No being – whether mammal, robot, computer, bird, slug, stone, or star – that is excluded from the category of humanity on the basis of its physical nature. Conversely, each and any being may qualify as human by demonstrating empathy for other beings.
We’re not living in the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, the author insists, but in the shifty algorithmic universe of Philip K. Dick, where the world that the Internet and social media shape is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. In this view, it’s a world in which technology is developing in ways that fudge the difference between the human and the artificial.
The author queries the existence of bad readers, linking causes not to illiteracy or injuries of class or the diffusion of mass culture, but to a Cold War literary trend sporting "an abundance of paraliterary works," such as memoirs, diaries, biographies, diplomatic studies, and feature reports as primers for engaging with literary texts as seemingly historically accurate yet stressing outcomes and expectations consonant with systemic social ends.
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The most dramatic and beautiful of writers who caught history -- the history of continents and of half-forgotten figures who struggled for what truly mattered -- in a unique fashion, in passages of hardly a page or more.
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Kafka's life was itself Kafkaesque, and if you want to know its span and its ending better- the book's author contends and the reviewer agrees - readers need to start at the beginning. The book under review is the third of a three-volume biography that critics widely call definitive.
Returning to two of socialist Jack London's classics, The Iron Heel and The People of the Abyss--both available free at Project Gutenberg--the reviewer finds stark similarities between the deprivation of the early 20th century and the modern world of neoliberal capitalism, with its gig economy and the emergence of a precariat, valorizing London's injunction that class supremacy can rest only on class degradation.
Inspired by the rhythms of American folk music, this moving account of Seeger’s life teaches kids of every generation that no cause is too small and no obstacle too large if, together, you stand up and sing!
Fifteen years after she slammed the door, Nora returns to Torvald’s house as the Betty Friedan of 19th-century Norway. As created by Laurie Metcalf from the script by Lucas Hnath, she is smart, witty, sarcastic, tough and likely to make women cheer. I did!
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