Absence of Mind: Book Review
Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. If you’re reading Robinson’s essays, you probably have already read her novels. You may well approach the essays as I did,...
Category: art
Heartfield and Photography
The celebrated German photomontage artist John Heartfield (né Helmut Herzfeld, 1891-1968), had an astonishing gift for finding specific photographs and reconfiguring them as news in a world of his invention — a world in...
What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics: Book Review
Adam Becker, What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, London: John Murray, 2018. This book is, at heart, a history of one literally earth-shaking event in the history of...
Gesture and Speech
This book makes human evolution look more exciting and provocative than I would have thought possible. In particular, it explains why, when we know that many, probably most plants and animals have evolved to...
Needing a Translator
We’d been skyping for months, both really enjoying it, I think — my husband kept noticing how much laughter was coming from the room where the really big computer lives. I was translating Lambert’s...
Apple Treachery
I have long assumed that virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) were related in some vague way. I’ve gradually come to understand them as opposites, and more, possibly, good guys and bad guys....