Bøker utgitt av The MIT Press

How the blockchain--a system built on foundations of mutual mistrust--can become trustworthy.

An exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity's powerful capacity to connect ideas and people.Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what's left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems-the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett-identical twins who write that their book "e;represents the thought of one mind and two bodies"e;-harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity-the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone's curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate-to be curious with the book and not simply about it.

An exploration of the practice of inventing languages, from speaking in tongues to utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics.In Imaginary Languages, Marina Yaguello explores the history and practice of inventing languages, from religious speaking in tongues to politically utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics. She looks for imagined languages that are autonomous systems, complete unto themselves and meant for communal use; imaginary, and therefore unlike both natural languages and historically attested languages; and products of an individual effort to lay hold of language. Inventors of languages, Yaguello writes, are madly in love: they love an object that belongs to them only to the extent that they also share it with a community.Yaguello investigates the sources of imaginary languages, in myths, dreams, and utopias. She takes readers on a tour of languages invented in literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, including that in More’s Utopia, Leibniz’s “algebra of thought,” and Bulwer-Lytton’s linguistic fiction. She examines the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language. Yaguello finds two abiding (and somewhat contradictory) forces: the diversity of linguistic experience, which stands opposed to unifying endeavors, and, on the other hand, features shared by all languages (natural or not) and their users, which justifies the universalist hypothesis.Recent years have seen something of a boom in invented languages, whether artificial languages meant to facilitate international communication or imagined languages constructed as part of science fiction worlds. In Imaginary Languages (an updated and expanded version of the earlier Les Fous du langage, published in English as Lunatic Lovers of Language), Yaguello shows that the invention of language is above all a passionate, dizzying labor of love.

"The book offers a framework for how to make innovation leaps more likely - and shows how radically improved technology can help solve the major challenges the world currently faces"--

"A manifesto on how to defend truth and reality against Trumpism, post truth, and disinformation campaigns"--]cProvided by publisher.

"The follow up to Sexus Animalis: the sex lives of plants, but more broadly, sexuality as the key to evolution. Plant sexuality is a bit of a controversial claim (in line with the notion of animal beauty) and difficult to prove, but an effective general-audience lens to looking at botanical diversity"--

"Datafication threatens human rights, including privacy and the right to self-determination. This book argues not that we should own but that we are our data; and it proposes an expansion of international human rights to recognize and protect our data selves along with our physical ones"--

"An introduction to the biodiversity of ancient lakes, explaining the surprising, often controversial findings ancient lake research is yielding about the formation and persistence of species"--

A foundational work of queer theory.First published anonymously in the notorious "Three Billion Perverts" issue of Félix Guattari's journal Recherches—banned by French authorities upon its release in 1973—The Screwball Asses was erroneously attributed to Guy Hocquenghem when it was first published in English in 2009. This second edition of that translation, with a new preface by Hocquenghem biographer Antoine Idier that clarifies the different theoretical positions within France’s Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionaire, returns the text to its true author: writer, journalist, and activist Christian Maurel. In this dramatic treatise on erotic desire, Maurel takes on the militant delusions and internal contradictions of the gay-liberation movement. He vivisects not only the stifled mores of bourgeois capitalism, but also the phallocratic concessions of so-called homophiles and, ultimately, the very act of speaking desire. Rejecting any “pure theory” of homosexuality that would figure its “otherness” as revolutionary, Maurel contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process. It is only when nondesire and the desire of desire are enacted simultaneously through speech and body that homosexuality can finally be sublimated under the true act of “making love.” There are thousands of sexes on earth, according to Maurel, but only one sexual desire. The Screwball Asses is a revelatory disquisition.

"A practical guide for business leaders to learn from moments of crisis and advance their digital capabilities"--

"Argues that a heterosexual bias is deeply embedded in the infrastructure of the Internet, with negative effects for society. In short, the Internet is straight"--

"A concise, reader-friendly overview of pragmatism, the most influential school of American philosophical thought"--

When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over.A delicate meditation on the nature of ghosts, belief, and how the future is shaped by the past. When the dead begin speaking to sixteen-year-old Kim Nguyen, her peaceful childhood is over. Suddenly everyone wants to exploit her new talent—her family, the Vietnamese government, and even the spirits themselves.

"More Voices of the Radium Age will showcase proto- and early sf stories by much-admired authors best known today for their non-sf work (E. Nesbit, author of Three Children and It and other popular children's fantasies, and Booth Tarkington, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Magnificent Ambersons); authors whose outsized success with readers would influence the subsequent development of the sf genre (H.G. Wells, who continued to make startling predictions in the early 20th century, and Abraham Merritt and George Allan England, who along with Edgar Rice Burroughs ushered in the crucial era of the pulp scientific romance); as well as writers who have now fallen into obscurity (George C. Wallis, the Russian Symbolist litterateur Valery Bryusov, "weird" horror master Algernon Blackwood, and Francis Stevens, "the woman who invented dark fantasy"). Note that Nesbit and Stevens are two of sf's only female writers pre-1926"--

"First published by Penguin Random House India."--Title page verso.

"Designing for resilience is a critical issue of the 21st century. This is the first book-length work that shows us how to design for a future that lasts, and why we should want to"--

"Ubiquitous computational technologies will define our future, and this book takes the hopeful view that such technologies, properly designed, can enhance rather than diminish human agency. As people co-evolve with our technology, we can develop technological assistance to enhance our decision making and compensate for our biases: personalized medicine, intelligent romance, digital law, hybrid athletics, and cyberfinance offer compelling cases of how augmented intelligence is working now and how it will continue to evolve"--

A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind anthology of art and writing exploring how surveillance impacts contemporary motherhood.The tracking of our personal information, activities, and medical data through our digital devices is an increasingly recognizable field in which the lines between caretaking and control have blurred. In this age of surveillance, mothers' behaviors and bodies are observed, made public, exposed, scrutinized, and policed like never before. Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance gathers together the work of fifty contributors from diverse disciplines that include the visual arts, legal scholarship, ethnic studies, sociology, gender studies, poetry, and activism to ask what the relationship is between how we watch and how we are watched, and how the attention that mothers pay to their children might foster a kind of counterattention to the many ways in which mothers are scrutinized.A groundbreaking collection, Supervision is a project about vision (and supervision), and all the ways in which vision intersects with surveillance and politics, through motherhood and personal history as well as through the histories and relations of the societies in which we live.Contributors:Melina Abdullah, Jeny Amaya, Gemma, Anderson, Nurcan Atalan-Helicke, Sarah Blackwood, Lisa Cartwright, Cary Beth Cryor, Moyra Davey, Duae Collective, Sabba Elahi, Laura Fong Prosper, Regina José Galindo, Michele Goodwin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lily Gurton-Wachter, Sophie Hamacher, Jessica Hankey, Keeonna Harris, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Jennifer Hayashida, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Lisbeth Kaiser, Magdalena Kallenberger, Caitlin Keliiaa, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Stephanie Lumsden, Irene Lusztig, Tala Madani, Jade Phoenix Martinez, Mónica Mayer, Iman Mersal, Jennifer C. Nash, Hương Ngô, Erika Niwa, Priscilla Ocen, Litia Perta, Claudia Rankine, Viva Ruiz, Ming Smith, Sable Elyse Smith, Sheida Soleimani, Stephanie Syjuco, Hồng-Ân Trương, Carrie Mae Weems, Lauren Whaley, Kandis Williams, Mai'a Williams, Carmen Winant, Kate Wolf, and Hannah Zeavin

"A gentle but detailed introduction to some of the algorithmic ideas behind machine learning"--

An exploration of the much-derided English suburbs through rap music.There are many different Englands. From the much-romanticized rolling countryside, to the cosmopolitanism of the inner cities (embraced by some as progressive, multicultural enlightenment and derided by others as the playground of a self-righteous metropolitan elite), or the disparagingly named "left behind" communities which, post-Brexit, have so interested political parties and pundits, demographers and statisticians.But there is also an England no one cares about. The England of semi-detached houses and clean driveways for multiple cars devotedly washed on Sundays, of "twitching curtains" and Laura Ashley sofas; of cul-de-sacs to nowhere and exaggerated accents; of late night drives to petrol stations on A roads, fake IDs tested in Harvesters, and faded tracksuits and over-gelled hair in Toby Carverys; of questionable hash from a "mate of a mate" and two-litre bottles of White Lightning from Budgens consumed in a kids playground. Much derided. Unglamorous, ordinary; cultural vacuity and small "c" conservatism. A hodgepodge. An—apparently—middling, middle-of-the-road middle-England of middle-class middle-mindedness. Part poetry anthology, part academic study into placemaking, and part autoethnography, The England No One Cares About innovatively brings together academic discussions of the ethnographic potential of lyrics, scholastic representations of suburbia, and thematic analysis to explore how rap music can illuminate the experiences of young men growing up in suburbia. This takes place by exploring the author’s own annotated lyrics from his career as a musician known as Context where he was referred to by the BBC as "Middle England’s Poet Laureate."

"Having assembled a crew of adventurers, the brilliant, blustering physiologist and physicist Professor Challenger journeys to a South American jungle ... in search of a lost plateau crawling with iguanodons. It's a ripping yarn-the first popular dinosaurs-still-live tale, prototype for everything from King Kong to Jurassic Park. At the same time, however, it's a philosophical novel, one that animates-in a thrilling, humorous fashion-the author's obsessive drive (also seen in his Sherlock Holmes stories) to reconcile the claims of logical reason and intuition. In their second adventure, Challenger et al. discover that the planet is about to pass through a belt of poisonous ether which will destroy all life on Earth. However, Challenger has transformed his wife's dressing room into an airtight chamber, so they can witness the end of the world. An epistemological thriller"--

A rich exploration of the extraordinary life and work of celebrated architect Yasmeen Lari, winner of the 2023 RIBA Royal Gold Medal.After more than three decades as a renowned global architect, Yasmeen Lari, the first woman to open her own architecture firm in Pakistan in 1964, developed Zero Carbon Architecture, which unites ecological and social justice. This volume, edited by Angelika Fitz, Elke Krasny, and Marvi Mazhar, presents Lari’s trajectory from exemplary modernist to zero carbon revolutionary, with a focus on her remarkable contributions to the global architectural movement to decarbonize and decolonize. The book includes extensive photographs, drawings, and plans from Lari’s archive, most of which have not previously been shown or published.Lari’s architectural thinking and activism have always gone beyond the quest for a singular built solution. Rather, she strategically plans systemic approaches and solutions, be it for housing, a heritage foundation, or zero-carbon shelters with communities at risk. Original essays from diverse international contributors contextualize Lari’s work; investigate architecture and the postimperial, postcolonial, and postpartition condition; and examine the intersections of architecture and human rights, climate change, decolonization, gender, care, activism, and vernacular innovation. More than a tribute to Yasmeen Lari’s extraordinary career, this volume brings her legacy forward and shows how to create change today.Contributors:Abira Ashfaq, Cassandra Cozza, Angelika Fitz, Runa Kahn, Anne Karpf, Elke Krasny, Marvi Mazhar, Chris Moffat, Anila Naeem, Raquel Rolnik, Helen Thomas, Rafia Zakaria

"The history of an unusual house built on a rocky outcrop on the Sardinian coast, designed by the author's mother in the 1960s. Through this history the author presents a text that is in part memoir but also in part advocacy for a closer relationship between architecture and landscape"--

"A bold, unflinching call to reject damaging design myths and instead build an ethical, aware, responsible design practice that contributes to the greater good-and how to do it successfully"--

"An exploration and analysis of the disturbing Lustmord images - graphic representations of sexual murder - by artists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, Rudolph Schindler, and more generally of the interelationship between art and criminality in early 20th-century Germany and Austria"--

What altered states of consciousness—the dissolution of feelings of time and self—can tell us about the mystery of consciousness.During extraordinary moments of consciousness—shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication—our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science, or considered crazy fantasies. Recent research, however, has located the neural underpinnings of these altered states of mind. In this book, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann shows how experiences that disturb or widen our everyday understanding of the self can help solve the mystery of consciousness.Wittmann explains that the relationship between consciousness of time and consciousness of self is close; in extreme circumstances, the experiences of space and self intensify and weaken together. He considers the emergence of the self in waking life and dreams; how our sense of time is distorted by extreme situations ranging from terror to mystical enlightenment; the experience of the moment; and the loss of time and self in such disorders as depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Dostoyevsky reported godly bliss during epileptic seizures; neurologists are now investigating the phenomenon of the epileptic aura. Wittmann describes new studies of psychedelics that show how the brain builds consciousness of self and time, and discusses pilot programs that use hallucinogens to treat severe depression, anxiety, and addiction.If we want to understand our consciousness, our subjectivity, Wittmann argues, we must not be afraid to break new ground. Studying altered states of consciousness leads us directly to the heart of the matter: time and self, the foundations of consciousness.

"A history of the relationship between modern architecture and abstraction"--