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In 1956, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in a single sitting that begins in 2061, with two drunk engineers asking a room-sized computer whether the universe has to end. The computer can't answer. Neither can the next one, a few centuries later, or ...

Electrical circuits have always been a mystery to me. Those tiny components that look like Chiclets or jewelry beads somehow make a light blink, produce music, and detect motion. So I was happy to learn about The Secret Life of Circuits: An ...

Historian Laura Beers, who is part of the Bartz v. Anthropic class action settlement, writes in The Conversation about realizing that Claude wasn't just trained on the content of her books -- it was trained on her voice. In March 2026, journalist ...

In 1980, Isaac Asimov published a negative review of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in the New Yorker. His central complaint was that Orwell didn't understand technology. The telescreens that Big Brother uses to monitor citizens struck Asimov ...

Jake Worth, a programmer who went from a non-reader to 44 books last year, credits one rule above everything else: read at least 15 pages every day. That's it. -- 15 pages. The minimum keeps momentum going, keeps the story alive in his head, and ...

In the Shadow of the CPC is a book about the Amstrad CPC, an 8-bit personal computer released in 1984 and popular in the U.K., France, Spain and Germany, selling about 3 million units through the decade. Though not so well-known as the Commodore 64 ...

A.J. Jacobs has a revision of the old thousand-mile proverb. The journey doesn't start with a step -- it starts, he writes, with "putting on your left sock." When it comes to outwitting procrastination, I try to make that first action as easy as ...

JA Westenberg -- a writer, commentator, and self-described autistic person -- argues that AI writing detection is junk science, and that the writers most harmed by it are often those with autism and other neurodivergent conditions whose natural prose ...

Playwright Jeremy O. Harris -- Slave Play, Daddy -- was in Okinawa last year to make a film when Japanese customs found MDMA in his toiletry bag. He spent 23 days in a Japanese detention facility. He went through 23 books and submitted a movie ...

In 1969, French author Georges Perec wrote La Disparition, an entire novel that does not contain the letter E. In 1994, Gilbert Adair translated it into English as A Void -- also without a single E. I've only read portions of it, and I'm still amazed ...