A guide for reading and gifting for current events readers
It’s our mission to publish books at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design that challenge and empower our readers. To help you uncover your next big idea, we’ve crafted a guide for reading and gifting that’s bursting with titles that exemplify the MIT Press: intellectual daring content, rigorous scholarly standards, a rich interdisciplinary focus, and beautiful distinctive designs.
Read on to discover new current events books, and explore even more big ideas in our full guide.
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Rebel Health: A Field Guide to the Patient-Led Revolution in Medical Care by Susannah Fox
Anyone who has fallen off the conveyer belt of mainstream health care and into the shadowy corners of illness knows what a dark place it is to land. Where is the infrastructure, the information, the guidance? What should you do next? In Rebel Health, Susannah Fox draws on twenty years of tracking the expert networks of patients, survivors, and caregivers who have come of age between the cracks of the health care system to offer a way forward. Covering everything from diabetes to ALS to Moebius Syndrome to chronic disease management, Fox taps into the wisdom of these individuals, learns their ways, and fuels the rebel alliance that is building up our collective capacity for better health.
Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry by Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild
In a world increasingly under surveillance, this cutting-edge documentary collaboration turns the camera on the ever-expanding American security state. Job/Security bears photographic and narrative witness to the people tasked with safeguarding our modern world. In these uniquely revealing interviews and photographs, authors Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild assemble a multifaceted portrait of the labor of security. They offer a close-up, in-depth look at what the near-ubiquitous business of monitoring, guarding, and protecting life and property in the United States means for the individuals who do the work, and for the society they ostensibly serve.
Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth by Karen Bakker
At the uncanny edge of the scientific frontier, Gaia’s Web explores the promise and pitfalls the Digital Age holds for the future of our planet. Instead of the Internet of Things, environmental scientist and tech entrepreneur Karen Bakker asks, why not consider the Internet of Living Things? At the surprising and inspiring confluence of our digital and ecological futures, Bakker explores how the tools of the Digital Age could be mobilized to address our most pressing environmental challenges, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Interspersed with ten elegiac, enigmatic parables, each of which is based on an existing technology, Gaia’s Web evokes the conundrums we face as the World Wide Web intertwines with the Web of Life.
Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals by Christopher J. Preston
The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction: bears in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.