John Fanning writes: Earlier this year I saw the film ‘Mountainhead’, the new Jesse Armstrong production continuing his exposure of the rich and powerful following the success of the Murdoch family saga ‘Succession’. The characters featured are all filthy rich tech bros, some easily identified: Musk, possibly Sam Altman.
Josh Abbey writes: Essays about close reading often begin with a cliche: IA Richards and his experiment. Soon the formula will include a disquisition on AI: can a large-language model close-read? I asked ChatGPT and it said ‘sort of’. So I asked CoPilot, and it said ‘Absolutely!’ It was a little shy and reticent to…
David Blake Knox writes: A literary storm raged during this summer. The eye of that storm could be found in the UK, but it concerned a book that has been an international multi-million bestseller. The book provided the basis of a movie that was released to critical acclaim earlier this year – with the promise…
Alena Dvořáková writes: Writing means turning things into words. But when is it too soon to turn people into words? When the dead are prolific, hugely successful writers, this worry is easier to dismiss. After all, they have made a lifetime career out of turning things as well as people into words incessantly, obsessively and,…
David Alvey writes: Some books become more relevant with the passage of time. Dervla Murphy’s A Month by the Sea, which relates the author’s experiences in Gaza during the month of June 2011, when she was eighty years old, is such a book. Her visit took place less than half a year after Israel’s twenty-two-day…
Kevin Stevens writes: I play pickleball several times a week at the YMCA in Central Square, Cambridge, a short walk from Harvard University. A cohort of thirty to forty of us play, and the group is a cross-section of the cosmopolitan Cambridge community. We run in age from fifteen to eighty-five. We are students, working…
Ryan Breeden writes: In March 2018, members of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) presented a formal ‘inquiry’ about the number of migrant families producing children with severe disabilities based on the alleged prevalence of incestuous marriages. The reaction to this almost word-for-word reworking of older antisemitic tropes about Jews and disability provoked swift public…
Michael Lillis writes: During March 1993 I met with Gerry Adams for two full days and one half-day in Dublin and briefly afterwards at a house in West Belfast. I had left the Irish public service in 1990, where I had served as diplomatic adviser to the taoiseach in 1982 and a negotiator of the…
John Fanning writes: Trump 2 arrives at a time when a new world order, or disorder, as it has been called, is already well under way. If Britain ruled the waves, and a good part of the land, in the nineteenth century and America took over the reins in the twentieth we now seem to…
Maurice Earls writes: Eoghan Murphy, former housing minister and once the most unpopular man in Ireland, has recently published a political memoir. The purpose is to give his side of the story and let the world know that he is a decent human being who did his best in an impossible situation and that after…