The Second Sex (book review)
Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and...
AI can’t dance
This morning I was about to ask my friendly local chatbot (OpenAI) whether Zumba (the joyous, global, immensely popular dance-exercise franchise) is feminist. Luckily, I stopped myself. Just in the nick of time, I...
What does AI remind me of?
I’ve been thinking for a while that the Open AI’s irritating chatbot reminds me of someone. This morning I figured it out: It acts like my brothers did toward me, their quite-a-bit younger sister,...
Disappearing Writer
This morning I read an AI-generated review of my own writing. It was of an academic article[1] from 2010, about the photomontage artist John Heartfield (1891-1968). The notification and link came from academia.edu, a...
Deaf Republic: Book Review
Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic, London: Faber and Faber, 2019. You might wonder, as I did, whether I was reading a fable, a myth, a folktale, a parable, or something else, something different. Of course...
Eros the Bittersweet: Book Review
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely...