Essays

Culture	Nagisa Oshima: Banishing Green “No matter how severe a human confrontation you are portraying, it immediately becomes mild the instant that even a little green enters into it.” Nagisa Oshima \| Feb 5
Science & Tech	It Turns Out We Were Born to Groove The evolution of beat perception likely unfolded gradually among primates, reaching its pinnacle in humans. Henkjan Honing \| Dec 14, 2023
Culture	Remembering My Friend Jean-Louis Cohen Thomas Weaver, Senior Acquisitions Editor for Art and Architecture at the MIT Press, reflects on the life and legacy of Jean-Louis Cohen, a hugely influential French architectural historian, curator, writer, and teacher, who died in August. Thomas Weaver \| Dec 2, 2023
Science & Tech	Will AI Render Programming Obsolete? It's exhilarating to think that, with the help of generative AI, anyone who can write can also write programs. It’s not so simple. Michael L. Littman \| Nov 20, 2023
Culture	Bruno Latour on Anna Tsing’s ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ "It would be a euphemism to say this book is not anthropocentric — it places humanity on another orbit." Bruno Latour \| Nov 9, 2023
Culture	Stanisław Lem's Prescient Vision of Artificial Life As with the best science fiction, Lem’s novel “The Invincible” has as much to teach us about our present situations as any futures we may face. N. Katherine Hayles \| Nov 2, 2023
Science & Tech	“Hallucinating” AIs Sound Creative, but Let’s Not Celebrate Being Wrong The term “hallucination,” which has been widely adopted to describe large language models outputting false information, is misleading. Its application to creativity risks compounding that. Oliver Bown \| Oct 13, 2023
Media	An Apocalyptic Meditation on Doomscrolling The next time you catch yourself doomscrolling, take it as an invitation to own your own horror. Erik Davis \| Oct 1, 2023
Science & Tech	A Tale About the Frontal Lobes as Told by a Neurologist Mark D'Esposito draws on a half-century of research, as well as insights gained in his lab, to break down our current understanding of frontal lobe function and working memory. Mark D'Esposito \| Sep 14, 2023
Culture	Why Immigrants Enlist in the U.S. Military I asked immigrants from 28 countries why they're serving in the U.S. military — and it's not primarily to gain citizenship. Sofya Aptekar \| Jul 27, 2023