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MIT Press Reader

Phenomenology could uncover the truth of love.

It is widely believed that ‘love is blind’, but philosophers would argue that it is actually a radical insight that lets us receive things as they are. Professor of philosophy Chad Engelland explores the philosophical realm of phenomenology, which investigates the experience of experience. In this profound examination of the concept of love, he explains its vital role in our lines of thought and reveals why it frees us to understand the truth in the world.

Sean Crisden

Amo, ergo cogito: a philosopher on love as a way of seeing

"The pursuit of human metrics has a rich and fascinating history."

To measure was to apprehend and be made accountable, and nowhere was this more resonant than in the identification and classification of criminals. Jessica Helfand explores how, in the 19th century, Alphonse Bertillon’s problematic index cards allowed for detailed measurements of the bodies and faces of criminals to be logged and filed for easy retrieval by police precincts, which in part remains a critical function in law enforcement today.

Simon Mattacks

Alphonse Bertillon and the troubling pursuit of human metrics

Why did the Russians exile those true to their cause?

The failures of the communist project are often overlooked. Bini Adamczak guides us through the era that saw Soviet Russians deport German and Austrian communist emigrants back to Nazi Germany, months before the beginning of World War II. In this striking look into the Hitler-Stalin pact, we discover what happened to these deportees on their return.

The Nazi-Soviet pact: a betrayal of communists by communists

An unstoppable wave of competitive innovation is heading our way.

Awareness of the limitations of our untrained mind when imagining a different world is key to creating a new narrative for the future. Psychologist Per Espen Stoknes reveals how research into the historical five main waves of innovation has led to major societal shifts. In this optimistic forecast of the years to come, he explains why we will see an inevitable separation from the ecologically destructive fossil-fuel economy if this pattern continues.

What 250 years of innovation history reveals about our green future

There's a linguistic reason why it's lost on many people.

Irony is notoriously difficult to understand, and over time its meaning has shifted to cover a range of feelings. Psychology professor Roger Kreuz provides a handy guide to distinguishing the notoriously slippery concept from its distant cousins: coincidence, satire, parody, and paradox — hoping that we can find some clarity on the complicated term.

Michael Satow

What irony is not

Freud’s unknown escape attempt.

During World War Two, President Lázaro Cárdenas — one of the most popular leaders in 20th-century history — had turned his Mexico into a haven for persecuted intellectuals: and Sigmund Freud could have been one of them. Rubén Gallo explores the fascinating campaign to bring Sigmund Freud to North America.

This excerpt was originally published in The MIT Press Reader in May 2019.

Jodie Bentley

Mexico's little-known attempt to save Freud from the Nazis

From Mesopotamia to South America: how our use of plants transcended mere economic value.

For thousands of years, plants have been cultivated not only for economic reasons but to serve magic, lure immortal beings, and for aesthetic pleasure. In this excerpt from George Gessert's book "Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution," we take a closer look into the fascinating history of ornamental plants.

Sharon Bott

The spectacular rise of ornamental plants

Have laws on weed ever been truly relaxed?

The ancient history of marijuana has created a false narrative that the prohibitions of the 20th century were the first of their kind. Yet, as Ryan Stoa explores, from Ancient China to 14th century Egypt, this has been a contentious issue for those in power.

  “Our marijuana-farming ancestors of the past could have told us, based on experience, that when prohibitionists come after cannabis, they will do so in predictable ways. They will use rhetoric to associate the plant with violence, depravity, and other more dangerous drugs, as the European temperance movement did in France and Great Britain. They will use a militarized show of force to eradicate crops, persecute farmers, and dissuade the next generation from growing marijuana, as the Ottomans did in Egypt. They will portray marijuana users as religious extremists or dangerous minorities, as Pope Innocent VIII did in Europe, Sunni Muslims did in the Middle East, or white South Africans did in South Africa.”

A brief global history of the war on cannabis

Exploring their often-humble final resting places, from Alvar Aalto to Frank Lloyd Wright.

One could say an architect's building, if well-received, ends up becoming a monument to the architects themselves. But what about their gravesites? Are they just as magnificent as some of the things they created? That's the premise of Henry H. Kuehn's book, "Architects’ Gravesites: A Serendipitous Guide", which offers a wonderful compilation of photographs and notes on them. Here, we listen to a fascinating excerpt from it.

A guide to the gravesites of architects

The history of British computing is rooted in discriminations that continue to have a negative effect today.

By exploiting women, British companies gained all the benefits of powerful mainframes with little labour overhead — and no long-term commitment to their computing workforce. In this excerpt from Mar Hicks' book "Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing", published in The MIT Press Reader, the technology historian describes why the "story of British women in computing is one of labour devaluation and sexism that ultimately led to the downfall of a strong national computing industry, and was detrimental to a nation’s overall fortunes."

Britain’s sexist campaign to sell computers

From the invention of the television to the masterful craft of PR strategies that followed it.

Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by moulding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff. In this short adaptation of historian Kerryn Higgs' book "Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet", published in The MIT Press Reader, she guides us through the key events that drove that change.

"Once World War II was over, consumer culture took off again throughout the developed world, partly fueled by the deprivation of the Great Depression and the rationing of the wartime years and incited with renewed zeal by corporate advertisers using debt facilities and the new medium of television. Stuart Ewen, in his history of the public relations industry, saw the birth of commercial radio in 1921 as a vital tool in the great wave of debt-financed consumption in the 1920s — 'a privately owned utility, pumping information and entertainment into people’s homes.'"

Emma Powell

A brief history of consumer culture

"One way to guarantee a conversation without a conclusion is to ask a group of people what nature is."

For over a century, conflicting views of wild nature created a rift between indigenous people and misguided conservationists. In this superb excerpt from Mark Dowie's book "Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples" published in The MIT Press Reader, we take a closer look into the complex debate behind defining what 'wilderness' is.

This story was originally published in The MIT Press Reader in October 2019.

The myth of a wilderness without humans

What would have happened if the Luddites had won their battle against alienating technology?

In The MIT Press Reader, Miriam A. Cherry — a professor of Law, and Associate Dean for Research & Engagement at Saint Louis University Law School — offers us a glimpse of an alternative economic and industrial history and future.

"In common parlance, the term 'Luddite' means someone who is anti-technology, or maybe, just not adept at using technology. Historically, however, the Luddite movement was a reaction born of industrial accidents and dangerous machines, poor working conditions, and the fact that there were no unions to represent worker interests during England’s initial period of industrialization. The Luddites did not hate technology; they only channelled their anger toward machine-breaking because it had nowhere else to go.

This is an alternate history (an encyclopedia entry from circa 2500) that depends on the critical assumption that the Luddites succeeded in their industrial campaign in the 1810s. Instead of techno-determinism (that the development of technology is inevitable, and that society will alter and adjust to it) the Encyclopedia entry notes that the Luddites, in their success, formulated a different, yet productive, relationship between society and the development of technology."

Emily Woo Zeller

The future encyclopedia of Luddism

14 to 21-year-olds successfully emulated the United States government in the early 1900s.

In an era when public opinion favoured sheltering young people from adult society, the Freeville republic and its many descendants immersed them in carefully designed models of that society instead. Jennifer S. Light, an MIT professor and author, tells us its peculiar history in The MIT Press Reader.

This story was originally published in The MIT Press Reader in October 2020.

Betsy Foldes Meiman

When kids ran the world: a forgotten history of the junior republic movement

Journey into the past with this excerpt from the acclaimed science-fiction author's memoir.

From beds and books to toy-homicide: Stanisław Lem's memories from his younger years were forever shaped by the home he lived in, the objects that inhabited it and his relationship with his father. Listen to the wonderful, meditative excerpt from “Highcastle: A Remembrance" originally published in The MIT Press Reader.

"The witnesses to my balcony adventures were two oleanders in large wooden tubs, one white and one pink. I lived with them on terms of neutrality; their presence neither pleased nor bothered me. Inside, there were also plants, distant and stunted relatives of the flora of the south: a rusty palm that kept dying but could not give up the ghost entirely, a philodendron with shiny leaves, and a tiny pine, or maybe it was a fir, which once a year produced clusters of fragrant, young, pale-green needles."

More on the author:
Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), a writer called “worthy of the Nobel Prize” by the New York Times, was an internationally renowned author of novels, short stories, literary criticism, and philosophical essays. His books have been translated into 44 languages and have sold more than 30 million copies.

Stanisław Lem's reflections on the objects of his childhood home

A mind-bending, jargon-free account of the popular interpretation of quantum mechanics.

First explored by the likes of Erwin Schrödinger and Hugh Everett, the idea that multiple universes exist alongside ours — or are created as a consequence of actions done in ours — has since inspired not only scientists and philosophers, but also artists and writers. For Everett, the Many Worlds Interpretation, or MWI, considers the "Universe 'splitting' into different versions of itself when faced with quantum choices, muddying the waters for decades." In this wonderful piece for The MIT Press Reader, John Gribbin gives us a detailed explanation of the MWI, and its conceptual evolution through the years.

"Everett came up with the idea in 1955, when he was a PhD student at Princeton. In the original version of his idea, developed in a draft of his thesis, which was not published at the time, he compared the situation with an amoeba that splits into two daughter cells. If amoebas had brains, each daughter would remember an identical history up until the point of splitting, then have its own personal memories. In the familiar cat analogy, we have one universe, and one cat, before the diabolical device is triggered, then two universes, each with its own cat, and so on... But Everett did point out that since no observer would ever be aware of the existence of the other worlds, to claim that they cannot be there because we cannot see them is no more valid than claiming that the Earth cannot be orbiting around the Sun because we cannot feel the movement."

This story was originally published in The MIT Press Reader in May 2020.