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The Womb and the Web
Isabel Davis considers Amanda Hess’s new book about bringing a baby into a world of smart technology and data harvesting.
Science & Technology
"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not." — Gertrude Stein
Is There Anything “Artificial” About Artificial Intelligence?
Julien Crockett speaks with Blaise Agüera y Arcas about the various ways that LLMs keep surprising scientists and how our definition of intelligence should be more complex than people generally think.
Giant Platforms of Shit
Dave Mandl catches a whiff of Cory Doctorow’s anatomy of platform “enshittification.”
The Return of the Luddites
Erik J. Larson considers “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want” by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.
Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities
Rachele Dini discusses OpenAI’s “A Machine-Shaped Hand” and an academic sector in crisis.
Power Hangs by a Literal Thread
Ian Kumekawa dives into Samanth Subramanian’s “The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World.”
A Network of Global Incinerators
Rob Arcand reviews Hito Steyerl’s new essay collection, “Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat.”
From Domination to Derision
W. Patrick McCray surveys Matthew Wisnioski’s description of the United States’ evolution—and devolution—into a nation obsessed with innovation.
Pills Have Legs
Julia Lloyd George interviews Rebecca Kelliher about her new book “Just Pills: The Extraordinary Story of a Revolution in Abortion Care.”
What Isn’t Intelligence?
Patrick House is inspired by Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s “What Is Intelligence?” to think about what might constitute the difference between artificial and natural intelligence.
Everything You Think Is Physical
Julien Crockett discusses cognition and metaphors with George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan, authors of “The Neural Mind: How Brains Think,” in a new installment of the series The Rules We Live By.
Control Freaks
Arjun S. Byju employs Emily C. Bloom’s “I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art” to investigate how tools of empowerment set us up for disappointment.
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