A preview of the MIT Press’s most anticipated books of the month
The books on offer from the MIT Press in March include Per Espen Stokes’s latest work on creating a healthy growth economy, Tomorrow’s Economy; a book on better understanding our microbiome and its effect on human health, Gut Feelings; and a collection of essays highlighting the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems. For even more, you can also browse all of the MIT Press’s upcoming titles.
Brave Green World: How Science Can Save Our Planet by Chris Forman and Claire Asher
In nature, there is little chemical waste; nearly every atom is a resource to be utilized by organisms, ensuring that all the available matter remains in a perpetual cycle. By contrast, human systems of energy production and manufacturing are linear; the end product is waste. In Brave Green World, Chris Forman and Claire Asher offer an unblinkered yet realistic and positive vision of a future in which we can combine biology and manufacturing to solve our central problems of waste and pollution.
“An ingenious, if highly speculative, save-the-planet proposal that emphasizes science over politics.” —Kirkus Reviews
You might also like Effective Advocacy: Lessons from East Asia’s Environmentalists by Mary Alice Haddad
Tomorrow’s Economy: A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth by Per Espen Stoknes
In Tomorrow’s Economy, Per Espen Stoknes reframes the hot-button issue of economic growth. Going beyond the usual pro-growth versus anti-growth debate, Stoknes calls for healthy growth. Healthy economic growth is more regenerative than wasteful, repairs problems rather than greenwashing them, and restores equity rather than exacerbating inequalities.
“Too often growth supporters and anti-growthers come to loggerheads, neglecting the crucial issue of what kind of economic growth we’re creating. Stoknes’s growth compass is a crucial tool to guide us toward a finer future.” —Hunter Lovins, coauthor of Natural Capitalism
You might also like The Flip Side of Free: Understanding the Economics of the Internet by Michael Kende
Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health by Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty
Our understanding of how to treat and prevent diseases has been transformed by knowledge of the microbiome—the rich ecosystem of microorganisms in and on every human. In Gut Feelings, Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show why we must go beyond the older, myopic view of microorganisms as our enemies to a broader understanding of the microbiome as a parallel civilization that we need to understand, respect, and engage with for the benefit of our own health.
“A comprehensive and compelling portrait of the ‘bugs’ that shape us from early childhood through old age and their role in human health.” —Mark Hyman, New York Times best-selling author of Food Fix; Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine
You might also like Hidden Wonders: The Subtle Dialogue Between Physics and Elegance by Etienne Guyon, José Bico, Étienne Reyssat and Benoît Roman
The Power of Experiments: Decision Making in a Data-Driven World by Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman
Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you’ve probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of different online experiences. In this book, now in paperback, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world.
“A fast, accessible read that offers a good overview of the applications, promise, and perils of experimentation.” —Strategy and Business
You might also like Cognitive Choice Modeling by Zheng Joyce Wang and Jerome R. Busemeyer
You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape by Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner
Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.
“This excellent book gives us timely and much-needed guidance for thinking about the overall information ecology that we are immersed in—including pathways to a better future.” —Jessica Beyer, University of Washington; author of Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization
You might also like The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives edited by Michael P. Lynch
Your Computer Is on Fire edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society.
You might also like The Politics of Dating Apps: Gender, Sexuality, and Emergent Publics in Urban China by Lik Sam Chan
Putting Skill to Work: How to Create Good Jobs in Uncertain Times by Nichola Lowe
The United States has a jobs problem—not enough well-paying jobs to go around and not enough clear pathways leading to them. Skill development is critical for addressing this employment crisis, but there are many unresolved questions about who has skill, how it is attained, and whose responsibility it is to build skills over time. In this book, Nichola Lowe tells the stories of pioneering workforce intermediaries that harness this ambiguity around skill to extend economic opportunity to workers at the bottom of the labor market.
“A bold, perfectly timed, and attainable vision.” —David Autor, Ford Professor of Economics, MIT, and Codirector of the MIT Task Force on Work of the Future
You might also like Just Money: Mission-Driven Banks and the Future of Finance by Katrin Kaufer and Lillian Steponaitis