In mornings dark, days Unborn Bathed in pools of artificial light I find myself, trappings all At the base of Hunger Mountain David Hinton smiles, ancient sages at his back All smiling, all mysterious As if knowing some unknowable And not sharing We begin up the Mountain Sometimes wandering, leaves in watery eddies Sometimes bounding, […]
Wendell Berry is an author I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. As a staunch defender of the environment and nonindustrial agriculture, Berry challenged my parents’ generation to think twice about the price of American modernity. This collection of essays from the 1970s and 80s does just that, and in much richer […]
Lately I’ve been wondering who’s going to take up Edward O. Wilson’s mantle after he dies. For decades, Wilson has penned accessible, intelligent books that help nonspecialists understand what he calls the “Evolutionary Epic”––the grand narrative of terrestrial life. “People need a sacred narrative,” Wilson wrote in 1998. “Homo sapiens is far more than a […]
Modern America faces a labor crisis that is both practical and existential. Even as new kinds of work are rapidly being created, we can’t adequately educate and fully employ the workforce we already have. Worse, we’ve created a system where elites have almost exclusive access to intellectually challenging and meaningful work opportunities, with everyone else […]
John Markoff’s Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots is another addition to the growing stack of books designed to help us think about the relationship between humanity and emerging technologies. Markoff offers a detailed history of artificial intelligence and robotics, and attempts to show how past trends are […]
David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is not a breezy book. From the first page, it plunged me into a fervid mode of double-layered analysis in which my struggle to comprehend the text was mirrored by efforts to track my personal reactions to whatever content I was able to wrest from it. Early on, […]
If you decide to read one piece of nonfiction this summer, let this be it. Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future is one of the most intelligent and important works of futurism to date. Although the book’s title might trigger images of popcorn and 3D glasses rather […]
Since well before the 2008 financial crisis, the practice of economic austerity has beleaguered American and European politics. Praised by the right as a panacea of renewed financial responsibility, and decried by the left as a mechanism for dismantling the West’s already struggling middle classes, austerity signifies a critical juncture where battered economies face radically […]
Since I began listening to NPR’s Planet Money and the Slate Money podcast, I’ve hatched a significant desire to correct my deficiency in economic and financial knowledge. When I heard John Lanchester plugging his new book on the “Read These Books Edition” of Slate Money, I thought How to Speak Money would be a good starting […]
Max More and Natasha Vita-More’s The Transhumanist Reader is probably the single best source for readers interested in a crash course in transhumanist philosophy. It presents more than forty essays addressing myriad aspects of transhumanist theory, with a good mixture of classic (i.e. pre-21st-century) papers and contemporary ones. It is a dense text containing a […]