Harper's Magazine September 2024

Context Clues In his attempt to dramatize the birth of artificial intelligence [“The Gods of Logic,” Essay, July], Benjamín Labatut presents half-truths and decontextualized ideas. George Boole’s unification of logic and mathematics was not so unique (Leibniz did something similar two hundred years earlier, with his characteristica universalis), nor was Boolean algebra “ignored” until Claude Shannon “chanced” upon it in the Thirties (it in fact inaugurated the field of symbolic logic, which thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). These omissions serve the story that the computer came from nowhere—like the Logos in the Bible, or the monolith in 2001. And that story is a dangerous one. Labatut describes the imagination as “that feral territory that will…

For all those involved in the publication and dissemination of ideas, freedom of expression is the foundation on which our work depends. Like many writers, I have campaigned to defend it, writing letters, speaking at public events, and participating in protests and meetings. So I was not best pleased to find myself named by The Atlantic (a monthly magazine) as an authoritarian bully who has participated in a “merciless” campaign to intimidate other writers into silence. The journalist George Packer was writing about a controversy that has engulfed the American branch of PEN, a century-old global organization of writers whose charter states: Members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong, as well as throughout the world…

At the end of Jordan Long’s sophomore year at Morehouse—a historically black private college in Atlanta—he had taken stock of his financial situation and come to a startling realization. He had already racked up more than $60,000 in student debt, and he was on track to graduate with $150,000 or more, an almost unimaginable sum, split among him and the several family members who had taken out loans on his behalf. He took an afternoon to reflect, and then let the school know he wouldn’t be returning. Two years later, on the day Jordan should have graduated from Morehouse, he watched from home as a man named Robert F. Smith stepped up to the dais to deliver words of advice and encouragement to the graduates. Smith had founded his own…

Since at least the mid-Sixties, the Town of Newbern, in Hale County, has failed to hold or publicize municipal elections as required by Alabama and federal law. Because the town is small, public announcements are typically posted at the Newbern Town Hall, fire station, post office, library, and streets. However, no notice about town elections has ever been seen in any of these places. Instead, a series of white mayors and town-council members employ a policy and custom of “handing down” the positions of mayor and town-council members from one white person to the next. Thus, Newbern continues to be governed by a small group of nearly all white people. Defendant Woody Stokes, who is white, currently holds himself to be the mayor of Newbern. Patrick Braxton, who is black,…

I was so taken by my satanic work that as soon as I awoke, I dashed to my studio. —Monet I’d like to capture Monet there: the precise instant he opens the door to his studio in the gray dawn of early morning. It’s the time of day I like best, this blessed hour when work awaits us. The dawn is fresh, the sharp air pricks our cheeks. It’s just after six-thirty, not a sound inside the slumbering house, just a few birds chirping in the garden while the trees are as still as the silence. It’s a typical morning in Normandy, one that happens every day in those villages along the river Eure and the Seine. It’s the summer of 1916. For a few months now, Monet has taken…

The Grande Bibliothèque is an enormous glass edifice that stands opposite the Berri–UQAM metro station and Place Émilie-Gamelin, surrounded by buildings belonging to the Université du Québec. The area is transitional, difficult to read. When I first visited Montreal, in 2007, it was still a seedy neighborhood. On Rue Sainte-Catherine, prostitutes lined up outside the entrances to the strip clubs, massage parlors, and video booths. A few blocks to the north was the Gay Village, with its saunas, rent boys, and drag shows. For almost a century, Montreal was a sort of eastern Tijuana. New Yorkers—from the city and also from upstate—crossed the border on weekends to live it up with their strong dollar and sample the privileges of Canadian table-dance clubs, where, unlike in the United States, the artistes…