Writing

Why do we love beauty? And why is the world so full of it? From rainbows and mountain landscapes to piano sonatas and Cezanne paintings, much of what we find beautiful seems to serve no practical purpose, despite our instinctive attraction to it. In this path-breaking book Why Is the World So Beautiful?, psychologist Nicholas Humphrey explains that the benefits of being drawn to beauty are primarily cognitive: we’re training our minds.

Inspired by a line from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, that “all beauty may be called rhyme,” the author argues that by actively searching for rhyming connections between things, we establish the “mental models” that guide our understanding of the world. These rhymes extend beyond sounds to shapes, colors, objects, and even abstract ideas. Just as we need food to nourish our bodies, we need rhymes to nourish our minds.

Our attraction to rhymes and patterns culminates in a uniquely human form of aesthetic emotion, one that recognizes that all artistry must issue from an artist. This leads Humphrey to his boldest claim: when we encounter beauty in the natural world, we are responding as if to a hidden artist’s—or Creator’s—hand. The result is a daring and illuminating argument for why beauty moves us—and why our hunger for it is as fundamental as our need for meaning itself.

Saving Utopia is about an endangered species: utopian fiction. “Utopia is dead” has become a common refrain in recent decades, now that the dominant strand of science fiction is decisively dystopian. Visions of violent, oppressive, and authoritarian futures cloud our horizons of expectation. In Saving Utopia, Joe Davidson tackles the relative absence of utopia in the contemporary cultural landscape. He focuses on the challenges to writing utopias, explicating the societal conditions that have endangered bold visions of new and better worlds, while also examining the final holdouts of the genre.

Utopian stories are a vital but imperiled means of sustaining hope, a vehicle for gathering the flickering sparks of another world into a cohesive vision of liberation. By unearthing and analyzing the rare examples of hopeful visions published in the last decade, this book considers the survival strategies of the literary utopia—that is, the tactics deployed by utopian writers to keep the desire for a better world alive when everything tends toward dystopia. Ranging across Black, feminist, and green traditions of imagining the future, Saving Utopia shows how to make dreams of utopian societies convincing in a moment of pervasive pessimism.

Peer production describes a unique form of global collaboration that is responsible for creating some of the most vital parts of the internet. Information ecosystem powerhouses like Wikipedia and the Linux operating system were founded on principles of open cooperation, and only exist today due to the contributions of thousands, and in some cases, millions of people. In Peer Production, Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold, and Aaron Shaw describe the central role that peer production plays in today’s information environment, and how it is a much broader phenomenon than the handful of famous projects that are now household names.

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The book offers three core ideas: peer production functions as a critical mode of collaborative knowledge production; represents a novel type of social collaboration; and has unique advantages over previous forms of collaboration. The authors show that peer production is not just the foundation of the internet as we know it, but also the engine driving the global digital economy to generative AI. Finally, the book also charts the uncertain future of peer production as it confronts new threats and a changing digital landscape.

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Part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

Roads, bridges, a renewable power plant, and an electricity grid: UN peacekeepers might be unusual infrastructure builders, but they’re certainly not unambitious. Since the beginning of the UN’s peacekeeping activities after the end of World War II, the Blue Helmets have cemented streets, constructed bridges, and dug wells in conflict zones. But how did the military arm of the world’s primary diplomatic forum become involved in such activities in its quest for peace, and with what consequences? Peace Infrastructures analyzes the turn to ever-more-complex infrastructure projects, from early road building via urban community projects to the commissioning of entire renewable power plants, in the context of an evolving understanding of peace “problems” and solutions. Tracing the global travel of policies, technologies, and expertise, Silvia Danielak investigates how the shift toward risk management, legacy, and climate security was driven by, and materialized in, conflict zones, shaping the very idea of peace.

The book critically engages with the UN’s ambition to insert itself in the sustainable development of the countries it seeks to assist, arguing that we need to consider peace operations’ spatial, urban, and material ways of engagement—especially in the face of mounting climate risks. Infrastructure is poised to take a more prominent position within peace operations, but a more nuanced understanding that recognizes its opportunities, as well as its potential for violence, is required.