The Mit Press: 939 books
by Jessa Lingel
Language: English
Release Date: April 7, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: April 7, 2017
How countercultural communities have made the Internet meet their needs, subverting established norms of digital technology use.
Whether by accidental keystroke or deliberate tinkering, technology is often used in ways that are unintended and unimagined by its designers and inventors. In this...
The Mobile Workshop
The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production
Language: English
Release Date: May 25, 2018
How the presence of the tsetse fly turned the African forest into an open laboratory where African knowledge formed the basis of colonial tsetse control policies.
The tsetse fly is a pan-African insect that bites an infective forest animal and ingests blood filled with invisible parasites,...
Measuring Happiness
The Economics of Well-Being
Language: English
Release Date: February 6, 2015
An investigation of the happiness-prosperity connection and whether economists can measure well-being.
Can money buy happiness? Is income a reliable measure for life satisfaction? In the West after World War II, happiness seemed inextricably connected to prosperity. Beginning in the 1960s,...
Virtual Menageries
Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 2019
The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks.
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries,...
Indecision Points
George W. Bush and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Language: English
Release Date: October 24, 2014
How a president who prided himself on his decisiveness vacillated between policy approaches in the Middle East.
Although George W. Bush memorably declared, “I'm the decider,” as president he was remarkably indecisive when it came to U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His...
by Robert A. Wilson, PhD
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2017
An examination of eugenic thinking past and present, from forced sterilization to prenatal screening, drawing on experience with those who survived eugenics.
Part science and part social movement, eugenics emerged in the late nineteenth century as a tool for human improvement. In response to...
Lessons from the Lobster
Eve Marder's Work in Neuroscience
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2018
How forty years of research on thirty neurons in the stomach of a lobster has yielded valuable insights for the study of the human brain.
Neuroscientist Eve Marder has spent forty years studying thirty neurons on the stomach of a lobster. Her focus on this tiny network of cells has yielded...
The First Sense
A Philosophical Study of Human Touch
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2013
An empirically informed philosophical account of human touch as a single, unified sensory modality that plays a central role in perception.
It is through touch that we are able to interact directly with the world; it is our primary conduit of both pleasure and pain. Touch may be our most immediate...
Experienced Wholeness
Integrating Insights from Gestalt Theory, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Predictive Processing
Language: English
Release Date: January 12, 2018
An interdisciplinary account of phenomenal unity, investigating how experiential wholes can be characterized and how such characterizations can be analyzed computationally.
How can we account for phenomenal unity? That is, how can we characterize and explain our experience of objects and groups...
by Daniel M. Wegner
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2017
A new edition of Wegner's classic and controversial work, arguing that conscious will simply reminds of us the authorship of our actions.
Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the...
by Daniel P. Friedman, William E. Byrd, Oleg Kiselyov
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2018
A new edition of a book, written in a humorous question-and-answer style, that shows how to implement and use an elegant little programming language for logic programming.
The goal of this book is to show the beauty and elegance of relational programming, which captures the essence of logic...
Liberalism in Practice
The Psychology and Pedagogy of Public Reason
Language: English
Release Date: February 27, 2015
An argument that draws on empirical findings in psychology to offer a blueprint for cultivating a widespread commitment to public reason.
At the core of liberal theory is the idea—found in thinkers from Hobbes to Rawls—that the consent of the governed is key to establishing political legitimacy....
Hacking Life
Systematized Living and Its Discontents
Language: English
Release Date: March 22, 2019
In an effort to keep up with a world of too much, life hackers sometimes risk going too far.
Life 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...
We Used to Wait
Music Videos and Creative Literacy
Language: English
Release Date: October 24, 2014
An investigation of music videos as a form, a practice, and a literacy.
Music videos were once something broadcast by MTV and received on our TV screens. Today, music videos are searched for, downloaded, and viewed on our computer screens—or produced in our living rooms and uploaded to social...