October 27, 2026
(NYT) – Netflix’s reboot of a notoriously cruel and unusual psychological study makes for unenlightening reality TV. You would think, then, that a “New Stanford Prison Experiment” would have all the appeal of “The New Donner Party Expedition.” And you … Read More
October 20, 2026
(Nature) – When I acquired a copy of the book A Mother’s Brain by neuroscientist Susana Carmona, I thought: at last, a book about what happens to your brain during pregnancy. I recalled how I’d realized in 1997, when I … Read More
October 9, 2026
(Wired) – Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network attempts to shame a ruling class that has proved itself shameless. Sorkin still wasn’t sure he had a film, but one day he asked Haugen why she finally decided to go … Read More
September 9, 2026
(CT) – In a society that treasures youth and equates beauty with worth, three books offer a better perspective on aging The antiaging industry in the United States is booming, now valued at $77 billion a year—a number expected to … Read More
July 8, 2026
(Wired) – In a world regulated by devices, humanity has become disconnected from the physical world—from stick-shift cars to postcards. If gratification is so easy, why don’t you feel more gratified already? Because it’s gotten harder. It’s still easy to … Read More
April 6, 2026
(Law & Liberty) – Glenn Hughes’s posthumous book is a reminder of the philosophical sources for the conception of human dignity that ought to define our political tradition. Glenn “Chip” Hughes, longtime professor of philosophy at St. Mary’s University in … Read More
February 24, 2026
(Wired) – In his new book, A World Appears, Michael Pollan argues that artificial intelligence can do many things—it just can’t be a person. A conscious AI might lack a clear commercial rationale (how do you monetize the thing?) and … Read More
November 7, 2025
(CT) – Leah Libresco Sargeant’s doggedly pro-life feminist manifesto argues that dependence is inevitable. The normal condition for humans is dependence—we start and finish there, and by gradations we depend on others throughout our lives. A system presupposing independence has … Read More
September 9, 2025
(Comment) – In Bioethics After God: Morality, Culture, and Medicine, a misbegotten if earnest attempt to reframe the discipline from within the standpoint of traditional Christian morality, Mark J. Cherry argues that the root of this disagreement lies in the … Read More
July 3, 2025
(New York Review of Books) – The origin of the many so-called artificial intelligences now invading our work lives and swarming our personal devices can be found in an oddball experiment in 1950 by Claude Shannon. Shannon is known now … Read More
June 30, 2025
(The New Yorker) – Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water. During the “golden age” of serial killing, between … Read More
June 13, 2025
(Undark) – Jennie Erin Smith’s “Valley of Forgetting” explores the genetics of early-onset dementia plaguing a mountain region. That cause — a hereditary genetic mutation known as E280A — is at the heart of science journalist Jennie Erin Smith’s deeply … Read More
June 13, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – While there’s a sprawling patchwork of ideas and philosophies powering these visions, three features play a central role, says Adam Becker, a science writer and astrophysicist: an unshakable certainty that technology can solve any problem, a … Read More
May 27, 2025
(Undark) – An unusual collaboration between scientists and psychics could transform the treatment of auditory hallucinations. In follow-up research, Powers and his team dug deeper into the possibilities of control mentioned by the medium he’d first encountered. Interview-based studies confirmed … Read More
May 19, 2025
(Christianity Today) – As surgeon general under Ronald Reagan, C. Everett Koop traveled in evangelical circles. But the partnership was always uneasy. Of the Christian conservatives whom Ronald Reagan appointed to high office after winning the presidency in 1980, none … Read More
May 8, 2025
(NPR) – In the new book, Second Life: Having A Child In The Digital Age, Hess writes about how technology shapes every aspect of parenting — from our online identities to the pressures of sharing our lives in real-time. “I … Read More
May 6, 2025
(Wall Street Journal) – Among those fortunate enough to reach 80, it’s rare to find anyone who has arrived unscathed. In 2008 a group of scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego set out to recruit 1,400 of … Read More
April 28, 2025
(The New Yorker) – When the writer Amanda Hess was twenty-nine weeks pregnant with her first child, her doctor, looking at an ultrasound, “saw something he did not like.” He suspected a rare genetic condition; Hess underwent an amniocentesis and … Read More
March 26, 2025
(New York Times) – After college, as her friends soared, her life became an endless round of psychiatrists, institutionalizations and outpatient programs. An incomplete list of the drugs she has been prescribed: Depakote, Prozac, Ambien, Abilify, Klonopin, Lamictal, Provigil, Lithium. … Read More
March 17, 2025
(Washington Post via MSN) – Are AI chatbots revolutionary technologies that herald the dawn of a new era of thinking machines? Or are they just “stochastic parrots,” as the linguist Emily M. Bender memorably put it — digital mimics programmed … Read More
March 12, 2025
(Undark) – In a provocative new book, political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee call for a pandemic reckoning. In their forthcoming book, “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us,” they argue that many pandemic-era policies were not grounded … Read More
February 26, 2025
(ABC News) – Audience disinterest has characterized many, though not all, of the films about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the output has pretty much dried up over the years. “My Dead Friend Zoe” feels like it was made … Read More
February 25, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – This discrepancy between the relative ease of teaching a machine abstract thinking and the difficulty of teaching it basic sensory, social, and motor skills is what’s known as Moravec’s paradox. Named after an observation the roboticist … Read More
January 27, 2025
(New York Times) – In the 1960s, the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke coined a useful adage: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He was right, as demonstrated by the almost mystical reverence with which people tend to … Read More
December 23, 2024
(New York Times) – Lydia Reeder’s “The Cure for Women” tells the story of the remarkable Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi. Determined to train as a physician at the highest level, in 1868 Putnam — a daughter of the prominent New … Read More
