Hannah Star Rogers, "Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022)
'Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022)' by Hannah Star Rogers When I sat down with Hannah Star Rogers to discuss her new book Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge, I fou...
13 Aug 20251h 2min
Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)
The human mind has the curious, even mysterious, ability to generate thoughts about things with which we are not in causal contact, such as when we think about yesterday’s tennis final, or Aristotle, ...
10 Aug 202558min
Paul Thagard, "Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?" (MIT Press, 2021)
Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really...
9 Aug 202557min
Cat Dawson, "Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape" (MIT Press, 2025)
For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often o...
15 Jul 202539min
Chris Bernhardt, "Beautiful Math: The Surprisingly Simple Ideas behind the Digital Revolution in How We Live, Work, and Communicate" (MIT Press, 2024)
Most of us know something about the grand theories of physics that transformed our views of the universe at the start of the twentieth century: quantum mechanics and general relativity. But we are muc...
14 Jul 202546min
Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, "Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France" (MIT Press, 2025)
On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the mid-nineteenth century the balloon remained relativ...
2 Jul 20251h 9min
Matthew Wisnioski on the History of the Idea and Culture of “Innovation” in the United States
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Wisnioski, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, about his new book, Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a W...
30 Jun 20251h 28min
David Zweig, "An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions" (MIT Press, 2025)
An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, 2025) is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy fai...
23 Jun 202555min
