One day in 1966, in an incident that has since passed into computer science legend, Weizenbaum’s secretary sat down to use ELIZA. The secretary soon asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she could have privacy. The thought of needing to be alone to talk to a piece of software—much less one that she […]
Read More
This attempt to have it both ways may explain why some critics struggled to combat the book’s influence in the wake of its success, accusing not Kübler-Ross but the pop consensus of a willful misreading. In a critique from 1979, medical ethics professor Larry R. Churchill argued that the fault “lies not so much with […]
Read More
The oversight is a result, perhaps, of Anderson’s strange, tenacious attachment to the idea of the nation. Waving aside “progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals,” who point out the violence and racism of nationalism, Anderson instead focuses on how “nations inspire love.” The “cultural products” of nationalism, he tells us, “show this love very clearly,” whereas it is […]
Read More