to those genes? In his new book, The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race (MIT Press, 2015), Myles W. Jackson (NYU) considers this question by examining the history of the sequencing and patenting of the CCR5 gene, which was found to have an important role in HIV/AID...
May 18, 2015•38 min
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the practices that surround its collection, is all the rage in both the media and in research circles. What makes data “big,” is described by the v’s: volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. Volume refers to the massive scale of the data that can be collected, velocity, the speed of streaming analysis. Variety refers to the different forms of data available...
Apr 20, 2015•35 min
In his new book, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (MIT Press, 2014), Casey O’Donnell , an assistant professor in the department of Media and Information in the College of Communication Arts at Michigan State University, takes the reader inside the game development process. An ethnographic study of the people and the process of videogame creation, Developer’s Dilemma considers the interactions between engineers and designers, publishers and executives, all motivated to ...
Apr 06, 2015•39 min
Although the push to persuade everyone to learn to code is quite the current rage, the coding movement has roots that extend back for more than a few decades. In 1980 Seymour Papert published his book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, arguing that learning to code would help children to better understand not only educational subject matter, but how to think. This book influenced the push in the early 1980s to place coding in schools. This early “learn to code” movement, thoug...
Mar 07, 2015•41 min
In Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2012) — part memoir, part elegy, and part collection of clinical vignettes — Gohar Homayounpour takes a defiant position against the Orientalizing gaze of Western publishers, editors, and journalists who search in her book for the exotic Iranian subject and the trauma of the Eastern Other. She turns a critical eye on the expectation that she perform an unveiling and reveal knowledge about the Other’s otherness. Insisting that “pain is pain” everywher...
Dec 19, 2014•56 min
Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The words of “technology” and “innovation” are exemplars of how definitions impact perspectives. Ask most people what they think of when they hear these words, and most often they will respond pictures of computers, the Internet, and mobile systems. But these pictures fail to encapsulate the true meanings of technology and innovation because they...
Dec 14, 2014•39 min
Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, to the ill-equipped and ill-fated responses to disasters like the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, and Hurricane Katrina, a common denominator in all of these events, and those similar, was a lack of inter- and intra-government information sharing. In his new book Traversing Digital Babel...
Nov 07, 2014•45 min
It is a rare event when a dissertation focused on a single work yields a rich and fruitful account of an entire period. James Nisbet ‘s new book, which began as a study of Walter De Maria’s 1977 Land Art work TheLightning Field, does just this by ranging freely across a wide variety of art works, practices, and attitudes from the formative decades of the environmental movement and of postwar American art. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (MIT Press, 2014)...
Sep 10, 2014•59 min
The long tradition of moral philosophy employs a familiar collection of basic concepts. These include concepts like agent, act, intention, consequence, responsibility, obligation, the right, and the good. Typically, contemporary moral theorists simply inherit these conceptual materials, and they use them to stake their positions within the terrain that is established by these concepts. But we must recognize the possibility that the categories and distinctions that form moral philosophy’s bedrock...
Aug 01, 2014•1 hr 5 min
