The Treachery of Machine Realism

By Morgan BarrySeptember 23, 2026

“The bombed elementary school in Iran appears to have become a target thanks to satellite imaging. In this case, what the image represented — and to who — was a matter of life and death.” The post The Treachery of Machine Realism appeared first on Public Books.

Read article

Literature & Essays

Comments

No comments yet.

“Narrow Escape,” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Fiction by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in English for the first time: The police lieutenant appeared to be writing down exactly what Gleb was telling him, but relying upon completely different words.

Aleksandr SolzhenitsynSep 27, 202614 min read

Literary Hub

A Prophetic Classic About the Dangers of Tech is Back in Print

Paulina Borsook saw there was something rotten afoot in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and in her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, she set out to document and understand a peculiar mindset

Paulina BorsookSep 25, 2026

Literary Hub

Have They Ruined Our Beloved Scholastic Book Fair?

Oh, Scholastic Book Fair. If you made your way through a public school in North America anytime during the past half-century, you should recall that shiny catalog. That sudden, circus-like presence in the school library. On Monday, the critic Michelle

Brittany AllenSep 25, 2026

The Paris Review

John Berger, Death’s Secretary: A Conversation with Tom Overton

“The first letter I sent to him was about a print that he’d made, which was in the archive—a Chagall-inspired Virgin Mary standing on a donkey.”

Scott SchomburgSep 24, 2026

Public Books

The Last Graduate Students?

“I began writing this as a record of what it felt like to be a student then, as collective attachments to values—long recognized as fraying, with the knell of the next scapegoat, or horrifying spectacle—face the final chopping block: public good, responsibility to others, democracy itself.” The post The Last Graduate Students? appeared first on Public Books.

Imani RadneySep 24, 2026

The Paris Review

“Do You Think This Conversation Is Going Well?” and Other Pickup Lines

“The dating app has engineered what one might call an Enneagrammatical system of bookish star signs.”

Gemma SieffSep 25, 2026