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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.
Science & Technology
"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not." — Gertrude Stein
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.
The Rules We Live By: Year in Review
Julien Crockett looks back on the first year of the LARB series The Rules We Live By.
Disaster Triumphant
Visiting Trinity Site, location of the Manhattan Project, Christopher Kempf is stunned by the failures of the American curatorial imagination.
The Character of Chinese Computing
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham reviews Thomas S. Mullaney’s “The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age.”
The Politics of Pigmentation
In the sixth essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Suman Seth explores the anti-history of the evolution of whiteness.
Play and the Engine of Creation
Julien Crockett interviews Kelly Clancy about gamification, simulations, and her new book “Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World.”
On Melons and Melancholy
Ben Wurgaft demonstrates how Steven Shapin’s “Eating and Being” illuminates the intellectual and cultural dynamics of “dietetics”—the relationship between diet, health, and identity—like no prior work on the subject.
Can “Tech Criticism” Tame Silicon Valley?
Evan Selinger lauds Gary Marcus’s new book for its clarity on how to stop the madness and greed around generative AI. He questions the power of “tech criticism” to translate into actual reform, however.
The New Artificial Intelligentsia
In the fifth essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Ruha Benjamin explores how AI evangelists wrap their self-interest in a cloak of humanistic concern.
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