An engaging plunge into the world of code and its transformative implications.
How algorithmic code works and what it means for our future.
As Smith, author of Moondust and Totally Wired, explains, computer code operates according to a “haunting alien logic” that grants extraordinary—and, in some ways, frightening—powers. The author tracks the history of coding from early computing pioneers to contemporary innovators in machine learning, while also documenting his own attempts to learn coding language as a means of understanding how our virtual worlds are being constructed. Smith provides refreshingly accessible accounts of the theoretical contributions to the field made by such early luminaries as Ada Lovelace, George Boole, John von Neumann, and Alan Turing and of the coding cultures that currently exist at high-tech companies around the globe. The author gives readers a vivid sense of the potential of new developments in AI, as well as the forbidding threats to privacy and human autonomy posed by the systems. The book also includes insightful commentary on the psychological impact of immersing oneself in the abstractions of code and on the workplace dynamics that fuel a rather ruthless and antisocial mode of innovation. There is, the author makes abundantly clear, a very real cost to relinquishing control of our lives to machines and machine logic. Smith dedicates the book to “those who would move slow and fix things,” and he presents his work as a guide to both comprehending and appropriately resisting the emergence of toxic forms of digital mediation. The author concludes that activism on this front will require a concerted effort informed by the high stakes involved: “Big Tech pushback and lobbying against moderation of their power will be as intense as the motor and oil industries’ decades-long war on climate science, and for the same reasons.”
An engaging plunge into the world of code and its transformative implications.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780802158840
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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