MITPressLog

A Dangerous Book

The Coming Insurrection was just given an unfriendly welcome by FOX News commentator Glenn Beck, who calls it a "dangerous" book of the "extreme left calling people to arms".

Although he rants about the book for quite a while, he does finally reveal that he hasn't read the book just yet and will read it on his upcoming holiday. We can't wait to hear what he has to say after he gets back!

Watch the FOX news video here or on YouTube, or read a transcript from the Support the Tarnac 9 website.

Canadian Exports Explored on Canada Day

Oh Canada, frigid country to the North, today is your day! The day you threw off your English shackles and united the provinces to form your beautiful country. So today, on this day of Canadian Days, we salute your exceptional Canadian exports: Dan Aykroyd, Alanis Morissette, Molson Beer, and Bauxite. But today, on this day of Canadian Days, we'll take a closer look at Canada's most famous export: Alphabet City Books.

John Knechtel founded Alphabet City in 1991, and began publishing this series with the MIT Press in 2004. The Alphabet City series focuses on rethinking ideas that are central to our lives, like water, food, and fuel.

In the current book, Fuel, contributors explore questions like: What will the world look like after peak oil? Will the changes be sudden or slow? How will the future of energy consumption drive decisions made today?

In the forthcoming book in the series, Water, photographers document water infrastructure from the inside out, wandering the drained hydrology tunnels beneath Niagara Falls; a memoirist recounts her life through the lens of swimming and her relationship to water; and an urban planner designs a return to the urban waterways of the 19th and 20th centuries and as a
consequence brings nature and urban living back into balance.

Alphabet City, Canada is proud of you for pushing smart readers everywhere out of our comfort zones and challenging us to think deeply about complex issues!

Happy Canada Day, Canada!

A Round Peg at the Whitney

What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?  Randy Kennedy poses this art-world stumper in his New York Times look at the Dan Graham retrospective which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art last week. 

Kennedy's piece provides an interesting look at Graham's life and work.  Liz Kotz wrote a bit about the exhibit for Artforum, commenting:

Tracing the evolution of Graham’s practice, the exhibition aims to loosely unite the artist’s divergent production around “the changing relationship of individual to society as mirrored through American mass media and architecture at the end of the twentieth century,” per cocurators Chrissie Iles and Bennett Simpson. The show, comprising about one hundred works, will navigate vastly different kinds of visual and perceptual experiences, from the private space of the page to screen-based and time-based works to the emphatically public pavilions. The events program will include a panel on music and collaboration featuring Graham, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore, in addition to other talks and screenings.

But don't take our word for it.  The exhibit runs at the Whitney until October 11th then moves to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in November. 

Casual Friday - Ode to the Barcode

This morning's Shelf Awareness pointed to a New York Times story about the 35th anniversary of the barcode.   Designed to speed up checkout and control inventory, the committee at MIT who reviewed the barcode thought it wouldn't last more than a few years. 

Boy, were they wrong.  Today, barcodes are used for most products--including the books we publish with our sophisticated 13 digit ISBN. A colleague here at MIT Press laughed as he recalled the controversy surrounding the decision to put barcodes on all of our books.  Now something that we barely notice, many designers and authors were upset about the barcode disrupting the design of their jackets. We've even managed to make them part of the design of our jackets on some occasions. 

A Look at Obama's Healthcare Plan

With all the discussion about President Obama's proposed healthcare plan, we thought we'd check in with Laurence Kotlikoff, author of The Healthcare Fix and professor of economics at Boston University to see what he thinks of the whole thing:

The President's plan to expand health insurance for the close to 50 million uninsured Americans is admirable in its objectives, but is fiscally reckless.   We need to get everyone insured in a basic plan, but not by having four separate systems, none of which together or are collectively affordable.  I speak here not just of the new proposed insurance system for those now uninsured, but also of the employer-based system, Medicare, and Medicaid. 

What the President proposes will likely induce an unraveling of the employer-based system as employers close down their plans in order to ensure their low-income workers benefit from the subsidies in the new system.  In short, we are going to end up with the government paying for everyone's basic health plan, i.e., we're going to get a one-payer system, but one that will be extremely inefficient and drive the nation broke.  The Healthcare Fix offers a real alternative that meets all of the President's healthcare objectives without driving our nation broke.  I recommend that everyone buy two copies, one for themselves and one to mail to the President. 

More on Kotlikoff's healthcare plan can be found here. 

On the Road: Report from the BoNE Show

On June 11th, one of our MIT Press designers, Emily Gutheinz, received a couple of Best of New England (BoNE) design awards. Another of our fabulous designers, Erin Hasley, attended the award show at Massachusetts College of Art (still on view until July 8th!) and writes about the show and the process of design:

The BoNE Show
American Institute of Graphic Arts, Boston Chapter, Best of New England Show
Massachusetts College of Art and Design
 
June 11, 2009
 
We ran to catch the Crosstown bus from Kendall/MIT, heading toward Ruggles. This bus jostles at an alarming pace, winding through Cambridge to Boston. We weren’t entirely sure where to disembark until we caught sight of MIT Press Journals Production Coordinator Katrina Noble. She was on her way to class at MassArt. We followed her. Outside Bakalar Gallery, we waited for fifteen minutes. The suspense was palpable (or was that our impatience?). We were near the front of the line. Let us in!
 
Making a quick tour of the premises before it filled up with people, we checked out the awards themselves, which resemble oversized dog biscuits (a.k.a. Milk-Bones), cast in solid metal. We gazed at the Boston Review series of books — produced by MITP — and located both of Senior Designer Emily Gutheinz’s MITP projects, I Am a Beautiful Monster, and Camps.

Then we looked at the show as a whole. It represents the work of New England designers, and excellence in this field. Projects range from posters, to books, to multi-media, to site-specific design. Some designers are household names around Boston, Providence, and New Haven, some are professors, some are students, and some belong to newish local chapters of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, formed in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.

MoMA Presents: DJ Spooky's Birth of a Nation

Nearly one hundred years after the release of D. W. Griffith's epic The Birth of a Nation, performance artist and musician Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, has applied his signature "DJ mix" to one of the most revered and reviled films ever made.  It's playing at MoMA all week.  Here's the trailer, but if you are in New York, be sure to check it out.

If you can't make it to the show, check out Sound Unbound, DJ Spooky's latest MIT Press remix

Brought to you by your Localist Movements

David Hess supports your local business. Author of Localist Movements in a Global Economy, and an expert on localism, he has been in the news lately for his efforts in developing Local First chapters and promoting campaigns to buy locally. He will have a book signing and presentation of Localist Movements tomorrow at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center at 2pm in Buffalo, New York, if you're in the area.

So we are pleased that it has just been announced that he has won the 2009 Robert K. Merton Book Award for an earlier book, Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry. This award recognizes an outstanding book in science and technology studies, and is given by the American Sociological Association Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology (SKAT). The award will be officially presented at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in August. More information about the award can be found on the SKAT website.

 

Life After Analog

TV is now all digital. No more snowy channels, no more rabbit-ear antennas. So what does this mean for the consuming public? Slate writer, Farhad Manjoon explores the technological advances in how Digital TV translates into broader internet- bandwidth (and faster internet connectivity). Paul Saffo, futurist and writer, interviewed on NPR about white noise, offers a look back at a cultural phenomenon and the emotional connections people have to technological limitations.

Sherry Turkle's Inner History of Devices features a deeply felt essay by Orit Kuritsky-Fox about television's role in social cohesion and religious identity. But what strikes the reader in this essay is the collision between religious observance and social construction of technology. Kuritsky-Fox's grandmother loved watching television,but the religious community she lived in didn't support the idea of television. 

"As I was waiting at the cemetery, the receptionist approached me and asked what I was looking for. I told him I was there for my grandmother's funeral. He stared at me in dismay. [...] 'Are you religious?" he asked, and I started to mumble. Then, he found a way to cut to the chase: 'Do you own a television?' I hesitated a second and then told him the truth."

Will digital television change they way we watch television or the way we participate in the cultural exchange of ideas? How does the "improved" platform affect the experience?

The Revolution will be Read Out Loud

This past Sunday, an unusual prank happened at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York: a large crowd arrived for a book signing and reading that the bookstore had not scheduled. The Coming Insurrection was the text. The New York Times picked up the story:

By 5 o’clock a crowd of more than 100 had gathered. Their purpose: to celebrate the publication of an English translation of a book called “The Coming Insurrection,” which was written two years ago by an anonymous group of French authors who call themselves the Invisible Committee. More recently, the volume has been at the center of an unusual criminal investigation in France that has become something of a cause célèbre among leftists and civil libertarians.

The book, which predicts the imminent collapse of capitalist culture, was inspired by disruptive demonstrations that took place over the last few years in France and Greece. It was influenced stylistically by Guy Debord, a French writer and filmmaker who was a leader of the Situationist International, a group of intellectuals and artists who encouraged the Paris protests of 1968.

In keeping with the anarchistic spirit of the text, the bookstore event was organized without the knowledge or permission of Barnes & Noble. The gathering was intended partly as a show of solidarity with nine young people — including one suspected of writing “The Coming Insurrection” —whom in November the French police accused of forming a dangerous “ultraleftist” group and sabotaging train lines.

 

The Coming Insurrection has been published by Semiotext(e). Semiotext(e) editor Hedi El Kholti was interviewed for the article:

Semiotext(e), a Los Angeles publisher that specializes in works by French theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, published an English-language edition of the book at the end of last month with a print run of 3,000. Hedi El Kholti, an editor at Semiotext(e), said that the book’s winding up as a key part of a controversial case added to the historical value of its message.“Everyone is dancing around this notion that publishing a book can take you to jail,” he said recently by telephone. “That a book is an element that can involve you in a trial.”