"The Book tracks the ways the book's physical form and artistic content have historically inspired one another's evolution. Borsuk shows that in order to see where books might be going, we must think of them as objects whose physical shape has experienced a long history of experimentation and play. Rather than bemoaning the death of books or creating a dichotomy between print and digital media, Borsuk points to their continuities, positioning the...

The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled, marked the moment when physicians started to take the prevention of pregnancy seriously as a medical concern. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Donna Drucker traces the history of modern contraception,...

In this volume of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Ansgar Allen charts the long history of cynicism, from the "fearless speech" of Greek Cynics in the fourth century BCE to the contemporary cynic's lack of social and political convictions. Allen describes ancient Cynicism as an improvised philosophy and a way of life disposed to scandalize contemporaries, subjecting their cultural commitments to derision. He chronicles the subsequent "purification"...

"An investigation of hate speech: legal appraches, current controversies, and suggestions for limiting its spread"--Page 4 of cover. "An Essential Knowledge book on hate speech"--

This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise and accessible introduction to phenomenology, a philosophical movement that investigates the experience of experience. Founded by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and expounded by Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others, phenomenology ventures forth into the field of experience so that truth might be met in the flesh. It investigates everything as experienced....

"How does Netflix know just what to suggest you watch next? How does Amazon determine what a "customer like you" has also purchased? The answer is recommender systems, the technological concept that lies at the heart of most of the successful companies in the digital economy. Michael Schrage starts with the origins of recommender systems, which go back further than you think (see: the Oracle at Delphi for one of history's earliest recommenders), and...

Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places? This volume offers a concise introduction to smart cities, presenting key...

"How the underlying biology of the "placebo effect" works and how could this change the way we think about modern and future medicine"--

"Short, accessible primer on human memory, written by two leading psychological researchers"--