The MIT Press Podcast
584 episodes - English - Latest episode: 23 days ago - ★★★★ - 3 ratingsInterviews with authors of MIT Press books.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)
April 27, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesEverything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets? This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formu...
Spatial Computing with Shashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold
April 24, 2020 14:29 - 32 minutes - 29.8 MBShashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold, authors of Spatial Computing, fromThe MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, discuss the reach, risks and importance of spatial computing in confronting COVID-19.
Alex Berke, "Beautiful Symmetry: A Coloring Book about Math" (MIT Press, 2020)
April 22, 2020 08:00 - 53 minutesAlex Berke's Beautiful Symmetry (MIT Press, 2020) is both a fascinating book and a concept -- it's like no other book I’ve ever read. It's a coloring book about math, inviting us to engage with mathematical concepts visually through coloring challenges and visual puzzles. We can explore symmetry and the beauty of mathematics playfully, coloring through ideas usually reserved for advanced courses. The book is for children and adults, for math nerds and math avoiders, for educators, students, a...
COVID Weirdness with Erik Davis
April 17, 2020 09:12 - 55 minutes - 50.9 MBAuthor of High Weirdness, Erik Davis discusses psychedelic politics, media paranoia, conspiracy theories, and consensus reality in the time of COVID-19.
Extraterrestrials with Wade Roush
April 10, 2020 13:20 - 16 minutes - 14.8 MBAn interview with Wade Roush, author of Extraterrestrials, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. Are we alone in the universe? If not, where is everybody? And which might be more meaningful? Soundtrack produced by artist and author of High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press, December 2018) Kristen Gallerneaux.
The History of Contraception with Donna J Drucker
April 03, 2020 14:06 - 15 minutes - 14.6 MBAn interview with Donna J. Drucker, author of Contraception, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. We discuss reproductive justice, the history of contraceptive technology and how the future of contraception can offer more choice and more freedom for every kind of person.
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
March 30, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesParadox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt C...
Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018)
March 27, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesThe “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past? In Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences (MIT Press, 2018), Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies and techniques at their disposal, and that thi...
Joseph Reagle, "Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents" (MIT Press, 2019)
March 26, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourLife hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool. They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its ...
Technologies of the Human Corpse with John Troyer
March 24, 2020 09:14 - 32 minutes - 29.4 MBIn this episode we hear from John Troyer, author of Technologies of the Human Corpse and the Director of The Center for Death and Society at The University of Bath. We discuss the way technology is blurring the distinctions between life and death, the emergence of death studies from the 70s social and political milieu and how his own experiences of bereavement inform his research.
Haunted Bauhaus with Elizabeth Otto
March 09, 2020 11:55 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBIn this podcast we discuss visibility, haunting and fascism with art historian and theorist Elizabeth Otto. Otto's book Haunted Bauhaus explores the marginalized histories of occult spirituality, gender fluidity and queer identity within the Bauhaus; offering fresh insight into one of the most canonized periods of European art history.
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "Data Feminism" (MIT Press, 2020)
March 03, 2020 09:00 - 37 minutesThe increased datafication our interactions and permeation of data science into more aspects of our lives requires analysis of the systems of power surrounding and undergirding data. The impacts of the creation, use, collection, and aggregation of data are such that individuals from various communities face disparate, negative impacts. In their new book, Data Feminism (MIT Press, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, call for changing the way we think about data and how it is communicated, pa...
David J. Gunkel, "Robot Rights" (MIT Press, 2018)
February 27, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWe are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality―self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various forms and functions. Although considerable attention has already been devoted to the subject of robots and responsibility, the question concerning the social status of these artifacts h...
Free Will with Mark Balaguer
February 24, 2020 12:02 - 14 minutes - 13.1 MBA discussion with the the author of Free Will (from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) and Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem, Mark Balaguer, in which we discuss the scientific arguments for and against the possibility of free will.
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Celebrates 20 Years of Success
February 06, 2020 16:04 - 19 minutes - 17.7 MBThe journal of Global Environmental Politics (GEP) has hit a tremendous milestone in 2020—celebrating its 20 years of publication with the MIT Press! In this episode, two of the journal’s Co-Editors Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal reflect on the origins and goals of GEP, its immeasurable impact on the discussions of relationships between global political forces and environmental change, and the thought process behind the journal’s upcoming 20th-anniversary volume.
Kyle Devine, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music" (MIT Press, 2019)
February 05, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesWhat is the human and environmental cost of music? In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019),Kyle Devine, an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, tells the material history of recorded music, counting the impact of music from the 78 to digital streaming. The book has a rich and detailed analysis of music’s contribution to our current environmental crisis, along with the human impact of making the materials that make our modern co...
Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019)
February 03, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesThree years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting internet service providers from discriminating between content – by the Federal Communications Commission, a need to holistically understand the net neutrality debates still exists. How can we make sense of the intensification of controversy, the advocacy and protests, and the political and corporate wrangling? In his new book, The Paradoxes of Net...
Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)
January 24, 2020 09:00 - 40 minutesFor years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys―an ugly death awaiting social deviants―neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020), Nancy D. Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fi...
Citizenship with Dimitry Kochenov
January 23, 2020 14:58 - 11 minutes - 10.6 MBA discussion with the the author of Citizenship (from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series), Dimitry Kochenov, in which we discuss the glorification of citizenship and the structures of power underlying this supposedly positive concept. Featuring an incredible new soundtrack produced by artists and author of High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press, December 2018) Kristen Gallerneaux.
Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019)
January 20, 2020 09:00 - 33 minutesThe “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data? What important data is ignored when it is not easily translated into 1s and 0s? In his new book, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, critical data scientist Ben Green, an Affiliate a...
Neil McArthur, "Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications" (MIT Press, 2017)
January 09, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourSexbots are coming. Given the pace of technological advances, it is inevitable that realistic robots specifically designed for people's sexual gratification will be developed in the not-too-distant future. Despite popular culture's fascination with the topic, and the emergence of the much-publicized Campaign Against Sex Robots, there has been little academic research on the social, philosophical, moral, and legal implications of robot sex. Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press...
New Beginnings: A Conversation with Ludo Waltman
November 18, 2019 21:51 - 17 minutes - 15.8 MBQuantitative Science Studies (QSS) is a newly launched open access journal that was born out of a collaboration between the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) and the MIT Press. In this episode, Editor-in-Chief Ludo Waltman discusses the origins of QSS, its growing inaugural issue, and its future as a publishing outlet run for and by the scientometric community.
Axel Seemann, "The Shared World: Perceptual Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space" (MIT Press, 2019)
October 01, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourMuch of what we are able to accomplish in our day-to-day lives depends on the ability to act and think in concert with others. Often this involves not only the capacity to perceive together the surrounding world—we must also know that we perceive together. In other words, there must be perceptual common knowledge. Philosophical questions mount quickly: How is this kind of knowledge possible? How does it arise? What does its possibility show us about our sociality? What does it suggest about t...
How Attention Works
September 19, 2019 13:45 - 14 minutes - 13.2 MBStefan Van der Stigchel discusses how we filter out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we need to know.
Garage: A Conversation with Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela
August 16, 2019 16:02 - 25 minutes - 23.3 MBOn this episode of the MIT Press podcast, Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela discuss their book, Garage Frank Lloyd Wright invented the garage when he moved the automobile out of the stable into a room of its own. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (allegedly) started Apple Computer in a garage. Suburban men turned garages into man caves to escape from family life. Nirvana and No Doubt played their first chords as garage bands. What began as an architectural construct became a cultural con...
Elizabeth Otto, "Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics" (MIT Press, 2019)
August 06, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIn this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Buffalo about her forthcoming work, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019). The MIT press release appropriately notes that Otto “liberates Bauhaus history” with this work, drawing the focus from the handful of m...
Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind, "Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business" (MIT Press, 2018)
July 19, 2019 08:00 - 46 minutesSmall is beautiful, right? Isn't that what we've all been taught? From Jeffersonian politics to the hallowed family farm, from craft breweries to tech start ups in the garage. Small business is the engine and the soul and the driver of the American system. That's the dominant narrative. And according to Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind, it is really wrong. In their new book, Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018), the authors review the empirical evidence and...
Ways of Hearing: Making-of
June 14, 2019 15:31 - 1 hour - 77 MBBonus to the Ways of Hearing podcast and book A behind-the-scenes conversation with the creators of Ways of Hearing, the podcast and book. Hosted by author Damon Krukowski, with Radiotopia and Showcase executive producer Julie Shapiro, sound designer Ian Coss, MIT Press editor Matthew Browne, and graphic designer James Goggin. Recorded live before a studio audience at the PRX Podcast Garage, April 9, 2019. Mixed by Ian Coss.
David Bissell, "Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities" (MIT Press, 2018)
May 20, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourWhat kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (MIT Press, 2018), geographer David Bissell contends that to commute is to enter a highly eventful domain, an atmosphere in which new “capsular collectives” form and reform, opening onto new political and ethical possibilities for being in public. With Sydney, Australia, as its setting, Transit Life d...
Chris Bernhardt, "Quantum Computing for Everyone" (MIT Press, 2019)
May 02, 2019 10:00 - 56 minutesToday I talked with Chris Bernhardt about his book Quantum Computing for Everyone (MIT Press, 2019). This is a book that involves a lot of mathematics, but most of it is accessible to anyone who survived high school algebra. Even a math-phobic can read the book, skip the math, and then more than hold his or her own in any but the highest-level discussion of quantum computing. For those of us who love math, the underlying math is elegantly simple and beautifully presented – and the same can be...
Thomas Lin on Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire, and A Prime Number Conspiracy
April 22, 2019 21:03 - 20 minutes - 19.2 MBOn this episode of the MIT Press podcast, Thomas Lin, Editor-in-Chief of Quanta Magazine, discusses the research and current climate behind the science and math in Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire: The Biggest Ideas in Science from Quanta and The Prime Number Conspiracy: The Biggest Ideas in Math from Quanta.
Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018)
April 18, 2019 10:00 - 53 minutesIn The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene -- our period in time where there are no longer places on Earth untouched by humans -- is not only how much impact humans have had, but how much deliberate shaping humans will do. To help us understand the Synthetic Age, Dr. Preston details the emerging fields of study and accompanying technologies ...
Food Routes with Robyn Metcalfe
April 01, 2019 18:02 - 22 minutes - 20.3 MBOn the latest episode of The MIT Press podcast, Robyn Metcalfe, food historian and food futurist, discusses her new book, Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating. Even if we think we know a lot about good and healthy food—even if we buy organic, believe in slow food, and read Eater—we probably don't know much about how food gets to the table. What happens between the farm and the kitchen? Why are all avocados from Mexico? Why does a restaurant i...
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
March 19, 2019 10:00 - 32 minutesIn the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments ...
Rodrigo Zeidan, "Economics of Global Business" (MIT Press, 2018)
January 18, 2019 11:00 - 40 minutesI spoke with Professor Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University, Shanghai. He has just published Economics of Global Business (MIT Press, 2018), a great book with innovative real-world macroeconomic analyses of timely policy issues, with case studies and examples from more than fifty countries. The book is particularly suitable for use as an introduction to macroeconomics for business students. If you are looking for something accessible that covers also the most contemporary topics (inequality,...
Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018)
January 15, 2019 11:00 - 1 hourMuch of the debate about the roles of nature vs. nurture in the development of individual people has settled into accepting that it's a bit of both, although what each contributes to a given trait or feature, how much, and they interact are still matters of dispute. In What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept(MIT Press, 2018), Maria Kronfeldner critically examines instead the 'nature' side of this dichotomy: what exactly is a ...
Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters" (MIT Press, 2018)
January 08, 2019 11:00 - 56 minutesMegan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how information infrastructures shape the ways that survivors and observers know and learn about disasters. Finn uses three historical case studies – major earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989 – to reflect upon the development of private and public information services and how these succeed and fail to inform local and distant audienc...
Suman Seth, "Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
December 19, 2018 11:00 - 43 minutesSuman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire. While scholars have often addressed this phenomenon through the lenses of academic anatomy and natural history, Seth suggests that medical care and theories of pathology were central to how Britons began to see their bodies as fundamentally distinct fr...
Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018)
December 03, 2018 11:00 - 56 minutesAmanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global warming. Lynch and Veland examine how the ostensible state of constant urgency we live in is identified and addressed in political discourse. With detailed analyses of major climate accords and theories of geo-engineering, they demonstrate how this discourse limits our imagined possibilities for su...
Mark Polizzotti, “Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto” (MIT Press, 2018)
November 14, 2018 11:00 - 40 minutesThe success of a translator may seem to lie in going unnoticed: the translator ducks out of the spotlight so that the original author may shine. Mark Polizzotti challenges that idea in a provocative treatise on his craft, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (MIT Press, 2018). “A good translation, created by a thoughtful and talented translator,” Polizzotti writes, “aims not to betray the original but to honor it by offering something of equal–possibly even greater–beauty in its ...
Nathan Kravis, “On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud” (MIT Press, 2017)
November 07, 2018 11:00 - 58 minutesSometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). In a live interview conducted in connection with the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, we discuss how the couch has become the leading symbol for psychoanalysis in positive and maligned ways. Dr. Kravis discusses how the couch came to signify reclining, rest, introspection and healing and how important decor was for...
Mike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear” (MIT Press, 2018)
November 05, 2018 11:00 - 44 minutesIn Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time of significant change within the industry. Drawing on a variety of disciplines from journalism studies, political theory and technological studies, Ananny argues press freedom is a result of an interplay of duty, autonomy, social, and institutional forces. Focusing on the public right to hear, Ananny...
Lee Humphreys, “The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life” (MIT Press, 2018)
October 19, 2018 10:00 - 2 minutesPhysical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike social media posting, this analog memorializing of life happenings is not encumbered with the negative theorizing about why people choose to record experiences. In her new book, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2018), Cornell University associate professor Lee Humphreys argues that selfies and other ...
Wade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018)
October 18, 2018 10:00 - 40 minutesScience fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future. Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds....
Robert A. Wilson, “The Eugenic Mind Project” (MIT Press, 2017)
October 15, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourFor most of us, eugenics — the “science of improving the human stock” — is a thing of the past, commonly associated with Nazi Germany and government efforts to promote a pure Aryan race. This view is incorrect: even in California, for example, sterilization of those deemed mentally defective was performed up to 1977. In The Eugenic Mind Project (MIT Press, 2017), Robert A. Wilson critically considers the type of thinking — which he calls eugenic thinking — that drives eugenic sterilization pr...
Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” (MIT Press, 2017)
August 15, 2018 10:00 - 22 minutesThough usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to ensure the technological security of this important infrastructure. Consumers want to find alternative ways of powering their homes and businesses. Whatever the deliberation, the grid is topic of great concern in this era of both innovation in power and technological terrorism. But to grasp the current significance of the grid, it is important to ...
Ilene Grabel, “When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence” (MIT Press, 2017)
August 07, 2018 10:00 - 53 minutesWe spoke with Ilene Grabel, Professor at the University of Denver and Co-director of the MA program in Global Finance, Trade & Economic Integration at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. Ilene just published a very timely, interesting and important book on the evolution of the global financial governance and its institutions: When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence (MIT Press, 2017). In the foreword,...
The Art and Craft of Translation
June 06, 2018 18:58 - 21 minutes - 19.6 MBMark Polizzotti translates authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert. In this episode, Polizzotti demystifies the process of translation and demonstrates its capacity for art. Beginning with the first translators, some 2,000 years ago--"traitors" who brought the Bible to the common public via translation--and illuminating the implications of contemporary machine translation, Polizzotti offers a riveting take on language and its elasticity. This conversation about Sympathy for the Trai...
Eden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” (MIT Press, 2011)
June 01, 2018 13:08 - 1 hourIt would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics. In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist president, Salvador Allende, the “father of management cybernetics” (as Norbert Wiener christened Beer) attempted nothing less than the development and implementation of a cybernetic governance system for Chile’s nationalized economy. For decades, we have relied solely on the writings of Beer and his assoc...
Solar's Future
May 25, 2018 17:49 - 23 minutes - 21.7 MBThis episode features an interview with MIT Press author Varun Sivaram about his new book Taming the Sun. Varun Sivaram is the Philip D. Reed Fellow for Science and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations. He teaches “Clean Energy Innovation” at Georgetown University, is a Fellow at Columbia University's Center for Global Energy Policy, and serves on Stanford University's energy and environment boards. He has advised both the mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of New York on energy...