Welcome to our weekly roundup of news from university presses! Once again, there is a lot to share this week from our fellow academic publishing houses and much to learn on What SUP at the social university presses. This week, we found conversations on Big Data in entertainment, Donald Trump’s public speaking skills, and Claudia Rankine. What did you read this week?
Harvard University Press features an essay by Stephen Burt on Claudia Rankine, who recently won the MacArthur “genius” Grant. Her book Citizen is a provocative meditation on race that challenged readers at a moment when the precarity of black life in America was laid bare.
The MIT Press talks about the disruption of the entertainment industry by Big Data. What conditions made it possible for game-changers like Netflix, Amazon and Apple/iTunes to disrupt the establishment, legacy companies like Disney-ABC and NBCUniversal, etc.?
The University Press of Florida highlights the methods, technologies and analyses archaeologists use to decipher data and decide where to dig when starting a new archaeological investigation. No matter how much one plans, however, there is always an element of surprise and one can never completely predict what one finds.
Stanford University Press chronicles what to do on one’s last day in London. The author finds delight in the common and the banal; from graffiti and tourists taking selfies to and the artifacts he finds in the mud on the Thames’s banks at low tide.
Princeton University Press tries to explains Donald Trump’s success as a speaker. Mr. Trump has cleverly and successfully identified a collection of emotionally-charged issues that have some significant resonance with a portion of the electorate. He plays upon fears that certainly have legitimacy for many people, and he offers hope that these fears and anxieties can be allayed with a change in leadership.
Oxford University Press talks about the targeted killing of American citizen terrorists, which can only be done if approved by Barack Obama. The author worries that in the future a president less committed to human life than President Obama, may find this a useful precedent in claiming a free hand to deal summarily with “terrorists” as long as they owe no allegiance to the country.
We Can’t Innovate Our Way Out of Ecocide