The MIT Press

07/25/2025

Caroline Boudoux, author of "It Goes without Saying: Taking the Guesswork Out of Your PhD in Engineering," shares 12 things that every PhD student should know via MIT Technology Review:

Here’s the practical advice nobody gave me before I started my PhD.

07/24/2025

Part-memoir, part-guidebook, "Sentido" (publishing October 4th) is an inspiring account of the power of design, diversity, and sisterhood from seasoned design leader Alison Rand.

The book derives its title from the Spanish word for “sense” or “to make sense of." Through her authentic storytelling, Rand bridges heart and business acumen to chronicle her journey as a multi-ethnic woman from New York City through a male-dominated, largely white corporate world in her evolution to becoming a design leader.

Written with broad appeal, "Sentido" is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring the intersection of technology and society. Whether you are a Gen Z corporate worker, an identity-conscious millennial, or a Gen Xer seeking relatedness, inspiration, and representation, this book will empower you to find confidence in your voice, experience, and contributions, while also helping you become a more empathetic ally for the underrepresented in today’s corporate and professional work spheres.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/4lwdL75

07/24/2025

"There might be many reasons why scientists resort to spin tactics, but a central motivation appears to be simple 'careerism,' where scientists are disproportionately rewarded if they find/report statistically significant and exciting results as opposed to using their work to promote cautious messages and (boring) null findings. Thus, maybe the neuroscience of psychopathy has a problem with scientific spin?"

If there is no clear evidence of brain abnormalities in psychopathic persons, why do so many scientists keep portraying psychopathy as a neurodevelopmental disorder?

07/23/2025

AI-generated images are everywhere on social media, making it harder than ever to tell what's real from what's fake. In "Fake Photos," Hany Farid, an expert in photo forensics, offers a concise and accessible guide to techniques for detecting doctored and fake images in photographs and digital media: https://bit.ly/3Imr5MN

07/22/2025

Today is World Brain Day! The perfect opportunity to browse The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS). Written by leading scholars, these concise articles provide tools for understanding what is at stake in the study of cognition and intelligence, especially as it shapes fundamental issues facing society today.

With over 100 articles available and many more to come, their new Thematic Collections page organizes articles by subject area for easier discovery. Take a look: https://oecs.mit.edu/themes

We'll be attending in San Francisco later this month. Find us during the conference to learn more about OECS!

07/21/2025

There's a deadly gap between knowledge about how to live a healthier, longer life and how we actually live. In "The Formula for Better Health" (publishing September 30th), former CDC director Tom Frieden shows how we can apply the tools of public health and avert foretold tragedies by using his transformative formula.

In this book, you will step into laboratories that solve mysteries and expose deadly deceptions. You’ll meet a trailblazing epidemiologist who survived a N**i concentration camp, a seventeenth-century cloth merchant who discovered public health’s superpower, and a brilliant Irish doctor knighted for unlocking the cure for tuberculosis. You’ll also learn how disease detectives ended the largest outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the United States, what caused the deadliest mistake during the COVID pandemic, and why we ignore urgent medical warnings. Most importantly, you’ll find out how to stop today’s leading killers.

Learn more:
https://bit.ly/3Ix5BwD

07/20/2025

The evolutionary story behind meat consumption is more complicated — and less convincing — than it sounds.

07/19/2025

"To all three authors, the mistakes of the pandemic should inspire a deeper reckoning in science that allows for more questions and freer debate."

Undark Magazine reviewed David Zweig's "An Abundance of Caution" alongside Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson’s book "The Weaponization of Expertise": https://bit.ly/44vu79Z

Two recent books make an impassioned case that in recent years, politics has tainted both health policy and science.

07/18/2025

Our Fall 2025 catalog is here! Highlights include former CDC Director Tom Frieden’s visionary guide to defeating the world’s deadliest diseases, Cass Sunstein’s powerful defense of liberalism, an alarming exposé of the threats to literary freedom in the age of social media, and a breathtaking visual dictionary of 2,000 Japanese words for rain (the inspiration behind our cover).

Browse the catalog on Issuu: https://bit.ly/3GsCZEm
Or Edelweiss: https://bit.ly/4kKbgNt
Or download the PDF directly to your device: https://bit.ly/46tPZnR

07/18/2025

We're pleased to announce that 13 MIT Press journals ranked in the top quartile of their fields in 2024 with exceptional impact factors, a testament to the rigorous work of their editorial teams: https://mitpress.mit.edu/mit-press-journals-top-three-categories-with-2024-impact-factors/

Our journals claimed the top position in three distinct categories:
▪️ Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics in both Linguistics and Language and Linguistics
▪️ International Security Journal in International Relations

Please join us in congratulating them!

07/17/2025

In the 1860s, German polymath Hermann von Helmholtz proposed that prediction is the fundamental principle behind intelligence. Many neuroscientists and AI researchers have since built on Helmholtz's insight, but only recently has it become plausible to imagine that prediction really is the whole story.

In "What Is Intelligence?" (publishing September 16th), Blaise Agüera y Arcas—one of the world's leading artificial intelligence researchers at Google—argues that the prediction principle, when fully understood and interpreted broadly, may explain not only intelligence, but life itself. The book offers a unified picture of intelligence from molecules to organisms, societies, and AI systems, drawing from computer science, machine learning, biology, physics, philosophy, and neuroscience. Combining technical rigor and recent findings from Agüera y Arcas, his research team, and colleagues, "What Is Intelligence?" argues that certain modern AI systems have genuine claims to intelligence, consciousness, and free will.

"What Is Intelligence?" will also be made available upon publication. Learn more: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049955/what-is-intelligence/

07/17/2025

New arrival: Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age, edits by Joshua Glenn (HiLobrow), a collection of short stories about superpowers written between 1902 and 1928. It’s out next month from The MIT Press.