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Our Spring 2026 catalog is here! Highlights include an avian enthusiast's close look at the marvelous engineering of birds, a moving photographic documentary of the Inner Passage, a darkly comedic journey into the science of aging, and a leading expert on race, class, and maternal health's unsettling exploration of the persistence of racism in reproductive healthcare in the US.

Our catalog is free to flip through online via Edelweiss, Issuu, or direct download to your device. Go to the link in our bio to start browsing!

There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.

Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories

There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.

Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories

There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.

Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories

There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.

Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories

There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.

Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories

There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.

Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories

There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.

Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories

There’s no single experience of pregnancy and motherhood. It can be joyful, disorienting, intimate, exhausting, and inseparable from the cultural forces around it. This Mother’s Day, we’re sharing a selection of books that honor this complexity and examine motherhood through the lenses of design, history, medicine, and art. Follow the link in bio to browse the list.

Images:
1) Two spreads from Designing Motherhood
2) Designing Motherhood
3) Mother Media
4) Expecting Inequity
5) Supervision
6) Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury
7) Conceiving Histories
8) Two spreads from Conceiving Histories

Shoutout to Asterisk Mag for this fantastic Q&A with MITP author Jon Peterson, encompassing 18th century Prussian wargames, cartography, game design, Dungeons & Dragons, AI, and more.

"Don't sell the role-playing in 1824 short. The game was actually played in the feedback loop, in the dialogue. A referee gives you a situation, you play a commander, you are roleplaying somebody in the field. It’s a level of role-playing purity"

Link to the conversation in our bio.

"An Alphabet for Dreamers" by @sharonsliwinski is a captivating look at how dreams serve as one of our most powerful ways to understand and radically change our world.

Each short chapter engages with a dream from the historical record—from both the recent and distant past—to show how these experiences can help us make sense of profound social conflicts and transform our shared reality.

Featuring original watercolor paintings by @melindajosie

"'An Alphabet for Dreamers' is a stunning and powerful book. Departing from Freud’s view that the true meaning of a dream is a hidden wish-fulfillment, Sliwinski takes dreams to be potent and transparent messages for social change, inspiring Nelson Mandela in his work against apartheid and Harriet Tubman in her work in the Underground Railroad. Dreams for Sliwinski point the way toward righting a world that is out of joint."
—@noellemcafee, author of "Feminism: A Quick Immersion"

Learn more and order your copy at the link in our bio.

"An Alphabet for Dreamers" by @sharonsliwinski is a captivating look at how dreams serve as one of our most powerful ways to understand and radically change our world.

Each short chapter engages with a dream from the historical record—from both the recent and distant past—to show how these experiences can help us make sense of profound social conflicts and transform our shared reality.

Featuring original watercolor paintings by @melindajosie

"'An Alphabet for Dreamers' is a stunning and powerful book. Departing from Freud’s view that the true meaning of a dream is a hidden wish-fulfillment, Sliwinski takes dreams to be potent and transparent messages for social change, inspiring Nelson Mandela in his work against apartheid and Harriet Tubman in her work in the Underground Railroad. Dreams for Sliwinski point the way toward righting a world that is out of joint."
—@noellemcafee, author of "Feminism: A Quick Immersion"

Learn more and order your copy at the link in our bio.

"An Alphabet for Dreamers" by @sharonsliwinski is a captivating look at how dreams serve as one of our most powerful ways to understand and radically change our world.

Each short chapter engages with a dream from the historical record—from both the recent and distant past—to show how these experiences can help us make sense of profound social conflicts and transform our shared reality.

Featuring original watercolor paintings by @melindajosie

"'An Alphabet for Dreamers' is a stunning and powerful book. Departing from Freud’s view that the true meaning of a dream is a hidden wish-fulfillment, Sliwinski takes dreams to be potent and transparent messages for social change, inspiring Nelson Mandela in his work against apartheid and Harriet Tubman in her work in the Underground Railroad. Dreams for Sliwinski point the way toward righting a world that is out of joint."
—@noellemcafee, author of "Feminism: A Quick Immersion"

Learn more and order your copy at the link in our bio.

"An Alphabet for Dreamers" by @sharonsliwinski is a captivating look at how dreams serve as one of our most powerful ways to understand and radically change our world.

Each short chapter engages with a dream from the historical record—from both the recent and distant past—to show how these experiences can help us make sense of profound social conflicts and transform our shared reality.

Featuring original watercolor paintings by @melindajosie

"'An Alphabet for Dreamers' is a stunning and powerful book. Departing from Freud’s view that the true meaning of a dream is a hidden wish-fulfillment, Sliwinski takes dreams to be potent and transparent messages for social change, inspiring Nelson Mandela in his work against apartheid and Harriet Tubman in her work in the Underground Railroad. Dreams for Sliwinski point the way toward righting a world that is out of joint."
—@noellemcafee, author of "Feminism: A Quick Immersion"

Learn more and order your copy at the link in our bio.

I’m really pleased to share the cover of my new book The Trembling City, which will be published by MIT Press on October 27. (Link in bio.)

The book is a meditation on the role of sound and vibration as instruments of violence that shape urban life. I consider forms of atmospheric occupation and vibrational warfare—a covert violence enacted through waves—as they turn cities themselves into instruments of war: amplifying sonic shock, conducting energy through bodies, air, and buildings, and saturating everyday life with violence.

I’ll share more from the book in the coming months, but for now I wanted to celebrate the photographer and artist Mane Hovanissyan, whose work graces the cover. I first met Mane at a Scoring the City workshop presented by Crossroads Festival in Yerevan in 2023, which I hosted with the pianist Eve Egoyan.

Mane was the photographer for the event, but she spontaneously took part in the score-making part of the workshop. She created three memorable photographic scores based on local architecture, one of which a student ensemble interpreted as music.

When I saw this photograph in particular, I immediately said to Mane, ‘maybe this could be the cover of my book one day.’ It seemed like a distant reality, but when I approached the press two years later, they loved it, too.

Two chapters of the book are dedicated to the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath: one listens to tent cities in the Ottoman Empire, attending to the sound worlds of ‘death-worlds’ (Mbembe); the other listens to disappeared cities in post-genocidal Turkey today.

It means a lot to me to be able to feature the work of a brilliant, soulful, and deeply imaginative artist from Armenia on the cover—and to have an image that also subtly refers to Armenia in its modern, defiant frame.

Much love to everyone connected with the book and with this image—and my gratitude to the press’s designer Marge Encomienda for turning Mane’s photograph into this wonderful cover.

Pre-order link here and in bio:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262056489/the-trembling-city/

@manecrimson @photostationevn
@mitpress
@oxmusicfaculty
@soncities
#sound #cities #violence

Humans are naturally drawn to stories. We take the chaos of the past — revolutions, discoveries, disasters — and shape it into beginnings, middles, and ends. The result is a kind of drama in which history comes to feel legible, orderly, perhaps even inevitable.

But this, as philosopher Alex Rosenberg argues, is precisely the trouble with narrative history. In school, students are often presented with the past as a coherent arc of characters, motives, turning points, and consequences. Yet “there are too many forces operating on the trajectory of human affairs even to be enumerated,” Rosenberg writes. “As a result, weighing them against one another is a fool’s errand.”

This does not mean that history cannot be analyzed. Ideologies, technologies, accidents, and institutions of all kinds can all shape the course of events. Yet the great danger of narrative is that it can make those forces seem more purposeful than they really are.
In the end, Rosenberg warns, it is a mistake to give “meaning” to history, as nations often do by turning their complicated pasts into myths: “When the broad sweep of a narrative history comes packaged in a story, it’s hard for anyone to shake it just because of the compelling way in which it’s packaged.”

Read the full article at the link in our bio.

"Philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith argued that while AI can make powerful, calculative decisions, judgment requires something else: human deliberation about how to apply ethical ideals under particular conditions, and grappling with others’ views about what is at stake. It is neither purely rational nor purely emotional. In order to take responsibility for its own decision, a jury needs judgment, not mere calculation inspired by what a machine considers the optimal outcome."

(Read the article at the link in bio)

"Saul Justin Newman has a deliciously wicked wit and an addictively original writing style, which serve him (and readers!) well in taking bullshit science to the mat."
—Mary Roach, author of "Replaceable You"

The science of aging is riddled with misleading claims, mistaken assumptions, and outright chicanery. Out June 9, Saul Newman’s "Morbid" takes readers on a rollicking, darkly comedic journey through the scandals, absurdities, and delusions of modern longevity science.

Pre-order it at the link in bio.

"Saul Justin Newman has a deliciously wicked wit and an addictively original writing style, which serve him (and readers!) well in taking bullshit science to the mat."
—Mary Roach, author of "Replaceable You"

The science of aging is riddled with misleading claims, mistaken assumptions, and outright chicanery. Out June 9, Saul Newman’s "Morbid" takes readers on a rollicking, darkly comedic journey through the scandals, absurdities, and delusions of modern longevity science.

Pre-order it at the link in bio.

Gestures convey meaning with a flourish. A vigorous nod of the head, a bold jut of the chin, an enthusiastic thumbs-up: all speak louder than words. Yet the same gesture may have different meanings in different parts of the world. What Americans understand as the “A-OK gesture,” for example, is an obscene insult in the Arab world.

This volume is the reference book we didn't know we needed — an illustrated dictionary of 850 gestures and their meanings around the world. It catalogs voluntary gestures made to communicate openly—as distinct from sign language, dance moves, involuntary “tells,” or secret handshakes—and explains what the gesture conveys in a variety of locations. It is organized by body part, from top to bottom, from head (nodding, shaking, turning) to foot (scraping, kicking, playing footsie). Illustrated with clever line drawings and documented with quotations from literature (the author, François Caradec, was a distinguished and prolific historian of literature, culture, and humorous oddities, as well as a novelist and poet), this dictionary offers readers unique lessons in polylingual meaning.

Follow the link in bio to order your copy.

In the U.S. healthcare system, wealth generally buys better doctors, better hospitals, and better outcomes. But for Black Americans, that assumption does not always hold. In fact, racial disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity often widen as one moves up the socioeconomic ladder, revealing how little class privilege protects Black pregnant people from racism in the healthcare system.

It’s a counterintuitive situation that, as Khiara Bridges writes, sits at the heart of the Black maternal mortality crisis in America. For her book, “Expecting Inequity,” Bridges spent years studying this crisis, interviewing close to 200 pregnant or recently postpartum people about the choices Black patients make in a maternal healthcare system known to fail them. What she found was startling.

Programs like Medicaid, Bridges explains, can sometimes protect low-income Black patients from racism by strictly dictating the care providers must deliver. Meanwhile, in doctors’ offices, many Black women refuse to take off their wedding rings for fear of being perceived as a “welfare queen,” while others bring their husbands to appointments as a protective measure. One patient told Bridges she always wears “Yale” sweatpants to signal status.

These are survival strategies in a country where Black pregnant people’s pain, concerns, and instincts are too often dismissed — sometimes with deadly consequences. So how do we fix it? As Bridges suggests, we must move beyond individual-level interventions, such as implicit bias training, and toward policies that are known to save lives. That means bolstering the ranks of Black providers, requiring hospitals to adopt safety bundles, and treating Black maternal health as the public crisis it is.

“The Black maternal health crisis is solvable,” she writes. “The question simply is whether the U.S. cares enough to solve it.”

Read the full article at the link in our bio.

Huge thanks to @villagevoice for this thoughtful, perceptive, and beautifully illustrated piece on Martha Schwendener's new book "The Society of the Screen."

"Although Flusser came of age in an analog world, he — through his interactions with artists, who are always reconnoitering at the frontiers of being — divined that the cultural, tech, and political fractures of the mid-20th-century would send us heedlessly barreling into the everything digital everywhere all at once 21st. He died before he could see how right he’d been about our ever-more-pixelated ride, but on his way out, he punched the ticket for the rest of us."

(Head to the link in our bio to read the article.)

In January 2006, an unexpected visitor knocked on the door of the @efforg's office in San Francisco. “Do you folks care about privacy?” he asked. This, as EFF’s Cindy Cohn recounts, was the start of the organization’s years-long collaboration with Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician who helped blow open one of the biggest corporate and government surveillance scandals in American history.

The backstory begins in 2001, following the U.S. government’s response to the 9/11 attacks. In the weeks that followed, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which helped erode the legal “wall” that had long separated foreign intelligence surveillance from domestic law enforcement. Before long, Cohn and her colleagues at EFF began hearing disturbing whispers: that the NSA was gathering Americans’ phone records, sitting “on the wire” inside the United States, and unlawfully collecting data about people’s online activities.

Klein, who had worked inside AT&T’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, brought EFF the proof they had been waiting for. He described a “secret room” — Room 641A — where copies of internet traffic could be drawn from fiber-optic cables carrying part of the internet’s backbone. As Cohn writes, “The NSA could then review the traffic separately, without slowing it down or leaving any trace of what it was actually doing on the public network.” Klein called it the “Big Brother machine.”

With Klein’s help, EFF filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, arguing that the company had violated federal privacy law by helping the NSA intercept and analyze Americans’ communications. The case became a years-long legal battle over surveillance, digital privacy, and whether corporations could be held accountable for helping the government spy on the public.

Read the full story at the link in our bio.

#surveillance #privacy #EFF #digitalprivacy