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What are humans truly capable of at their best? Gary Marcus looks at studies on human resilience, or what one psychologist calls, “ordinary magic”: http://nyr.kr/Z8jPEG
(Source: newyorker.com)
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"What we really want are machines that can go a step further, endowed not only with the soundest codes of ethics that our best contemporary philosophers can devise, but also with the possibility of machines making their own moral progress, bringing them past our own limited early-twenty-first century idea of morality."
— Gary Marcus on Google’s driver-less car, and building machines with the ability to make ethical decisions: http://nyr.kr/R8J1ua -
General Petraeus, Meet Philip Roth
As the baffling and then burlesque and then baroquely burlesque affair enveloping General Petraeus and his friends, of both sexes, fell upon us like another hurricane last week, it seemed to confirm once again Philip Roth’s fifty-year-old assertion that you can’t write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent. The Petraeus story rapidly expanded, novella-like, into a kind of “Fifty Shades of Khaki.”
In Comment this week, Adam Gopnik writes about the Petraeus scandal, Philip Roth’s retirement from novels, and human nature.
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Understanding Owls
In this week’s issue, David Sedaris reflects upon his search for the perfect gift: a stuffed owl:
The story sounds a bit far-fetched, but there was no denying that the arm was real. The cut had been made two inches south of the elbow, and the exposed end, with its cleanly severed radius and ulna, reminded me of osso bucco. “It was my grandfather who mummified it,” the taxidermist said. “You can see it’s not the best job in the world, but it’s really rather good for a first attempt.”
I leaned closer.
“Touch it,” the taxidermist whispered.
As if I were under a spell, I did, shuddering a little at the feel of the hairs. Equally creepy was the arm’s color, which was not Caucasian flesh tone but not brown, either, the way most desiccated body parts are. This was the same slightly toasted shade as a spray-on tan.
“I think I’ll just take one of those owls,” I said.
Photograph by Richard Barnes.
