Featuring a field guide for a new dawn of natural history; an accessible and authoritative guide to AI; and a much-needed corrective to a dangerous blind faith in expertise
At the MIT Press, we strive to cross disciplinary boundaries and eschew orthodoxies. We believe knowledge should be shared widely and mobilized for action, and that books can change lives. Our Spring 2025 seasonal catalog features a carefully curated selection of titles that explore the most pressing issues of our time. These wide-ranging works offer both thought-provoking insights and practical guidance.
The human relationship to information looms large in this intellectual moment, in step with the growing role of AI in our personal and professional lives. Whether we can trust our information sources, be they human or machine generated, impacts everything from the geopolitics of climate change to how we make decisions, do science, and create art.
Highlights from this rich season include Menno Schilthuizen’s The Urban Naturalist, a book that calls on us all to be citizen scientists by exploring the natural delights of our urban habitats, using some new technologies in the process. De Kai’s Raising AI provides an accessible framework to navigate the enormous impact of AI upon human culture, values, and flow of information. In The Silicon Shrink, Daniel Oberhaus explains why the race to apply AI in psychiatry is so dangerous. And in The Weaponization of Expertise, Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson investigate the dark side of the equation “knowledge = power.”
As we navigate an increasingly complex and interconnected world, you can rely on books from the MIT Press to keep you informed and engaged. Read on to explore just a few of the books publishing by the MIT Press this spring, or explore our entire catalog of forthcoming releases.
The Urban Naturalist: How to Make the City Your Scientific Playground by Menno Schilthuizen
Imagine taking your smartphone-turned-microscope to an empty lot and discovering a rare mason bee that builds its nest in empty snail shells. Or a miniature spider that hunts ants and carries their corpses around. With a team of citizen scientists, that’s exactly what Menno Schilthuizen did—one instance in the evolutionary biologist’s campaign to take natural science to the urban landscape where most of us live today. In this delightful book, The Urban Naturalist, Schilthuizen invites us to join him, to embark on a new age of discovery, venturing out as intrepid explorers of our own urban habitat—and maybe in the process do the natural world some good.
Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick by Murray Carpenter
If we knew that Coca-Cola was among the deadliest products in our diet, would we continue drinking it in such great quantities? The Coca-Cola Company has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure we don’t find out, as this damning exposé makes patently clear. Marshaling the findings of extensive research and deep investigative reporting, Murray Carpenter describes in Sweet and Deadly the damage Coke does to America’s health—and the remarkable campaign of disinformation conducted by the company to keep consumers in the dark.
Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World—and the Future by Cass R. Sunstein
If you’re injuring someone, you should stop—and pay for the damage you’ve caused. Why, this book asks, does this simple proposition, generally accepted, not apply to climate change? In Climate Justice, a bracing challenge to status quo thinking on the ethics of climate change, renowned author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein clearly frames what’s at stake and lays out the moral imperative: When it comes to climate change, everyone must be counted equally, regardless of when they live or where they live—which means that wealthy nations, which have disproportionately benefited from greenhouse gas emissions, are obliged to help future generations and people in poor nations that are particularly vulnerable.
Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future by De Kai
In a world where AI will change everything, we need a leader in this radical new technology to illuminate the impact of “the automation of thought” on our way of life. How is AI’s widespread everyday use impacting our world, our minds, and our future—not just as a technical innovation, but as a mode of culture? Should we be afraid? Longtime AI trailblazer De Kai brings decades of his paradigm-shifting work at the nexus of AI and society to help audiences make sense of our interactions with AI at both personal and collective levels—ethically and responsibly.
The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum by Daniel Oberhaus
AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can’t afford or can’t access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink, Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems, he writes, have vanishingly little evidence that they improve patient outcomes, but the risks they pose have less to do with technological shortcomings than with the application of deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale.
The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism by Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson
Experts are not infallible. Treating them as such has done us all a grave disservice, and, as The Weaponization of Expertise makes painfully clear, given rise to the very populism that all-knowing experts and their elite coterie decry. Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson use the devastating example of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate their case, revealing how the hubris of all-too-human experts undermined—perhaps irreparably—public faith in elite policymaking. Paradoxically, by turning science into dogmatism, the overweening elite response has also proved deeply corrosive of expertise itself—in effect, doing exactly what elite policymakers accuse their critics of doing.