The Mit Press imprint: 939 books
The Least Likely Man
Marshall Nirenberg and the Discovery of the Genetic Code
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2015
How unassuming government researcher Marshall Nirenberg beat James Watson, Francis Crick, and other world-famous scientists in the race to discover the genetic code.
The genetic code is the Rosetta Stone by which we interpret the 3.3 billion letters of human DNA, the alphabet of life, and the...
by Herbert A. Simon
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 1996
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 1996
In this candid and witty autobiography, Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon looks at his distinguished and varied career, continually asking himself whether (and how) what he learned as a scientist helps to explain other aspects of his life.
A brilliant polymath in an age of increasing specialization,...
Engineers for Change
Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2012
An account of conflicts within engineering in the 1960s that helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.
In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change....
Sacrifice Zones
The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States
Language: English
Release Date: September 21, 2012
The stories of residents of low-income communities across the country who took action when pollution from heavy industry contaminated their towns.
Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites....
"Our Kind of Movie"
The Films of Andy Warhol
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2012
A celebrated writer on contemporary art and queer culture argues that Andy Warhol's films enable us to see differently, and to see a different world.
“We didn't think of our movies as underground or commercial or art or porn; they were a little of all of those, but ultimately they were just...
The Trouble with Pleasure
Deleuze and Psychoanalysis
Language: English
Release Date: February 9, 2016
An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan.
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is...
Sympathy for the Traitor
A Translation Manifesto
Language: English
Release Date: April 13, 2018
An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't.
For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation...
by Rebecca Comay, Frank Ruda
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2018
An argument that what is usually dismissed as the “mystical shell” of Hegel's thought—the concept of absolute knowledge—is actually its most “rational kernel.”
This book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the “mystical shell” of Hegel's system proves to be its most “rational...
by Jonathan Westphal
Language: English
Release Date: September 23, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: September 23, 2016
An introduction to the mind–body problem, covering all the proposed solutions and offering a powerful new one.
Philosophers from Descartes to Kripke have struggled with the glittering prize of modern and contemporary philosophy: the mind-body problem. The brain is physical. If the mind is...
by Slavoj Žižek
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2009
The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating...
by James C. Klagge
Language: English
Release Date: December 22, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: December 22, 2010
A new way of looking at Wittgenstein: as an exile from an earlier cultural era.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing....
War Games
A History of War on Paper
Language: English
Release Date: March 16, 2012
The convergence of military strategy and mathematics in war games, from medieval to modern times.
For centuries, both mathematical and military thinkers have used game-like scenarios to test their visions of mastering a complex world through symbolic operations. By the end of World War I, mathematical...
Thinking like a Mall
Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature
Language: English
Release Date: May 29, 2015
A provocative argument that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of “nature” altogether and spoke instead of the built environment.
Environmentalism, in theory and practice, is concerned with protecting nature. But if we have now reached “the end of nature,”...
Relive
Media Art Histories
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2013
Leading historians of the media arts define a new materialist media art history, discussing temporality, geography, ephemerality, and the future.
In Relive, leading historians of the media arts grapple with this dilemma: how can we speak of “new media” and at the same time write the histories...