Science

Artificial Reason

A conversation on AI, rationality, and violence.

  • Kevin T. Baker
  • Sophia Goodfriend
  • Benjamin Recht
  • Lily Hu

How to Lie with (Political) Statistics

Inside the data wars over Democratic strategy.

  • Lily Hu

How Did We Fare on COVID-19?

To restore public trust and prepare for the next pandemic, we need a reckoning with the U.S. experience—what worked, and what didn’t.

  • Stephen Macedo
  • Frances Lee
with responses from
  • Adam Gaffney
  • Jonathan White
  • Cailin O’Connor & James Owen Weatherall
  • Adam Kucharski

From the Editors: Checks and Balances Won’t Save Us Now

Introducing our Spring 2025 issue.

  • Boston Review

What Is This Nation?

Palantir’s military-industrial plan for America.

  • David Austin Walsh

How to Save the NIH

Public science too often serves private profits, making it vulnerable to attacks like Trump’s.

  • Eric Reinhart
  • Craig Spencer

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Politics All the Way Down

Critics are right: the algorithms that increasingly run the world can be dangerous. Are human systems always better?

  • Lily Hu

The New Old Warfare

The self-serving myths of a new wave of defense tech, from Palantir’s Gotham to Israel’s Gospel.

  • Sophia Goodfriend

To Whom Does the World Belong?

The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT.

  • Alexander Hartley

The AI We Deserve

Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?

  • Evgeny Morozov
with responses from
  • Brian Eno
  • Audrey Tang
  • Terry Winograd
  • Bruce Schneier & Nathan Sanders
  • Sarah Myers West & Amba Kak
  • Wendy Liu
  • Edward Ongweso Jr.
  • Brian Merchant

My Father, the Cyborg

The seductions of medical surveillance.

  • Omer Rosen

What AI Can’t Do for Democracy

Its potential to enhance civic engagement crucially depends on what policymakers want to learn from the public.

  • Daniel Berliner

From the Editors: AI Futures

Introducing our Fall 2024 issue.

  • Boston Review

The Extortionist’s Doctrine

On the persistence of U.S. nuclear deterrence policy.

  • Elaine Scarry

The Politics of Price

How accounting protocols undermine public goals—from decolonization to climate action.

  • Kevin P. Donovan

Semiconductor Island

The colonial making of Taiwan’s chip supremacy.

  • Brian J. Chen

Can AI Break Out of Panglossian Neoliberalism?

What Big Tech has done to our institutional and infrastructural imagination.

  • Evgeny Morozov

Psychic Numbing

For Robert Jay Lifton, treating veterans’ trauma was an antiwar tool. How did PTSD, the diagnosis he helped create, come to accommodate state violence?

  • Hannah Proctor

The War on Hospitals

Israel’s attacks on health care workers and facilities in Gaza are unprecedented.

  • Joelle M. Abi-Rached

Can We Imagine a World Without Work?

The post-work movement reckons with reproductive labor.

  • Rachel Fraser

An Innovation System That Works

Before rushing to build the next DARPA, we need to assess the R&D model we have.

  • Andrew Schrank

Neither Governed nor Free

Even the singularity’s biggest boosters mostly concede that AI can’t create real works of art.

  • James Duesterberg

How Not to Do Industrial Policy

Instead of pouring public funds into private industry—as the U.S. did with COVID-19 vaccines—we must build public capacity and prioritize public objectives.

  • Amy Kapczynski
  • Christopher Morten
  • Reshma Ramachandran

Our Avatars, Ourselves

Generative AI has made it possible to create lifelike models of real people. Should we?

  • Mala Chatterjee
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