配信予定コンテンツ

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the philosophy of data—takes us deep into the heart of games, and into the depths of bureaucracy, to see how scoring systems shape what we care about. Games are the most important art form of our era. They embody the spirit of free play. They show us the subtle beauty of action everywhere in life—in video games, sports, and boardgames—but also cooking, gardening, fly fishing, and moving. They remind us that it isn’t always about outcomes, but about how glorious it feels to be doing the thing.

■思考や表現の幅を広げ、新しい扉を開く隠れた言葉たち「鴆酒（ちんしゅ）」「猫の魚辞退（うおじたい）」「アハ体験」「竹夫人（ちくふじん）」「ぐりはま」「ブーバ／キキ効果」……

With The Interpretation of Cultures, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the concept of thick description, and in so doing, he virtually rewrote the rules of his field. Culture, Geertz argues, does not drive human behavior. Rather, it is a web of symbols that can help us better understand what that behavior means. A thick description explains not only the behavior, but the context in which it occurs, and to describe something thickly, Geertz argues, is the fundamental role of the anthropologist.

This extraordinarily wide-ranging work represents a new departure for contemporary literary theory. Author of Beginnings and the controversial Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrates that modern critical discourse has been impressively strengthened by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, for example, and by such influences as Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis.

Math is famous for its equations: 1 + 1 = 2, a^2 + b^2 = c^2, or y = mx + b. Much of the time it can seem like that’s all mathematics is: following steps to show that what’s on one side of an equation is the same as what’s on the other. In Unequal, Eugenia Cheng shows that’s just part of the story, and the boring part to boot. It isn’t even just about numbers and symbols at all, but a world of shapes, symmetries, logical ideas, and more.

Journeying to the dawn of Homo sapiens, evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman reveals the “happy accidents” hidden in our molecular biology that led to one of the most fateful events in the history of life on Earth: our giving birth to babies earlier in their development than our hominid cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Faced with highly dependent infants requiring years of nurturing and protection, early human communities needed to cooperate and coordinate, and it was this unprecedented need for communication that triggered the creation of human language—and changed everything.

An award-winning mathematician shows how we prove what’s true, and what to do when we can’t.