Tag: book review
A Portrait of Japanese America, in the Shadow of the Camps
In the nineteen-twenties, United States officials began preparing for the possibility of war in the Pacific, and the consequences this would have for the territory of Hawaii. About a third of Hawaii’s population were people of Japanese descent, a community that had first arrived in the late eighteen-hundreds to work in the sugarcane and pineapple plantations. But the group remained largely mysterious to American leaders. If the United States went to war with Japan, a military study from 1929 concluded,
Maybe We Already Have Runaway Machines
Most of us aren’t quite sure how we’re supposed to feel about the dramatic improvement of machine capabilities—the class of tools and techniques we’ve collectively labelled, in shorthand, artificial intelligence. Some people can barely contain their excitement. Others are, to put it mildly, alarmed. What proponents of either extreme have in common is the conviction that the rise of A.I. will represent a radical discontinuity in human history—an event for which we have no relevant context or basis of comparison.
The Woman Who Reimagined the Dystopian Novel
In E. M. Forster’s dystopian story “The Machine Stops,” published in 1909, the inhabitants of an underground society live siloed, dehumanized lives: they are convinced that the Earth’s surface is uninhabitable, and that to find interest in nature or seek out new experiences is madness. At the story’s end, the society collapses, and a fissure opens to the air above, offering a glimpse of “the untainted sky”—proof that the outside world they had been instructed to avoid was both accessible
The Accidental Truth-Tellers of the Post-Privacy Era
It is only in the penultimate chapter of Kerry Howley’s “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State” that we properly get to Satan. The previous two hundred pages have traced an odyssey through the post-9/11 American security state, searching for rhymes and resonance among the lives of its whistle-blowers, accidental truth-tellers, targets, and victims—and also the rest of us, tapping at our phones, constantly feeding data onto the Internet, aware that it’s all accumulating somewhere,
The Marvellous Boys of Palo Alto
Not long before his death in 2007, my father told me that he “thought he might have” coined the term information technology. It turns out he was right. In an article titled “Management in the 1980’s,” published in the November, 1958, issue of the Harvard Business Review, Harold J. Leavitt and his co-author, Thomas L. Whisler, identify a “new technology” that “has begun to take hold in American business, one so new that its significance is still difficult to
Sheryl Sandberg and the Crackling Hellfire of Corporate America
In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year. She was the chief operating officer of Facebook, back when most of us had no understanding of the platform’s fearsome powers—in the halcyon
What Made Washington, D.C., the “Gayest and Most Antigay City in America”
In March, 1950, Roy Blick, a lieutenant of the Washington, D.C., police force and the director of its Morals Division, appeared before a two-person subcommittee for what was then considered one of the most secretive testimonies in Senate history. Only two transcripts of Blick’s testimony were to be printed, and both would be sealed in a vault. Blick arrived to share intelligence about a new threat, one that, he suggested, could destabilize American national security from within: the existence of
Rediscovering a Lost Dystopia and Its Prescient Author
In the summer of 2020, Becky Brown, a literary agent who represents dead authors, went to stay with her parents in Bath. Brown was between apartments and somewhat depressed. Like many people during the first months of the pandemic, she was struggling to read for pleasure. Brown represents around a hundred and thirty literary estates at Curtis Brown, a London-based agency. Her work has made her a skilled peruser of thrift and secondhand bookstores. Her eye scans rapidly and from
Searching for Coherence in Asian America
Near the beginning of his new book, “The Loneliest Americans,” the journalist Jay Caspian Kang imagines the memoir he could have written. It would begin with his parents arriving at the airport in Los Angeles, or unpacking boxes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Kang’s father completed his postdoctoral research in the eighties. If brevity were of no concern, he could start even earlier, with “General Douglas MacArthur’s liberation of Seoul,”and with “some line like ‘On the day my mother was born,