The MIT Press Podcast
584 episodes - English - Latest episode: 23 days ago - ★★★★ - 3 ratingsInterviews with authors of MIT Press books.
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Episodes
Yasmin B. Kafai and Quinn Burke, “Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming” (MIT, 2014)
March 07, 2015 17:45 - 40 minutesAlthough 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, th...
Gohar Homayounpour, “Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran” (MIT Press, 2012)
December 19, 2014 06:00 - 55 minutesIn 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” everyw...
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014)
December 14, 2014 21:11 - 39 minutesWords 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 t...
Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014)
November 07, 2014 14:34 - 44 minutesFailure 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 Ba...
James Nisbet, “Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s” (MIT Press, 2014)
September 10, 2014 11:48 - 58 minutesIt 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, 201...
Elise Springer, “Communicating Moral Concern: An Ethics of Critical Responsiveness” (MIT Press, 2013)
August 01, 2014 06:00 - 1 hourThe 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 bedr...
Josh Lerner, “Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics” (MIT Press, 2014)
July 28, 2014 06:00 - 20 minutesJosh Lerner is the author of Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (MIT Press, 2014). Lerner earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from The New School for Social Research, and is now the Executive Director of The Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit organization that empowers communities to decide how to spend public money. Lerner asks the question at the start of the book: Can games make democratic participation more fun? He does not mean g...
Judith Donath, “The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online” (MIT Press, 2014)
July 19, 2014 10:46 - 31 minutesThe conversation about the Web and social media skews toward a discussion of the potential for connections, and how both individuals and organizations are using the media to communicate, to form communities, and to conduct business. Lacking, for the most part, is an investigation of the design of these spaces and how design, both good and bad, encourages or provokes certain kinds of interactions. In her new book, The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press, 2014), Judith Donath, ...
Marcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013)
July 15, 2014 06:00 - 1 hourThe computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea has been elaborated since in a number of very different ways, but in some form it remains a core idea of the cognitive sciences today. In Explaining the Computational Mind (MIT Press, 2013), Marcin Milkowski, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of Mind of the Polish Academ...
Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova, “Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis” (MIT, 2014)
June 19, 2014 06:00 - 40 minutesThe continued growth of online gaming and virtual worlds has effects not only in the analog world, with games and social media organizations taking stock options public, but also in the worlds created online. Many games and platforms allow users to involve themselves in virtual labor, to own property, and most importantly to make purchases. This one of areas where the analog and virtual crossover. And the question for platform providers becomes how to capitalize on user interest while earning...
Peter Gardenfors, “The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces” (MIT Press, 2014)
June 09, 2014 12:01 - 44 minutesA conceptual space sounds like a rather nebulous thing, and basing a semantics on conceptual spaces sounds similarly nebulous. In The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces (MIT Press, 2014), Peter Gardenfors demonstrates that this need not be the case. Indeed, his research is directed towards establishing a formal, mathematically-grounded account of semantics, an account which – as expounded here – is nevertheless accessible. In this interview we discuss the essence of thi...
David Adger, “A Syntax of Substance” (MIT Press, 2013)
April 26, 2014 18:59 - 1 hourNouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and it’s easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Syntax of Substance (MIT Press, 2013), David Adger tackles this question, as well as others that are just as fundamental to the way we think about syntax. The book takes nouns to specify “substances”, and Adger defends the view that nouns, unlike verbs, never take arguments. Moreover, he marshals evidence to show that some of the constituents that have...
Alistair Knott, “Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax” (MIT Press, 2012)
January 28, 2014 12:47 - 53 minutesWhen 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 scepticism by experienced linguistics practitioners, either because experience tells them not to believe the hype, or (in a few cases) because they were already obsolete and were managing just fine anyway. Alistair Knott‘s claim in Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax (MIT Press, 2012...
Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013)
January 14, 2014 16:23 - 1 hour“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 famously in a series of experimental works on electricity, but also in a series of public lectures that generated very strong, furious responses, du Bois-Reymond galvanized (ha! see what I did there? galvanized? electricity?) nineteenth century publics of all sorts. In Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuro...
Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012)
November 10, 2013 11:39 - 1 hourWe 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 transforms this understanding by arguing instead that nuclearity is a process, a phenomenon, a property distributed among and across objects. In this multi-sited study of several localities in Africa, Hecht weaves together narratives of atomic history, African history, and the histories of mining, econ...
William J. Clancey, “Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers” (MIT Press, 2012)
November 03, 2013 11:12 - 1 hourHow 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 Exploration Rovers (MIT Press, 2012), William J. Clancey explores the nature of exploration in the context of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions of the first decade of the twenty-first century. From 2002-2005 (and with additional interviews thereafter), Clancey led a group of computer and social ...
Tadeusz Zawidzki, “Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition” (MIT Press, 2013)
October 15, 2013 06:00 - 1 hourSocial 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, at least not to the same level of sophistication: pervasive collaboration, language, mind-reading and what Tadeusz Zawidzki, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University, calls “mindshaping”. Mindshaping includes our capacities and dispositions to imitate, to be natural l...
David Munns, “A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy” (MIT Press, 2012)
July 29, 2013 14:31 - 1 hourHow 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 as a result. David P. D. Munns‘s new book charts the process through which radio astronomers learned to see the sounds of the sky, creating a new space for Cold War science. A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy (MIT Press, 2012) uses the emergence of...
Anne Cutler, “Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words” (MIT Press, 2012)
July 01, 2013 13:11 - 52 minutesOne 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, although I get used to it, I can’t help wondering whether the result will make sense to an outside listener. I mention this now because Anne Cutler‘s book, Native Listening: Language Experience and the Recognition of Spoken Words (MIT Press, 2012), is an eloquent and compelling justification of...
Patrick Hanks, “Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations” (MIT Press, 2013)
June 10, 2013 15:30 - 56 minutesIt’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 or worse, as Patrick Hanks makes clear in Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (MIT Press, 2013), this is no longer true: lexicographers must respond to theoretical and practical pressures from lexical semantics, and this lexicographer has very interesting things to say about that discipline ...
Jonathan Bobaljik, “Universals of Comparative Morphology” (MIT Press, 2012)
May 06, 2013 17:19 - 1 hourMorphology is sometimes painted as the ‘here be dragons’ of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which Heath Robinson contraptions abound and anything goes. In his new book, Universals of Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words (MIT Press, 2012), Jonathan Bobaljik reassesses the terrain, and argues that there are hard limits on the extent to which languages can vary in the morphological domain. The book is a compar...
Alexandra Hui, “The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910” (MIT Press, 2013)
April 30, 2013 17:14 - 1 hourIn The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics and natural science came together in the psychophysical study of sound in nineteenth century Germany. Though we tend to consider the performing arts and sciences as occupying different epistemic and disciplinary realms, Hui argues that the scientific study of sound sensation not only was framed in ter...
Stephen E. Nadeau, “The Neural Architecture of Grammar” (MIT Press, 2012)
April 13, 2013 18:29 - 1 hourAlthough there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics and neuroscience. Network models of various aspects of language have often been criticised as theoretically simplistic, custom-made to solve a single problem (such as past tense marking), and/or abandoning their neurally-inspired roots. In The Neural Architecture of Grammar (MIT Press, 2012), Stephe...
Matthew Wisnioski, “Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America” (MIT Press, 2012)
February 26, 2013 14:20 - 1 hourIn his compelling and fascinating account of how engineers navigated new landscapes of technology and its discontents in 1960s America, Matthew Wisnioski takes us into the personal and professional transformations of a group of thinkers and practitioners who have been both central to the history of science and technology, and conspicuously under-represented in its historiography. Between 1964 and 1974, engineers in America wrestled with the ethical and intellectual implications of an “ideolog...
Kristin Andrews, “Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology” (MIT Press, 2012)
September 15, 2012 22:14 - 1 hourThe ability to figure out the mental lives of others – what they want, what they believe, what they know — is basic to our relationships. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this ability by accurately simulating the thought processes of suspects in order to solve mysterious crimes. But folk psychology is not restricted to genius detectives. We all use it: to predict what a friend will feel when we cancel a date, to explain why a child in a playground is crying, to deceive someone else by saying less ...
Lee Braver, “Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger” (MIT Press, 2012)
August 15, 2012 18:54 - 1 hourLudwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are both considered among the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Both were born in 1889 in German-speaking countries; both studied under leading philosophers of their day – Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl, respectively – and were considered their philosophical heirs; and both ended up critiquing their mentors and thereby influencing the direction of thought in both the Analytic and Continental traditions. In Groundless Grounds:...
David A. Kirby, “Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema” (MIT Press, 2011)
July 02, 2012 13:34 - 1 hourFirst things first: this was probably the most fun I’ve had working through an STS monograph. (Really: Who doesn’t like reading about Jurassic Park and King Kong?) In addition to being full of wonderful anecdotes about the film and television industries, David Kirby‘s Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (MIT Press, 2011) is also a very enlightening exploration of the role of science consultants on television and in film, and the negotiations of expertise involved in relati...
Paul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012)
May 15, 2012 10:30 - 1 hourWe’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of historians of science and philosophers of science. But another perspective on them is from the point of view of cognition. For example, how do scientists come up with breakthroughs? What happens when a scientist confronts a new theory that conflicts with an established one? In what ways does her belief sys...
Michael Lynch, “In Praise of Reason” (MIT Press, 2012)
April 27, 2012 15:06 - 1 hourModern society seems in awe of the advances of science and technology. We commonly praise innovations that enable us to live longer and more comfortable lives, we look forward to the release of new gadgets, we seek out new ways to employ technology in our everyday lives. These developments depend upon a set of intellectual practices that are commonly associated with the methods of the natural sciences. We are able to invent and create precisely because we are able to gather evidence and reaso...
Lawrence Busch, “Standards: Recipes for Reality” (MIT Press, 2011)
April 16, 2012 22:59 - 1 hourAs Lawrence Busch reminds us, standards are all around us governing seating arrangements, medicine, experimental objects and subjects and even romance novels. In Standards: Recipes for Reality (MIT Press, 2011) Busch provides a wide ranging and accessible analysis of the ways that standards structure the world. More than simply providing a typology of standards, Busch shows the ways that the impetus to standardization and standardized differentiation have transformed as a part of historical a...
Robert F. Barsky and Noam Chomsky, “Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism” (MIT Press, 2011)
March 07, 2012 18:49 - 59 minutesZellig Harris’s name is famous in linguistics primarily for his early work on transformational grammar and his influence on his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. However, much of his linguistic work has since fallen into comparative obscurity. Moreover, his political research and activism – about which he was especially guarded throughout his lifetime – has received scant attention. In this meticulously-researched biography, Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism (MIT ...
Susan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011)
August 15, 2011 17:10 - 1 hourIn 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the mind, in which thinking was theorized as the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Fodor argued that certain features of human thought required that any human-like computational cognitive system had to ...
Lee Ambrozy, “Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009” (MIT Press, 2011)
June 21, 2011 15:33 - 1 hourAnyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and for his recent arrest by Chinese police. What has been less widely appreciated is Ai’s profound...
Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011)
June 15, 2011 15:03 - 1 hourHow much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skepticism regarding our knowledge of the phenomenology of conscious experience. We don’t know if we dream in color or black and white, we don’t know whether tilted coins look elliptical or round, and we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abunda...