The MIT Press Podcast

The social consequences of anti-parasitic urbanism, as efforts to expunge supposedly biological parasites penalize those viewed as social parasites. According to French philosopher Michel Serres, ordered systems are founded on the pathologization of parasites, which can never be fully expelled.  In Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City (MIT Press, 2021), Macs Smith...

Shashi Shekhar and Pamela Vold, authors of Spatial Computing, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, discuss the reach, risks and importance of spatial computing in confronting COVID-19.  An accessible guide to the ideas and technologies underlying such applications as GPS, Google Maps, Pokémon Go, ride-sharing, driverless cars, and drone surveillance. Billions of people around the globe u...

In Uncommon Sense: Aesthetics after Marcuse (MIT Press, 2022), Craig Leonard argues for the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic theory of Herbert Marcuse, an original member of the Frankfurt School and icon of the New Left, while also acknowledging his philosophical limits. This account reinvigorates Marcuse for contemporary readers, putting his aesthetic theory into dialogue with anti-capital...

Author of High Weirdness, Erik Davis discusses psychedelic politics, media paranoia, conspiracy theories, and consensus reality in the time of COVID-19. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 197...

An 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. Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests...

An 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. The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, view...

In 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. The relationship...

In 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. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth ce...

A 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. In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an...

The 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 th...

A 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....

Quantitative 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.

In this episode, Gita Manaktala, Editorial Director at the MIT Press, and Ellen Finnie, Co-Interim Associate Director for Collections at MIT Libraries, discuss the Ideas series: a hybrid print and open access book series for general readers, that provides fresh, strongly argued, and provocative views of the effects of digital technology on culture, business, government, education, and our lives. L...

The authors of Data Feminism (2020), Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, along with Catherine Ahearn, Content Lead at PubPub, discuss the value and process of open peer review, share experiences and best practices, and explore issues surrounding peer review transparency.

Stefan Van der Stigchel discusses how we filter out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we need to know. We are surrounded by a world rich with visual information, but we pay attention to very little of it, filtering out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we think we need to know. Advertisers, web designers, and other "attention architects" try hard to get our attention, promoting p...

On 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...

Bonus 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...

On 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. 

On 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 happ...

Amy Brand, director of the MIT Press, and Peter Suber of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society discuss open access models, experimentation, and the future of scholarly communication.

Jess Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, and Sam Klein of the MIT Press/MIT Media Lab’s Knowledge Futures Group (KFG) and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society survey and explain open science initiatives and tools.

In this episode, Nick Lindsay, Director of Journals and Open Access at the MIT Press, and Katharine Dunn, scholarly communications librarian at the MIT Libraries, discuss open access at the Institute and beyond—illuminating many issues surrounding open access and scholarly publishing present and future.

In the first of four episodes in the MITP Open Access series, Travis Rich, PubPub co-founder and project lead, speaks with Edward Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. They discuss Frankenbook—an open access digital version of the print edition of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein published by the MIT Press in 2017.

Sherry Zane, Associate Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Connecticut, discusses her recent article, “’I did It for The Uplift of Humanity and The Navy’: Same-Sex Acts and The Origins of The National Security State, 1919–1921”, published in the June 2018 issue of The New England Quarterly. Abstract: This essay explores U.S. national security interes...

Mark 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 offe...