Highlighting Open Access on the MIT Press Reader

The MIT Press has been a leader in open access (OA) book publishing for over two decades, beginning with the publication of William Mitchell’s “City of Bits,” which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition in 1995. Today, the Press boasts well over 300 open access books — and hundreds of free-to-read journal articles — with an average of 80 new titles added each year.

Featured below are excerpts, essays, and interviews with authors of OA books and articles, from Jennifer Light’s fascinating history of the “junior republics” of the last century, where kids made laws, sat for civil service exams, and paid taxes, to Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick’s deeply researched account of how small-scale drones are being used by social movements for the greater good.

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Science & Tech	What the Science Actually Says About Unconscious Decision Making There is no free lunch when it comes to tricky decisions; you have to do the thinking. Ben R. Newell and David R. Shanks |
Culture	The Dark Side of Play Our broken definition of play is drawn from a white European philosophical tradition that has harmed and erased people of color. Aaron Trammell |
Science & Tech	The Tyranny of Science Over Mothers How parenting became "optimized" and made mothers miserable. Jessica Clements & Kari Nixon |
Culture	Frescoes in the Desert: Alois Musil and the Rewriting of Islamic Pasts When it comes to the modern history of Islamic art, the story of Musil's "discovery" of Qusayr ‘Amra epitomizes the difference between objects as they exist and knowledge about them. Shahzad Bashir |
Culture	Why Punish? Historian Peter Baldwin explores the evolution of the state's role in crime and punishment over 3,000 years. Peter Baldwin |
Media	Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering A deep history of mass manipulation, from the 1920s through the mid-1970s. Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson |
Media	Of Trauma, Testimony, and the Power of Human Rights Voices Human rights video activism is closely tied to the struggle to assert voice. Sandra Ristovska |
Science & Tech	Around the World in 50,000 Years: The Genetics of Race To fully understand race and genetics, we have to consider where we came from and how we got here. Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston |
Science & Tech	Blaming Our Genes: The Heritability of Behavior When it comes to behavior, genetics may play a larger role than you think. Stanley Fields & Mark Johnston |
Culture	Le Corbusier as I Knew Him "To go for a walk with him was a revelation, he would notice so much." Jane B. Drew |
Culture	When Kids Ran the World: A Forgotten History of the Junior Republic Movement In an era when public opinion favored sheltering young people from adult society, the Freeville republic and its many descendants immersed them in carefully designed models of that society instead. Jennifer S. Light |
Culture	The Birth of the USPS and the Politics of Postal Reform As the fate of the USPS hangs in the balance, postal scholar Ryan Ellis looks back at its creation and reveals how the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 transformed postal politics for good — and for ill. Ryan Ellis |
Science & Tech	A Complete History of Pandemics Renowned scientist and best-selling author Vaclav Smil offers a sweeping look at pandemics that ravaged the world. Vaclav Smil |
Science & Tech	The Mega-Wars That Shaped World History Renowned scientist and best-selling author Vaclav Smil meticulously charts one of the single largest causes of non-natural mortality. Vaclav Smil |
Culture	Reflections on the Black Experience at MIT We must explore our role and leave a legacy so that future generations can relate to our hopes and disappointments, our struggles and achievements. Clarence G. Williams |

Philosophy	Grief Worlds: In Conversation With Philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe Matthew Ratcliffe’s book "Grief Worlds" is a wide-ranging philosophical exploration of what it is to experience grief and what this tells us about human emotional life. The Editors |
Culture	How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly Emily West, communication scholar and author of “Buy Now,” offers a cautionary tale of bigness in today’s digital economy. The Editors |
Media	How the Internet Became Straight Alexander Monea, author of "The Digital Closet," argues that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQIA+ content into increasingly narrow channels. Zoë Kopp-Weber |
Economics	If You Pay a Mouse To Eat a Cookie, Will He Like It More or Less? Researchers Constança Esteves-Sorenson and Robert Broce reviewed more than 100 tests — and ran one of their own — to find out if pay harms performance on enjoyable tasks. Here’s what they learned. Brigitte C. Madrian |
Culture	Lessons From Operation “Denver,” the KGB’s Massive AIDS Disinformation Campaign Historian Douglas Selvage sheds light on a conspiracy theory that reverberates to this day. Mark Kramer |
Science & Tech	Of Maritime Quarantines, the Third Plague Pandemic, and Hygienic Utopia The authors of "Sulphuric Utopias" chart the history of ideas about fumigation and quarantine, and shed light on the origins of epidemic photography. The Editors |
Culture	The Stigma of Poverty: In Conversation With Rebecca de Souza The author of “Feeding the Other” demonstrates how stigmatization is a process that is as much about power and privilege as it is about marginalization and disenfranchisement. The Editors |

Science & Tech	“Hallucinating” AIs Sound Creative, but Let’s Not Celebrate Being Wrong The term “hallucination,” which has been widely adopted to describe large language models outputting false information, is misleading. Its application to creativity risks compounding that. Oliver Bown |
Science & Tech	The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage. Steven Gonzalez Monserrate |
Science & Tech	A History of the Data-Tracked User “Cyberspace” was once celebrated as a public, non-tracked space that afforded users freedom of anonymity. How did individual tracking of users come to dominate the web as a market practice? Tanya Kant |
Media	The Proxies That Shape Real Life, From Yodaville to the Golden Tagliatella What can we learn from the stand-ins helping to shape real life? Dylan Mulvin |
Science & Tech	Using Drones to Disrupt the Status Quo From Standing Rock to Syria, drones are being used to hold the powerful to account. Let’s keep it that way. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick |
Science & Tech	U.S. Postal Workers Were on the Front Lines Before. They Were Ignored. In 2001, postal workers, for a brief moment, had a chance to reorganize how postal policy operated. But their health and safety was traded away in favor of cheap and fast mail. Ryan Ellis |