Spells that Sell
John Updike, Alice Hoffman, and the golden age of “witch lit.”
Kevin Mims
· 11 min read
Trauma and Terror
If you’re not already familiar with the casus belli that ignited the Gaza war, watching the fifth season of ‘Fauda’ will be good for you, but it will also be bad for you.
Michael J. Totten
· 11 min read
An Open Letter to Scott Alexander
The dangers of AI are real, but doomerism may be counterproductive.
Steven Pinker
· 8 min read
From Atmosphere to Empire
U2 reconsidered at fifty.
David Cohen
· 12 min read
AI Doom Is Not Cybersecurity
An OpenAI agent’s breach of a Medicare portal shows that the real danger from AI is a mundane one—and the labs’ fixation on a coming machine god is making it worse.
Zack Korman
· 6 min read
Banning the Horseless Carriage
Bernie Sanders wants to outlaw artificial superintelligence. The risks he points to are real—but the answer to a powerful new technology is regulation, not prohibition, and China has no intention of pausing.
John Aziz
· 10 min read
Myths and Illusions of the Digital Age
The digital revolution is not remaking the world as the industrial one did.
Shalom Lappin
· 13 min read
Citizen Sane
The mainstreaming of therapy culture may be driving us all out of our minds.
Steve Salerno
· 18 min read
The Ape in the Basement
Why is masturbation so shameful?
Robert Lynch
· 13 min read
Bad Criticism
Name-calling, guilt-by-association, and other unscrupulous methods of argument are polluting our discourse.
Rosalind Arden
· 11 min read
The $64 Question, Again
Anna D. Shapiro’s recent revival of Eric Bentley’s 1972 play about the HUAC hearings offered entertainment along with the pleasures of moral certainty and ideological reinforcement.
Thomas Doherty
· 11 min read
Naked in America
To be naked is to give up obsessive self-presentation and take off the mask.
Robert Lynch
· 10 min read
‘The Battle of Algiers’ at Sixty
Watching Gillo Pontecorvo’s film six decades after its release permits a nuanced understanding of the events that it portrays, which was unavailable when it first came out.
Shalom Lappin
· 13 min read
Red Reign
A thrash-metal classic turns forty.
Noel Yaxley
· 9 min read
The Autism Epidemic That Wasn’t
The Trump administration’s scientific illiteracy about rates of autism is going to have catastrophic results.
Geoffrey C. Kabat
· 6 min read