Leuker and Van Den Bos in Nautilus:
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service. To date, it is estimated that only 10 percent have taken the opportunity. In 2007, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, asked that he not be given any information about his APOE gene, one allele of which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Most people tell pollsters that, given the choice, they would prefer not to know the date of their own death—or even the future dates of happy events. Each of these is an example of willful ignorance. Socrates may have made the case that the unexamined life is not worth living, and Hobbes may have argued that curiosity is mankind’s primary passion, but many of our oldest stories actually describe the dangers of knowing too much. From Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge to Prometheus stealing the secret of fire, they teach us that real-life decisions need to strike a delicate balance between choosing to know, and choosing not to.
But what if a technology came along that shifted this balance unpredictably, complicating how we make decisions about when to remain ignorant? That technology is here: It’s called artificial intelligence. AI can find patterns and make inferences using relatively little data. Only a handful of Facebook likes are necessary to predict your personality, race, and gender, for example. Another computer algorithm claims it can distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual men with 81 percent accuracy, and homosexual and heterosexual women with 71 percent accuracy, based on their picture alone.1 An algorithm named COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) can predict criminal recidivism from data like juvenile arrests, criminal records in the family, education, social isolation, and leisure activities with 65 percent accuracy.
More here.
Surprisingly, few of the world’s great philosophers have directly addressed this question. Instead, they have focused on a subtly different question: what does it mean to live well? In his 
The Bakhshali manuscript is a mathematical document found in 1881 by a local farmer in the vicinity of the village of Bakhshali, near the city of Peshawar in what was then British India and is now Pakistan. It is written in ink on birch bark, a common medium for manuscripts in northwestern India throughout much of history. In the tough climate of India and neighbouring regions, such things deteriorate rapidly, and it is miraculous that this document has survived.
Although he’s older than the Giza pyramids and Stonehenge, the 5,300-year-old mummy of Otzi the Tyrolean Iceman continues to teach us things.
On 7 January this year, the alt-right insurgent Steve Bannon turned on his TV in Washington DC to watch the Golden Globes. The mood of the event was sombre. It was the immediate aftermath of multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault against film producer Harvey Weinstein, which he has denied. The women, whose outfits would normally have been elaborate and the subject of frantic scrutiny, wore plain and sober black. In the course of 
As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.
Like Bouanani’s memories of his childhood rue de Monastir, The Hospital is fastened securely to Morocco, even if it floats above it in a haze of time and space. Vergnaud expresses this endemic connection between lexicon and place succinctly: “The taxonomy of flora and fauna, smells and tastes, saints and legends permeates The Hospital,” she writes, meaning of course the one in Bouanani’s novel, and Bouanani’s novel itself. “With amnesia as the disease, and time itself in question, Bouanani delights in naming things—weeping willows and cyclamen flowers, prickly pears and esparto grass, Sidi bel Abbas and the two-horned Alexander—to anchor his character’s memories and dream lives.” Vergnaud’s lexical choices in these instances affect her reader in a slightly different way that do Bouanani’s, as the local implications can’t necessary cross the gap, but in the end, the result is quite similar: these precisely vague choices tie us to a Morocco we can’t reach, much as they connect the in-patients to a Morocco that is fragmentary, inaccessible, and lost in the past.
The book gives us a glimpse not only into Lynch, the man and the artist, but also into Lynch’s America — the place the man came from, the space the artist depicts. “In Lynch’s realm,” McKenna writes, “America is like a river that flows ever forward, carrying odds and ends from one decade into the next, where they intermingle and blur dividing lines we’ve invented to mark time.” Lynch’s America is dream-like, uncanny, full of mystery, full of madness, ever-askew.
The internet has for some time hummed with anxious murmuring about the Singularity. The rate of technological progress is accelerating exponentially; the Singularity refers to the moment when computers have become so smart that they escape our control and eventually become super-intelligences capable of stamping out humans like so much vermin. Those tuned into news of the coming catastrophe keep a beady eye on IBM, whose scientists are doing all they can to ensure their own survival as obsequious quislings to our future mechanical overlords. On Tuesday, the company announced that it had brought us one step closer to “real AI” (an intelligence as smart as a human) with its snappily named Project Debater: a supercomputer dedicated to the art of competitive debating. After years of research, this week it finally competed against two real-life human debaters. The result? A thumping one-all draw – according to an audience that I suspect was almost entirely made up of people who thought that HAL, the genial yet murderous computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, was the real hero of the film.
When “Go Set a Watchman” was published in 2015, an Alabama lawyer called me with a catch in his voice. Had I heard that his hero Atticus Finch had an evil twin? Unlike the virtuous lawyer who saved an innocent black man from a lynch mob in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the segregationist Atticus organized the white citizens council, figuratively speaking, in Boo Radley’s peaceful backyard. Three years later, my friend still believes that Harper Lee was tricked, in her dotage, into shredding the image of perhaps the only white Alabamian other than Helen Keller to be admired around the world. Never mind that this better Atticus is fictional; my home state has learned to grab admiration where it can.
Barbara Ehrenreich cuts an unusual figure in American culture. A prominent radical who never became a liberal, a celebrity, or a reactionary, who built a successful career around socialist-feminist writing and activism, she embodies an opportunity that was lost when the New Left went down to defeat. Since the mid-1970s she has devoted her work to an unsparing examination of what she viewed as the self-involvement of her professional, middle-class peers: from their narcissism and superiority in 
In order to test General Relativity as a theory of gravity, you need to find a system where the signal you’ll see differs from other theories of gravity. This must at least include Newton’s theory, but should, ideally, include alternative theories of gravity that make distinct predictions from Einstein’s. Classically, the first such test that did this was right at the edge of the Sun: where gravity is strongest in our Solar System.
In an expert analysis commissioned to defend Harvard’s admissions practices against a lawsuit, claiming the elite university discriminates against Asian-American applicants, economist 
HALF A CENTURY AGO, when Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel was published, reasonable people the world over were entertaining the possibility that a global Marxist revolution really was at hand. Naturally, not everyone was enthused about the prospect. In Japan, where the upheaval was massive, campus demonstrators were regularly attacked by gangs of right-wing phys-ed majors wielding sports equipment. Administrators at Tokyo’s Nihon University at one point publicly requested the help of these reactionary jocks in quelling student unrest. Mishima (1925–70), a reactionary jock himself, was appalled by the demonstrations and by the New Left in general, but bashing people on the head with golf clubs was not his style. Sun and Steel—billed by the author as a “personal history,” but really more of a philosophical tract—has the unhurried cadences of the long game. Mishima was dreaming of imperial restoration, a rewinding not only of the 1960s but also of Bretton Woods, the whole postwar geopolitical order, and, possibly, political modernity tout court. Many contemporary readers of Sun and Steel harbor analogous ambitions. A minor work in the context of world literature, it is a major one in the bizarro universe of white-supremacist arts and letters.
But here is the real reason I hate asterisks.
Sadlowski embodied the wish for organized labor to wake from its postwar slumber and again throw its weight behind a great movement for a different country, as it had done in the 1930s and before. The AFL-CIO had shamefully backed the Vietnam War; Sadlowski opposed it and denounced the growth of “the weapons economy”—of which steel was very much a part. Many of the unions in the federation, including the USWA, had dragged their heels at best on racial integration of their workplaces; Sadlowski called for strengthening the union’s civil rights apparatus, attracting the support of Jesse Jackson and members of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Much of organized labor met environmentalism with hostility; Sadlowski dissented. “It’s one hell of a thing for me to say—we just don’t need any more steel mills. We don’t need that kind of industrial growth, at the expense of what the environment should be.” He followed the thought where it led: “Enough with the car!” What more radical claim could a blue-collar worker make about postwar society than to doubt the automobile?