What We’re Reading
After we finished up The Power Broker, a bunch of people were asking us what other books we’d been reading. A group of us got together and presented some of…
Dismantling the Mother Shelf: Expanding Our Thinking About Women’s Stories of Parenthood
When it comes to the Mother Shelf, it’s tempting to shrug our collective shoulders and say, Well, that’s just how book marketing works. But the uncomfortable truth is that publishers,…
Q&A: Stewart Battles Book Bans at PRH
In September 2024, during Banned Books Week, Penguin Random House (PRH) expanded its Intellectual Freedom Taskforce, a group dedicated to protecting the freedom to read, by naming Rosie Stewart senior…
AI Threatens Literary Translation
The etymology of the word translation—“to carry across”—conjures an image of physical labor. It is deeply relational, requiring at least two bodies, those of an author and of the person…
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Work, and Algorithms | Matteo Pasquinelli and Richard Hames
What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence"—a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind, such as in its…
Grave New World
Richard Beck charts how 9/11 shapes the way we live now
The Limits of Witness
What a surgeon’s 1989 memoir tells us about working in Gaza and Lebanon
Commons People
Making radical ideas a reality
The Varieties of Mystical Experience
Simon Critchley seeks to say the unsayable