HARPER’S MAGAZINE – JANUARY 2024:This issue features ‘Behind the Iron Curtain’ – Caviar, counterculture, and the cult of Stalin reborn; A Life in Psychedelics; Sex and Grue in Ancient Rome, and more…
Russia has become, to observers in the West, a distant, mysterious, and hostile land once again. It seems implausible, in the age of social media, that so little should be known about the country that has shattered the international order, but the shadows surrounding Russia have only grown since the days of the Soviet Union. Of course, it is one thing to observe the country from the outside; it is another to try to understand how Russians experience the war and react to sanctions from within, and what they hope the future holds. If Russia seems to have become…
The Atlantic Magazine – December 7, 2023: The latest January/February 2024 issue features ‘IF TRUMP WINS’ – A second Trump presidency won’t just mirror the first. It will be much worse. In The Atlantic’s January/February issue, two dozen writers warn what could happen if Donald Trump is reelected, from destroying the rule of law to abandoning NATO and reshaping the international order.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Donald Trump said this past November, in a campaign speech that was ostensibly honoring Veterans Day. “The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup—a quieter one—was in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as “disparate impact.” The memo was quickly overshadowed by the events of January 6, and, in the chaotic final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was never implemented. But Barr’s proposal represented perhaps the most aggressive step the administration took in its effort to dismantle existing civil-rights law. Should Trump return to power, he would surely attempt to see the effort through.
HARPER’S MAGAZINE – DECEMBER 2023: This issue features The Hofmann Wobble – Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory; Your Mind’s in the Hands of Everything – Letting go of Philip Roth; Risky Disco – A sensory workshop bridges the gap; Occult Murder and Gospel Thrillers, and more…
At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.
It is difficult to predict when one will spend the night at a hotel in Newark, let alone three, and uncommon to agree to such a scenario willingly. If you live there already, you stay home. If you’re there for a professional engagement, your boss made you go. If your flight has been canceled, you go there as a last resort. Whereas, though I felt compelled to be there, I couldn’t point to an authority outside of myself that had forced my hand. The room had been booked a week in advance.
The Atlantic Magazine – December 2023 issue: For the first time since the publication of our first series of stories on Reconstruction, in 1901, The Atlantic is examining “the enduring consequences of Reconstruction’s tragic fall at a moment—yet another moment—when the cause of racial progress faces sustained pressure”…
The Drift Magazine – Fall 2023 Issue – Essays on dissidents, ecoterrorists, and mermaids; an interview with Veronica Gago, Dispatches on the future of the Supreme Court; also fiction, poetry, reviews and more…
Harper’s Magazine – NOVEMBER 2023: This issue features The Machine Breaker – Inside the mind of an “ecoterrorist”; Forbidden Fruit – The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán; Principia Mathemagica; From Magus – The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, and more…
In the summer of 2016, a fifty-seven-year-old Texan named Stephen McRae drove east out of the rainforests of Oregon and into the vast expanse of the Great Basin. His plan was to commit sabotage. First up was a coal-burning power plant near Carlin, Nevada, a 242-megawatt facility owned by the Newmont Corporation that existed to service two nearby gold mines, also owned by Newmont.
Phone service was down—a fuse had blown in the cell tower during a recent storm—and even though my arrival had been cleared with the government of Cherán in advance, the armed guard manning the highway checkpoint, decked out in full fatigues, the wrong shade to pass for Mexican military, refused to wave me through. My guide, Uli Escamilla, assured him that we had an appointment, and that we could prove it if only we could call or text our envoy. The officer gripped his rifle with both hands and peered into the windows of our rental car.
Harper’s Magazine – OCTOBER 2023: This issue features ‘Craving A Choice’ – Insurgency and its Threat to the Democratic Party; The Spy – An Essay On seeing without being seen, and more…
For decades, New Hampshire has generated brisk and gratifying drama with its first-in-the-nation presidential primary. The Granite State momentously destroyed a presidency in 1968, when the Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy ran against President Lyndon Johnson on an antiwar platform.
Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.
(September 14, 2023) – The new issue features OpenAI’s now famous ChatGPT bot was used by the Humanist to generate this article as an experiment to discover what today’s AI knows and will tell about the dangers posed by AI technology.
The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence
From Misinformation to Autonomous Weapons
IN RECENT YEARS, the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have brought forth a myriad of benefits and possibilities. Be it healthcare or transportation, AI has shown its potential to revolutionize industries and improve the quality of human life. However, this transformative power comes hand in hand with a range of dangers that must be understood and addressed. This article delves into both the narrower personal risks and the broader socio-political concerns associated with AI.
Artificial Intelligence Unveiled: Navigating the Hazards in Our Everyday Lives
Imagine a world where your conversations with AI-powered machines could lead you astray, your job might vanish overnight, and your personal data might end up in the wrong hands. Welcome to the realm of artificial intelligence, a place where the marvels of technology coexist with a web of dangers that can reshape our lives in unexpected ways. There are personal concerns that ordinary people face as they navigate this AI-infused landscape.
Harper’s Magazine – September 2023: This issue features Justin E. H. Smith’s Elegy for Gen X; Zadie Smith and the Gen X novel; The Rise and Fall of an Iranian Exile and John Jeremiah Sullivan plumbs the Depths…
Harper’s Magazine – August 2023 issue: The New Science Wars – The COVID Response and Its Discontents; Freud Shrinks Woodrow Wilson; Lawrence Jackson on Colson Whitehead, and more…
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People wearing N-95 masks and latex gloves stood beside others wearing no mask at all—or else letting their mandatory face coverings slouch flaccidly beneath their chins.
Twenty-two years ago, a six-year-old girl—my cousin—got lost in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance would eventually connect my family to another story, a dark and bizarre one involving kidnapping, brainwashing, murder, and a cult that believed in the imminent end of the world, laced with the kind of eerie coincidences or near-coincidences that cause perfectly rational people to question what they think they know about reality.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Intellicurious 