Jack Gross interviews historian of science Lorraine Daston about her early work on rules, which has become newly salient in the age of algorithms. | Continue reading
Historian of technology Patrick McCray reviews Morgan Ames’s new book on the MIT Media Lab’s One Laptop per Child program. | Continue reading
Emily Drabinksi reviews Jen Schradie’s “The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives.” | Continue reading
Hun Sen has hung on in Cambodia through a combination of shape-shifting, self-dealing, and luck. | Continue reading
Jessica Riskin challenges Steven Pinker’s take on the Enlightenment. | Continue reading
Samantha Rose Hill considers the continent-spanning turmoil that has marked the publication of Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History." | Continue reading
Historian of Science Steven Shapin turns the screw on the notion that “truth” is in crisis. | Continue reading
Andrew Benedict-Nelson considers "The Cigarette: A Political History" by Sarah Milov. | Continue reading
Matt Keeley considers the uncertain legacy of Robert Graves as well as a new biography of the writer by Jean Moorcroft Wilson. | Continue reading
LARB presents an essay by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by David Stromberg. | Continue reading
Evan Selinger argues that Ted Chiang’s fiction is more useful for understanding the dangers of AI than “Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI.” | Continue reading
Hired to write stories alongside an AI writing bot, neuroscientist Patrick House reflects on how the bot can — and can’t — write the same story that he can. | Continue reading
Morgan G. Ames on the problem of letting Silicon Valley tech elites guide conversations on child development and schooling. | Continue reading
Scott Bradfield on the pleasures and perils of the “Oz” series. | Continue reading
Matthias Fritsch wonders which parts of Habermas's corpus will resonate with future generations. | Continue reading
Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” an enduring science fiction classic, owes much of its mythology to “The Sabres of Paradise,” an undeservedly forgotten history. | Continue reading
Dear Television's Sarah Mesle considers Emily Nussbaum as a feminist critic and a chronicler of the televisual cult of seriousness. | Continue reading
John Macintosh reviews "The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics," edited by Michelle Chihara and Matt Seybold. | Continue reading
Kevin Werbach considers the pitfalls and the potential of Bitcoin and blockchain, explored in three recent publications. | Continue reading
Are the Silver Jews getting back together? The story of David Berman and his father, Dr. Evil. | Continue reading
Gabriel Nicholas interrogates “The End of Killing” by Rick Smith and “Thin Blue Lie: The Failure of High-Tech Policing” by Matt Stroud. | Continue reading
Amit Chaudhuri reviews the new critical edition of Gandhi’s autobiography. | Continue reading
"The Big Book of Classic Fantasy," by embracing the strange and the esoteric, shows that classic fantasy has always been a more complex imaginative space | Continue reading
Andrew Fedorov considers the legacy of prolific Hollywood extra Robert G. Haines. | Continue reading
Samuel Loncar reviews D. W. Pasulka's new book, "American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology." | Continue reading
Samuel Loncar reviews D. W. Pasulka's new book, "American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology." | Continue reading
James Penner takes a trip through “Foucault in California” by Simeon Wade, which chronicles the day when a great French philosopher blew his mind. | Continue reading
Daegan Miller reviews Jeffrey S. Cramer’s new book about the friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. | Continue reading
Philosophy and the "intellectual game": Kieran Setiya interviews Alva Noë about his book, "Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher on the Ballpark." | Continue reading
Jefferson Pooley on the unlikely career of Marshall McLuhan, and the Luddite message of “The Mechanical Bride.” | Continue reading
This piece appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal: The Occult, No. 22 To receive the Quarterly Journal, become a member or purchase at our bookstore. ¤ Even though Freud popularized the term, he never outright defined what he meant by “the uncanny.” He of … | Continue reading
A new book about how to declutter our technologically oversaturated lives. | Continue reading
Is Justin E. H. Smith's assemblage of material actually illuminating? Yes, but only sometimes. | Continue reading
Michael J. Barany reviews "Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe" by Steven Strogatz. | Continue reading
Is Justin E. H. Smith's assemblage of material actually illuminating? Yes, but only sometimes. | Continue reading
Otis Houston speaks to Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of “Losing My Cool” and “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race.” | Continue reading
Walter Rodney’s "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" still reads cogently after almost 50 years. | Continue reading
Andrew Fedorov thumbs through the works of a pair of saintly writers. | Continue reading
Any process of designing science, with its complex suite of methods, funding structures, laboratories, and so forth, is inherently political. | Continue reading
Colin Dickey reviews two new books about the Victorian dog. | Continue reading
Robert Zaretsky looks at the illuminating “City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris” by Rupert Christiansen. | Continue reading
Erin Zimmerman thinks Star Trek can teach us a thing or two about life on Earth. | Continue reading
Whatever its imperfections, Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is an original and brilliant work, and it arrives at a crucial moment. | Continue reading
Kieran Setiya considers “Why Iris Murdoch Matters” by Gary Browning. | Continue reading
This piece appears in the latest issue of the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 20 Childhood To receive the LARB Quarterly Journal, become a member or purchase a copy at your local bookstore. ¤ In the three-year period between 1941 and 1944, 13-year-old Margarete Schaffer w … | Continue reading
Part of a LARB forum in which philosophers reflect on the legacy of Richard Rorty. | Continue reading
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft remembers Jonathan Gold, who helped him fall in love with Los Angeles. | Continue reading
A catalog of oils, watercolors, and pencil sketches by the Beat luminary. | Continue reading