Hitting the Books
Latest
Hitting the Books: Why America once leaded its gasoline
Automakers have been fighting to eliminate Engine knock since the days of the Model T. Their initial attempts to fix it, as University of Manitoba's Professor Vaclav Smil explains in "Invention and Innovation," went over like a lead balloon.
Hitting the Books: NASA's Class 8 broke color barriers and glass ceilings alike
In The New Guys, author Meredith Bagby follows the exploits of NASA's Astronaut class of 1978 — "Class 8," America's first women, African Americans, Asian American, and gay person to fly to space.
Hitting the Books: High school students have spent a decade fighting Baltimore's toxic legacy
In Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore, Dr. Nicole Fabricant of Towson University, chronicles the participatory action research of local students between 2011 and 2021, organizing and mobilizing their communities to fight back against a century of environmental injustice.
Hitting the Books: That time San Francisco's suburbs sued the airport for being too loud
Dr. Eric Porter, Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, examines how San Francisco International came to be and the challenges it will face in a climate changing 21st century in his latest work, A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport.
Hitting the Books: How to build a music recommendation 'information-space-beast'
As of October, music makers are uploading 100,000 new songs every day to streaming services like Spotify. That is too much music. It's a monumental problem that data scientist Glenn McDonald is working to solve.
Hitting the Books: America might not exist if not for a pre-Revolution smallpox outbreak
As historian Andrew Wehrman explains in The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution that our downright violent resistance to, and demand for freedom from, this disease also helped galvanize our mobilization of independence from England.
Hitting the Books: AI is already reshaping air travel, will airports themselves be next?
University of Toronto economists and professors Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb posit what the airports of tomorrow might look like if AI manages to wholly eliminate the need to show up two hours early.
Hitting the Books: Social media's long, pointless war against sex on the internet
In the excerpt below from her most excellent new book, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex, Samantha Cole discusses the how and why to Facebook, Instagram and Google's slow strangling of online sexual speech over the past 15 years.
Hitting the Books: How Dave Chappelle and curious cats made Roomba a household name
Lowen Liu explores the development of iRobot's Roomba vacuum and its unlikely feline brand ambassadors.
Hitting the Books: AI could help shrink America's gender wage gap
In her new book, The Equality Machine, Dr. Orly Lobel explores how digital technologies -- often maligned for their roles in exacerbating societal ills -- can be harnessed to undo the damage they've caused.
Hitting the Books: The fall 2022 reading list
Hitting the Books Quarterly is back with a brewer's six-pack of great titles to get you clear through to cuffing season!
Hitting the Books: The women who made ENIAC more than a weapon
Kathy Kleiman uncovers the secret history of ENIAC and the forgotten team of women who first programmed it in "Proving Grounds," out now.
Hitting the Books: Steve Jobs' iPhone obsession led to Apple's silicon revolution
Microprocessors are shaping up to be the crude oil of the 21st century.
Hitting the Books: What the wearables of tomorrow might look like
Smaller, more powerful electronics are leading the current wearable revolution. In The Skeptic's Guide the the Future, Dr. Steven Novella looks at what comes next.
Hitting the Books: How Southeast Asia's largest bank uses AI to fight financial fraud
'Working with AI' by Thomas Davenport and Steven Miller is filled with case studies looking at commonplace human-AI collaboration and providing insight into the potential implications of these interactions.
Hitting the Books: What if 'Up' but pigeons?
In the sequel to 2014's 'What If?' Randall Munroe returns with more scientific answers to more absurd hypotheticals.
Hitting the Books: How to uncover the true nature of the multiverse
The universe had to have come from somewhere, theoretical astrophysicist Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton has spent her trailblazing career in search of an answer.
Hitting the Books: Newfangled oceanographers helped win WWII using marine science
Lethal Tides tells the story of pioneering oceanic researcher Mary Sears and her leading role in creating one of the most important intelligence gathering operations of World War II.
Hitting the Books: How hurricanes work
In his new book, Looking Up: The True Adventures of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd, Matthew Cappucci mixes anecdotes from his meteorological career with explanatory science to share with readers his passion for the weather.
Hitting the Books: How can privacy survive in a world that never forgets?
In his new book, Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI, world-leading AI researcher, Dr. Toby Walsh, explores the duality of potential that artificial intelligence/machine learning systems offer.