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What Can Enlightened Coders Really Do?
Evan Selinger reads Darryl Campbell’s “Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software” with the realities his students face in mind.
Science & Technology
"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not." — Gertrude Stein
The Man Who Believed He Could Have Raised Hitler to Be a Nice Person
Åsmund Borgen Gjerde excavates the link between Ole Ivar Lovaas’s Nazi past and his UCLA-based work on “curing” autistic children.
Embrangled Banks
David Toomey delights in Banu Subramaniam’s “Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism.”
But Why Would You Want to Self-Transcend Through Mysticism?
Dan Turello considers Vladimir Miskovic and Steven Jay Lynn’s “Dreaming Reality: How Neuroscience and Mysticism Can Unlock the Secrets of Consciousness.”
We Are Never Well, nor Can Be So
Helena Aeberli ponders Caroline Crampton’s “A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria.”
Who Shall and Shall Not Have a Place in the World?
In the seventh essay in the Legacies of Eugenics series, Lily Hu asks whether the racialist and eugenicist roots of statistics can be cordoned off from “proper” science.
Crashes on the Information Highway
Kendra Sullivan reviews Chris Campanioni’s “Windows 85.”
Dealer’s Choice: What Freedom Is—and Isn’t
Henry Cowles describes how every choice he makes is now haunted by Sophia Rosenfeld’s “The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life.”
To Touch the Dust of Anarres
Jonathan Bolton thoughtfully reads Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” within and against the grain of a half century of criticism.
Are We All Addicts?
Maria Cichosz explores new models of addiction and finds them unsatisfactory.
The Case for Kicking the Stone
Philip Ball finds Nicholas Carr’s “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart” disturbingly compelling.
Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem
Julien Crockett speaks with Ted Chiang about the search for a perfect language, the state of AI, and the future direction of technology.
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