Tag: Nobel Prize
Has the Rise of the One Percent Really Been Debunked?
Everyone knows that inequality has gotten out of hand in the United States. Thanks largely to the work of three now-famous economists—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman—it’s probably one of the most widely accepted facts in modern American life. Since the early aughts, they have meticulously documented the rate at which the richest have pulled away from the rest. Their research transformed domestic politics, leading President Barack Obama to declare inequality the “defining issue of our time,” and
When AI Becomes ‘Natural’ – The Atlantic
Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles…
— Macbeth
Some years ago, the satellite radio and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt decided that she wanted a semblance of her wife to last forever. So she commissioned Hanson Robotics to create a robot that looked exactly like the head and shoulders of her wife, Bina. The human Bina uploaded many of her memories and autobiographical material into a computer connected to the robot, which Rothblatt named BINA 48. Other
The Photographer Undoing the Myth of Appalachia
If you wanted to understand why flipping through Stacy Kranitz’s recent photography book, As It Was Give(n) to Me, feels like plunging your head into ice water, you could ponder the omission of captions that might have contextualized her images of Appalachia. You could dwell on the dissonant chord struck by mixing beauty pageants, burning cars, and bloody teeth together on the page.
Or you could consider a moment in January 1944, when a lanky Kentucky soldier disembarked from
Nine Books Overshadowed by the Pandemic
There are moments when one can dive into the sustained dream of a book and stay there for hours. The spring of 2020 was not one of those times. If you weren’t actively battling COVID-19 or grieving a loved one, your life was likely all of a sudden relentlessly logistical: the sudden evaporation of childcare, the Tetris of fitting multiple working adults inside one tiny apartment, the paranoid wiping down of groceries. Reading often felt impossible, even for those of
Nine Translated Books You Almost Didn’t Hear About
Haruki Murakami’s fifth book, Norwegian Wood, was a sensation in Japan when it was first released in 1987. Despite its success, it wasn’t widely available in English until 2000. The gap between its publication and its popular translation is surprising in hindsight, but few people outside the author’s home country had heard of him until the later English releases of some of his other works. Reportedly, American publishers initially assumed that Norwegian Wood wouldn’t appeal to a wide audience.
FDA Delays Carry a Death Toll
This morning, the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer vaccine for use in people 16 and older. Although “the vaccine approval was the fastest in the agency’s history,” as The Washington Post noted, serious side effects have proved extremely rare. Nevertheless, anti-vaccine activists—and the politicians and pundits pandering to them—have criticized the accelerated approval process as rushed. Yet the problem with the FDA is precisely the opposite: The agency too often fails to recognize the danger of being