Anyone adapting a movie from a book faces a dilemma: stay true to the book and potentially alienate a wider audience — or diverge from the text and leave an angry mob of bookish fans in your wake. Admittedly, Noah Baumbach’s screen adaptation of Don Delillo’s White Noise stays relatively…

A review of Daniel Susskind’s ‘A World Without Work’ — It wasn’t long ago that “creatives” were told automation would finally validate our life choices. …

Your house would like to be a pile of sticks and other thoughts on home ownership The point of owning a home, as far as I can tell, is to keep it from falling down. And if you’ve recently purchased a home, the first thing you need to understand is…

Why that should make you reconsider wearing one — The New York Times recently ran an op-ed by opinion editor Lindsay Crouse titled, I Ditched My Smart Watch and I Don’t Regret It. …

Let Virgil’s “The Aeneid” guide you in 2022 — One of the best things about being an English major was that after a few introductory classes, my books became pretty cheap. They were usually novels, poetry collections, or slim nonfiction volumes that I could get used for less than $10. One of the worst things about being an English…

A small, unelected, unaccountable group of executives are the ones making sweeping decisions about how we use new technology — In his recent article in The Atlantic, “The Metaverse is Bad,” Ian Bogost takes on a question that business and technology publications have so far mostly avoided — do we, as a society, actually want a metaverse? Put differently, are there any reasons beyond the machinations of a handful of…

A new book documents how monopoly has become the defining economic problem of our era — What did I read? Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People by Barry Lynn So who is this Barry Lynn? Lynn is the founder and CEO of the Open Markets Institute and the author of two previous books — End of the Line and Cornered — that analyzed the concentration of private power…

Intel makes a big bet on American manufacturing — $20 billion: That’s how much Intel is spending on two new semiconductor chip fabrication plants in the US. The fabs, both currently under construction just outside of Phoenix, AR, are expected to be fully operational by 2024. The news is encouraging, but it does nothing in the short term to…

A recovering productivity addict wants us to think about time management through the lens of our imminent mortality — What did I read? Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman So who is Oliver Burkeman? Burkeman is an award winning feature writer for The Guardian, where he wrote the weekly column, “This Column Will Change Your Life.” He’s also the author of The Antidote: Happiness for…