Listen, I’ve probably been a bit hard on this whole robot uprising thing. The idea of losing my job to something as coldly logical as an algorithm spooked me for a bit, plus I wasn’t exactly jazzed by the prospect of being rendered obsolete as a species by a platoon of super-intelligent militarised killing machines. […]
Every day, millions of people around the world ask Google some variation of the question, “Am I normal?” Burdened by shame, we turn to the internet to figure out if our behavior, our bodies, and our deepest emotions mark us as outside the mainstream. The very fact that so many of us are typing “Is it […]
On the morning of the Oscar nominations, I was chatting with a stranger about movies, as one does. The conversation turned to Woody Allen. “My son has seen all his movies, and he thinks he’s innocent,” she said. “I’ve seen all his movies, and I think he’s guilty,” I said. There was not much else […]
Here I was, a strong-willed young athlete. There he was, a charismatic pillar of the community. But I’m the one who, all these many years later, at the age of 68, no matter how happy and together I may be, continues to deal with the rage and the shame that comes with being silenced. My […]
In my 30 years at Hewlett Packard, I was proud of what we did to assist the good causes in our communities, from donating printers to encouraging employees to take time off for volunteering. Yet when I began my retirement, I noticed an enormous missed opportunity for corporate retirees — the chance to connect them […]
This past week, the novelist Cormac McCarthy published the first nonfiction piece of his career, a three-thousand-word essay titled “The Kekulé Problem,” in the popular science magazine Nautilus. It is studded with suggestive details about the anatomy of the human larynx, what happens to dolphins under anesthesia, and the origins of the click sounds in […]
…The points Sanders touched on in his “sermon” were familiar from the campaign and from his campaign book, “Our Revolution” — the dangerous rise of an American oligarchy that buys control of the political system and reaps most of the rewards of economic growth; workers with stagnant wages for lengthening hours of labor; the hollowing […]
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a Supreme Court Justice, cancer survivor, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, and the namesake of a praying mantis species. The woman knows a thing or two about how to succeed at life. At a Feb. 6 speech at Stanford University, where she is a visiting fellow, Ginsburg shared […]
Trump’s inaugural address contained a lot of populist boilerplate and committed to achieving a lot of overly ambitious or impossible goals. One of the more unrealistic pledges he made concerned combating jihadists: We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones – and unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will eradicate […]
What would Clare Hollingworth, who died this week, have made of Donald Trump? Or the world of Twitter? Each time one of our breed departs, we predict the end of the foreign correspondent. All of 40 years ago, one of the first radio interviews I endured – for an Irish station, I recall – involved […]
The editors present the following collection of opinion pieces from all segments of the political and cultural spectrum, assembled by the New York Times after Donald Trump’s historic election. Reading this remarkable assemblage of disparate viewpoints will take an investment of time but will be rewarded by a new understanding of (if not agreement with) […]
The electoral demographics are now undeniable: The white working class in the Rust Belt just made Donald J. Trump the president-elect of the United States. To suggest that Trump voters are worried about anything real is to invite scorn from certain corners of the mainstream media. The “economic anxiety” tweet, a special brand of sarcasm […]
