The MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social

"In their 2001 book, 'The Myth of the Paperless Office,' Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper show how digital tools rarely eliminate older forms of work. Instead, they reshape them." theconversation.com/just-looping-y…

"Saul Justin Newman has a deliciously wicked wit and an addictively original writing style." —Mary Roach Saul Newman's rollicking takedown of the longevity industry and bullshit science is out next month. Pre-order it here: mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052719/…

Great piece by Hal Foster, art critic and author of many MIT Press books, in which he demystifies the act of seeing an artwork: theparisreview.org/blog/2026/04/2… via @parisreview

The borderlands of sleep were patrolled by poets, novelists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts, all aware of how sleep and insomnia could, as Samuel Johnson put it, carry us into "a kind of twilight existence" somewhere "between dreaming and reasoning." thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/daydreamers-an…

"My prediction is that within 50 years, biology will be the engineering material of choice, and many of the people reading this article will become bioengineers." Terrific wide-ranging interview with @AdrianWoolfson at @IEEESpectrum: spectrum.ieee.org/synthetic-biol…

The First Gilded Age bred oligarchs. The Second breeds monopolies. The latest from Mordecai Kurz, author of "Private Power and Democracy's Decline," out next month: time.com/article/2026/0…

From International Security: "Why Populists Love Dead Soldiers and Hate Live Officers: Right-wing populist leaders love soldiers (especially fallen ones) and the trappings of military life. But their love affair with the military rarely endures." international-security.simplecast.com/episodes/10-wh…

In 2006, a retired AT&T technician walked into the Electronic Frontier Foundation's office and helped expose the NSA’s “Big Brother machine,” launching a years-long lawsuit against AT&T over mass surveillance. thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblo…

Interested in the LLM vs. linguistic theory debate? My just out book will tell you (almost) all about it. mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052009/…

Revisiting some of the secondary literature for "The Différance Engine" @mitpress and I am again finding a lot of brilliant material in Briankle Chang's "Deconstruction Communication" @UMinnPress. Though the book is now 30 years old, it seems like it was written for #LLM #AI.

"This beautifully told story is important for anyone interested in the science of language and its neural encoding, and their relation to the promises of generative AI." —Danny Fox, Anshen-Chomsky Professor of Language & Thought, MIT mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052009/…

"What's interesting is that the lower their testosterone, the more involved they become with the mother and infant postnatally," says James Rilling, who in 2024 published 'Father Nature,' a book exploring the science of fatherhood." bbc.com/future/article…

Socially responsible investing mostly reassures investors while changing little. As our book of the week underscores, markets reward profit, not ethics, and portfolio choices cannot fix exploitation or climate destruction. By Brad Swanson on @mitpress buff.ly/24EUT85

New this week from the MIT Press. Happy publication day to our authors! 📚

A little hors d'oeuvre from "The Différance Engine" forthcoming from @mitpress: The reason why LLMs are so disturbing--especially for philosophers--is that they are writing machines. And philosophy since at least the time of Plato's "Phaedrus" has had a major issue with writing.

Very pleased to announce *two* new volumes in the October Files series, on Pierre Huyghe and Glenn Ligon. More info here: mitpress.mit.edu/series/october…

Chatbots may feel new, but anxiety over “writing machines” has bedeviled writers for decades. From Roald Dahl to ELIZA, W. Patrick McCray traces the long history behind today’s fears about AI, authorship, and human creativity. thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-is-author…

"A shift in the timing of blooms without an attendant shift in when their pollinators are active reduces how many flowers can produce fruit as well as crucial food resources for the pollinators." thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-the-craba…

Today, neuroplasticity is taken as fact, but for much of the 150-year history of neuroscience, the adult brain was thought to be static. quantamagazine.org/a-new-type-of-…

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