How will virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Cortana change the way that we interact with the Web? Will Oremus looks at their short history, and speculates on how their evolution might proceed. “Conversational interfaces don’t lend themselves to the sort of open flow of information we’ve become accustomed to in the Google era,” Oremus writes. “By necessity they limit our choices—because their function is to make choices on our behalf.”
Isaac Chotiner interviews Ross Duothat about the Republican primary, asking the New York Times op-ed columnist how he’s been dealing with Donald Trump’s recent success. “As someone who is trying to imagine a future conservatism, it leaves you wondering whether you are too late—the alienation is too strong to be addressed in meliorist ways—and whether it’s a little silly to imagine that a bunch of pundits and journalists could come up with five great policy ideas that would fix this problem,” Duothat says.
Dana Goldstein talks to Maia Szalavitz, author of Unbroken Brain, a new book on understanding addiction, and finds that Szalavitz offers a powerful metaphor: addiction as miseducation. “We never get out of this ‘It’s a disease or it’s a choice’ debate,” Szalavitz says to Goldstein. “But addiction is not brain damage or a pathology like Alzheimer’s. It really is misguided learning.”
Elissa Strauss interviews Amy Tuteur, an OB who has taken a skeptical view of the natural childbirth movement. Tuteur discusses the origins of the movements for natural childbirth and attachment parenting (“It’s so ironic that [they] are now considered feminist, because they were started by people who absolutely weren’t feminist”) and analyzes their psychological appeal (“Being a mother is really, really, really hard … along came this system that told that you are automatically an awesome mother if you have an unmedicated birth and breast-feed and co-sleep. That’s so seductive and can easily become a big part of one’s identity.”)
Most of poet Adrienne Rich’s personal letters are sealed until 2050, but a batch of correspondence with poet and critic Hayden Carruth is open to read. Michelle Dean writes about these communications in the New Republic, finding them “an intimate portrait of [Rich’s] intellectual and political awakening.”
For fun: An excerpt from Glen Weldon’s new book, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, takes on the long history of Batman, Robin, and gay subtext.
Under the protecting mantle,
Rebecca
