In the 1970s, an eccentric group of physicists in Berkeley, California, banded together to explore the wilder side of science. Dubbing themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” they pursued an audacious, speculative approach to physics, studying quantum entanglement in terms of Eastern mysticism and psychic mind reading.
How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they…
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication.
A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities brings together articles from the key theoretical approaches in the field of medical anthropology as well as related science and…
Becoming MIT examines a series of turning points, crucial decisions that helped to define MIT. Many of these issues have relevance today: the moral implications of defense contracts, the optimal balance between government funding and private investment, and the right combination of basic science, engineering, and humanistic scholarship in the curriculum.
Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. In Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle examines the now dominant medium of our working lives and finds that simulation has become its own sensibility.
In Anthropological Futures, Michael M. J. Fischer explores the uses of anthropology as a mode of philosophical inquiry, an evolving academic discipline, and a means for explicating the…
The Nature of Cities offers a new understanding of the history of urban renewal in the United States in the rise and fall of the American conservation movement. The book brings together environmental and urban history to reveal how, over four decades, this ecological vision shaped the development of cities around the nation.