The MIT Press Podcast

As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore (MIT Press, 2024), Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus, with a geographic focus on Singapore.Widely considered a model for the future of urbanism and an emblematic new world city, Singapore, Wang contends, is a fascinating site to explore how modernist sustainable urbanism is imagined and put into practice. Drawing on field research, this book explores distinct and intrarelated urban imaginaries situated in various sites, from the futuristic, authoritarian Supertree Grove, positioned as a technologically sustainable solution to a velocity-charged and singular urban transportation system, to highly protected nature reserves and to the cemeteries, where graves and memories continue to be exhumed and erased to make way for development. Wang also attends to more contingent yet hopeful alternatives that aim to reconfigure current urban approaches. In the face of growing enthusiasm for building high-tech, sustainable, and “natural” cities, Wang ultimately argues that urban imaginings must create space for a more relational understanding of urban environments.

'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 found myself nodding along to a refreshingly obvious yet somehow radical proposition: why do we insist on keeping art and science in separate corners? Rogers makes a compelling case that this artificial boundary isn't just limiting our understanding of both fields, it's actively distorting how we think about knowledge itself. What struck me most during our conversation was Rogers' articulation of Art-STS (ASTS) as an emerging field that refuses to play by the old rules os separation and siloed study. The field, and Rogers, recognizes that both artists and scientists are engaged in the same fundamental project - making sense of the world through experimentation, observation, and yes, imagination. When we acknowledge this shared enterprise, the implications ripple outward. Who gets to produce legitimate knowledge? Whose methods count as valid? These questions matter because they shape everything from funding decisions to educational curricula to which voices we trust in public discourse. Rogers doesn't just theorize about these connections; she shows us what happens when we take them seriously. The experimental collaborations she documents reveal knowledge production as a deeply social, often messy, always political process. This isn't a bug in the system, it's the system itself. And maybe, just maybe, admitting that is the first step toward building more honest and inclusive ways of understanding our world. Notes: Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies Picturing the Invisible Science Communication as a Boundary Space: An Interactive Installation about the Social Responsibility of Science Gaïa Global Circus: A Climate Tragicomedy Shot on LiDAR, a Short Film Examines the Contradictions of Urban Surveillance

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, or unicorns. Naturalizing mental content has usually meant explaining how this is possible in terms that eliminate the mystery while retaining commitment to a substantive relationship between mind and world that undergirds this ability. In Deflating Mental Representation (MIT Press), Frances Egan argues that we should give up this commitment in favor of a naturalistic account that treats attributions of content as abstract glosses of neural mechanisms. According to Egan, who is emeritus professor of philosophy at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, representational glosses play ineliminable roles in commonsense psychology and our explanations of human behavior, but they should not be taken literally. Egan forcefully challenges many leading theories of mental representation, making her book a must-read for those interested in the concept of mental representation in the cognitive sciences. Deflating Mental Representation is available open-access and free here. 

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 have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? (MIT Press, 2021), Paul Thagard looks at how computers (“bots”) and animals measure up to the minds of people, offering the first systematic comparison of intelligence across machines, animals, and humans.Thagard explains that human intelligence is more than IQ and encompasses such features as problem solving, decision making, and creativity. He uses a checklist of twenty characteristics of human intelligence to evaluate the smartest machines—including Watson, AlphaZero, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars—and the most intelligent animals—including octopuses, dogs, dolphins, bees, and chimpanzees. Neither a romantic enthusiast for nonhuman intelligence nor a skeptical killjoy, Thagard offers a clear assessment. He discusses hotly debated issues about animal intelligence concerning bacterial consciousness, fish pain, and dog jealousy. He evaluates the plausibility of achieving human-level artificial intelligence and considers ethical and policy issues. A full appreciation of human minds reveals that current bots and beasts fall far short of human capabilities.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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 overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been removed or toppled, bringing to the fore a long-repressed conversation about the relationship between the monumental landscape and national identity. In Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Cat Dawson takes up the social, political, and art historical causes and ramifications of this important shift.Examining the conditions that have led to and define this new era, Dr. Dawson reveals that these interventions are as indebted to the monumental tradition as they are to representational strategies that grew out of twentieth-century social justice efforts, from the Civil Rights movement to queer organizing during the AIDS crisis.Since 2014, a new generation of artists has established a groundbreaking role for monuments, calling into question the very notion of what a monument is through novel investigations of how symbolic structures can be made and what stories they can tell. This book tells the important story of that sea change. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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 much less familiar with the brilliant theories that make up the backbone of the digital revolution. In Beautiful Math: The Surprisingly Simple Ideas behind the Digital Revolution in How We Live, Work, and Communicate (MIT Press, 2024) Chris Bernhardt explores the mathematics at the very heart of the information age. He asks questions such as: What is information? What advantages does digital information have over analog? How do we convert analog signals into digital ones? What is an algorithm? What is a universal computer? And how can a machine learn?The four major themes of Beautiful Math are information, communication, computation, and learning. Bernhardt typically starts with a simple mathematical model of an important concept, then reveals a deep underlying structure connecting concepts from what, at first, appear to be unrelated areas. His goal is to present the concepts using the least amount of mathematics, but nothing is oversimplified. Along the way, Bernhardt also discusses alphabets, the telegraph, and the analog revolution; information theory; redundancy and compression; errors and noise; encryption; how analog information is converted into digital information; algorithms; and, finally, neural networks. Historical anecdotes are included to give a sense of the technology at that time, its impact, and the problems that needed to be solved. Taking its readers by the hand, regardless of their math background, Beautiful Math is a fascinating journey through the mathematical ideas that undergird our everyday digital interactions.

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 relatively unchanged and was no longer seen as the harbinger of a new era. Yet that all changed in the last third of the century, when following the traumatic Franco-Prussian War defeat, the balloon reemerged to become the modern artifact that captured the attention of many. Through this process, the balloon became an important symbol of the fledgling Third Republic, and France established itself as the world leader in flight. In Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira tells for the first time the story of this surprising revival.Through extensive research in the press and archives in France, the United States, and Brazil, De Oliveira argues that French civil society cultivated popular enthusiasm for flight (what historians call “airmindedness”) decades before the advent of the airplane. Champions of French ballooning made the case that if the British Royal Navy controlled the seas and the Imperial German Army dominated the continent, then France needed to take ownership of the skies. The French appropriated this newly imagined geopolitical space through a variety of practices, from republican savants who studied the atmosphere at high altitudes to aristocrats who organized transcontinental long-distance competitions. All of this made Paris into the global capital of a thriving aeronautical culture that incorporated seemingly contradictory visions of sacrificial patriotism, aristocratic modernity, colonial anxiety, and technological cosmopolitanism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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 Way of Life. The pair talk about how the new book connects to Matt’s earlier book, Engineers for Change; how what Matt calls “innovation expertise” first emerged; how government played a key role in promoting the idea of innovation; how the idea of innovation was democratized from focusing on elite white men to focusing on women, people of color, children, and, well, everyone; and much more. Vinsel and Wisnioski also talk about Matt’s current book project with Michael Meindl, Associate Professor of Communication at Radford University - a history of the television show and multimedia product, The Magic School Bus.

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 failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how some of the most trusted members of society—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to eminent health officials—repeatedly made fundamental errors in their assessment and presentation of evidence. As a result, for the first time in modern American history, millions of healthy children did not set foot in a classroom for more than a year.Since the spring of 2020, many students in Europe had been learning in person. Even many peers at home—in private schools, and public schools in mostly “red” states and districts—were in class full time from fall 2020 onward. Whatever inequities that existed among American children before the pandemic, the selective school closures exacerbated them, disproportionately affecting the underprivileged. Deep mental, physical, and academic harms—among them, depression, anxiety, abuse, obesity, plummeting test scores, and rising drop-out rates—were endured for no discernible benefit. As Europe had shown very early, after they had sent kids back to class, there was never any evidence that long-term school closures, nor a host of interventions imposed on students when they were in classrooms, would reduce overall cases or deaths in any meaningful way.The story of American schools during the pandemic serves as a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis and uncertainty. Ultimately, this book is not about COVID; it’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress. David Zweig is the author of the novel Swimming Inside the Sun and the nonfiction book Invisibles. He has testified twice before Congress as an expert witness on American schools during the pandemic, and his investigative reporting on the pandemic has been cited in numerous congressional letters and a brief to the Supreme Court. Zweig’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, Wired, The Free Press, The Boston Globe, and, most often, his newsletter, Silent Lunch. He lives with his family in New York State. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

In The Computer Always Wins: A Playful Introduction to Algorithms through Puzzles and Strategy Games (MIT Press, 2025), Elliot Lichtman will teach you some of computer science’s most powerful concepts in a refreshingly accessible way: exploring them through word games, board games, and strategy games you already know. Learn recursion by playing tic-tac-toe, efficient search through puzzle games like sudoku and Wordle, and machine learning by way of the playground classic rock-paper-scissors. Finish the book, and you’ll come away with not only a deeper understanding of these foundational programming techniques but also a new appreciation for the amazing feats that can be accomplished using simple, readable code. Elliot Lichtman started teaching online classes in computer science when he was a freshman in high school. Small classes quickly grew into a series of larger and longer offerings, and from those, this book was born. Elliot is currently a junior at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.