The MIT Press

12/20/2025

Stu Horvath's expansive guide is "a really fascinating read about the tabletop universe." "Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground" is one of Joey Fameli's favorite things! Check out the clip on Adam Savage's Tested:
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxlItBsEsvQlm_F4OzCLUV93GrSPtGJKYt?si=33fmKzgOrHdT_C5R

12/19/2025

For as little as $29, companies like 23andMe promise to tell your genetic origin story. But biologist Carles Lalueza-Fox warns that genetic claims to "Viking” or “Yamnaya” roots are “neither universal nor objective,” and ancestry is just one piece of a bigger puzzle:

If you’re looking for your genetic origin story, ancestry tests will only take you so far.

12/19/2025

Before the ubiquity of personal computers, a group of teens gathered in a New Jersey barn to learn to code, program, and experiment with the interactive world of the future. IEEE Spectrum excerpts "README," a literary history of computers by W. Patrick McCray:

In the 1960s, before PCs and the Internet were a thing, the RESISTORS were O.G. computer hackers, learning to code on old mainframes in a New Jersey barn.

12/18/2025

Our Spring 2026 catalog is here! Highlights include an avian enthusiast's close look at the marvelous engineering of birds, a moving photographic documentary of the Inner Passage, a darkly comedic journey into the science of aging, and a leading expert on race, class, and maternal health's unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US.

Our catalog is free to flip through online via Edelweiss, Issuu, or direct download to your device: https://mitpress.mit.edu/catalogs/

12/17/2025

With more than 100,000 patients in the United States waiting for life-saving organ transplants, the shortage of organs will never be solved if someone must die for someone else to be saved. And yet, a solution is well within reach—xenotransplantation, or the transplanting of organs between different species—a once unimaginable scientific achievement.

Written by Joshua Mezrich, an award-winning transplant surgeon, "Every Living Creature" (out April 7th, 2026) describes the incredible history and promise of inter-species organ transplantation: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051163/every-living-creature/

12/16/2025

"If you want a book that explains the climate challenge without doom or denial, 'Clearing the Air' is a must-read. It’s a hopeful reminder that while the problem is enormous, the progress is real."

Bill Gates recommends Hannah Ritchie's clear-eyed guide to global warming, publishing in February 2026: https://gatesnot.es/3KCml70

In her second book, Clearing the Air, Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data sets the record straight on 50 questions about climate and global warming.

12/15/2025

Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround,” imagined a simple ethical framework for artificial intelligence: Robots must not harm humans. But today, applying such absolute edicts is far from simple. Culture is relative, and moral dilemmas abound, argues AI pioneer De Kai. In an excerpt from his new book “Raising AI,” he says the real danger isn’t rogue machines but a hyperpolarized humanity:

Isaac Asimov’s “Handbook of Robotics” imagined simple rules for machine morality. But reality is a maze of contradictions, biases, and blind spots.

12/15/2025

Proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944, the Second Bill of Rights entitled every American to economic rights that he saw as necessary to political freedom, including the right to a decent home, adequate medical care, and a good education.

Why does the American Constitution lack Roosevelt’s second bill, and why hasn’t it become a part of our constitutional understandings? In "The Second Bill of Rights," Cass Sunstein builds on FDR's call for a "Second Bill of Rights" to argue for a new vision of FDR, constitutional history, and our current political scene: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553841/the-second-bill-of-rights/

12/12/2025

"When it comes to climate fiction, I think the most impactful stories aren’t totalizing, totemic world-ending or world-saving yarns that try to treat the Earth as a broad undifferentiated space. Instead, they’re stories that inhabit very particular geographies and social contexts, and immerse us in the complexities of the climate crisis and multifarious responses to it within a specific community. That was a guiding light for assembling this book."

Clarkesworld Magazine talked to the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination's Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn about their new edited collection, "Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures": https://bit.ly/48MSOAT

Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

12/11/2025

The Press and Open Mind are pleased to announce a partnership with Lyrasis through the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP).

"Support by academic libraries and publishers is central to Open Mind’s mission," the editors stated. "We cannot achieve the dream of providing universal and free access to knowledge without detaching ourselves from corporate publishers."

Learn how your institution can support this initiative to continue providing the latest cognitive science research—free of charge—here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/the-mit-press-and-open-mind-partner-with-lyrasis-to-support-diamond-open-access-publishing-through-the-open-access-community-investment-program/

The Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP), an innovative model for community action, will seek support for MIT Press journal Open Mind through July 2026

12/11/2025

Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. Coming February 10, 2026, Raiford Guins' "King PONG" is the first book dedicated to an unassuming game that changed the world: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051330/king-pong/

12/10/2025

"Sheer retro bliss, no spandex." — James Lovegrove

Learn more about "Before Superman," a Financial Times Best Science Fiction Book of 2025: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553070/before-superman/