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The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers accessible, concise, beautifully produced books on topics of current interest. 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. Synthesizing specialized subject matter for nonspecialists and engaging critical topics through fundamentals, each of these compact volumes offers readers a point of access to complex ideas.
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A concise introduction to cyborg theory that examines the way in which technology is situated, political, and embodied.
This introduction to cyborg theory provides a critical vantage point for analyzing the claims around emerging technologies like automation, robots, and AI. Cyborg analyzes and refr ...
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An accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen.
The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with ...
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An updated, revised, and comprehensive overview of the concepts related to cloud computing, including recent applications, innovations, and its future evolution.
In this Essential Knowledge volume, Nayan B. Ruparelia provides an updated and revised version of Cloud Computing, first published in 2016 ...
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A comprehensive introduction to the plastics life cycle—the impacts on our lives, our future, and our planet—and the actions we can take.
Everywhere we look, we are surrounded by plastics: perhaps you have a book in one hand and your phone—made of various metals, plastics, and glass—in the other, or ...
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Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits of this approach to urban problems.
Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a som ...
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An insightful guide to the practice, teaching, and history of critical thinking—from Aristotle and Plato to Thomas Dewey—for teachers, students, and anyone looking to hone their critical thinking skills.
Critical thinking is regularly cited as an essential 21st century skill, the key to success in ...
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Are we alone in the universe? If not, where is everybody? An engaging exploration of one of the most important unsolved problems in science.
Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidenc ...
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The non-economist’s accessible, pocket-sized refresher on the basics of macroeconomics and how it affects the local and global economies! Macroeconomics takes a broad perspective on the economy of a country or region; it studies economic changes in the aggregate, collecting data on production, unemp ...
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An accessible introduction to algorithms, explaining not just what they are but how they work, with examples from a wide range of application areas.
Digital technology runs on algorithms, sets of instructions that describe how to do something efficiently. Application areas range from search engines ...
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An investigation of hate speech: legal approaches, current controversies, and suggestions for limiting its spread.
Hate speech can happen anywhere--in Charlottesville, Virginia, where young men in khakis shouted, "Jews will not replace us"; in Myanmar, where the military used Facebook to target the ...
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How science fiction has been a tool for understanding and living through rapid technological change.
The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we ...
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The emergence of ketamine--previously known as a combat anesthetic and club drug--as a treatment for depression.
Ketamine, approved in 2019 by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of depression, has been touted by scientists and media reports as something approaching a miracle cure. Th ...
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MIT presents a concise primer on machine learning—computer programs that learn from data and the basis of applications like voice recognition and driverless cars. No in-depth knowledge of math or programming required! Today, machine learning underlies a range of applications we use every da ...
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Why gender is strange, even when it's played straight, and how race and money are two of its most dramatic ingredients.
In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the fascinating, fraught, intimate, morphing matter of gender. Stockton argues for gender ...
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A concise illustrated introduction to the history and physics of supernovae, the brilliant explosions of stars; with striking color illustrations.
Supernovae are the explosions of stars. They are some of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe, rivaling the combined light of billions of s ...
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A primer on nuclear weapons, from the science of fission and fusion to the pursuit of mutual assured destruction, the SALT treaties, and the Bomb in pop culture.
Although the world’s attention has shifted to drone-controlled bombing and cyberwarfare, the threat of nuclear war still exists. There are ...
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The history of hunting, from Stone Age hunter-gatherers to today’s sport hunters.
Hunting has a long history, beginning with our hominid ancestors. The invention of the spear allowed early humans to graduate from scavenging to actual hunting. The famous cave paintings at Lascaux show a meticulous kn ...
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An exploration of echo not as simple repetition but as an agent of creative possibilities.
In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amit Pinchevski proposes that echo is not simple repetition and the reproduction of sameness but an agent of change and a source of creation and crea ...
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A guide to the ethical questions that arise from our use of industrial robots, robot companions, self-driving cars, and other robotic devices.
Does a robot have moral agency? Can it be held responsible for its actions? Do humans owe robots anything? Will robots take our jobs? These are some of the e ...
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The socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness: how it was created, how it changes, and how it protects and privileges people who are perceived as white.
This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the socially constructed phenomenon of whiteness, tracing its creation, its cha ...
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The biological power of the placebo effect.
The power of placebos to ameliorate symptoms has been with us for centuries. Western medicine today is finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the efficacy of placebos. In some clinical trials with placebos as controls, inert or sham replicas of active ...
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A short, accessible primer on human memory, its workings, feats, and flaws, by two leading psychological researchers.
Why do we vividly recall a traumatic childhood event but forget where we left our keys five minutes ago? How can a scent take us back fifty years while a colleague’s name eludes us? ...
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A concise introduction to the history and methods of espionage, illustrated by spy stories from antiquity to today’s high-tech world.
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 b ...
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A concise and engaging exploration of how we understand happiness.
What does it mean to feel happiness? As a state of mind, it’s elusive. As a concept—despite the plethora of pop psychology books on the subject—it’s poorly understood. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psych ...
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