In some previous blog posts we described in details how one can generalize automatic differentiation to give automatically stability enhancements and all sorts of other niceties by incorporating graph transformations into code generation. However, one of the things which we didn' … | Continue reading
In Nazi Europe, countless books were banned. So those who saved books—whether university archivists or Jewish scholars—became smugglers. | Continue reading
How the United States terrorizes the rest of the world, Baldwin realized abroad, echoed how it terrorized its inhabitants at home. | Continue reading
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics ... | Continue reading
It might seem self-evident that White the author practiced what Strunk and White the style gurus preached, but the truth is more complicated. | Continue reading
What could our internet have been? | Continue reading
Women writing about women spies who are, themselves, writing. What’s next for women’s espionage writing? | Continue reading
When the Trump presidency ends, and the toll of years of toxicity and mismanagement becomes clear, we are going to need some guidance. | Continue reading
Are our phones the bane of critical thought? Or might they be our latest texts to read and interpret—objects worthy of inquiry and analysis? | Continue reading
What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur? | Continue reading
What distinguishes the American from the European intellectual? Does that matter? | Continue reading
Strangers share a 1932 train ride from Belgium to Istanbul, a journey that reveals the dark changes already sweeping the continent. | Continue reading
As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle. | Continue reading
The Public Books Database is collecting the resources being offered for free by academic presses during the COVID-19 crisis. | Continue reading
When we mythologize the '60s, we lose sight of what’s truly ahead of us. | Continue reading
Particularly with the advent of the handheld device, digital games now seem a ubiquitous part of our culture ... | Continue reading
Does the relationship between power and AI mean that all people will be monitored all the time? | Continue reading
One of the roles of science fiction is to provide readers with a glimpse of how ... | Continue reading
No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets ... | Continue reading
Isaac Asimov loved large numbers. He was born a century ago this month, and when he died, in 1992, he was both the most famous science fiction writer in the ... | Continue reading
In February 2017, California state authorities ordered more than 180,000 residents near Oroville Dam, the tallest in the United States, to evacuate. After ... | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence has a copyright problem, and this problem is deeply related to questions of ethics and justice. Increasingly, AI is adopted by our banks ... | Continue reading
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ... | Continue reading
Earlier this morning, the Booker Prize judges announced their shortlist for 2019, stamping just six novels—out of the ... | Continue reading
What is science fiction for? A good friend says that in imagining other worlds, science fiction helps us understand our own. Such work addresses scientific ... | Continue reading
Fifty years ago, almost every publisher in the United States was independent. Beginning in the late 1960s, multinational corporations consolidated the industry ... | Continue reading
This spring, I was enchanted by the story of mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck, awarded the Norwegian Abel Prize in 2019 for her work on bubbles, who at 76 still relishes the “technical obstacle,” “secrets,” and “mystery” of ... | Continue reading
When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious ... | Continue reading