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"[The authors explain] gently yet firmly exactly how the internet threatens established ways and what can and cannot be done about it. Their book should be required for anyone who wishes to believe th

Franz Hessel (1880--1941), a German-born writer, grew up in Berlin, studied in Munich, and then lived in Paris, where he moved in artistic and literary circles. His relationship with the fashion journ

For five decades, the artist Hans Haacke (b. 1936) has created works that explore the social, political, and economic underpinnings of the production of art. His works make plain the hidden and not-so

We used to think that video games were mostly for young men, but with the success ofthe Nintendo Wii, and the proliferation of games in browsers, cell phone games, and social gamesvideo games changed

More than thirty years after the birth of the modern women's movement and thebeginnings of feminist art-making and art history, the time is ripe to examine the legacies of thoserevolutions. In Women A

In the twenty-first century, we must learn to look at cities not as skylines but as brandscapes, and at buildings not as objects but as advertisements and destinations. In the experience economy, exp

Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in

How the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean; with examples ranging from Papers, Please to Dys4ia.In How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers two quest

The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for

Why would an architect reach for a pencil when drawing software and AutoCAD are aclick away? Use a ruler when 3D-scanners and GPS devices are close at hand? In WhyArchitects Still Draw, Paolo Belardi

What is the first thing to learn in art school? "Art can be anything." Thesecond thing? "Learn to draw." With 101 Things to Learn in Art School, artist and teacherKit White delivers and develops such

When the real estate bust of the 1970s hit New York City, artists found their own mixed uses for the city’s run-down lofts, abandoned piers, vacant lots, and deserted streets, and photographers

The small Central American country of Costa Rica—less than one-eighth the size of California—boasts the highest density of plant and animal species in the world. Its wild and rugged lands

Robert Smithson (1938-1973) produced his best-known work during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the boundaries of the art world and the objectives of art-making were questioned perhaps m

In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses ne

Written in Paris after the heady days of student revolt in May 1968 and before the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, History of Shit is emblematic of a wild and adventurous strain of 1970s' theoretic

How we can achieve healthy growth--more regenerative than destructive, restoring equity rather than exacerbating inequalities.In Tomorrow's Economy, Per Espen Stoknes reframes the hot-button issue of economic growth. Going beyond the usual dialectic of pro-growth versus anti-growth, Stoknes calls for healthy growth. Healthy economic growth is more regenerative than destructive, repairs problems rather than greenwashing them, and restores equity rather than exacerbating global inequalities. Stoknes--a psychologist, economist, climate strategy researcher, and green-tech entrepreneur--argues that we have the tools to achieve healthy growth, but our success depends on transformations in government practices and individual behavior. Stoknes provides a compass to guide us toward the mindset, mechanisms, and possibilities of healthy growth.

How to use finance as a tool to build a more equitable and sustainable society.Money defines our present and will shape our future. Every investment decision we make adds a chapter to the story of wha

Noted novelists, poets, and essayists, including Samuel R. Delany, Min Jin Lee, Joy Harjo, and Zadie Smith, consider how we are shaped by the past.It is rare now for people to stay where they were rai

An argument that we have a moral duty to colonize other planets and solar systems, and a plan for doing so.Inevitably, life on Earth will come to an end, whether by climate disaster, or by cataclysmic

From the TED stage to the page, Juan Enriquez, author of As the Future Catches You and Evolving Ourselves, presents a lively and engaging guide to ethics in a technological age. Most people have a str

An exploration of how and why social media content is tagged as "not safe for work" and an argument against conflating sexual content with risk. The hashtag #NSFW (not safe for work) acts as both a

The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek.We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execut

The history of feminism? The right to vote, Susan B. Anthony, Gloria Steinem, white pantsuits? Oh, but there's so much more. And we need to know about it, especially now. In pithy text and pithier com

Sitting on the beach on a sunny summer day, we enjoy the steady advance and retreatof the waves. In the water, enthusiastic waders jump and shriek with pleasure when a wave hits them.But where do thes

In the 1960s art fell out of time; both artists and critics lost their temporal bearings in response to what E. M. Cioran called "not being entitled to time." This anxiety and uneasiness ab

The importance of telling new climate stories―stories that center the persistence of life itself, that embrace comedy and radical hope.“How dare you?” asked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations in 2019. How dare the world’s leaders fiddle around the edges when the world is on fire? Why is society unable to grasp the enormity of climate change? In Beyond Climate Breakdown, Peter Friederici writes that the answer must come in the form of a story, and that our miscomprehension of the climate crisis comes about because we have been telling the wrong stories. These stories are pervasive; they come from long narrative traditions, sanctioned by capitalism, Hollywood, and social media, and they revolve around a myth: that the nation exists primarily as a setting for a certain kind of economic activity. Stories are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. The story that “the economy” takes priority over everything else may seem foreordained, but, Friederici

Stories from the future of intelligent machines―from rescue drones to robot spouses―and accounts of cutting-edge research that could make it all possible.Tech prognosticators promised us robots―autonomous humanoids that could carry out any number of tasks. Instead, we have robot vacuum cleaners. But, as Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo report, advances in robotics could bring those rosy predictions closer to reality. A new generation of robots, directly inspired by the intelligence and bodies of living organisms, will be able not only to process data but to interact physically with humans and the environment. In this book, Floreano, a roboticist, and Nosengo, a science writer, bring us tales from the future of intelligent machines―from rescue drones to robot spouses―along with accounts of the cutting-edge research that could make it all possible. These stories from the not-so-distant future show us robots that can be used for mitigating effects of climate change, providing healthcare,

The history of hunting, from Stone Age hunter-gatherers to today’s sport hunters.Hunting has a long history, beginning with our hominid ancestors. The invention of the spear allowed early humans to graduate from scavenging to actual hunting. The famous cave paintings at Lascaux show a meticulous knowledge of animal behavior and anatomy that only a hunter would have. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series traces the evolution of hunting, from Stone Age hunting and gathering to today’s regulated sport hunting. Humans have been hunting since we became human―but did hunting make us human? The authors consider and question the “hunting hypothesis of human origins,” noting that according to this theory, “hunting” meant hunting by men. They explore hunting in the Stone Age and how, beginning some ten thousand years ago, the spread of agriculture led to the emergence of empires and attempts by elites to monopolize hunting. They examine the democratization of hunting in the Am

A hallucinating, insomniac, and increasingly fragile flaneur wanders the streets of Paris over the long Easter weekend of 1960.Paris, Easter weekend 1960. The French composer Jacques Besse sets out on a marathon stroll through the city that begins on Good Friday, when he leaves his brother’s house on rue de Turbigo, and ends on Easter Monday, when, having declared himself Mars, the god of war, to mystified restaurant-goers, he ambles back toward Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Great Easter―a memoir in the form of a novella, or perhaps a novella in the form of a memoir―is the first-person account of a hallucinating, insomniac, and increasingly fragile flaneur’s unending ambulation. The Great Easter was first published in French in 1969 and became famous a few years later when in their milestone work Anti-Oedipus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to Besse’s walk as the quintessential “double stroll of the schizo.” (Besse was a patient at Guattari’s psychiatric clinic La Borde.) Bess

How teens navigate a networked world and how adults can support them.What are teens actually doing on their smartphones? Contrary to many adults’ assumptions, they are not simply “addicted” to their screens, oblivious to the afterlife of what they post, or missing out on personal connection. They are just trying to navigate a networked world. In Behind Their Screens, Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, Harvard researchers who are experts on teens and technology, explore the complexities that teens face in their digital lives, and suggest that many adult efforts to help―“Get off your phone!” “Just don’t sext!”―fall short. Weinstein and James warn against a single-minded focus by adults on “screen time.” Teens worry about dependence on their devices, but disconnecting means being out of the loop socially, with absence perceived as rudeness or even a failure to be there for a struggling friend. Drawing on a multiyear project that surveyed more than 3,500 teens, the authors explain that youn

How biodiversity classification, with its ranking of species, has social and political implications as well as implications for the field of information studies. The idea that species live in nature as pure and clear-cut named individuals is a fiction, as scientists well know. According to Robert D. Montoya, classifications are powerful mechanisms and we must better attend to the machinations of power inherent in them, as well as to how the effects of this power proliferate beyond the boundaries of their original intent. We must acknowledge the many ways our classifications are implicated in environmental, ecological, and social justice work―and information specialists must play a role in updating our notions of what it means to classify. In Power of Position, Montoya shows how classifications are systems that relate one entity with other entities, requiring those who construct a system to value an entity’s relative importance―by way of its position―within a system of other entities

A reconception of the sublime to include experiences of disaster, war, outer space, virtual reality, and the Anthropocene. We experience the sublime―overwhelming amazement and exhilaration―in at least seven different forms. Gazing from the top of a mountain at a majestic vista is not the same thing as looking at a city from the observation deck of a skyscraper; looking at images constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data is not the same as living through a powerful earthquake. The varieties of sublime experience have increased during the last two centuries, and we need an expanded terminology to distinguish between them. In this book, David Nye delineates seven forms of the sublime: natural, technological, disastrous, martial, intangible, digital, and environmental, which express seven different relationships to space, time, and identity. These forms of the sublime can be experienced at historic sites, ruins, cities, national parks, or on the computer screen. We find them in beaut

A concise and accessible explanation of the science and technology behind the domestication of nuclear fusion energy.Nuclear fusion research tells us that the Sun uses one gram of hydrogen to make as much energy as can be obtained by burning eight tons of petroleum. If nuclear fusion―the process that makes the stars shine―could be domesticated for commercial energy production, the world would gain an inexhaustible source of energy that neither depletes natural resources nor produces greenhouse gases. In Star Power, Alan Bécoulet offers a concise and accessible primer on fusion energy, explaining the science and technology of nuclear fusion and describing the massive international scientific effort to achieve commercially viable fusion energy. Bécoulet draws on his work as Head of Engineering at ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) to explain how scientists are trying to “put the sun in a box.” He surveys the history of nuclear power, beginning with post–World War I

A psychologist explores love, belongingness, and fulfillment, focusing on how modern technology can both help and hinder our need to connect. Millions of people around the world are not getting the physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy they crave. Through the wonders of modern technology, we are connecting with more people more often than ever before; but are these connections what we long for? Pandemic isolation has made us even more alone. In Out of Touch, psychologist Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide. Drouin explains that intimacy is not just sex―although of course sex i

A philosopher refutes our culturally embedded acceptance of death, arguing instead for the desirability of anti-aging science and radical life extension. Ingemar Patrick Linden’s central claim is that death is evil. In this first comprehensive refutation of the most common arguments in favor of human mortality, he writes passionately in favor of antiaging science and radical life extension. We may be on the cusp of a new human condition where scientists seek to break through the arbitrarily set age limit of human existence to address aging as an illness that can be cured. The book, however, is not about the science and technology of life extension but whether we should want more life. For Linden, the answer is a loud and clear “yes.” The acceptance of death is deeply embedded in our culture. Linden examines the views of major philosophical voices of the past, whom he calls “death’s ardent advocates.” These include the Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, and Montaigne. All have taug

How the world―and the world of visual culture in particular―creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.How does the world form itself? How does it create itself as a world? And how

A day in the inner and outer lives of a college professor, blogger, divorced father, thinker, and yearner.What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a l

How mobile games are part of our day-to-day lives and the ways we interact across digital, material, and social landscapes.We often play games on our mobile devices when we have some time to kill―wait

Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is o