Books
A select list of books by CMS/W faculty, lecturers, and alumni.
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Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings (2021)
Alan Lightman’s meditative essays on “the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between.”
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Money for Nothing (2020)
Thomas Levenson looks at “The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich”.
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Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (2020)
Associate Professor Sasha Costanza-Chock’s new book is “an exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.”
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The Other Digital China (2019)
Professor Jing Wang tells the story of change makers operating within the Chinese Communist system, whose ideas of social action necessarily differ from those dominant in Western, liberal societies.
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Three Flames: A Novel (2019)
Three Flames portrays the struggles of a Cambodian farming family against the extreme patriarchal attitudes of their society and a cruel and dictatorial father, set in a rural community that is slowly being exposed to the modern world and its values.
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Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (2018)
From Professor T.L. Taylor comes her look at the revolution in game live streaming and esports broadcasting.
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Dispatches from Planet 3: Thirty-Two (Brief) Tales on the Solar System, the Milky Way, and Beyond (2018)
“These pieces will transport you to ancient Mars, when water flowed freely across its surface; to the collision of two black holes, a cosmological event that released fifty times more energy than was radiating from every star in the universe; and to the beginning of time itself.”
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In Praise of Wasting Time (2018)
Professor Alan Lightman investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam, without attempting to accomplish anything and without any assigned tasks.
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Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018)
As a physicist, Alan Lightman has always held a scientific view of the world. As a teenager experimenting in his own laboratory, he was impressed by the logic and materiality of a universe governed by a small number of disembodied forces and laws that decree all things in the world are material and impermanent. But one summer evening, while looking at the stars from a small boat at sea, Lightman was overcome by the overwhelming sensation that he was merging with something larger than himself–a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial. Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine is Lightman’s exploration of these seemingly contradictory impulses.
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Islandborn (2018)
CMS/W Professor Junot Díaz and illustrator Leo Espinosa publish Islandborn, a “joyous, fantastical, heartbreaking” children’s book on memory, place, and imagination.
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The Truelist (2017)
The Truelist is a book-length poem generated by a one-page, stand-alone computer program.
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Knowledge Games: How Playing Games Can Solve Problems, Create Insight, and Make Change (2016)
Schrier argues that knowledge games are potentially powerful because of their ability to motivate a crowd of problem solvers within a dynamic system while also tapping into the innovative data processing and computational abilities of games.
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Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line (2016)
“A unique and compelling portrait of William F. Buckley as the champion of conservative ideas in an age of liberal dominance.”
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The Sinatra n (2016)
“The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing triggered the poems in The Sinatra n, poems that race across these pages with lethal riptide quickness.”
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Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (2016)
Nick Montfort reveals programming to be not merely a technical exercise within given constraints but a tool for sketching, brainstorming, and inquiring about important topics.
