Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
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Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll
From Bob Dylan to David Bowie to The Beatles, the legendary Beat writer’s influence reached beyond literature into music in surprising ways.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Day New York Rose Up Against the Nazis On the Hudson
In 1935, a group of New York communists boarded a German luxury liner during a lavish sending-off party attended by celebrities, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Their goal: capture the swastika.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
Judging Books By Their Covers
Jason Diamond analyzes his obsession with Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks from the 80s.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
Judging Books By Their Covers
Jason Diamond analyzes his obsession with Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks from the 80s.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
How Lobbyists Normalized the Use of Chemical Weapons on American Civilians
Or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the gas.
Essay
Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us.” —Cormac McCarthy, “The Kekulé Problem,” Nautilus, April 20, 2017 I. The Smartest Person in the Room I often say that one of the […]
Posted inCurrent Events, Uncategorized
The Press Has Always Been a Guest in the President’s Home
And they can be thrown out at any time, for any reason.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
How Lobbyists Normalized the Use of Chemical Weapons on American Civilians
Or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the gas.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Nightmare Dream of a Thinking Machine
The question “Can a machine think?” has shadowed computer science from its beginnings. Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that a machine could be taught like a child; John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955. As AI researchers in the 1960s and 1970s began to use computers to recognize images, translate between languages, and understand instructions in normal language and not just code, the idea that computers would eventually develop the ability to speak and think—and thus to do evil—bubbled into mainstream culture.
