The MIT Press Podcast

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 well as the measures that can be taken to eradicate it. We also explore issues of corruption across the globe, including the Lava Jato case in Brazil, the authoritarian anti-corruption of Rwanda and the ways in which corporate elites shape politics in countries like the US and the UK.Robert I. Rotberg is President Emeritus of the World Peace Foundation, Founding Director of Harvard Kennedy School's Program on Intrastate Conflict, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of The Corruption Cure: How Citizens and Leaders Can Combat Graft, Things Come Together: Africans Achieving Greatness in the Twenty-First Century, Transformative Political Leadership, and numerous other books.Hosted by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux

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 Hollingshead. Appearing as if from nowhere, he turned Timothy Leary on to LSD in 1962, and was influential in Leary's years at Harvard, Millbrook, and beyond. A Zelig-like character, Hollingshead was a key player in London's early LSD scene. In 1965 he went to London to establish a cultural beachhead for Leary's LSD philosophy at the World Psychedelic Centre in Chelsea. Following a spell in prison, where he dosed KGB spy George Blake, he continued to pursue adventures with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, established a psychedelic commune, created the first electronic I Ching installation, published an underground magazine, and spent time in Nepal, before dying a mysterious death in Bolivia in the 1980s.Psychedelic trickster guru, or conman and charlatan? Exactly who Hollingshead was and what his motives were remain unclear. Some believed he was working for the secret services, others that he was just a Leary wannabe, his aspirations destroyed by his deviant personality and addiction to alcohol and opiates. Divine Rascal is the first reliable biography of one of psychedelia's key figures, without whom the trajectory of LSD in the world would have been radically different.

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 approaching a miracle cure. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series chronicles the ascent of a drug that has been around for fifty years--in previous incarnations, a Vietnam-era combat anesthetic and a popular club drug--that has now been reinvented as a treatment for depression. Bita Moghaddam, a leading researcher in neuropharmacology, explains the scientific history and the biology of ketamine, its clinical use, and its recently discovered antidepressant effects, for the nonspecialist reader.

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 world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes readers on the journey that patient and doctor travel together.Sekeres, who writes regularly for the "Well" section of The New York Times, tells the compelling stories of three people who receive diagnoses of adult leukemia within hours of each other: Joan, a 48-year-old surgical nurse, a caregiver who becomes a patient; David, a 68-year-old former factory worker who bows to his family's wishes and pursues the most aggressive treatment; and Sarah, a 36-year-old pregnant woman who must decide whether to undergo chemotherapy and put her fetus at risk. We join the intimate conversations between Sekeres and his patients, and we watch as he teaches trainees. Along the way, Sekeres also explores leukemia in its different forms and the development of drugs to treat it--describing, among many other fascinating details, the invention of the bone marrow transplant (first performed experimentally on beagles) and a treatment that targets the genetics of leukemia.The lessons to be learned from leukemia, Sekeres shows, are not merely medical; they teach us about courage and grace and defying the odds.

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 unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys--an ugly death awaiting social deviants--neither scientifically nor clinically interesting. But over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone. In OD, Nancy Campbell charts the emergence of naloxone as a technological fix for overdose and describes the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned--and, above all, preventable. Naloxone, which made resuscitation, rescue, and "reversal" after an overdose possible, became a tool for shifting law, policy, clinical medicine, and science toward harm reduction. Liberated from emergency room protocols and distributed in take-home kits to non-medical professionals, it also became a tool of empowerment.After recounting the prehistory of naloxone--the early treatment of OD as a problem of poisoning, the development of nalorphine (naloxone's predecessor), the idea of "reanimatology"--Campbell describes how naloxone emerged as a tool of harm reduction. She reports on naloxone use in far-flung locations that include post-Thatcherite Britain, rural New Mexico, and cities and towns in Massachusetts. Drawing on interviews with approximately sixty advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, witnesses, clinicians, and scientists--whom she calls the "protagonists" of her story--Campbell tells a story of saving lives amid the complex, difficult conditions of an unfolding unnatural disaster.

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 of exclusion. This book offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racial representation but also issues of structural change and the redistribution of resources. In essays, conversations, discussions, and artist portfolios, contributors confront in new ways questions at the intersection of art, race, and representation.The book uses saturation as an organizing concept, in part to suggest that current paradigms cannot encompass the complex realities of race. Saturation provides avenues to situate race as it relates to perception, science, aesthetics, the corporeal, and the sonic. In color theory, saturation is understood in terms of the degree to which a color differs from whiteness. In science, saturation points describe not only the moment in which race exceeds legibility, but also how diversity operates for institutions. Contributors consider how racialization, globalization, and the production and consumption of art converge in the art market, engaging such topics as racial capitalism, the aesthetics of colonialism, and disability cultures. They examine methods for theorizing race and representation, including “aboutness,” which interprets artworks by racialized subjects as being “about” race; modes of unruly, decolonized, and queer visual practices that resist disciplinary boundaries; and a model by which to think with and alongside blackness and indigeneity.Copublished with the New Museum

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 publishing.

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 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, "Against Innocence," as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

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 evidential role of matter--when media records trace evidence of violence--explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere.In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather.These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milosevic; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or "disaster film" produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed.An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.

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 Sylvère Lotringer, discuss the history of the press.