David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer. His book Illogical Operator: A Life in Code is forthcoming from Pantheon. He lives in New York.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES

The Soul of the Body: William Empson’s “The Face of the Buddha”
David Auerbach on William Empson’s “The Face of the Buddha.”...

Make America Austria Again: How Robert Musil Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump
What can "The Man Without Qualities" teach us about Donald Trump?...

A Delville of a Tolkar: Martin Gardner’s “Undiluted Hocus-Pocus”
Undiluted Hocus-Pocus has no dramatic revelations to offer about Gardner, but it reveals the mentality that shaped itself around his encyclopedic interests....

Revenge of the Dryasdusts: Paul Hazard’s “The Crisis of the European Mind”
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE A BOOK as simultaneously erudite and irreverent as Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of ...
Devourer of Encyclopedias: Stanislaw Lem's "Summa Technologiae"
AT LAST WE have it in English. Summa Technologiae, originally published in Polish in 1964, is the cornerstone of Stanislaw ...

Scenes from the Resistance: Georges Perec’s “La boutique obscure”
GEORGES PEREC'S dream journal, which he kept between 1968 and 1972 and published in 1973 as La boutique obscure, is bookended ...
