The MIT Press Podcast

Epizodai

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  Nozomi Naoi, "The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life" (MIT Press, 2026) 04.08.2026 43min

  The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life (MIT Press, 2026) explores the far-reaching influence of the Japanese department store on modern life and our imaginations. In this gorgeously illustrated volume, Dr. Nozomi Naoi explains how Japanese department stores modeled “the new modern Japanese life and identity” through print media and design, physical and imagined space, and the new experiences that these spaces offered. The stores created the notion of a modern subject enjoying a “land of happiness”—and this, in turn, shaped the wider sociological context, including emerging roles for women and perceptions of coloniality. The book focuses on three areas: the mediascape of proliferating department store posters, advertisements, commercial design, promotional magazines, and merchandise; the physical space, such as the Western-style architecture that characterized many of these early department stores, and the imagined “modern space” created within their walls; and, finally, the production of a novel “dreamworld,” which included dining spaces with children’s menus, new technology such as elevators and escalators, and more. Although the research on department stores and their role in the quotidian experience is vast, there is nothing like this study, which is uniquely grounded in an art-historical approach that draws on the visual media environment of early twentieth-century Japan and its impact on the everyday. 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. 
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  Virginia McGee Richards, "The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway" (MIT Press, 2026) 01.08.2026 33min

  Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida. In The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (MIT Press, 2026), Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history.
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  Khiara Bridges, "Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans" (MIT Press, 2026) 19.07.2026 46min

  An unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US—and why even affluent Black women are imperiled by substandard care.From a leading expert on race, class, maternal health, and reproductive rights.Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the United States, Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans (MIT Press, 2026) reveals that not only are black people three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. That is, wealthier black people are much more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. Focusing on a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the affluent, Khiara Bridges looks at the choices around prenatal care and childbirth that class-privileged, pregnant black people are making in order to survive what has been called the “black maternal health crisis.”Bridges, whose previous work exposed how race and racism are embedded in maternal healthcare for the poor, draws on two years of participant-observation to show how wealthier black people try to leverage their class privilege to avoid some of the negative effects of their blackness—only to discover that in a country that has never reckoned with its horrific racial past, there is no escaping racism’s reach. Throughout the book, engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating stories of women’s experiences with pregnancy and prenatal care illustrate how race and racism matter regardless of wealth or status.
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  Fenwick McKelvey, "SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers" (MIT Press, 2026) 17.07.2026 51min

  This book is available open access. For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics: America’s Quest to Solve Politics with Computers (MIT Press, 2026), Dr. Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet. Drawing on novel archival and historical research, Dr. McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes. 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. 
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  Soraya Murray, "Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination" (MIT Press, 2026) 14.07.2026 1val 6min

  Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT Press, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and surveillance culture. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Soraya Murray is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores the visual culture of innovation, advanced computation, and its imaginaries as imaged in popular American films, for which technology assumes a central role. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), examines popular video games like Assassin’s Creed, Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Theft Auto as visual culture. She currently serves as Provost of Porter College, UCSC.
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  Are Capitalism and Democracy Fundamentally Incompatible? A Conversation with Mordecai Kurz 09.07.2026 1val 3min

  Today I'm speaking with Mordecai Kurz, Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University. We are discussing his latest book, Private Power and Democracy's Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy (MIT Press, 2026). After its high-water mark several decades ago, democracy's status continues to slide globally. Capitalism and democracy, which once seemed to complement each other, now appear at odds. Free-market policies and monopolistic technologies have enriched many while driving inequalities that harm workers. Many have opined on how to fix the political and economic problems of our day, from an embrace of radical libertarian policy to socialist ownership of the means of production. Mordecai Kurz's extensive study of capitalism and democracy charts a path for balancing economic and political freedom. Since the days of Adam Smith, technology has changed rapidly, necessitating new formulations that take into account the private power centers that exercise control much like monarchies did in the Age of Enlightenment. Despite the imbalance, capitalism still remains a driver of technological progress and innovation. How can we make both capitalism and democracy work for the good of everyone? I'm happy today to get the chance to speak with such an illustrious scholar and to learn a bit more about how to understand this defining puzzle of our age. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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  Joe P. L. Davidson, "Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times" (MIT Press, 2026) 17.06.2026 1val 4min

  There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026). Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in ‘time consciousness’, the ways in which our sense of the future seems less open to possibility than it once was. Despite this he notes the persistence of utopianism in a new form, the ‘postdystopian utopia’ which takes account of the assumption the future will be worse and uses this as a spur to utopian thinking. He then explores how this manifests itself in various utopian works in different traditions, from Black utopianism considering the tragedy of the slave trade, feminism mining the nostalgia of previous battles to consider how things could be different and climate change utopianism confronting catastrophe. In our discussion we explore the changing fortunes and forms of utopianism over time, the value of ‘utopian studies’, why Silicon Valley tech-bros might be as utopian (or dystopian) as they make out and think about why it is important we all imagine the possibility of different worlds. Joe also makes a number of reading recommendations for postdystopian utopian novels. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
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  Michael Brownstein et al., "Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change" (MIT Press, 2025) 06.06.2026 1val 11min

  A novel and scientific approach to creating transformative social change—and the surprising ways that each of us can help make a real difference. Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The dilemma is that there is no way to make structural change without individual people making different—more structure-facing—decisions. In Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (MIT Press, 2025), Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly show us how we can connect our personal choices to structural change and why individual choices matter, though not in the way people usually think. The authors paint a new picture of how social change happens, arguing that our most powerful personal choices are those that springboard us into working together with others—warehouse worker Chris Smalls’s unionization at Amazon is one powerful example. Taking inspiration from the writer Bill McKibben, they stress how one “important thing an individual can do is be somewhat less of an individual.” Organized into three main parts, the book first diagnoses the problem of “either/or” thinking about social change, which stems from the false choice of making better personal choices or changing the system. Then it offers a different way to think about social change, anchored in a new picture of human nature emerging across the social sciences. Finally, the authors explore ways of putting this picture into practice. Neither a how-to manual nor an activist’s guide, Somebody Should Do Something pairs stories with science (plus some jokes) to help readers recognize their own power, turning resignation about climate change and racial injustice into actions that transform the world. My guests today are Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva and Daniel Kelly. Michael is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Jay College and Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, Cuny. Alex is Professor of Philosophy, Director of the California Center for Ethics and Policy, and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Consortium at Cal Poly Pomona. Daniel Kelly is Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Cognition, Agency, and Intelligence Center at Purdue University.
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  Rahul Mukherjee, "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" (MIT Press, 2026) 02.06.2026 1val 1min

  Around 2016, buoyed by so-called data kranti  ("data revolution"), an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first time on their mobile phones. Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, 2026) tells the story of digital infrastructures that are being created by state-corporations for content and money to move and reach such users. It interrogates how their design impact the forms of inclusions and exclusions enacted as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in "Digital India." The book contends that to understand the possibilities and limits of India's aspirational politics, media studies scholars should attend to infrastructures of aspiration: the distributional logistics of streaming content and mobile money are the infrastructural backbone that recalibrate thresholds of aspirational goals.  Digital content media distribution is also shaped by how user practices get entangled with particular affordances of platforms, and hence the need to study both participatory cultures of circulation and logistics of distribution together. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, critical discourse analysis and participant observation, the book traces the supply chains of content delivery networks enabling streaming video-on-demand services and informal ways of circulating "vernacular" music videos through memory cards. Unlimited does not restrict itself to formal media infrastructures, but also researches online phishing and lending scam assemblages to understand how such scams perform critical boundary work to reveal the cracks in and workings of financial distribution networks. This book offers a systematic examination of distribution considerations—including localization strategies—required for imagining mobile phone users across the varied regional geographies of "Digital India." Rahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of TV & New Media and graduate chair in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His teaching and research focus on the logistical and environmental dimensions of digital infrastructures and platforms. Rahul is the author of the monograph Radiant Infrastructures, and his work has been published in Critical Inquiry, SM+S, New Media & Society, and Science, Technology & Human Values. He has co-edited a special issue on "Media Power in Digital Asia" for Media, Culture & Society journal.   Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body, and her work has been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. She is also a regular podcast host at the New Books Network and has been published in public writing forums like the Economic and Political Weekly, FemAsia, Asian Film Archive, among others. More information on her ongoing projects can be found on her website and you can follow her on X.
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  Yosef Grodzinsky, "How Deeply Human Is Language?: Chomsky, the Brain, and the AI Fantasy" (MIT Press, 2026) 24.05.2026 48min

  How Deeply Human Is Language? Chomsky, the Brain, and the AI Fantasy (MIT Press, 2026) is Yosef Grodzinsky’s exploration of the criticality of the linguistic theories to the design of LLMs. The book dwells on the significance of the marriage between computational and theoretical fields, specifically “engineering and science” on the development of unique Language Learning Models. Yosef maintains that leveraging linguistic theories for the development of Gen AI chatbots and training of Language Learning Models will help the growing Gen-AI revolution. In the book, LLMs are evaluated from the neurolinguistic perspective, comparing how the human brain works with different LLMs’ reactions to prompts, highlighting how a collaboration between the core linguists and the experts in the technology-related fields could make a change. Yosef Grodzinzky’s positions in the book is grounded in contemporary linguistics, founded and inspired by Noam Chomsky, the father of the “mentalist” linguistic perspective to language acquisition. In the book, the author employs the historical approach to tell different significant stories to communicate multiple messages of success of interdisciplinary practices. While the main idea is to explore the centrality of linguistic science to other fields with specific emphasis on Engineering and sister’s technological fields, the book dwelled on specific pitfalls of the linguistics and way forward to promote novel interdisciplinary productions. Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links here. | LinkedIn| here. |ORCID| and here. |Meta|
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  Silvia Danielak, "Peace Infrastructures: How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges, and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability" (MIT Press, 2026) 15.05.2026 34min

  Roads, bridges, a renewable power plant, and an electricity grid: UN peacekeepers might be unusual infrastructure builders, but they’re certainly not unambitious. Since the beginning of the UN’s peacekeeping activities after the end of World War II, the Blue Helmets have cemented streets, constructed bridges, and dug wells in conflict zones. But how did the military arm of the world’s primary diplomatic forum become involved in such activities in its quest for peace, and with what consequences? Peace Infrastructures: How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges, and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability (MIT Press, 2026) by Dr. Silvia Danielak analyzes the turn to ever-more-complex infrastructure projects, from early road building via urban community projects to the commissioning of entire renewable power plants, in the context of an evolving understanding of peace “problems” and solutions. Tracing the global travel of policies, technologies, and expertise, Dr. Danielak investigates how the shift toward risk management, legacy, and climate security was driven by, and materialized in, conflict zones, shaping the very idea of peace.The book critically engages with the UN’s ambition to insert itself in the sustainable development of the countries it seeks to assist, arguing that we need to consider peace operations’ spatial, urban, and material ways of engagement—especially in the face of mounting climate risks. Infrastructure is poised to take a more prominent position within peace operations, but a more nuanced understanding that recognizes its opportunities, as well as its potential for violence, is required. 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.
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  Aymar Jèan Escoffery, "Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture" (MIT Press, 2025) 15.05.2026 1val

  Can producing stories and developing platforms to support people who have been harmed by multiple, intersecting systems heal those systems? In Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture (MIT Press, 2025), Aymar Jèan Escoffery argues that this is exactly how we repair our culture and heal harms from racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and religious discrimination: by reconsidering how we make media, how we connect through technology, and how we generate knowledge.Based on five years of deep, complex work cocreating an independent alternative to platforms like Netflix and YouTube, the author reveals the process behind developing OTV | Open Television to stream stories by diverse creators. The book shows that planting seeds for a more community-based media and tech ecosystem can also reform corporate systems better than so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, as the platform helped elevate creators on social media and in Hollywood at companies like HBO, Netflix, and more. Combining theory and practice, local production and global distribution, Chicago and Hollywood, the book paints a portrait of what a healing media ecosystem looks like—and shows how communal ways of knowing can cultivate reparative media, technology, and research that benefit everyone no matter how they identify.
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  Scott Solomon, "Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change Our Bodies and Minds" (MIT Press, 2026) 30.04.2026 1val 1min

  How living in space will affect future generations—and what the potential unintended consequences of space settlements are.We are on the cusp of a golden age of space travel in which, for the first time, it will be possible for large numbers of people to venture into space. Some intend to stay. But what happens—and will happen—to us in the extreme conditions of space? What should space tourists expect to happen to them during a journey to an orbiting space station, the Moon, or Mars? What would happen to children born on another planet? Would they evolve into a new species? In Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change Our Bodies and Minds (MIT Press, 2026) Scott Solomon explores the many ways in which humanity’s migration into space will change our bodies and our minds.This book focuses on the latest science, taking readers to the front lines of research. We hear from astronauts, including Scott Kelly who writes the foreword, and we join a team of scientists guiding a rover across the surface of Mars. We visit a high-security lab where engineers are simulating space radiation to measure its effects on the body. We travel to isolated islands where field biologists are gleaning insights into evolutionary processes applicable to people isolated on faraway planets. We meet synthetic biologists developing gene-editing tools to equip future humans to thrive in alien environments. We watch a rocket designed to carry humanity to Mars make its first successful launch. And then we ask, knowing what we know: Should we go?
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  Nikki Luke, "Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy" (MIT Press, 2026) 24.04.2026 50min

  Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy (MIT Press, 2026) by Dr. Nikki Luke traces the intertwined history of Atlanta’s racialized uneven development and growing electricity use to show how electricity infrastructure shapes everyday life. Nikki Luke looks at how quotidian relationships with the electric utility catalyze intersectional organizing for energy democracy. She also investigates the legal and material construction of the investor-owned utility as a regulated monopoly and the state public service commission that regulates it.Contemporary organizing for energy democracy questions how the utility and the systems that govern it need to change to ensure energy affordability, provide remedy and reparation for enduring environmental and energy injustice, and build a just and equitable energy transition from fossil fuels. Bridging urban, environmental, and labor studies, the author demonstrates how these demands to change the utility emerge from the tradition of civil rights, labor, and environmental organizing for fair treatment from the utility, affordable energy, protection from pollution, and good jobs. The book is available Open Access. 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.
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  Adrian Woolfson, "On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence" (MIT Press, 2026) 20.04.2026 54min

  Imagine a future where we grow houses rather than build them. Where smartphones are alive, clothing has opinions and all human knowledge fits into a speck of DNA. A world where disease is a thing of the past and the human lifespan is dramatically extended.To achieve this, says Adrian Woolfson, founder of the genome writing company Genyro, we must transform biology into a predictive, programmable engineering material. That means decoding the generative grammar of DNA: the language of life itself. We will then be able to author genomes—and, if we choose, even rewrite our own.In On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence (MIT Press, 2026), Woolfson describes how we are at the cusp of a technological revolution, driven by the convergence of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. Currently at the scribbling phase—writing the genomes of viruses, bacteria and yeast—we will eventually author the genomes of extinct and never-before-realized species. Life will become computable, detached from its past and no longer bound by Darwinian evolution.While offering extraordinary opportunities, this power also carries great risk, and it is vital for everyone to understand what the future might hold. In this groundbreaking work, Woolfson provides a guide to this bold new world, offering a moral compass to help us do so safely, wisely and ethically. Adrian Woolfson is the cofounder of Genyro, a California-based biotechnology company specializing in synthetic genome design and construction. He studied medicine at Balliol College, Oxford, and was formerly the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Greg is the Executive Director and Founder of the World War II Discussion Forum (wwiidf.org). He also has a strong interest in literature, culture, religion, science and philosophy (translation: he's an eclectic reader who is constantly missing deadlines for book reviews).
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  Kathryn Nave, "A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life" (MIT Press, 2025) 10.04.2026 55min

  The cybernetic tradition in cognitive science analyzes the purposive behavior of many complex systems – from sensory-guided missiles to sensory-guided animals -- in terms of feedback control that maintains stability in the face of external perturbation. A more recent extension and elaboration of this framework brings in predictive processing and the minimization of free energy – essentially, minimizing getting inputs that conflict with what the system expects. In A Drive to Survive: the Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life (MIT Press, 2025), Kathryn Nave argues that this framework is inadequate for explaining living organisms, which are not merely complex but inherently unstable and continually producing themselves through metabolism. Nave, who is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, defends a bioenactivist view of living organisms in which the chemical and energetic constraints involved in having a metabolism are essential for understanding their actions, in contrast to the “sensor-guided movementism” of the FEP framework.
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  Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025) 04.04.2026 43min

  The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech. Cory Arcangel (b. 1978)—perhaps best known for Super Mario Clouds, the most referenced artistic game hack in art history—became one of the first artists from a new generation of punk DIY–new media geeks to capture the attention of the art world.Combining the hands-on skills from the 1990s net art scene and the 2010s post-internet art’s fondness for memes and the generic image, Arcangel demonstrated the way cultural expressions are intimately connected to media technologies and how these technologies can be pranked for cultural critique. In The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice (MIT Press, 2025), Eivind Røssaak shows how Arcangel’s body of work defines a particular strain of postconceptual art that is fundamental for understanding the digital world we live in.Today, the question is not what comes first, humans or machines, but what the forces regulating expressive flows are. Arcangel’s aesthetic and micropolitical critique of mediation at the level of codes and chips enables us to think critically with computational articulations through specific aesthetic clashes and disjunctions, identified in the book as critical “flow-cut arrangements.” This book explores three dominant arrangements in Arcangel’s work—the flow-break hack, the flow-remix hack, and the flow-parody hack—that pinpoint areas of both creativity and concern before and after platform capitalism.Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas.
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  Ben Collier on Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy 30.03.2026 1val

  Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology at University of St. Gallen, talk to Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer in Digital Methods in the Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies department at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, about his book, _Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy_, as well as some of his other work. The book examines one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, Tor, the overlay network that allows for anonymous communication, best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. Collier takes a community-centered approach and examines the many different reasons and motivations people become involved in using and maintaining the platform. The trio also talk about various other projects and themes, including Collier’s current project on the visual and aesthetic standardization of public security infrastructure, like barriers and bollards.
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  E. and H. Heron, "Flaxman Low: Occult Detective" (MIT Press, 2026) 15.03.2026 24min

  Flaxman Low, literature’s first professional, full-time “occult detective”—that is, an intrepid investigator who deploys the scientific method when tackling paranormal phenomena—appeared in a dozen stories first published from 1898–1899. Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (MIT Press, 2026), the latest edition to the Radium Age series from MIT Press, is introduced and discussed by Dr. Alexander B. Joy. Flaxman Low’s creators, the mother-and-son team Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard and Hesketh “Hex” Prichard (who published as “E. and H. Heron”), endowed the Oxford-trained psychologist with the bravery and acumen to tackle every sort of adversary from ghosts, mummies, and vampires to a mushroom mannequin. Both less credulous and less cynical than earlier fictional investigators of the spirit world, Low always triumphs in the end . . . but not before scientifically demonstrating that even the most outré incidents and situations can’t hold a candle to the bizarre capacities of the human mind. 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.
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  Carlin Wing, "Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play" (MIT Press, 2026) 11.03.2026 44min

  Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play (MIT Press, 2026) follows an array of bouncing balls through the histories of nonelectronic and electronic games, across the spectrum of play, game, and sport, and into the domains of physics, material science, animation, and computing. The book’s focus on bounce sidesteps the focus on play found in much of the game studies literature and broadens the scope of game history by spotlighting an interaction that is central to thousands of physical and digital games and sports. The book is divided into three sections that introduce different kinds of bounce to address the matter of the ball, the virtuality of bounce, and bounded spectacle: Ricochet in ancient tennis is set against modern tennis’s true bounce; squash and stretch in animation serves as a mirror of the pings and pongs of computer bounce; and the bounce feel in Electronic Art’s FIFA video game series and pok ta pok of the Mesoamerican game ulama elaborate the contrasting positions of these two mythological games. Carlin Wing is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Scripps College. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.