Tag: long days
Humans Are Haunting the Chatbots
On weekdays, between homeschooling her two children, Michelle Curtis logs on to her computer to squeeze in a few hours of work. Her screen flashes with Google Search results, the writings of a Google chatbot, and the outputs of other algorithms, and she has a few minutes to respond to each—judging the usefulness of the blue links she’s been provided, checking the accuracy of an AI’s description of a praying mantis, or deciding which of two chatbot-written birthday poems
There Are Many Kinds of Long COVID
As a pulmonary specialist, I spend most of my clinical time in the hospital—which, during pandemic surges, has meant many long days treating critically ill COVID-19 patients in the ICU. But I also work in an outpatient clinic, where I also treat those same sorts of patients after they’re discharged: people who survived weeks-long hospitalizations but have been dealing ever since with lung damage. Such patients often face the same social and economic factors that made them vulnerable
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
Karen Brown: ‘Needs,’ a Short Story
Patty’s murder happened on a Tuesday afternoon in June, overcast and cool. You needed a sweater if you were going to work in the yard. It was 1966, a small town in Windham County, Connecticut. Milkweed and moths at screens, fields of corn and goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. There were woods behind her new house, a cape, and small animals emerging from the shadows to scamper over the clover. Wood thrush, wind in trees. That summer, ants formed