The MIT Press

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.

05/27/2026

In the 1920s, the American psychologist Sidney Pressey invented a "teaching machine" that could administer a multiple-choice test and grade it in real time. As Audrey Watters writes in her 2021 book, "Teaching Machines," the ed-tech innovators of yore—including Pressey’s better-known rival B. F. Skinner—spoke about their devices “in ways almost identical to those who push for personalized learning today."

“I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block,” Jessica Winter writes. Read her report on the push for A.I. in education.

05/26/2026

“Sack the charlatans, laugh out anyone who promises a ‘cure’ to aging or carries a trademark, and give space to reproducible basic research."

Fabulous review of Saul Justin Newman's forthcoming book "Morbid" via Science News Magazine:

Scientist Saul Justine Newman debunks high-profile longevity research and antiaging “medicine” in a new book.

05/22/2026

1,600 respondents answered 10 questions about central issues in physics, from the Big Bang to black holes, cosmic inflation, and quantum gravity. No one agreed on anything.

1,600 respondents answered 10 questions about central issues in physics, from the Big Bang to black holes, cosmic inflation, and quantum gravity. The results are…interesting.

05/21/2026

The hantavirus has found itself caught between scientific concern, media sensationalism, and global health melancholia. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/pleasure-plague-and-panic-why-cruise-ship-outbreaks-still-haunt-us/

05/20/2026

Elongated spines. Flat feet. Orange skin? Humans could evolve to look quite different on Mars. Scott Solomon, the author of "Becoming Martian," explains how for RealClearScience: https://bit.ly/3MCwGky

The humans who move to Mars might not remain

05/19/2026

Stanislaw Lem's "His Master's Voice" made The Atlantic's summer reading list!

"What would happen if humanity received a signal from outer space? In science fiction, the answer is usually something spectacularly bad, such as an alien invasion—or, more rarely, spectacularly good, such as a technological quantum leap. But when the scientists in Lem’s strange and thought-provoking novel detect a constantly repeating cosmic message, they’re left to solve a baffling mystery. Reading like a hybrid of Nabokov and Asimov, this book takes the form of a memoir by a mathematician who is recruited for a Manhattan Project–scale effort to decipher the signal. The premise allows Lem, the Polish sci-fi master, to reflect on questions that are just as challenging today as they were when the novel was published, in 1968: Are we alone in the universe? Would we recognize nonhuman minds even if we found them? And could any alien be more dangerous to humanity than we are to ourselves?" — Adam Kirsch

Browse the complete list here: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/05/summer-reading-2026/686880/

05/18/2026

If you want to have a story published alongside some of the leading names in speculative fiction, now's your chance! We’re publishing an anthology linked to the Protopian Prize, a fiction contest for hopeful future visions of democratic governance and AI that serves human flourishing. On top of the $5,000 prize itself, the two contest winners will have their stories published in the anthology, edited by Gideon Lichfield and Ruthanna Emrys. The deadline is July 31. More about the prize and how to submit a story here:

The Protopian Prize is a fiction contest inviting you to share your vision of people working toward liberatory futures, meeting obstacles, and making real change. “Protopian”—a word coined by Kevin Kelly, one of our contest's judges—means an achievable, optimistic future characterized by con...