Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenștok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (and nonlingual) shouting, ...
Jun 21, 2023•17 min•Ep. 115
The fiftieth anniversary of Helvetica, the most famous of all sans serif typefaces, was celebrated with an excitement unusual in the staid world of typography and culminated in the release of the first movie ever made starring a typeface. Yet Helvetica's fifty-year milestone pales in comparison with the two thousandth anniversary in 2014 of Trajan's Column and its famous inscription--the preeminent illustration of the classical Roman capital letter. For, despite the modern ascendance of the sans...
Jun 20, 2023•15 min•Ep. 114
Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; they post offensive messages on Facebook memorial pages, traumatizing grief-stricken friends and family; they use unabashedly racist language and images. They take pleasure in ruining a complete stranger's day and find amusement in their victim's anguish. In short, trolling is the obstacle to a kinde...
Jun 19, 2023•20 min•Ep. 113
Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event scores and boxes--to name just a few examples. Over the past fifteen years, the synthesis of art and games has clouded for both artists and gamemakers. Contemporary art has drawn on the tool set of videogames, but has not considered them a cultural form with its own conceptual, formal, and experient...
Jun 18, 2023•15 min•Ep. 112
Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In Reading the Comments , Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations "on the bottom half of the Internet," he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior. Reagle visits communities of Amazon reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, freethinkers, and mean...
Jun 17, 2023•18 min•Ep. 111
The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home. Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars. Worlds Without E...
Jun 16, 2023•33 min•Ep. 128
The rise of the Indian information technology industry is a remarkable economic success story. Software and services exports from India amounted to less than $100 million in 1990, and today come close to $100 billion. But, as Dinesh Sharma explains in The Outsourcer , Indian IT's success has a long prehistory; it did not begin with software support, or with American firms' eager recruitment of cheap and plentiful programming labor, or with India's economic liberalization of the 1990s. The founda...
Jun 16, 2023•17 min•Ep. 110
Prehension is a hymn to the hand. In Prehension, Colin McGinn links questions from science to philosophical concerns to consider something that we take for granted: the importance of the hand in everything we do. Drawing on evolutionary biology, anatomy, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, among other disciplines, McGinn examines the role of the hand in shaping human evolution. He finds that the development of our capacity to grasp, to grip, to take hold (also known as prehensi...
Jun 15, 2023•21 min•Ep. 109
California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of...
Jun 14, 2023•21 min•Ep. 108
Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers--parents--labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It's almost as if parents are set up to fail--and the result is lost opport...
Jun 13, 2023•55 min•Ep. 152
Although each instance of creativity is singular and specific, Kyna Leski tells us, the creative process is universal. Artists, architects, poets, inventors, scientists, and others all navigate the same stages of the process in order to discover something that does not yet exist. All of us must work our way through the empty page, the blank screen, writer's block, confusion, chaos, and doubt. In The Storm of Creativity , Leski draws from her observations and experiences as a teacher, student, ma...
Jun 13, 2023•14 min•Ep. 107
Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip...
Jun 12, 2023•40 min•Ep. 192
When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was "only" collecting metadata about phone calls--information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location--and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In...
Jun 12, 2023•19 min•Ep. 106
The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American, European, and East Asian cities. But most videogames today, in fact, are made by small clusters of people working on shoestring budgets, relying on existing, freely available software platforms, and hoping, often in vain, to rise to stardom—in short, people working like artists. Aiming squarely at this disconnect between perception and reality, Br...
Jun 11, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 343
Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes. In Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan's edited ...
Jun 11, 2023•54 min•Ep. 94
Humans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became enormous in a very short amount of time in evolution, allowing us to leave our cousins, the great apes, behind. So the human brain is special, right? Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals, but not because we are e...
Jun 11, 2023•8 min•Ep. 105
Myra Strober became a feminist on the Bay Bridge, heading toward San Francisco. It is 1970. She has just been told by the chairman of Berkeley's economics department that she can never get tenure. Driving home afterward, wondering if she got something out of the freezer for her family's dinner, she realizes the truth: she is being denied a regular faculty position because she is a mother. Flooded with anger, she also finds her life's work: to study and fight sexism, in the workplace, in academia...
Jun 10, 2023•19 min•Ep. 104
In 1936, when he was just twenty-four years old, Alan Turing wrote a remarkable paper in which he outlined the theory of computation, laying out the ideas that underlie all modern computers. This groundbreaking and powerful theory now forms the basis of computer science. In Turing's Vision , Chris Bernhardt explains the theory, Turing's most important contribution, for the general reader. Bernhardt argues that the strength of Turing's theory is its simplicity, and that, explained in a straightfo...
Jun 09, 2023•18 min•Ep. 103
What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual--when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving. New media--we are told--exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we miss in this constant push to ...
Jun 08, 2023•22 min•Ep. 102
Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontation...
Jun 07, 2023•55 min•Ep. 69
Drone Warfare is the first comprehensive analysis of one of the fastest growing--and most secretive--fronts in global conflict: the rise of robot warfare. In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had a fleet of nearly 7,500, and the US Air Force now trains more drone "pilots" than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Drones are already a $5 billion business in the US alone. The human cost? Drone strikes have killed more than 200 children alone in Pakistan and ...
Jun 07, 2023•18 min•Ep. 101
In this episode, the journal’s Features Editor Liberty Vittert and Editor in Chief Xiao-Li Meng dig into the data behind sports with two experts: Brian Macdonald , sports analytics at Yale (formerly Carnegie Mellon University) and Kirk Goldsberry , NBA analyst at ESPN and author of Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New era of the NBA. This episode is syndicated from the new Harvard Data Science Review Podcast. Published by the MIT Press, Harvard Data Science Review is an open access multidiscipli...
Jun 06, 2023•30 min•Ep. 100
In this episode, the journal’s Features Editor Liberty Vittert and Editor in Chief Xiao-Li Meng discuss fake news, disinformation, and misinformation with Scott Tranter , CEO and founder of Optimus Analytics, and Hany Farid , a professor from UC Berkeley who specializes in the analysis of digital images and is the author of two MIT Press books: Fake Photos and Photo Forensics . This episode is syndicated from the new Harvard Data Science Review Podcast. Published by the MIT Press, Harvard Data S...
Jun 05, 2023•44 min•Ep. 99
What does data science tell us about art auctions? This episode is syndicated from the new Harvard Data Science Review Podcast. Published by the MIT Press, Harvard Data Science Review is an open access multidisciplinary journal that defines and shapes data science as a scientifically rigorous field based on the principled and purposed production, processing, parsing and analysis of data. In this episode, the journal’s Features Editor Liberty Vittert and Editor in Chief Xiao-Li Meng discuss art a...
Jun 04, 2023•38 min•Ep. 98
Over the last half century, "smartness"—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and the environment. Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart homes. Smart cities. The imperative to make our world ever smarter in the face of increasingly complex challenges raises several questions: What is this "smartness mandate"? How has it emerged, and what does it say about our evolving way of understanding—and managing—reality? How have we com...
Jun 04, 2023•54 min•Ep. 342
Featured episode from Between Art and Science , a new podcast from Leonardo . This episode, hosted by Erica Hruby, features a conversation between two authors published in the Leonardo special issue “Cosmos and Chaos:” Bettina Forget and Lindy Elkins-Tanton. Listen as these authors discuss the connection between art and science, the flawed idea of the hero, exploration of both land and space, and the complexities of being a woman in male dominated fields....
Jun 03, 2023•14 min•Ep. 97
Writer and educator Marcus Gilroy-Ware ( After the Fact? , Filling the Void ) speaks with Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner about their new book You Are Here . Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here , Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecol...
Jun 02, 2023•48 min•Ep. 96
The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation? In ¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground (MIT Press,...
Jun 02, 2023•52 min•Ep. 233
Joy White, author of Terraformed , speaks with Dhanveer Singh Brar about his forthcoming book Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski , Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban—ecologies that can never be reduced simply to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diasp...
Jun 01, 2023•42 min•Ep. 95
Tariq Goddard (author, publisher and co-founder of Repeater Books) speaks with Victoria Nelson about her forthcoming book Neighbor George . Do you know the language of the birds? Summer, 1979: A lonely young woman housesitting for her aunt and uncle in an isolated bohemian enclave finds troubling reminders of a past family tragedy surfacing in odd and unsettling ways. When a mysterious man moves in next door, Dovey hopes for a romance like the ones in the novels she secretly devours. But a dark ...
May 31, 2023•55 min•Ep. 94
