Katy Borner, "Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures" (MIT Press, 2021)
To envision and create the futures we want, society needs an appropriate understanding of the likely impact of alternative actions. Data models and visualizations offer a way to understand and intelli...
10 Sep 202142min
Silvia Casini, "Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology" (MIT Press, 2021)
Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonanc...
9 Sep 202157min
Audrey Watters, "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" (MIT Press, 2021)
Contrary to the claims of many of today’s advocates of computerized instruction and online learning, efforts to use technology to improve the education process are hardly new. In Teaching Machines: Th...
7 Sep 202144min
James W. Cortada, "IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon" (MIT Press, 2019)
Retired from life after 38 years in several roles at IBM, the prolific academic production of James W. Cortada now continues telling his side of the story of his long-term employer. In particular the ...
18 Aug 202138min
Lee McIntyre, "How to Talk to a Science Denier" (MIT Press, 2021)
Climate change is a hoax--and so is coronavirus. Vaccines are bad for you. These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. They are not merely uninfor...
17 Aug 20211h 7min
P. J. Boczkowski and E. Mitchelstein, "The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now" (MIT Press, 2021)
Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long march toward the...
17 Aug 20211h
Benjamin R. Cohen et al., "Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food" (MIT Press, 2021)
The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers trace our eating habits to World War II, but this book...
17 Aug 202150min
Mark L. Johnson and Don M. Tucker, "Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing" (MIT Press, 2021)
Plato's Allegory of the Cave trapped us in the illusion that mind is separate from body and from the natural and physical world. Knowledge had to be eternal and absolute. Recent scientific advances, h...
17 Aug 20211h 16min
