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What to read this Halloween, based on your ideal spooky activity

Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
Whether you’re a homebody or a thrill-hunter, we’ve got a seasonal, spine-tingling read for you.
NonfictionLifestylesCookbooks

Bodega Bakes

In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
In the personable Bodega Bakes, pastry chef Paola Velez presents just that: sweets that can be made solely from the ingredients found at a corner store.
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NonfictionTechnology

You Look Like a Thing

Review by Nadia Berenstein

Artificial intelligence. Those words often conjure extreme visions: a shiny techno-future of self-driving cars and hyperefficient production, or a dystopian doomscape of mass unemployment and robot overlords.

In her first book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, Janelle Shane assures us that AI is more like a toaster than like Skynet from Terminator. It’s a tool—one that is really good at some things and really, really terrible at others. This accessible guide to AI and machine learning cuts through the techno-hype and shows how AI is making the world a stranger place.

You may know Shane from her humor blog, AI Weirdness, where she trains AI to perform all kinds of silly tricks, such as coming up with pick-up lines—the source of the book’s title. You Look Like a Thing follows in the blog’s footsteps, with plenty of hilarious AI fails, neural-net-generated recipes for “Basic Clam Frosting” and robots doing the can-can. But the humor isn’t just a gimmick. Shane, who holds advanced degrees in engineering and physics, unpacks the whack, using incidents of AI weirdness and abject failure to reveal the peculiar logics of machine learning. Why do image-identifying AI obsessively find giraffes everywhere? What made Google Translate interpret nonsense syllables as biblical verses? How could a self-driving car mistake a truck for a road sign? In unraveling all the ways AI can go wrong, Shane illuminates its inner workings.

Where Shane really excels is in spotlighting the social consequences of AI. She explains how an algorithm widely used to decide whether to release prisoners on parole systematically identifies black inmates as higher-risk for reoffending than comparable white inmates. In another example, a resume-screening bot routinely penalized women applicants. The data that AI are trained on are often more important than the design of the neural networks—and these datasets unintentionally reflect the explicit and implicit biases of the cultures that produced them. After reading this book, you’ll never again assume that an algorithm is neutral.

This is why You Look Like a Thing and I Love You should be essential reading, even if you never end up training your own pet neural-net. AI is already busy all around us—determining what we see (and don’t) on the internet, deciding whether we qualify for a loan, finishing our sentences. If AI unleash a dystopia, it won’t be because the algorithms have outwitted us but because they’ve been pigging out on our data, amplifying our worst tendencies and biases.

AI is a tool, not a slippery slope to the singularity. If we don’t understand how this tool works, what it excels at, how it fails, then we can’t use it to shape a better world.

Artificial intelligence. Those words often conjure extreme visions: a shiny techno-future of self-driving cars and hyperefficient production, or a dystopian doomscape of mass unemployment and robot overlords. In her first book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, Janelle Shane assures us that AI is more like a toaster than like Skynet from […]
NonfictionEuropean History

A Pilgrimage to Eternity

Review by Kelly Blewett

Timothy Egan is Irish Catholic, thoroughly lapsed. A well-read skeptic and New York Times columnist, Egan shares a telling anecdote about his mother. On her deathbed, she still wasn’t sure how she felt about the afterlife. “I’m not feeling it, Timmy,” she told him. “I don’t know what to believe or what’s ahead.” He doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulties of faith. And yet.

Egan finds himself wanting more. He wants to slow down. He wants to take time away from his many screens. He wants to meet Pope Francis, who has captured the attention of the world. And so Egan becomes a pilgrim, determined to walk the Via Francigena, an ancient route from Canterbury to Rome. “I’m interested in the Big Questions,” Egan writes in a personal letter to the Pope. “How do we live in an increasingly secular age? What is our duty to our fellow humans in a time of rising nationalism and tribalism? And what can the Gospel say to someone who thinks he can get all the world’s knowledge from the internet?”

Egan stays on the road for months, traversing snowy mountains and sweltering valleys, getting lost and blistered and lonely, reconnecting with family and buying more comfortable shoes. He visits libraries, monasteries, plus all manner of religious sites. As he wanders, Egan beautifully describes the landscape, his personal prayers and his family’s heartbreaking experiences with untrustworthy men of faith. In the most surprising passages of the book, Egan turns to the history of Catholicism in Europe.

It’s a bloody story, full of martyrs and villains, gruesome relics and deserted graves. Egan’s lively recounting of history is juxtaposed by his contemporary observations of the emptying cathedrals of today, as he traces the many ways that the Catholic Church has changed over time. And he himself is changed through the journey. Part travel memoir, part history, part spiritual reflection—A Pilgrimage to Eternity is wholly enjoyable.

Timothy Egan is Irish Catholic, thoroughly lapsed. A well-read skeptic and New York Times columnist, Egan shares a telling anecdote about his mother. On her deathbed, she still wasn’t sure how she felt about the afterlife. “I’m not feeling it, Timmy,” she told him. “I don’t know what to believe or what’s ahead.” He doesn’t […]
NonfictionHistory

Dominion

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The legacy of Christianity is ambiguous at best. Followers of the Christian traditions espouse unconditional love of others as the central tenet of their faith, but violent acts against those outside the faith are frequently undertaken in the name of Christianity. As Tom Holland illustrates in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, this tension between universalism (loving your neighbor as yourself) and exclusivism (shunning anyone who doesn’t embrace the Christian faith) lives at the heart of Christianity, resulting in the proliferation of various groups that all claim to be Christian.

In his sprawling and detailed look at the ways that Christianity grew to be such a powerful force in the Western world, Holland traverses widely over time and space to narrate the rise of Christianity, its adaptation of ideas from already existing religions, its fitful origins as a small group, its eventual official acceptance by the Roman Empire and its development of creeds, a canon of scripture and orthodoxy. Holland explores the ideas of early Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Origen and Irenaeus as they struggle to capture the duality of the Christian faith—the goodness manifested in God and Christ versus the evil manifested in the devil and his minions; the goodness associated with living spiritually (spirit) versus the evil of living materially (flesh). Holland follows Christianity though the Middle Ages and into the Reformation, when various factions of Christians evolved and held, often tenaciously, to their own versions of what it means to be a Christian. Additionally, Holland shows that Western culture in the 21st century—whether it claims to embrace Christianity or not—is thoroughly imbued by the language, thought and theology of a religious tradition that shuttles between universalism and exclusivism.

Holland’s writing energetically conducts us through some often-dull history and ponderous concepts to demonstrate just how insidious Christian beliefs are in modern culture.

The legacy of Christianity is ambiguous at best. Followers of the Christian traditions espouse unconditional love of others as the central tenet of their faith, but violent acts against those outside the faith are frequently undertaken in the name of Christianity. As Tom Holland illustrates in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, this tension between universalism […]
NonfictionHistory

Crucible

Review by Sarojini Seupersad

Opening with a striking scene from Petrograd, Russia, at the Tsar’s estate in the winter of 1917, Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917–1924, is a fascinating gallop through interwar Europe, told chronologically through the eyes of some of the era's most radical figures.

Historian Charles Emmerson explains how fascism, revolution and artistic growth unfolded in parallel during this critical time, exploring the lives of several important political figures, artists, thinkers and revolutionaries to emphasize how key figures led Europe from tentative peace after World War I into an era of violent nationalism. Stories of dictators on the rise (Lenin, Mussolini) become entangled with those of other movements and leaders, too—the black liberation philosophies of Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, the rise of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey, the surrealism of André Breton, the toxic anti-Semitism of Henry Ford and the growing popularity of Sigmund Freud’s brand of psychoanalysis.

Intimate, diary-like passages, which read more like a novel than a historical text, take readers through the stories of these figures one by one. By isolating each vignette to one point of view, Crucible slowly reconstructs the history of interwar Europe one puzzle piece at a time. This approach to storytelling is not only helpful and cinematic but also lends an intimate sense of what life was like in Europe 100 years ago.

If you’ve ever wondered what is in the heart of a revolutionary, or what it takes to live through war and destruction, this dramatic, illuminating retelling of a significant time in history will prove to be an invaluable text. 

Opening with a striking scene from Petrograd, Russia, at the Tsar’s estate in the winter of 1917, Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917–1924, is a fascinating gallop through interwar Europe, told chronologically through the eyes of some of the era's most radical figures. Historian Charles […]
NonfictionMemoir

Here We Are

Review by Sarah Carter

Aarti Namdev Shahani’s career trajectory gives no hint that she grew up in a cockroach-infested apartment in Flushing or that her father did time in Rikers. This NPR correspondent graduated from an elite prep school in Manhattan and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her timely debut, Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares, recounts her family’s gut-wrenching struggle to immigrate despite a broken system.

Shahani’s story fulfills what most call the American dream. Her parents emigrated from India to America (via Casablanca) over 40 years ago, full of hope that this new country would offer their growing family more than their war-torn home. “To migrate to America—to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans or the Sonoran Desert—is the boldest act of one’s life. You do it to be the hero of your own story,” writes Shahani of her parents’ epic journey.

After a rough start, conditions begin to improve for the family—albeit temporarily. When Shahani’s father, a hardworking entrepreneur, accidentally becomes entangled with the Cali drug cartel, his life becomes mired in legal and immigration woes. Teenage Shahani becomes her father’s greatest advocate, tenaciously following up with inept lawyers. While her high school classmates are having fun and going to movies, Shahani does legal work for her father’s case. She even begins writing letters to her father’s judge, a correspondence that spans years.

The author graciously avoids black-and-white answers to difficult questions. How can two members from the same family have such opposite experiences in America? What does it mean to make it? Who really belongs here? A worthy addition to immigration discourse, this book is a raw and engaging glimpse into the challenges immigrant families face that are either too traumatic or mundane to land on the news.

Aarti Namdev Shahani’s career trajectory gives no hint that she grew up in a cockroach-infested apartment in Flushing or that her father did time in Rikers. This NPR correspondent graduated from an elite prep school in Manhattan and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s […]
NonfictionEssays

Burn It Down

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Women’s anger is having a moment in publishing. Make room on your shelf next to Eloquent Rage, Good and Mad and Rage Becomes Her for another book on the subject: Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, an anthology edited by Lilly Dancyger.

Twenty-two women writers contributed essays about their anger. That number seemed excessive at first; how original could each piece really be? But there is so much to be angry about. Burn It Down features essays about sexual abuse, chronic pain, transphobia, disability, religious persecution, gun violence, racism, sizeism, rape. The list goes on.

Leslie Jamison’s standout essay, “Lungs Full of Burning,” addresses her inclination toward sadness in a society that’s inhospitable to women’s anger. “In what I had always understood as self-awareness—I don’t get angry. I get sad—I came to see my own complicity in the same logic that has trained women to bury their anger or perform its absence,” she writes.

Another memorable piece is “Homegrown Anger” by Lisa Factora-Borchers. Being a woman of color in a Trump-voting area of Ohio led her to “befriend” anger, she writes, and to rely on it as a source of strength.

Like Jamison, I am a woman inclined toward sadness over anger—or perhaps I should say, was inclined. The essays in Burn It Down illustrate how patriarchal society benefits from women stifling their anger, even if suppression feels like our best chance at survival. To that end, the angry authors in this anthology are inspirational. In fact, why are all of us women not furious all the time? Burn It Down asserts that there is no panacea for women’s anger, save for widespread political and social change.

Whether you are coming into your own anger, or anger is your daily fuel, there is something for everyone to draw from in this anthology. It is time to light a match.

Women’s anger is having a moment in publishing. Make room on your shelf next to Eloquent Rage, Good and Mad and Rage Becomes Her for another book on the subject: Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, an anthology edited by Lilly Dancyger. Twenty-two women writers contributed essays about their anger. That number seemed excessive […]

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