The MIT Press

06/05/2026

"I’ve always loved the clown—for its abjection and patheticness, to be honest. Being q***r in the ’90s, clowns were a symbol of putting on the brave face, putting on the smile. They’re on the fringes of so many subcultures."

Great Q&A with Michelle Tea of Dopamine Books:

Why has the culturati developed such an appetite for the oft-maligned performance mode? A new anthology from Michelle Tea might have the answer.

06/04/2026

Today, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and MIT Press announce a new joint mathematics book series, POLYMATH, which will present readers with rich, accessible, and irresistible mathematics books for a general audience.

The first book in the series will be Double-Take: A Field Guide to Optical Illusions, Magic, and Movie Tricks Arising from Perspective Geometry by acclaimed mathematician Annalisa Crannell, publishing in fall 2027. In her Double-Take, Crannell investigates how artists, magicians, and Hollywood cinematographers exploit the geometry of perspective to baffle, tease, and hoodwink the viewer.






Read more. Link in comments.

06/04/2026

We do a lot of sneering at “virtue signaling.” It’s time to rethink our approach, argue Michael Brownstein and Alex Madva, authors of "Somebody Should Do Something."

Yes, it's good to do good things. It may be even more effective to tell people you're doing them.

06/03/2026

"You need to actively seek out situations in which you are forced to confront your own thoughts and emotions. That has the most effect.”

There is more to running than just training your muscles and improving your stamina. It is also a mental sport, and maybe even more so than previously believed.

06/02/2026

"Initiated by chronically online crusaders, these degradation ceremonies serve no purpose beyond affirming the moral rectitude of their participants."

A deep dive on sensitivity reads & publishing culture featuring Adam Szetela's "That Book Is Dangerous!" (out next week in paperback):

Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! examines the emergence of a new job in publishing—secondary readers who comb through books for possible offenses.

06/01/2026

Cindy Cohn is one of the world's leading advocates for digital righ...

06/01/2026

During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy built a vast underwater listening system to detect enemy submarines. But its hydrophones picked up something unexpected: whale songs traveling across enormous distances. As David Rothenberg recounts, a military surveillance project accidentally became an archive of ocean life, revealing a hidden world of moans, clicks, pulses, and acoustic connection beneath the sea. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-cold-wars-accidental-whale-observatory/

05/29/2026

For the cinephiles: A24's "Backrooms" is out today. ICYMI, here’s a great piece on the surprisingly deep history behind Backrooms — touching on everything from Gothic literature to internet folklore to video game culture to ’80s nostalgia.

“Above all, Backrooms captures a feeling — and one that I would argue has become a defining condition of life under Corporate America: dread.”

A new spin on an old genre replaces flesh-and-blood monsters with the mundanity of modern bureaucracy.

05/28/2026

People are "turning to [A.I.] like an object of worship," says Greg M. Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard and MIT and the author of "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation." "But Pope Leo is saying the true source of virtue is in humanity and God.”

"The pope is really doing the Lord’s work here, and I say that as an atheist. There are so few institutions left on planet Earth that have the gravitas, the strength, the communal network to take on this phenomenon, which is trying to become inevitable and superhuman.”

The American pope wants to take artificial intelligence down a notch. Is he challenging the tech companies, or will tech take over the papacy?

05/28/2026

Glass walls, steel railings, concrete, odd prefab huts: Modernist homes baffled America. Gabriele Neri shows how cartoonist Alan Dunn turned that confusion into biting satire.

With biting satire, Alan Dunn captured how 20th-century architectural trends left everyday Americans astonished, baffled, and enraged.