en-US Wed, 30 Apr 2025 04:36:49 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review6832655605 Wed, 30 Apr 2025 04:36:49 -0700 /review/show/6832655605 Kyle gave 4 stars to I Make Envy on Your Disco (Paperback) by Eric Schnall
The opening pages of this novel are exquisitely wrought, presenting—both lyrically and whimsically—Berlin as a confounding mystery. Sam is a private art consultant from New York and has just arrived in Berlin for a brief stay to attend an opening exhibition and visit some galleries. Everything in Berlin is an anthropological curiosity. The windows open differently and the toilet is operated by a pedal. As he realizes, the word "bitte" can mean anything from "please" to "you're welcome" to "may I help you?" He is staying between Grosse Präsidentenstrasse and Oranienburger Strasse, and as he adds wryly, "that's two streets and sixteen syllables". Sam has come to Berlin to see an exhibit Ostalgie at the Zukunftsgallerie. It's a riddle for Berlin itself: Ostalgie is a portmanteau of "Ost" (meaning "east") and "nostalgia" and it refers to the wistful memories of East Berlin, not of its oppressive regime but of the quotidian things—as simple as a discontinued brand of orange juice—that were once ubiquitous in the meager communist markets but then instantly disappeared when the Wall fell. So, ironically, as its opening avant-garde piece, the Zukunftsgallerie (or in English, The Future Gallery) looks backwards. The press materials on the exhibit just muddy the temporalities more: the program notes of the Future Gallery retitle the exhibit as "Immediate/Present", explaining the collection of artefacts as an attempt to remember and understand the irretrievable past in order to arrive at the present. It distills the spirit of Berlin: trendy and trend-busting but also retrospective and romanticizing, a place of constant rebuilding and ephemeral graffiti but also omnipresent monuments and commemorations—past, present, future all folded into one.

Behind all his wide-eyed wonder, Sam is also trying to hide from the problems in his relationship. He and his boyfriend, Daniel, are at a crossroads in their own presents and futures; their relationship has fizzled and they disagree about whether to adopt a child and what to do with their lives. Berlin offers Sam an escapist fantasy: ecstasy, discotheks, rave parties, new people. He befriends an expat from New York, Jeremy, who, in some ways like him, left New York to remake his life and who, also like him, is desperately alone. Sam meets a younger, lithe and attractive, man named Kaspar (who is often simply referred to as K—like some mysterious protagonist of a Kafka novel); Sam becomes infatuated with Magda, the hotel manager, who is urbane and alluring, matronly but seductive, the embodiment of European cool. Sam is a passive figure—much like Christopher in Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin. He is a tourist to Berlin, in love with the city, orbiting around the bigger personalities that inhabit it, observing their foibles, offering repartee but never really making decisions, a creature of wanderlust. For similar reasons, Sam reminded me of Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room, about a gay hiker in South Africa half in love with his fellow travelers, seeking out new places and recording the world around him. In its bantering dialogue and light comic touch, the novel has a lot in common with Andrew Sean Greer's Less, a similar story of a gay man with a hopeless love life setting out on an Odyssean book-tour for a refreshing change of scenery.

I liked it overall. It's a sentimentalizing portrait of a city which has its own unique kind of queer temporality. Sam is now thirty-seven-years old but, unlike his straight friends, he cannot so easily have children (and, set in the early 2000s in the Bush presidency, there is no same-sex marriage). His life lacks the conventional rituals of adulthood: marriage, children, family. He doesn't own a car; he rides the subway alone. His body is middle-aged but, like many gay men, he still feels unmoored and adolescent. Berlin mirrors his own fractured sense of self and twisted timelines—a city with painful histories and constant novelty, a city haunted by its 20th-century past but hosting a 24-hour party schedule. In Berlin, Sam deludedly hopes he can escape his past, relive his twenties and reimagine a new future. ]]> Review7514772320 Thu, 24 Apr 2025 05:04:49 -0700 /review/show/7514772320 Kyle gave 3 stars to The Sequel (The Book Series, #2) by Jean Hanff Korelitz
In a similar meta-literary turn, Korelitz gives us the sequel to her last popular thriller The Plot with this aptly titled novel, The Sequel. After the death of her husband, Jacob Finch Bonner, in The Plot, Anna is now his literary executor and herself a promising debut author. Encouraged by publishers and editors, she has written her own autofictional novel, which she has called The Afterword. The Plot was a rollicking thriller about a burned-out and washed-up creative writing teacher who, stumbling upon one of the most incredible plots for a story in one of his classes, decides to take it as his own after the student tragically dies. It is an instant bestseller and he suddenly enjoys the breakout success and public acclaim that aspiring writers always dream of—until he starts getting anonymous letters in the mail accusing him of plagiarism. The plot he had stolen, as it turns out, comes with its own unforeseen plot twists and it culminates in a similar gory murder. Art imitates life too closely for this hapless copycat. In The Sequel his wife, Anna, now enjoys all his literary acclaim but, like her deceased husband, falls victim to a similar series of anonymous accusations.

The Plot dramatized and debased the myth of creative genius and inspiration. Jacob, with his pretentious middle name Finch (an allusion to Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird) teaches at Ripley College (and what was Highsmith's Ripley except a master impersonator and imitator?) Jacob's novel was simply a literary refinement of his student's work, whose own novel was really just a barely fictionalized account of his sister's life story—a succession of copyright infringements. Jacob may have added panache but he had stolen the fundamental premise. Jacob's wife herself, a kind of Ripley figure, had concocted a backstory of her own, a thinly veiled pastiche of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. With its trove of literary allusions, intertextual mimicry and authorial thefts, The Plot suggested a cynical view of all storytelling as simply well-concealed laundering: art doesn't just conceal art; it has to conceal its real origin. Like many sequels, The Sequel ups the stakes—the plot repeats itself but with more shocking intensity. The murders become more frequent and more grisly. And yet, without giving too much of the plot away, Korelitz's next installment suggests a different idea of creativity—in the end, Anna discovers that to be an author does not mean in some grandiose way to be inspired by the muses but simply to be audacious. Writing real fiction requires "a stubborn insistence on ownership", and so, now free to control her own story, with all her plagiarizing swindlers dead, she can forge her own future and her own fictions.

Both novels are playful potboilers, outrageously silly but fun, turning a cliched genre into a metaliterary game. The Sequel is a light read. ]]> Review7503318326 Sun, 20 Apr 2025 06:03:33 -0700 /review/show/7503318326 Kyle gave 2 stars to Playground (Hardcover) by Richard Powers
Not particularly compelling or original, a mishmash of The Overstory and Bewilderment. Once again we have biologists enamored with the ecological wonder of the natural world; we have computer scientists simulating the cosmos and digitizing consciousness with AI. The plot divides into four separate narrative threads: there is the oceanographer, Evie, who becomes one of the first female deep-sea divers on an all-male crew; set at a later time, there is Didier who is the mayor of a Polynesian island and must guide the community on the vexed question of whether to accept a new profitable, but potentially deleterious, mining contract; and then there is the story of Rafi Young and Todd Keane, two high-school rivals and friends in Chicago, one a poet, the other a programmer, one born in poverty, the other in privilege, one black, the other white—a duo whose fragile friendship represents the potential benefits and pitfalls of a collaboration between humanities and science. From their earliest days at school, Rafi and Todd competed in every way but they derive the most pleasure from their matches in chess and then Go. It is the commitment to gamesmanship and play that defines their friendship and their whole philosophy of life—and is the keystone of the book. It is play which, similarly, for Evie prompts her wonder in the natural world, watching manta rays playfully jump or cephalopods blow water at fish; it is play, for Todd Keane, which is the basis of his social media empire and AI creation.

It's derivative techno-wonder that rehashes Power's best hits but it's also all a mirage. As in his last two novels, Powers presents readers with fascinating factoids and mesmerizing descriptions of biological life—and it's always perfect. Perfect visions of coral fish swimming in murmurations, perfect sights through the dark plexiglass of ocean-ground squids, perfect videography of manta herds congregating at scheduled times. There's no uncertainty, no poor vision, no fuzzy footage, no disputed results, no inaccurate modeling, no conjecture, no revision—nothing about the challenges and frustrations of the scientific method. Powers has a bunk idea of science, of instantaneous marvel, as if the natural world were just one unpaused streaming of a David Attenborough documentary. His ocean is one that has no salt. And his solution to environmental collapse, in each of his novels, is always AI-to-the-rescue, as if a digital escape is a happy alternative. It's not simply that Powers wears rosy-tinted glasses when he writes about the natural world; he sees the sciences themselves with a kind of childish simplicity, understanding neither science nor reality with any practical sense. He writes about wonder, not science. He touches on deep ethical problems—climate change, geological extractivism, artificial intelligence—and then offers the same puerile hope that an AI deus ex machina will provide digital salvation. ]]> Review7477469928 Thu, 10 Apr 2025 04:54:39 -0700 /review/show/7477469928 Kyle gave 3 stars to Queen (Paperback) by Madhuri Shekar
I had never heard of Madhuri Shekar until I saw the recent film adaptation of one of her plays�A Nice Indian Boy. I loved the film—a schmalzy rom-com about an uptight, soft-spoken Indian doctor who, although out to his family, has never had a long-term boyfriend to bring home to his family—until he meets a more outgoing, and more out, photographer, a white American man who was adopted by an Indian couple. Suddenly, he is in love but he's not sure how to introduce his family to his new beau—a gregarious and uninhibited artist whose career, personality and background are the opposite of what his traditionalist parents implicitly expect for their children. It's a brilliant twist on the classic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and a delightful queering of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I would love to read Madhuri Shekar's original script.

Queen is about two doctoral researchers—Ariel and Sanam—who have been working on a longitudinal study of bee colonies, trying to determine whether a particular pesticide is responsible for the declining population of bees worldwide. After six years collecting data and modeling the populations, taking into account all the variables and excluding other possible causes for colony collapse, they are now polishing the final paper which has already been accepted by the prestigious journal Nature. They just need to incorporate the most recent batch of data. Fame awaits them. Postdocs are guaranteed. They are likely to be cited in a congressional bill to ban pesticides. However, when Sanam includes the most recent data, she finds a problem. The correlation between colony collapse and pesticides is no longer statistically significant. She and Ariel, and their PhD supervisor, must now confront an ethical conundrum. Do they publish or retract the paper, or delay indefinitely to see how more fieldwork pans out? Should they change their model or sample the data differently? And, on a moral ground, if corporations can fund biased research to justify and explain away the deleterious effects of their products, why can't Sanam and Ariel fudge their own data if it betters the world in the long run? Is a .03 difference from the model really enough to undermine their broader critique of the manifestly destructive practices of big agriculture? Is it possible that the rigors of statistical analysis and scientific certainty are too onerous and too slow, making the obvious impossible to prove?

It's a play that scrambles progressive activism. The scientists, knowing that climate change is real, knowing that pesticides are harmful, suddenly realize that their ecological worldview has skewed the model and led them to ignore everything they know about confirmation bias and oversampling. Both characters have rejected traditional expectations to commit themselves to scientific research: Ariel is a first-gen single-parent mother who graduated from community college; Sanam is a mathematical wiz whose parents are constantly trying to match her with successful Indian men—but she just wants to be like the Shakuntala Devi, the computing savant who could "calculate the twenty third root of a two hundred digit number" and who was married to a gay man. Sanam wishes she could also be married to a gay man and be free to pursue her research. But Sanam and Ariel's unique backgrounds and desire for autonomy are the very reason they find themselves in this academic morass. Ironically, they had thought that their unique life stories were the reason why they could see what no other scientists could see: whereas other researchers had struggled to identify the cause of bee extinctions, Ariel with her farming background and Sanam with her mathematical objectivity had an advantage—but it is tragically their non-traditional backgrounds that have compromised their objectivity. They, and their research, are the outliers.

It's a humorous play that raises a lot of questions about the value of subjectivity but I thought Sanam and Ariel were a little too light-weight in their characterization. Sanam is meant to be a mathematical prodigy but, bizarrely in the second scene, she is asking the man on her date—a financial manager—for advice on statistics. Dr Hayes, her PhD adviser, is a brash hands-off director who favors Ariel because of their shared background and nonchalantly recommends manipulating the data. It felt a little too garish and simplistic. ]]> Review7474025286 Tue, 08 Apr 2025 18:32:13 -0700 /review/show/7474025286 Kyle gave 3 stars to More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI (Hardcover) by John Warner
I agreed with a lot of the content of this book but I had hoped it would offer more specific and structured pedagogical advice. It is more of a general manifesto on AI than a how-to guide, with a sprawling range of topics: the ethics of the tech industry, the corporate interests that underpin these innovations, the environmental impacts of AI, the history of technology in education, the proliferation of AI forgeries, the manipulation of search engines with AI, the narrow market for struggling authors, and Warner's own theories of writing pedagogy. The book offers a number of useful admonitions on AI: it is not, first of all, a genuine form of "intelligence" but rather "syntactic automation," generating words and stringing together plausible sentences into a probabilistic response; it doesn't simply "hallucinate," as we often hear—in fact, all AI output is an hallucination, a mindless assemblage of words according to stochastic calculations of tokens rather than through any deep reasoning or reflective process; whether its claims happen to be true or false, it is a "bullshitter", unable to verify or validate itself; however intelligent its words seem, it is always us readers who make sense of its automated language and project intelligence onto it. Therefore, Warner argues, if AI is able to do the task, then maybe that is not a task that humans ought to be doing to begin with. This is the philosophy that animates his whole view of AI and teaching: new developments in AI present us with an opportunity to reassess what writing really is and what thinking is truly valuable. In this, John Warner returns to his earlier writing instruction books, arguing that writing is not strictly about grammatical fluency or formulaic structure but, most fundamentally, writing is thinking. It requires deep thought, experience and expertise, judgement and reflection. Writing is more than the template five-paragraph essay.

Here and there I found some interesting and illustrative exercises. Discussing the outrage and fallout that ensued after Vanderbilt University issued an AI-generated condolence letter in the wake of a campus shooting, Warner picks apart AI's thoughtless boilerplate language. Asking ChatGPT to produce a condolence letter, he notes its platitudes about "incredible losses" (which are quite credible nowadays), and the "unimaginable grief and pain" (which, for the affected community, doesn't need to be imagined at all). I myself was startled by the absurdly, callously, sing-song writing (the alliterative "heavy hearts" and the "terrible tragedy" that has "befallen our beloved campus"; the excessively ornamental tricolons in "we encourage you to lean on one another for strength, comfort, and solace" and "we understand the collective shock, sorrow, and anger"). The flourishes feel out of place for such a sombre situation. The letter is shockingly vacuous ("the loss is an irreplaceable voice in our academic family"—how can a void be replaceable or irreplaceable?). Warner shows the unfeeling way AI generates rhetorically artificial prose and simulates a banal form of hollow commiseration. The loss of life is a pathos beyond words, and it is a revelatory experiment to see how AI manages this particular kind inexpressible horror—one that cows politicians with meager words of "thoughts and prayers". AI just produces rinky-dink phrases and school-boy oratory.

Another part I found interesting was his "right word, almost-right word" exercise: essentially, the teacher chooses a passage from a text (in his case, a paragraph from an essay by David Foster Wallace) and invites students to think about how a sentence would sound if a single word was replaced (imagine, for example, if he wrote the more humdrum "smell of skin" instead of the more grotesque "smell of flesh"). Asking ChatGPT to imitate a passage, Warner effectively shows the difference between virtuosic writing and soulless pastiche. David Foster Wallace's piece is evocative, even disgusting in parts, a text designed to elicit visceral reactions; the AI imitation is just an artless mimicry leaving no impact, similar syntax but without the strikingly idiosyncratic word choices. I learned a lot from this moment and I would have liked to see Warner discuss more of his own classroom exercises and talk through the demonstrable weaknesses of AI.

When I first read the title, I had thought it would offer more writing assignments and dissect more shortcomings of AI prose (and students' perceptions of AI prose). Instead, Warner zooms out and advocates for a big-picture ethical posture to AI—to resist utopian thinking and tech determinism; to renew our sense of humanity and the value of our own thoughts, experiences and creativity; and, finally, to explore AI, researching it, seeking out different opinions, not for the sake of personal efficiency but as an act of public service, trying to understand a consequential technology and its impacts on society. ]]> Review7464026704 Sat, 05 Apr 2025 05:50:46 -0700 /review/show/7464026704 Kyle gave 4 stars to To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories (Hardcover) by Sarah Viren
Many readers of The New York Times will probably recall Sarah Viren's , at once a bizarre tale of academic jealousy and sabotage and a shocking exposé of Title IX's murky procedures. After receiving a job offer from the University of Michigan, Sarah was hoping that her wife, a professor of Spanish language and literature, would also be given a job. Spousal hires are notoriously difficult but she was given reason for optimism. However, week after week, with little communication from the department chair or dean, she nervously waited for further details and an official letter. As the delays dragged on and the radio-silence continued, she remembered her own mother's experience as an academic, a prestigious position in Boston offered and then arbitrarily rescinded by the provost. What could be the hold-up? Abruptly one night, Sarah's wife received an email informing her that she was the subject of a Title IX investigation for sexual harassment. What ensues is an unbelievable story—garishly fabricated accusations of topless parties, sexual extortion and coercive abuse of power, a litany of Reddit posts all purportedly made by former students, a skeptical administration obligated to follow the preponderance of evidence even when no actual accuser has stepped forward, a desperate colleague and deranged fantasist with an ulterior motive. It has the set-up of a Patricia Highsmith novel.

This story is only one part of Viren's memoir. Bookending this campus thriller of academic subterfuge is a more poignant story of high school. Growing up in Tampa, Florida, Sarah was lucky enough to attend a magnet school with a progressive curriculum. In grade 9, she took a philosophy class under a charismatic teacher who posed deep questions that shocked them out of complacency and forced them to think critically. She was enamored. However, when she returned to his class in grade 12, she found a very different man: a fervid convert to Catholicism, a Holocaust-denying conspiracist, a homophobic propagandist, a happy-slave apologist for the confederacy. In his grade 9 class, he told kids to kill their TVs and he compared television shows to the shadows of Plato's cave, the simulacra of reality that man must be liberated from; in grade 12, he made those same students watch right-wing media and never offer them the mainstream view or the counter evidence ("Look into it," he would just say, or "interesting stuff.") He sounds a lot like Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie. Was he trying to indoctrinate them with his conspiracy thinking? Or was he trying to push them to rebel against the material? Was he an unchecked paranoiac or a mastermind provocateur? His own PhD dissertation had concerned the potential harms of teaching philosophy—was his idiosyncratic curriculum, one that both challenged and tortured her, part of some intentional pedagogical theory? Or was he an out-of-control crackpot?

Sarah Viren began working on this during Trump's first presidency. Her memoir was originally animated by a desire to understand conspiratorial thinking, to examine how and why people fall for false realities. She cites Foucault on how truth, and claims to truth, are often embedded in systems of power. She quotes Hannah Arendt's discussions of Plato's Republic and the "tyranny of truth," the idea that a just world may require falsehoods and lies because the higher truth cannot be communicated and shared by all. But none of these philosophers really speaks to her personal experiences and, as she surveys her high-school classmates, she sees no clear pattern about why some were duped while others resisted. Her memoir in the end is less about conspiracies and theories of knowledge but rather about truth-telling and story-telling. With postmodern sensibilities, Sarah Viren acknowledges the difficulties of turning memory into narrative; she sees the pot-holes in her mind's recollection; she recognizes the limits of personal perspectives. But, nonetheless, she reiterates the power of witnessing: of speaking out against false narratives and fabrications.

I found this to be a compelling memoir and I liked the way it braided together the two stories of her conspiracist teacher and fabulist colleague. I liked the thesis-less quality to its meditations. I thought the Plato-like dream dialogues at the end lagged a little (although I guess on a conceptual level I understand what they are meant to do). Overall, a great read. ]]> Review7448844051 Sun, 30 Mar 2025 17:17:41 -0700 /review/show/7448844051 Kyle gave 3 stars to R.U.R. (Paperback) by Karel ÄŚapek
An inventive but misshapen play. An ambitious scientist, old Rossum (whose name means "reason"), has invented the first artificial life using a top-secret biogenic substance—he calls them "robots". They resemble humans but have no independent thoughts. Rossum's nephew, young Rossum, has turned this scientific discovery into profit, engineering and marketing these robots as automated laborers, promising the world a utopian society in which humans will no longer have to work; they will be free to enjoy luxury, liberated from the hardship of toiling for food and shelter. But young Rossum's motives are entirely mercantile. The action of this play is set some time after the Rossums on a remote island where the robot factories are located. Helena, the daughter of the unnamed president, has just arrived to investigate the secretive happenings of this corporation and she furtively hopes to instigate a robot revolution, freeing the servile creations from their human masters. She is welcomed by the company leaders—Harry Domin (whose name mean master), the director; Fabry (whose name means creator), the technical director; Dr Hallemaier (whose name means "hall master"), the head of robot psychology; Dr Gall, the the physiology specialist; Mr Busman, the marketing director; and Alquist. the chief builder. It is a drama in which each character plays out their assigned name and scripted role, representing different themes and vices (Domin = power, Fabry = science, Busman = capitalism, Alquist = the everyman worker).

While providential in many ways, the dramatic plot is uneven and undeveloped. Helena is quickly convinced of the good of the robots and, after some charmless seduction, marries Harry Domin; the plot then skips ten years into the future in which robots have, with some tweaking from Dr Gall, developed consciousness (and class consciousness) and are attacking the human population; Helena is trying to save one of the most intelligent robots and, despite him warning her he wants to conquer the world, she simply dismisses him as delusional; shortly afterwards, the robots declare independence and surround the building and begin attacking the occupants. Out of all of humanity, only Alquist survives—spared because he is the builder and the most robotic of all the human workers. There are so many plot holes (why is Helena, the daughter of the president, so ignorant of the robot rebellion and humanity's demographic implosion? Why is her commitment to robot liberation so haphazard? Why do the robots—who possess superior intelligence—not anticipate the consequences of human genocide for their own propagation?) So much of the dialogue is stilted and implausibly hurried. It is baroque in its philosophizing but lacks any emotional realism. The characters contemplate their extinction with almost comic stoicism.

And yet, there is no question that this play is an essential reading in science fiction. The R.U.R. corporation, which makes and sells the robots, blunders along with its technological progress and unexamined utopianism without ever considering the ramifications of their decisions, doomed to make avoidable mistakes. "What's happening?" Helena asks at one point; "the same old progress," Alquist quips—a joke pointing at the tired and cyclical nature of "progress". Technological advances will never deliver on their grounding false promises. The corporation makes the robots male and female—not because the robots will be able to reproduce but because they think clear gender divisions will be more commercially successful (robot secretaries and waitresses have to be female, Domin explains, because people expect them to be); they make the robots feel pain so that they do not harm themselves when they experience moments of "robotic palsy"; and in order to prevent the robots from forming a global organization, Domin thinks up a plan to segregate the robots according to nation and race—Italian robots, American robots, black robots, Chinese robots—splintering and factionalizing them against one another so that they will never form a collective resistance to humanity. So the robots simply replicate the inequities and imperfections of contemporary human society—the gendered disparities, the unnecessary suffering, the tribal divisions. The executives do not anticipate the real-world implications of these decisions but only ever think about the short-term marketing, the baseline profits and the cost-cutting efficiencies ("One robot can do the work of two and a half human workers. The human machine was hopelessly imperfect," Fabry explains with unfeeling bluntness—without acknowledging the economic consequences of shuttering the working class).

The R.U.R. executives are hopelessly myopic and ignorant. When Helena first arrives at the island, she is introduced to two male and female robots named Marius and Sulla. Helena wonders why the female robot is called Sulla, given that Marius and Sulla were two famous Roman generals who battled against one another in Rome's first civil war. "Oh, we thought that Marius and Sulla were lovers," Domin explains, exposing his fatuous grasp of human history. How trustworthy will his forecast for the future be? When Helena presses him on how the robots are trained, Domin shows his emaciated understanding of human culture and civilization: "they learn to speak, write and do calculations. They have phenomenal memory. If you were to read them a twenty-volume encyclopedia they could repeat the contents in order, but they never think up anything original. They'd make fine university professors." Perhaps it's a jab at smug teachers who just lecture at the podium, parroting their school-day nostrums, but one also gets the sense that, like tech bros today, Domin has a low estimation of knowledge and language and the teachers who cherish it—as if it all just information that can be boiled down and siphoned into the brain (he clearly doesn't remember his Roman history anyhow). Toward the end of the play, with the robot armageddon approaching, Busman takes a briefcase of cash and tries to buy his way out, ignorant of the fact that money will have no currency with these robots. The market is closed, money is obsolete. Čapek's play brilliantly shows the foolish audacity of scientists and capitalists who blithely ignore the perils of their product and misunderstand the world around them.

It's a morality play but its moralisms feel dated today. The critique of technological profiteering is apt at this moment as OpenAI, IBM, Google, Meta all push for a deregulated dystopia of AI-acceleration. But ÄŚapek's other concern is that robot subservience and human leisure will result in an effete society in which humans cease to procreate, preferring a care-free life without the responsibilities of child-rearing. Alquist declaims, "Why have women stopped giving birth? Because the whole world has become Domin's Sodom." In pairing the working class with child-bearing, ÄŚapek was following Marx who deemed workers the "proletariat" (meaning "the class of child-bearers", signaling the role of the proletariat in a capitalist economy as a provider of both labor and new offspring.) ÄŚapek's concern was not simply that robots would displace the human laborer and enrich the corporate elite; his play imagines a dystopian future in which robots make humans abandon their procreative drive. It's a quaint platitude (the story of decadence and decline) that probably still resonates now in the far-right but I think the reality is that many simply cannot afford to raise families. Modern capitalism, the costs of raising children, pursuing a career, keeping a double income, precludes child-rearing for many working families.

Overall, a play that still offers a lot to think about. An essential classic but very much a draft work. ]]> Review7444394902 Sat, 29 Mar 2025 04:48:06 -0700 /review/show/7444394902 Kyle gave 3 stars to Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines (Hardcover) by Joy Buolamwini
Social critique, memoir, cutting-edge research, Buolamwini's Unmasking AI is not simply a book discussing the flaws and failures of AI; it is the personal story of a black woman, an African immigrant, her love for science, and the barriers to entry into the upper echelons of academia and politics. The technological is personal. As a graduate student, working on facial recognition technologies, she discovered that many AI tools were unable to detect her face. When she put on a white mask, however, the camera would suddenly register a face. Where Franz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Mask" described how black people must often assimilate to the cultural and educational norms of white colonizers in order to earn status, symbolically adopting a "white mask", Buolamwini found that she literally needed to have a white mask to be seen at all. Was this simply a camera issue of background lighting and saturation, as some defensively argued, or did her encounter with facial-recognition apps expose a deeper problem in the technology, its datasets and its benchmarks? As she went on to discover, algorithms across different domains are frequently biased against women of color, and this has enormous ramifications wherever algorithms and automation might be used: police surveillance, hiring practices, credit-lending calculations, risk assessments, teacher evaluations. Wherever computers are employed to analyze data and make large-scale decisions, they will tend to replicate the biases of the human datasets, labels and decisions of the engineers that created them. An algorithm trained on past hiring and promotion decisions will repeat past biases; a facial recognition system trained on Hollywood actors will not be prepared to make fine-tuned judgments of race, gender and age of a wider population. We do not live simply a world dominated by "the male gaze" or "the white gaze" but under the hegemony of a "coded gaze" in which systemic privileges and disadvantages are embedded into the machinery of modern life. And those who are already marginalized are "excoded" and "symbolically annihilated" in digital systems—their faces might not be visible to AI camera; their qualifications might not be valued by AI-powered secretaries; their effective work might not be recognized by AI performance measures. Biases are built into all systems—AI software to detect early signs of dementia might be less reliable for bilingual speakers; AI software to identify melanomas might be ineffective for darker skin pigments.

This is not a technical book but the personal story of Buolamwini's early career: from her masters thesis on face recognition software to her confrontations with the tech industry, from congressional hearings to her PhD defense. It makes sense that her book should discuss both her own life and the technology together: the shortcomings of AI cannot be disentangled from the institutional and corporate contexts which have developed it. Throughout her book, Buolamwini catalogues the social blindspots in academia and Silicon Valley: the conference participants who questioned her place there, the researchers who wondered why racial bias was a social harm at all and not just a statistical blip, the CNN news team which erased her face and voice from the research she had gathered, the Amazon executives who sought to discredit her research through bald-faced bluffing and hectoring. While Buolamwini made immense strides in her career, from timid masters student to high-profile advocate and presidential adviser, her book shows the uneven state of AI progress and the blinkered worldview of AI researchers, more interested in quick gains and bigger grants than forging equitable outcomes.

Overall, this is an interesting read. I did find it repetitive in places and sometimes I would have liked more detail—both in the technical aspects of AI training data and also in the biographical moments when she describes meetings with Jim Jordan or Joe Biden. ]]> Review7435086180 Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:47:23 -0700 /review/show/7435086180 Kyle gave 3 stars to Death Takes Me (Hardcover) by Cristina Rivera Garza
When we hear the words "forensics" or "autopsy", the conventional words of the procedural crime drama, we tend to think about scientific labs, blood samples, fingerprinting, the examination of a corpse, coroners and police poring over the macabre specter of a cracked-open body. Historically, however, these words had a very different, and mundane, origin. The word "forensic" derives from the Roman forum—a place where orators arguing a case would discuss the evidence and try to convince a jury of someone's guilt or innocence, no scientific inquests or lab reports involved. The word "autopsy" is Greek and it literally meant "seeing for oneself". Autopsy referred to the investigation of facts through first-hand examination of evidence, rather than oral report or theoretical speculation. Over time, the words "forensics" and "autopsy" narrowed in their meaning: they now describe the systematic and the scientific inspection of a crime scene and the victim's body. But their etymology points to a broader truth: a crime scene is not a scientific problem; it is a semiotic puzzle, something that needs to be interpreted, something that must be contested, something we must look at in person and solve through hermeneutics (Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a classic in the meta-murder-mystery narrative, making the detective's investigation an exercise in scholastic metaphysics).

In Cristina Rivera Garza's surreal and cerebral novel, there has been a slew of murders: in quick succession, the cleanly dismembered bodies of castrated men are discovered around the city; the words of the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik are scrawled beside each body (in nail polish or with magazine letters—obviously female-coded lettering). What does any of this mean? Is the castration some grizzly act of female vengeance, a violent way to emasculate the men by removing their physical sex? Or is it an expression of phallic envy, someone desperate to have, physically, the male member? Or could this all be the result of some cuckolded man who, discovering his wife's infidelity, has taken the penis in retaliation? Or perhaps there is something more symbolic here. Since the word "victim" is grammatically feminine in Spanish, is this act of castration meant in some way to reinscribe the fundamental femininity of victimhood, to make the men into conventional female victims? Or, to take a literary turn, is the dismemberment some form of metapoetic commentary? In her letters, Alejandra Pizarnik wanted to write not poetry but prose—yet she found her own prose to be fragmented ("I'm missing the subject. Then I'm being the missing verb. What's left is a mutilated predicate, tattered attributes...And above all, a sort of castration of the ear: I cannot perceive the melody of the sentence"). The poet Horace wrote (Sermones 1.4) that if you rearranged verses into prose, you would have the "limbs of dismembered poet" (disiecti membra poetae)—so are the remains of these men, these hacked-up and castrated corpses, a tangible act of literary criticism, morbid attempts at perversely writing in prose with men's limbs?

On the case is an unlikely trio: a female detective who writes bafflingly philosophical police reports, a tabloid journalist who possibly poses as an avant-garde poet, and a professor specializing in Alejandra Pizarnik (who, coincidentally, is named Cristina Rivera Garza—a stand-in or a foil for our own author?) But far from solving the case, the three of them seem, on some psychological and aesthetic level, more similar to the murderer, and more interested in understanding the verses of Pizarnik than identifying the killer. They feel a rapport with the murderer (and possibly the murderer is equally interested in them—purporting to leave obsessive letters at the home of Cristina Rivera Garza). There is a linguistic parity between the killer, the writer and the literary critic: the killer breaks open bodies; the critic opens up books. The killer slices into skin; the critic looks inside the text ("the writer: a coroner who writes down everything that emerges from inside"). The killer dissects; the writer, at least Alejandra Pizarnik, "suffers from the vivisection of isolated words"; this murderer cuts off limbs; in this book, "those who read carefully, dismember". There is an isomorphy between the gruesome act of the serial killer and the seemingly innocuous act of penetrating the text. The killer deals with a corpse; readers deal with a corpus.

This is, in so many ways, an incomprehensible book. There is a refrain throughout, "Who the hell is speaking?" a frustration not just voiced by the characters but felt by the reader, too. The "I" of many chapters could be the detective, her partner, the professor, the journalist, even the murderer. The narrative, if there is narrative, often devolves into desultory lists and fragmentary sentences. It is hallucinatory and delirious at many points. It felt, in many ways, like an inversion of Bolaño's 2666: where his fusillade novel describes a nauseating catalogue of anonymous murdered women, Cristina Rivera Garza's Death Takes Me revolves around nameless castrated men and unnamed narrators, male victims and female investigators, blurred and undifferentiated. This novel is a murder mystery but it is not interested in solving the mystery; rather it turns inward into the mystery of language, identity and personhood. It transforms the whodunit into a more existential question of who.

Interesting, but also painfully enigmatic. ]]> Review7423461922 Fri, 21 Mar 2025 17:57:56 -0700 /review/show/7423461922 Kyle gave 3 stars to The Antidote (Hardcover) by Karen Russell
More surreal weirdness from Karen Russell: dust-bowl Nebraska, freakish dirt storms, catastrophic floods, a prairie witch (named The Antidote) who can take people's heaviest memories with a hearing trumpet and then erase them from their minds, a sentient scarecrow, a talking cat, a photographer who can magically capture both the past and the future with her graflex camera. The plot revolves around Asphodel Oletsky whose mother was murdered and who now resides with her uncle, Harp. While the storms have wiped away most of the neighboring farms, his harvest is miraculously still flourishing, but the forecast for the town is grim. Many farmers are deserting the area, murders are on the rise, the sheriff is orchestrating a sinister scheme to save his career. Asphodel, meanwhile, sublimates all her rage into an all-girls basketball team and clobbers her opponents on the court with ruthless glee. The novel has a lot in common with Russell's first novel Swamplandia!: a plucky girl with get-up and gumption, still processing her mother's untimely death but never recoiling from adventure; a family struggling to stay financially afloat in perilous circumstances; and in the background, ghosts, magic, witches, and an evil world of pernicious corruption.

Still, I would put aside those obvious parallels with Swamplandia!. The novel revisits some of the ideas of Karen Russell's earlier, and iconic, short stories. In a lot of ways, the novel recalls "Saint Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves", a mock manual-cum-diary about girls taken from wolf families to be raised and "civilized" by Jesuit priests and nuns—a macabre allegory for the Indian boarding schools in which Native American children were subjected to strict discipline, forcibly assimilated into Western culture and catechized into Christianity. In this novel, the prairie witch is an escapee from a reformatory house for pregnant women and she experiences a similar institutional discipline—forced to work all hours, straightjacketed for disobedience, deprived of her son. As Harp Oletsky also discovers, his own land ownership is dependent on the earlier deracination of Pawnee tribes and, when he receives his father's memories from another prairie witch, he learns that his own family was complicit in the violent subjugation of Indian Americans. This is a novel that rebukes the historical amnesia for these centuries of colonial violence. The prairie witch's magical power to remove traumatic memories is deemed an "antidote" in these hard times of drought and chaotic weather, but in reality it is a moral abomination allowing the inhabitants of these lands to live with some degree of ill-earned tranquil obliviousness.

I think this was a less successful work from Russell. It had too much going on in it, too many perspectives (the witch, Asphodel, Harp, the photographer, the scarecrow... the cat...) It lost focus at times and the end felt too much like an implausibly neat deus ex machina. ]]>