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 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
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
December 17, 2024
(The Dispatch) – Christine Rosen’s new book shows how modern technology simply lacks an essential human touch. Would you choose to spend the rest of your life in the experience machine? When Nozick first asked this question to his students … Read More
December 16, 2024
(Nature) – The influential writer talks about frighteningly accurate predictions, the creative act of reading, AI consciousness — and hope. My feeling is that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a public-relations name that obscures what’s really going on. It’s artificial for sure. … Read More
October 28, 2024
(The Atlantic) – Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality. But Burkeman’s enterprise—to free people from traditional, silver-bullet self-help while selling them his own carefully packaged counsel—is a tricky one. Burkeman himself doesn’t … Read More
September 2, 2024
(Medical Xpress) – White women are paid up to eight times more for their eggs than Black women in the U.S., according to data uncovered by the author of a new book which exposes the lesser-known ramifications of egg donation. … Read More
July 1, 2024
(Washington Post via MSN) – There is a meme, popular among tech world insiders, that distinguishes between two types of people: wordcels and shape rotators. Wordcels are humanists, effete creatures who trade in anachronisms like writing and philosophy. Shape rotators, … Read More
June 18, 2024
(The Atlantic) – The Cesarean delivery can save lives in labor emergencies, and it’s overwhelmingly safe—but in the United States, nearly one in every three births now results in a C-section, including for low-risk patients who don’t need them. For many of … Read More
May 2, 2024
(NPR) – Economist Emily Oster made a name for herself using data to tackle big questions about pregnancy in her 2013 blockbuster book Expecting Better. Now, she’s returning to the topic with a book on how to navigate difficult pregnancies … Read More
April 17, 2024
(Wired) – The untold, top-secret story of the British researchers who found the key to keeping humans alive underwater—and helped make D-Day a success. In my field of dive research, there’s one story from eight decades ago that blows the … Read More
January 9, 2024
(The Free Press) – When Casey Means’ mother was diagnosed in 2021 with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, she and her brother Calley were suddenly given a front-row seat to the American healthcare system. It was a world they already knew … Read More
January 9, 2024
(Nature) – The Digital Departed: How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality Timothy Recuber NYU Press (2023) Many of us will have turned to the Internet to grieve and remember the dead — by posting messages on … Read More
November 16, 2023
(NPR) – In a new book, The Invisible Ache, Vance and psychologist Robin L. Smith (who often goes by Dr. Robin) explore the trauma unique to Black men and boys, and address what they see as an urgent need to … Read More
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