"A critical investigation of a massive commercial phenomenon, the so-called "Euro" or "German"-style tabletop board games whose basic goal is explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
The #MeToo movement has focused public attention on the issue of sexual consent. People of all genders, from all walks of life, have stepped forward to tell their stories of sexual harassment and violation. In a predictable backlash, others have taken to mass media to inquire plaintively if “flirting” is now forbidden. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a nuanced…
Herbert Simon's classic and influential The Sciences of the Artificial declares definitively that there can be a science not only of natural phenomena but also of what is artificial. Exploring the commonalities of artificial systems, including economic systems, the business firm, artificial intelligence, complex engineering projects, and social plans, Simon argues that designed systems are a va…
This book gathers together authors from the new wave of cannabis histories that has emerged in recent decades. It offers case studies from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. It does so to trace a global history of the plant and its preparations, arguing that Western colonialism shaped and disseminated ideas in the nineteenth century that came to drive the international con…
For more than thirty years, the Dalai Lama has been in dialogue with thinkers from a range of disciplines, helping to support pathways for knowledge to increase human wellbeing and compassion. These conversations, which began as private meetings, are now part of the Mind & Life Institute and Mind & Life Europe. This book documents a recent Mind & Life Institute dialogue with the Dalai Lama and …
In Material Noise, Anne Royston argues that theoretical works signify through their materiality—such nonsemantic elements as typography or color—as well as their semantic content. Examining works by Jacques Derrida, Avital Ronell, Georges Bataille, and other well-known theorists, Royston considers their materiality and design—which she terms “noise”—as integral to their meaning. In …
In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the asset—meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream—has become the primary basis of technoscientific capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization prevails, imposing investment and return as…
What will high school education look like in twenty years? High school students are educated today to take their places in a knowledge economy. But the knowledge economy, based on the assumption that information is a scarce and precious commodity, is giving way to an economy in which information is ubiquitous, digital, and machine-generated. In Running with Robots, Greg Toppo and Jim Tracy show…
Many state and federal environmental agencies have put in place programs, policies, and practices to redress environmental injustices, and yet these efforts fall short of meeting the principles that environmental justice activists have fought for. In From the Inside Out, Jill Lindsey Harrison offers an account of the bureaucratic culture that hinders regulatory agencies' attempts to reduce envi…
Although this is the Information Age, there is no universal agreement about what information really is. Different disciplines view information differently; engineers, computer scientists, economists, linguists, and philosophers all take varying and apparently disconnected approaches. In this book, Antonio Badia distinguishes four levels of analysis brought to bear on information: syntactic, sem…