Books in The MIT Press series

Andy Warhol's daily practice of photography during the last decade of his life, examined and documented for the first time.“A picture means I know where I was every minute. That's why I take pictures.”―Andy WarholFrom 1976 until his death in 1987, Andy Warhol was never without his camera. He snapped photos at discos, dinner parties, flea markets, and wrestling matches. Friends, boyfriends, business associates, socialites, celebrities, passers by: all captured Warhol's attention―at least for the moment he looked through the lens. In a way, Warhol's daily photography practice anticipated our current smart phone habits―our need to record our friends, our families, and our food. Warhol printed only about 17 percent of the 130,000 exposures he left on contact sheets. In 2014, Stanford's Cantor Center for the Arts acquired the 3,600 contact sheets from the Warhol Foundation. This book examines and documents for the first time these contact sheets and photographs―Warhol's final body of work Peggy Phelan and Richard Meyer analyze the contact sheets, never before seen, and their importance in Warhol's oeuvre. Accompanying their text and other essays are reproductions of contact sheets, photographs, and other visual material. The contact sheets present Warhol's point of view, unedited; we know where he was every minute because a photograph remembers it.Copublished with the Cantor Arts Center

An introduction to modern physics and to Richard Feynman at his witty and enthusiastic best, discussing gravitation, irreversibility, symmetry, and the nature of scientific discovery.Richard Feynman was one of the most famous and important physicists of the second half of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, celebrated for his spirited and engaging lectures, and briefly a star on the evening news for his presence on the commission investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Feynman is best known for his contributions to the field of quantum electrodynamics. The Character of Physical Law, drawn from Feynman's famous 1964 series of Messenger Lectures at Cornell, offers an introduction to modern physics―and to Feynman at his witty and enthusiastic best.In this classic book (originally published in 1967), Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws and gathers their common features, arguing that the importance of a physical law is not “how clever we are to have found it out” but “how clever nature is to pay attention to it.” He discusses such topics as the interaction of mathematics and physics, the principle of conservation, the puzzle of symmetry, and the process of scientific discovery. A foreword by 2004 Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek updates some of Feynman's observations―noting, however, “the need for these particular updates enhances rather than detracts from the book.” In The Character of Physical Law, Feynman chose to grapple with issues at the forefront of physics that seemed unresolved, important, and approachable.

Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace.Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architectural historian, Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace. It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives.

Why companies need to move away from a “product first” orientation to pursuing innovation based on customer need.In the past, companies found success with a product-first orientation; they made a thing that did a thing. TheInversion Factor explains why the companies of today and tomorrow will have to abandon the product-first orientation. Rather than asking “How do the products we make meet customer needs?” companies should ask “How can technology help us reimagine and fill a need?” Zipcar, for example, instead of developing another vehicle for moving people from point A to point B, reimagined how people interacted with vehicles. Zipcar inverted the traditional car company mission. The authors explain how the introduction of “smart” objects connected by the Internet of Things signals fundamental changes for business. The IoT, where real and digital coexist, is powering new ways to meet human needs. Companies that know this include giants like Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Google, Tesla, and Apple, as well as less famous companies like Tile, Visenti, and Augury. The Inversion Factor offers a roadmap for businesses that want to follow in their footsteps.The authors chart the evolution of three IoTs―the Internet of Things (devices connected to the Internet), the Intelligence of Things (devices that host software applications), and the Innovation of Things (devices that become experiences). Finally, they offer a blueprint for businesses making the transition to inversion and interviews with leaders of major companies and game-changing startups.

Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature. Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading―the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators―to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history―what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States―by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.

An argument in favor of finding a place for humans (and humanness) in the future digital economy.In the digital economy, accountants, baristas, and cashiers can be automated out of employment; so can surgeons, airline pilots, and cab drivers. Machines will be able to do these jobs more efficiently, accurately, and inexpensively. But, Nicholas Agar warns in this provocative book, these developments could result in a radically disempowered humanity.The digital revolution has brought us new gadgets and new things to do with them. The digital revolution also brings the digital economy, with machines capable of doing humans' jobs. Agar explains that developments in artificial intelligence enable computers to take over not just routine tasks but also the kind of “mind work” that previously relied on human intellect, and that this threatens human agency. The solution, Agar argues, is a hybrid social-digital economy. The key value of the digital economy is efficiency. The key value of the social economy is humanness.A social economy would be centered on connections between human minds. We should reject some digital automation because machines will always be poor substitutes for humans in roles that involve direct contact with other humans. A machine can count out pills and pour out coffee, but we want our nurses and baristas to have minds like ours. In a hybrid social-digital economy, people do the jobs for which feelings matter and machines take on data-intensive work. But humans will have to insist on their relevance in a digital age.

Why our human brains are awesome, and how we left our cousins, the great apes, behind: a tale of neurons and calories, and cooking.Humans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became enormous in a very short amount of time in evolution, allowing us to leave our cousins, the great apes, behind. So the human brain is special, right? Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals, but not because we are evolutionary outliers. The human brain was not singled out to become amazing in its own exclusive way, and it never stopped being a primate brain. If we are not an exception to the rules of evolution, then what is the source of the human advantage?Herculano-Houzel shows that it is not the size of our brain that matters but the fact that we have more neurons in the cerebral cortex than any other animal, thanks to our ancestors' invention, some 1.5 million years ago, of a more efficient way to obtain calories: cooking. Because we are primates, ingesting more calories in less time made possible the rapid acquisition of a huge number of neurons in the still fairly small cerebral cortex―the part of the brain responsible for finding patterns, reasoning, developing technology, and passing it on through culture.Herculano-Houzel shows us how she came to these conclusions―making “brain soup” to determine the number of neurons in the brain, for example, and bringing animal brains in a suitcase through customs. The Human Advantage is an engaging and original look at how we became remarkable without ever being special.

The role of design in the formation of the Silicon Valley ecosystem of innovation.California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage.Offering a thoroughly original view of the subject, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies―including IDEO, frog, and Lunar―and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader―including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman―Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation.

Robert Barro's Macroeconomics has become the classic textbook presentation of the equilibrium approach to macroeconomics. In its first four editions, this book has shown undergraduates how market-clearing models with strong microeconomic foundations can be used to understand real-world phenomena and to evaluate alternative macroeconomic policies. Moreover, a single, unified framework works as well for short-term business fluctuation as for long-term economic growth. This latest edition includes the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in economic growth, recent evidence on the macroeconomics of labor markets and public finance, and up-to-date results on the interplay between nominal and real variables.

An accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and other topics for the general reader.Most of us feel at home in front of a computer; we own smartphones, tablets, and laptops; we look things up online and check social media to see what our friends are doing. But we may be a bit fuzzy about how any of this really works. In Bits to Bitcoin, Mark Stuart Day offers an accessible guide to our digital infrastructure, explaining the basics of operating systems, networks, security, and related topics for the general reader. He takes the reader from a single process to multiple processes that interact with each other; he explores processes that fail and processes that overcome failures; and he examines processes that attack each other or defend themselves against attacks. Day tells us that steps are digital but ramps are analog; that computation is about “doing something with stuff” and that both the “stuff” and the “doing” can be digital. He explains timesharing, deadlock, and thrashing; virtual memory and virtual machines; packets and networks; resources and servers; secret keys and public keys; Moore's law and Thompson's hack. He describes how building in redundancy guards against failure and how endpoints communicate across the Internet. He explains why programs crash or have other bugs, why they are attacked by viruses, and why those problems are hard to fix. Finally, after examining secrets, trust, and cheating, he explains the mechanisms that allow the Bitcoin system to record money transfers accurately while fending off attacks.

This ode to the spirit of place consists of an exchange of letters in which one author recalls and the other responds to the elements considered essential to the art of successful place-making. Each of the book's chapters forms a chamber, and each chamber is inscribed with the authors' personal observations.This collaboration between two distinguished architects and former colleagues is a joyous celebration of admired places and a thoughtful consideration of the role that design has played in giving these places their memorable qualities. It is also an invitation to readers to inhabit the chambers of the book with their own imaginations to join in the making of the Memory Palace proposed. The authors' informal, witty, and anecdotal style extends to the illustrations―the freehand travel sketches, line drawings, and watercolors of places they have remembered and enjoyed. Chambers for a Memory Palace consists of an exchange of letters in which one author recalls and the other responds to the elements considered essential to the art of successful place-making. Each of the book's chapters forms a chamber, and each chamber is inscribed with personal observations on the composition of places and the architectural elements central to each building, garden, court, monument, or open space described. The examples considered in these dialogues range from classic Western tradition to Asian temples and Islamic tombs, from ancient ruins to modern cities. In "Axes that Reach/Paths that Wander," Lyndon and Moore discuss the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, the Taj Mahal in Agra, Vaux le Vicomte in France, the Beverly Hills Civic Center, and the Kimbell Museum in Forth Worth. In "Orchards that Measure/Pilasters that Temper," they consider the rhythmic spacing of elements in the Mosque at Cordoba, the Cathedral at Bourges, the thousand-pillared mandapas of South Indian temples, the facades of Schauspielhaus in Berlin, and the Seagram building in New York City. They use these and many other examples to illustrate the ways in which architecture, experience, and memory intertwine to help us experience events and places.

The role of design in the formation of the Silicon Valley ecosystem of innovation.California's Silicon Valley is home to the greatest concentration of designers in the world: corporate design offices at flagship technology companies and volunteers at nonprofit NGOs; global design consultancies and boutique studios; research laboratories and academic design programs. Together they form the interconnected network that is Silicon Valley. Apple products are famously “Designed in California,” but, as Barry Katz shows in this first-ever, extensively illustrated history, the role of design in Silicon Valley began decades before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak dreamed up Apple in a garage.Offering a thoroughly original view of the subject, Katz tells how design helped transform Silicon Valley into the most powerful engine of innovation in the world. From Hewlett-Packard and Ampex in the 1950s to Google and Facebook today, design has provided the bridge between research and development, art and engineering, technical performance and human behavior. Katz traces the origins of all of the leading consultancies―including IDEO, frog, and Lunar―and shows the process by which some of the world's most influential companies came to place design at the center of their business strategies. At the same time, universities, foundations, and even governments have learned to apply “design thinking” to their missions. Drawing on unprecedented access to a vast array of primary sources and interviews with nearly every influential design leader―including Douglas Engelbart, Steve Jobs, and Don Norman―Katz reveals design to be the missing link in Silicon Valley's ecosystem of innovation.