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Robopocalypse: by Daniel H. Wilson
Robots have been gaining sentience and rising against their human creators for decades, at least within the realm of sci-fi. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics (all centering on the notion that robots must never
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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood: by James Gleick
Journalist and science writer James Gleick’s The Information takes many shapes, much like its slippery subject. It’s in parts a biography of symbolic logic, a history of the bit and an introductory course in
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The Marriage Plot: by Jeffrey Eugenides
In our post-modern, post-structuralist, post-feminist, post-damn-near-everything era, is the concept of “love” antiquated, an artifact from a time when people spoke in totalizing terms about truth and human happiness? This question is central to
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Packing for Mars: by Mary Roach
Think about astronauts. Guys with “the right stuff.” Heroic, clean-cut Americans who boldly go where no one has gone before, willing to sacrifice their lives not only for science but for the pride of
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Culinary Reactions: by Simon Quellen Field
I spend a lot of time working in the kitchen, but I often have no idea what’s going on in it. I don’t mean that I’m inept as a cook – though opinions may
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Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War: by Tony Horwitz
In the span of a few years between 1856 and 1859, the abolitionist John Brown led a raid that left five pro-slavery men dead in Pottawattamie, Kansas, staged a takeover of the federal armory
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Art-Toys: by Brian McCarty
There is much cultural commentary to unpack in regards to the Art-Toy movement. It was in the ‘90s that designer toys became a “thing,” as aspects of comics, graphic design, graffiti art and DJing
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The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories: by Don DeLillo
Few active writers have done more to uphold the novel as a preeminent form of human expression than Don DeLillo. Like filmmaker John Ford, with his famously blunt introduction, “I make Westerns,” DeLillo has
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There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America: by Philip Dray
Taking its name from a song by writer, IWW activist and labor martyr Joe Hill, Philip Dray’s There is Power in a Union is a comprehensive history – and, at times, a celebration –
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An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine: by Howard Markel
Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion, describes the cognitive limitations of human beings, our inability to fully understand the entirety of the world around us. Through media images, our upbringing, value system and a host
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