MIT Press staff members share their favorites from the iconic Essential Knowledge series as we reach a landmark 100 books
The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series—a much-beloved series of accessible, concise, beautifully produced books on topics of current interest—reaches a milestone of 100 books published this fall.
Written by leading thinkers, the books in this series deliver expert overviews of subjects that range from the cultural and the historical to the scientific and the technical. In today’s era of instant information gratification, we have ready access to opinions, rationalizations, and superficial descriptions. Much harder to come by is the foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world. Essential Knowledge books fill that need.
To celebrate 100 books in publication, MIT Press staff members have assembled our own favorites from the series. Read on to explore our staff picks, or discover all of the books in the Essential Knowledge series.
Espionage: A Concise History by Kristie Macrakis
Staff pick by Angela Schmidt, Sales and Marketing Assistant
Espionage is one of the most secret of human activities. It is also, as the popularity of spy stories suggests, one of the most intriguing. This book pulls the veil back on the real world of espionage, revealing how spying actually works. In a refreshingly clear, concise manner, Kristie Macrakis guides readers through the shadowy world of espionage, from the language and practice of spycraft to its role in international politics, its bureaucratic underpinnings, and its transformation in light of modern technology. As thorough—and thoroughly readable—as it is compact, the book is an ideal introduction to the history and anatomy of espionage.
Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Shifman
Staff pick by Nick Lindsay, Director of Journals and Open Access: “A crisp, well written guide to how memes work, why they’re important, the subtle distinctions between memes and other kinds of viral communications, and much more.”
In December 2012, the exuberant video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video—“Mitt Romney Style,” “NASA Johnson Style,” “Egyptian Style,” and many others. “Gangnam Style” (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture.
The Book by Amaranth Borsuk
Staff pick by David Olsen, Publicist
What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book’s development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.
Metadata by Jeffrey Pomerantz
Staff pick by Corinne Gould, Manager of Advertising and Promotions: “This book helped me conceptualize how metadata can represent the complexity of an object (a book or a journal) in a simpler, more discoverable and distinguishable form, but more than that, Pomerantz’s accessible guide energized and empowered me to see the creative and analytical skills I could bring to a press.”
When “metadata” became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was “only” collecting metadata about phone calls—information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location—and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In this book, Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadata.
Nihilism by Nolen Gertz
Staff pick by Nicholas DiSabatino, Manager of Global Publicity and Author Relations
When someone is labeled a nihilist, it’s not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, “an ideology of nothing. “ Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.