Category: Books
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Oppenheimer, John Donne, and the atomic origins of AI
You will probably have seen the news that #Oppenheimer, the film directed by Christopher Nolan, has won a bunch of Oscars. What you might not know is that the story it tells – of the birth of the atomic bomb – has two lesser-known dimensions. The first concerns the name given to the first test…
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‘God-Like’ – Chapter 1 excerpt
I’m really looking forward to getting this out in a few weeks! It’s been a wild ride to write because, as you’ll know, AI right now is such a shape-shifting, slippery beast. The upshot of that is that this book can only ever be a snapshot… but this is why I’ve been super keen to…
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After Getting High: Getting Down
As many of you will already know, I’m just beginning writing again. Through five works of non-fiction I’ve been wanting to follow my heart over to the other side, and I’m really thrilled that I’m going to have the chance to work on a novel this coming academic year. This has been made possible through…
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In Which Mark Zuckerberg Says Facebook is the New Church, and We Are All Its Priests
In a recent speech, Mark Zuckerberg has declared that Facebook is the new Church, and its users should all be like Priests. “Communities give us that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are not alone, that we have something better ahead to work for,” he noted, before adding that…
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Harry Potter and the Death of the Hallowed
In celebration of 20 years since the first Harry Potter book was published, I thought it’d be a good chance to look back to one of my own offerings in which I offered a radical reading of Potter’s relationship to his magical art. During a short speaking tour on Mutiny in the US with Peter Rollins,…
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Mark Fisher
Not sure how I missed this in January, but genuinely saddened to hear that Mark Fisher has died. Very open about his struggles with mental health, he took his own life. There’s a fantastic summary of his huge influence on cultural theory here, and also here. On a more personal level, I was hugely impressed…