If you read one piece on early computer scientist Alan Turing that’s come out in celebration of his 100th birthday last Saturday (if you were wondering about Friday’s Google Doodle) you might do very well to make it this one in the Atlantic on how his reading of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution influenced his work and continues to shape the way we work with computers. It’s also about the limits of artificial intelligence.
Competence without comprehension
El Presidente
Following the death of Hugo Chavez, the publishing industry is gearing up to provide retrospectives of his life. At the Christian Science Monitor, Whitney Eulich reviews Comandante, a book that claims Chavez was “this close” to becoming a dictator.
Writing Without Rain
“We don’t yet know how to make it rain. But increasingly, we may be talking about what to do when the rain doesn’t come.” Anna North writes for The New York Times about literature in the age of drought.
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2017’s Independent Bookstore Day
Next Saturday (April 29) is Independent Bookstore Day! If you’re looking for a place to celebrate, check out our staff recommendations of tried and true mainstays. You can also map out the stores Janet Potter’s “bookstore resume,” which she freely admits has taken “the shape of a relationship history.”
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Zadie Smith on The Social Network
“Why Facebook? Why this format?… The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the ‘Why’ of Facebook. He uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself…” Zadie Smith considers “Generation Why” and The Social Network at the New York Review of Books. Our own review of The Social Network by Sonya Chung can be found here.