Tag Archives: Culture & Politics

Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Previews, Society, Stories

Previews: The Humanist Magazine – Autumn 2023

September 14, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

(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.

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Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — SEPT 2023

August 13, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

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…

My Generation

Anthem for a forgotten cohort

by Justin E. H. Smith

Man Called Fran

Plumbing, the depths

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Waiting for the Lights

The life of an Iranian exile

by Amir Ahmadi Arian

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Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — August 2023

July 17, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

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…

Doctor’s Orders

Photographs from the series The Masks We Wear by Benjamin Lowy © The artist

COVID-19 and the new science wars

by Jason Blakely

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.

Who Walks Always Beside You?

A disappearance in Arkansas

by Benjamin Hale

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.

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Politics & Ideas: The Critic Magazine – July 2023 Issue

June 26, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

The Critic Magazine (July 2023 Issue) – The new issue features The errors of escalation; The end of German stability?; Brahms: sublime genius on a major scale, and more…

The errors of escalation

What does it mean and why is it so dangerous?

Paul Winter

A fresh face for an old friend

The National Portrait Galley’s renovation doesn’t disappoint, bringing light and space to tell the story of the nation

Helen Barrett

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Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — July 2023 Issue

June 19, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

Harper’s Magazine – July 2023 issue: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Wokeness by Ian Buruma; Jackson Lears on Nuclear Insouciance and The World of Homemade Submarines…

Doing the Work

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness

By Ian Buruma

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is the word itself, which has been a term of abuse employed by the far right, a battle cry for the progressive left, and an embarrassment to many liberals.

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Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — June 2023 Issue

May 16, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

Harper’s Magazine – June 2023 issue:

Why Are We in Ukraine?

On the dangers of American hubris by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia.

Seeing Through Maps

by Madeline ffitch

I was splitting wood at sunset when the cat jumped up on the chopping block in front of me, arched her back, and took a long piss. My axe hung in the sky. The cat stared at me, tail up. I put my axe down and squatted before her. I hitched my gown to my waist.

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Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — May 2023 Issue

April 17, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

Harper’s Magazine – May 2023 issue: @laurenoyler goes on the @goop cruise; @harikunzru and @erikmbaker on the real “crisis of work; A person history of panic; Losing a father and finding Stoicism; New fiction by Cynthia Ozick and more..

The Age of the Crisis of Work

What is the sound of quiet quitting?

Something has gone wrong with work. On this, everyone seems to agree. Less clear is the precise nature of the problem, let alone who or what is to blame. For some time we’ve been told that we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. Workers are quitting their jobs en masse, repudiating not just their bosses but ambition itself—even the very idea of work.

The Anatomy of Panic

A personal history of anxiety

I had my first panic attack when I was fifteen, in the middle of January, while I was sitting in geometry class. Winter in Illinois, flesh comes off the bones—what did we need geometry for? We could look at the naked angles of the trees, the circles in the sky at night.

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Culture: The New Review Magazine – April 2, 2023

March 31, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

The New Review (April 2, 2023) – How running helped me navigate the strange terrain of grief An extract from @drrachelhewitt’s memoir, In Her Nature @ChattoBooks.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad review – drama in the West Bank

An actor returns to Palestine and joins a local production of Hamlet in this richly layered and elegant examination of memories and oppression

The West Bank town of Jenin: ‘what could offer a more febrile union of the personal and the political than Palestine?’ Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images

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Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – April 2023 Issue

March 20, 2023 Intellicurious Leave a comment

Harper’s Magazine – April 2023 issue:

The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday

How the climate catastrophists learned to stop worrying and love the calm

The first signs that the mood was brightening among the corps of reporters called to cover one of the gravest threats humanity has ever faced appeared in the summer of 2021. “Climate change is not a pass/fail course,” Sarah Kaplan wrote in the Washington Post on August 9.

In Search of Lost Time

The science of the perfect second

When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the “time lady”—an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out—who would announce, with prim authority “at the tone,” the correct time to the second. I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time.