The MIT Press Podcast

Cathi Unsworth, journalist and author of Bad Penny Blues, as well as numerous other novels, speaks with artists and author Jenny Hval about her recent book Girls Against God. At once a time-travelling horror story and a fugue-like feminist manifesto, this is a singular, genre-warping new novel from the author of the acclaimed Paradise Rot. “It’s 1992 and I’m the Gloomiest Child Queen.” Welcome to...

Damon Kruskowski, author of Ways of Hearing and The New Analog, previously member of Galaxie 500 and currently a member of Damon & Naomi interviews Rose Simpson about her book Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden. Rose is an English former musician. Between 1968 and 1971, she was a member of the Incredible String Band, with whom she sang and played bass guitar, violin, and percussion. Between 1967 and 1971...

The philosopher Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life, Science in Action) and Eugene Richardson, physician, anthropologist, and author of Epidemic Illusions discuss COVID, colonialism and Critical Zones. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

Michael Truscello, author of Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure, discusses the ways in which infrastructure determines who may live and who must die under contemporary capitalism. In this book, Michael Truscello looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a...

Tai Shani (Turner Prize winning artist, educator and author of Our Fatal Magic) and Amy Hale (anthropologist, folklorist, and writer) discuss the work of artist, occultist and writer Ithell Colquhoun to celebrate the publication of Amy’s book Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of The Fern Loved Gully. This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colqu...

An extended conversation between Lauren Fournier, writer, independent curator, artist, and author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism and writer, educator and philosopher McKenzie Wark (A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Capital Is Dead, Reverse Cowgirl.) Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux  

Lauren Fournier, writer, independent curator, artist, and author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism discusses her forthcoming book with writer, educator and philosopher McKenzie Wark (A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Capital Is Dead, Reverse Cowgirl.) In the 2010s, the term “autotheory” began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which...

In the final episode of this series, Brandon Terry, political theorist and African American Studies scholar at Harvard discusses the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. Terry is the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK, published in 2018 by MIT Press and Boston Review and co-edited To Shape a New World, alongside Tommie Shelby, which was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press. These books ex...

In her groundbreaking and timely book Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (MIT Press, 2020), distinguished art historian Pamela M. Lee poses fundamental questions about how the rise of the “think tank” in the mid-20th century has challenged, and indeed must challenge, our understandings of aesthetics, political economy, scholarly knowledge producti...

Around the world, liberal democracies are in crisis. Citizens have lost faith in their government; right-wing nationalist movements frame the political debate. At the same time, economic inequality is increasing dramatically; digital technologies have created a new class of super-rich entrepreneurs. Automation threatens to transform the free economy into a zero-sum game in which capital wins and l...

In this series of interviews from The MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today. In this episode Carol A. Stabile discusses her book The Broadcast 41 (published in April of last year by Goldsmiths Press.) In her book, Carol traces the history of forty-one women who were forced out of Ame...

Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general public. If we recognize the prison as a central site for the development of media technologies, how might that change our un...

In this series of interviews from The MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today. The second episode of this series features a discussion with the author of Anti-vaxxers, Jonathan M. Berman. Vaccines are a documented success story, one of the most successful public health interventions in...

In this series of interviews from the MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today. In this, the first episode, Robert I. Rotberg (author of Anticorruption) discusses corruption - what is it? where is it? And is it getting worse? He explains the long history of corruption in the USA, as wel...

Michael Hollingshead, the man who turned Timothy Leary onto LSD, managed to fundamentally influenced modern drug culture whilst remaining virtually anonymous in popular culture at large. In this episode, biographer Andy Roberts talks us through the life of a key character in psychedelic history. Of all the figures associated with the history of LSD there is none more enigmatic than Michael Holling...

In this episode, Bita Moghaddam discusses the emergence of ketamine as a combat anesthetic in the Vietnam war, its transformation into a recreation drug central to club culture, and its current transition into a treatment for depression.  Ketamine, approved in 2019 by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of depression, has been touted by scientists and media reports as something appr...

This episode offers an insight into the work of leading cancer specialist and author of When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael A. Sekeres. 1 in 2 people will develop cancer in their lifetime, but thankfully treatment for the disease is rapidly changing and improving. I ask Mikkael about the drugs that allow people to beat cancer and live better with it. When you are told that you have leukemia, your worl...

Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists; Nancy D. Campbell has drawn together a history of a defining tragedy of contemporary life; the overdose. I ask her about the reality of drug overdoses and one of the tools being used by activists to prevent more deaths--Naloxone. For years, drug overdose was...

C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp read from Saturation, a book that offers an analysis of racial representation and controversy in the art world. Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions from historic forms...

Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 brings together urgency and scientific rigor so the world’s researchers can quickly disseminate new discoveries that the public can trust. Amy Brand (Director, The MIT Press) and Vilas Dhar (Trustee, The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation) discuss this new overlay journal, its innovative goals, and its role as a proof-of-concept for new models of peer-review and rapid publishin...

Conor Rose reads from Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism. This extract, taken from the opening of the book, offers insight into the Black Lives Matter movement as well as new forms of predatory policing, informed by the 2008 financial crash. In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the...

Susan Schuppli is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her book, Material Witnesss, her research is an exploration of the evidential role of matter in contexts including the natural disaster, climate change, and conflict zones. In this interview she discusses her work as a writer, artist and educator. The evid...

Best known for its introduction of French theory to American readers, Semiotext(e) has been one of America's most influential independent presses since its inception more than three decades ago. Publishing works of theory, fiction, madness, economics, satire, sexuality, science fiction, activism and confession.  In this interview Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti, who run Semitext(e) alongside Sylvèr...

In Co-Illusion, writer and critic David Levi Strauss, tracks the rise of Donald Trump and the media landscape that warped around him. In this interview he discusses the language of Trump, the forthcoming election, and the changing relationship between image and truth. The political crisis that sneaked up on America--the rise of Trump and Trumpism--has revealed the rot at the core of American excep...

An interview with Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska about Collaborative Society (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) and how networked technology enables the emergence of a new collaborative society. Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of communication act as a super-amplifier of our natural collaborative mindset. This volume in the MIT Press Essential...