This afternoon, I took my oldest friend in the world out to lunch. It was a quiet celebration of his seventy ninth birthday. If, when we were thrown together as roommates at boarding school more than sixty years ago, we had been told that such a thing would happen, we would have rolled our eyes …
Hua Hsu is a Bard professor in the humanities and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he has published report, “The End of the Essay,” on the impact of inexpensive access to Large Language Model chatbots on the behavior of college students. It is understood in his wide-ranging discussion that students who submit …
Many years ago, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a piece for Forverts, complaining about the replacement of moral black and white with shades of grey.* Just as grey is a blend of black and white, so modern judgment is ambivalent, often self-contradictory, quite often consisting of opposing terms of praise and blame linked by the conjunction …
The other day, my daughter was kind enough to tear herself away from the study of spectral graph theory for the weekly conversation with dear old Dad. As often happens, we spent about an hour talking about Artificial Intelligence. Earlier in these conversations, during the winter, she said of AI, “It’s only as good as …
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We have a new pope, and he is an American of mixed-race background. If we throw in the fact that he holds dual citizenship (US and Peru), and that he is the first pope to be a member of the Augustinian Order — to which Martin Luther also belonged — we have an impressive number …