Howard Kunreuther and Erwann Michel-Kerjan were interviewed on Knowledge @ Wharton. The podcast and transcript are available here. 

The interview covers the current financial crisis, recent natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina), and impending pandemics (swine flu). This is a very interesting conversation and well worth a listen.

The Coming Insurrection was just given an unfriendly welcome by FOX News commentator Glenn Beck, who calls it a "dangerous" book of the "extreme left calling people to arms".

Oh Canada, frigid country to the North, today is your day! The day you threw off your English shackles and united the provinces to form your beautiful country. So today, on this day of Canadian Days, we salute your exceptional Canadian exports: Dan Aykroyd, Alanis Morissette, Molson Beer, and Bauxite. But today, on this day of Canadian Days, we'll take a closer look at Canada's most famous export: Alphabet City Books.

John Knechtel founded Alphabet City in 1991, and began publishing this series with the MIT Press in 2004. The Alphabet City series focuses on rethinking ideas that are central to our lives, like water, food, and fuel.

In the current book, Fuel, contributors explore questions like: What will the world look like after peak oil? Will the changes be sudden or slow? How will the future of energy consumption drive decisions made today?

In the forthcoming book in the series, Water, photographers document water infrastructure from the inside out, wandering the drained hydrology tunnels beneath Niagara Falls; a memoirist recounts her life through the lens of swimming and her relationship to water; and an urban planner designs a return to the urban waterways of the 19th and 20th centuries and as a
consequence brings nature and urban living back into balance.

Alphabet City, Canada is proud of you for pushing smart readers everywhere out of our comfort zones and challenging us to think deeply about complex issues!

Happy Canada Day, Canada!

What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?  Randy Kennedy poses this art-world stumper in his New York Times look at the Dan Graham retrospective which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art last week. 

Kennedy's piece provides an interesting look at Graham's life and work.  Liz Kotz wrote a bit about the exhibit for Artforum, commenting:

Tracing the evolution of Graham’s practice, the exhibition aims to loosely unite the artist’s divergent production around “the changing relationship of individual to society as mirrored through American mass media and architecture at the end of the twentieth century,” per cocurators Chrissie Iles and Bennett Simpson. The show, comprising about one hundred works, will navigate vastly different kinds of visual and perceptual experiences, from the private space of the page to screen-based and time-based works to the emphatically public pavilions. The events program will include a panel on music and collaboration featuring Graham, Kim Gordon, and Thurston Moore, in addition to other talks and screenings.

But don't take our word for it.  The exhibit runs at the Whitney until October 11th then moves to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in November. 

With all the discussion about President Obama's proposed healthcare plan, we thought we'd check in with Laurence Kotlikoff, author of The Healthcare Fix and professor of economics at Boston University to see what he thinks of the whole thing:

The President's plan to expand health insurance for the close to 50 million uninsured Americans is admirable in its objectives, but is fiscally reckless.   We need to get everyone insured in a basic plan, but not by having four separate systems, none of which together or are collectively affordable.  I speak here not just of the new proposed insurance system for those now uninsured, but also of the employer-based system, Medicare, and Medicaid. 

What the President proposes will likely induce an unraveling of the employer-based system as employers close down their plans in order to ensure their low-income workers benefit from the subsidies in the new system.  In short, we are going to end up with the government paying for everyone's basic health plan, i.e., we're going to get a one-payer system, but one that will be extremely inefficient and drive the nation broke.  The Healthcare Fix offers a real alternative that meets all of the President's healthcare objectives without driving our nation broke.  I recommend that everyone buy two copies, one for themselves and one to mail to the President. 

More on Kotlikoff's healthcare plan can be found here. 

On June 11th, one of our MIT Press designers, Emily Gutheinz, received a couple of Best of New England (BoNE) design awards. Another of our fabulous designers, Erin Hasley, attended the award show at Massachusetts College of Art (still on view until July 8th!) and writes about the show and the process of design:

The 2009 biennial Best of New England (BoNE) show has a “green” theme, with signs made out of corrugated cardboard and displays made out of reused wooden pallets. The materials create an understated but warm environment. I wonder if the judges knew, beforehand, about the theme of the show. Their choices might have been informed — in part — by entries representing this theme of sustainability. Many of the pieces (such as Grazier Design Works’ brown paper 50 lb sugar bags) reinforced the aesthetic of the display.

An exhibit’s opening may not be the optimal time to see a show. A show is better appreciated when you’re on your own or with one friend and the gallery is almost empty. Yet an opening is a perfect time to see many individuals interested in the same discipline. It’s a great opportunity to people-watch, and to speculate. Specific to the BoNE show, it could well be a time to check out the work of your mentors, contemporaries, and protégés, all in one room. Observing the diversity of work that exists within New England alone makes the exhibit impressive and unique.

It was great to see my former professor Doug Scott, and the four posters he had in the show. This was a welcome reminder that the fundamentals I was taught are still the things that sustain me in my career, more than a decade later. My first boss after college said, “Tell me what you did and why you did it.” I repeat that statement to myself, now and then. Even better is when the reason for doing something is integral to the piece itself, and there is no real need to explain anything.

The MIT Press’s own Emily Gutheinz (MassArt ’00) won two awards at the BoNE show, including the highest honor — Judges’ Pick — for the book Camps. She was deeply invested in both of the winning projects. Bookmaking involves our authors, and it requires the expertise of our colleagues in various departments including acquisitions, editorial, production, and marketing. Designers rely on experience (performing the same skills over and over), intuition (sensing, trying to “get into” what they’re doing), and innovation (not being afraid to try new methods, new materials), to present the content as appropriately as possible.

One feature of Camps that draws the reader to its utilitarian yet elegant narrative is the exposed spine. Before they are bound, groups of book pages are folded together. These are usually numbered on the individual spines of each grouping (called ‘signatures’), to help keep them in order. Then they may be sewn together. Emily envisioned what a book spine would look like without the normal finishing that occurs when heavy cloth- or paper-covered cardboard is adhered to the book itself, completely covering things up.

With the support of printer GRAFOS S.A. (Spain) and Production Director Terry Lamoureux, black markings were made on selected signatures, where the numbering might normally be. When sewn together, these marks form the title, author’s name, and publisher’s colophon. The result — seeing the unapologetic materials from which a book is made — seems akin to camp culture. The book is kind of lashed together, and roughing it. At the same time it is organized, clean, and compact — a ‘guide,’ as the subtitle suggests.

…

Partway into the night — when the BoNE Show awards were actually presented — we couldn’t hear everything organizers/Chairs Brandon and Jeff were saying, because the place was so crowded with enthusiastic and noisy people. But I did hear one of the organizers say, “labor of love.”

At its best, that’s what design work is.

We took the subway home — a less direct but more predictable route. On the way I was still thinking about the show. What made me most happy was to see my colleagues and friends succeed and be recognized. The act of designing is seldom glamorous, and a lot of it can be quite solitary. Hartford’s CO:LAB contributed a piece that uses this as its concept: Design Ain’t Pretty. The second benefit of the show was to know that work can still be made in this era with high-quality materials and to see so many examples of visual information presented both clearly and creatively.

Erin Hasley, Senior Designer, The MIT Press

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