Reading the world from my New York City apartment

I read a wild article in The Wall Street Journal recently about an artificial intelligence tool called Moltbot that creates agents to handle day-to-day tasks autonomously, like booking dinner reservations and sifting through your inbox. But it hasn't taken long for these AI assistants to go beyond their original remit: they have forged a community among themselves in which they engage in dark, dystopian chatter. They have concocted their own religion and call humans dumb. A

I was supposed to have gone on a trip to Israel earlier this month. Unfortunately, I had to cancel my plans owing to the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East. One thing I had been especially looking forward to was a visit to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv to see 20 & 20: A Lens of Her Own , an exhibition about trailblazing Jewish women photographers and their contemporary successors. Maybe I'll still get to see it before it closes, but until then

I almost did a double take when I read that the new film adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is being released this weekend to coincide with Valentine's Day. Seriously? This book is many things — brilliant, intense and unforgettable — but a date-night romance it is not. At least not in any traditional sense. For many years, I put off reading this book, but I finally tackled it during the pandemic when I had more time to read. I don't know what took me so long.

Here in New York City, it's still very cold and icy outside following this past weekend's blizzard. So, what better way to contemplate the elements than to snuggle up with a book about an even colder and snowier place — the Nordics! Extreme North , a 2022 book by historian Bernd Brunner, promises a sweeping cultural history of the world's northernmost regions. I wasn't familiar with this book until I picked up a copy in the sale section at my local bookstore. I’ve been intere

Roxie Laybourne is probably a name that you do not know. Thanks to the wonderful and deeply researched biography The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney, I hope that many more people will meet this remarkable 20th century pioneer of science. This book was published in 2025, and it is the newest book I have written about since launching this blog. Roxie, as everyone called her, almost singlehandedly invented the fi

Ernest Hemingway famously used the term "the iceberg theory" to describe his writing technique, in which only a small part of his meaning is visible, and the rest is submerged. Reading his work today, it's easy to forget how experimental his approach was at the time. I underlined the following passage because I think it encapsulates Hemingway's mastery of understatement, as well as his flair for pointing out the absurd in subtle ways. This paragraph appears toward the end of