Our Spring 2026 catalog is here! Highlights include an avian enthusiast's close look at the marvelous engineering of birds, a moving photographic documentary of the Inner Passage, a darkly comedic journey into the science of aging, and a leading expert on race, class, and maternal health's unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US.
Our catalog is free to flip through online via Edelweiss, Issuu, or direct download to your device. Go to the link in our bio to start browsing!
In her richly illustrated book "Conjuring the Void," Lynn Gamwell approaches one of the universe’s most mesmerizing and enigmatic phenomena—black holes—through the lens of modern art. Locals: Join the author next week at the @MITMuseum !
📆 Tuesday, May 19th
🕓 6:00 PM
📍314 Main Street | Cambridge, MA, 02142
Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing after the talk, courtesy of the @MITPressBookstore .
Tap the link in our bio to RSVP.
"A carefully crafted, profound critique of meditation and slowness in digital games, 'Zen and Slow Games' takes us on a journey to the boundaries of the medium, detaching playfulness from the pressures of winning and performing otherwise dominant in games and contemporary societies."
—Martin Roth, author of "Unboxing Japanese Videogames"
Head to the link in bio to order your copy or grab the #openaccess edition.
New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall asked @leahcstokes , a professor of environmental politics and the author of the forthcoming book "The Carbon Wave," how much Trump's fossil fuel handouts and attacks on cheap, clean power are costing the American people. So she sat down and did the math. This year alone, it's on pace to be $1508 per household.
"The big story here is corruption. Trump is doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry and enriching his friends because they got him elected. I cannot fathom why else he's keeping open these old, dirty, expensive coal plants that were otherwise slated to close in places like Michigan. Someone is getting very rich off these decisions, and everyday Americans are paying the price."
Follow the link in bio to read the full story.
The human brain hasn't changed much since the Stone Age, let alone in the mere thirty years of the Screen Age. That's why, according to neurologist Richard Cytowic, our brains are so poorly equipped to resist the incursions of Big Tech.
Full of practical actions that we can start taking right away, "Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age" offers compelling evidence that we can change the way we use technology, resist its addictive power over us, and take back the control we have lost.
Link in bio to learn more and order.
“We women were right,” says Susana Carmona, a neuroscientist and director of the neuromaternal lab at Hospital Gregorio Marañón in Madrid. “We knew that something happens to our brains, or the way we perceive the world and the way we feel. Now, we have neuroimaging data that very powerfully demonstrates that motherhood changes you completely.”
Follow the link in bio to read the story, and look out for Susana's new book "A Mother's Brain" this October!
During the French Revolution, speech — and the ability to hear it clearly — could be a matter of life and death. From Robespierre’s famously quiet oratory to the muffling of King Louis XVI’s final speech in 1793, rapid and unambiguous communication became a revolutionary necessity. To meet that need, Richard Taws chronicles, the French invented a number of strange devices — many of them now forgotten — designed to carry ideas to the masses.
There was the “porte-voix du peuple,” a serpent-like trumpet that amplified the speaker’s voice for large crowds. The “tableau populaire” consisted of paired wooden drums mounted on spindles and set high on a prominent building, resembling the moving panoramas of the 19th century. The “siège oral mobile,” meanwhile, used a giant parabolic screen to bounce a speaker’s voice outward through a latticed floor, and was intended for use by lawmakers inside the meeting hall of the National Assembly.
But few inventions were as transformative as the Chappe brothers’ optical telegraph. With its movable arms arranged in semaphoric code, the device could convey messages across great distances. “At the time the telegraph took hold, an uncluttered,” Taws writes, “transparent sign language was being proposed as a realistic alternative to speech altogether.”
Read the full article at the link in bio.
In 1954, a small team at TIFR set out to build a digital computer. Most of them had never seen one. None but their lead had trained outside India. By 1959, they had designed and assembled TIFRAC, the first digital computer built by Indian engineers, with specs that rivalled IBM’s first-generation machines. It was obsolete by the time Nehru formally named it in 1962, but what the team proved was far bigger than the machine itself.
On National Technology Day, a look back at where India’s tech story began.
Selections from The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution by NIF Fellow Dinesh C. Sharma.
There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.
Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories
Shoutout to Asterisk Mag for this fantastic Q&A with MITP author Jon Peterson, encompassing 18th century Prussian wargames, cartography, game design, Dungeons & Dragons, AI, and more.
"Don't sell the role-playing in 1824 short. The game was actually played in the feedback loop, in the dialogue. A referee gives you a situation, you play a commander, you are roleplaying somebody in the field. It’s a level of role-playing purity"
Link to the conversation in our bio.
"An Alphabet for Dreamers" by @sharonsliwinski is a captivating look at how dreams serve as one of our most powerful ways to understand and radically change our world.
Each short chapter engages with a dream from the historical record—from both the recent and distant past—to show how these experiences can help us make sense of profound social conflicts and transform our shared reality.
Featuring original watercolor paintings by @melindajosie
"'An Alphabet for Dreamers' is a stunning and powerful book. Departing from Freud’s view that the true meaning of a dream is a hidden wish-fulfillment, Sliwinski takes dreams to be potent and transparent messages for social change, inspiring Nelson Mandela in his work against apartheid and Harriet Tubman in her work in the Underground Railroad. Dreams for Sliwinski point the way toward righting a world that is out of joint."
—@noellemcafee , author of "Feminism: A Quick Immersion"
Learn more and order your copy at the link in our bio.
I’m really pleased to share the cover of my new book The Trembling City, which will be published by MIT Press on October 27. (Link in bio.)
The book is a meditation on the role of sound and vibration as instruments of violence that shape urban life. I consider forms of atmospheric occupation and vibrational warfare—a covert violence enacted through waves—as they turn cities themselves into instruments of war: amplifying sonic shock, conducting energy through bodies, air, and buildings, and saturating everyday life with violence.
I’ll share more from the book in the coming months, but for now I wanted to celebrate the photographer and artist Mane Hovanissyan, whose work graces the cover. I first met Mane at a Scoring the City workshop presented by Crossroads Festival in Yerevan in 2023, which I hosted with the pianist Eve Egoyan.
Mane was the photographer for the event, but she spontaneously took part in the score-making part of the workshop. She created three memorable photographic scores based on local architecture, one of which a student ensemble interpreted as music.
When I saw this photograph in particular, I immediately said to Mane, ‘maybe this could be the cover of my book one day.’ It seemed like a distant reality, but when I approached the press two years later, they loved it, too.
Two chapters of the book are dedicated to the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath: one listens to tent cities in the Ottoman Empire, attending to the sound worlds of ‘death-worlds’ (Mbembe); the other listens to disappeared cities in post-genocidal Turkey today.
It means a lot to me to be able to feature the work of a brilliant, soulful, and deeply imaginative artist from Armenia on the cover—and to have an image that also subtly refers to Armenia in its modern, defiant frame.
Much love to everyone connected with the book and with this image—and my gratitude to the press’s designer Marge Encomienda for turning Mane’s photograph into this wonderful cover.
Pre-order link here and in bio:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262056489/the-trembling-city/
@manecrimson@photostationevn@mitpress@oxmusicfaculty@soncities
#sound #cities #violence
