Jason Andrew Garshfield

Nov 25, 2024 | quillette.com | Rob Brooks |David Stoll |Sonny Loughran |Jason Andrew Garshfield

Of all the ways people expect Artificial Intelligence to change their lives, making new friends is not high on anybody’s list. I wrote an entire book called Artificial Intimacy about AI-powered technologies that capable of socialising with human beings, and yet even I did not anticipate talking with a green-haired, violet-eyed chatbot in the hope of shaking myself out of a slump. Men of my age often don’t have enough friends.

Nov 25, 2024 | quillette.com | David Stoll |Sonny Loughran |Jason Andrew Garshfield |Michael Shermer

A review of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De Leon, 400 pages, Viking (March 2024)One of the reasons Donald Trump has just been re-elected US president is the battle over how to manage the country’s southern border with Mexico.

Nov 24, 2024 | quillette.com | Sonny Loughran |Jason Andrew Garshfield |Michael Shermer |Marco Visscher

Disinformation is a term often deployed by politicians, journalists, and partisans as a catch-all to discredit opposing views and justify the censorship of inconvenient opinions. But disinformation is, nevertheless, a real problem and tackling it is a challenge we must not shy away from. In its most nefarious form, disinformation refers to lies spread by the agents of enemy states, whose intelligence services are hoping to gain some strategic advantage by deliberately manipulating public opinion.

Nov 21, 2024 | quillette.com | Jason Andrew Garshfield |Michael Shermer |Marco Visscher |John Lloyd

The US presidential election cycle is a spectacle of carefully cultivated suspense. Yet despite this, elections have mostly followed a remarkably predictable pattern from the mid-twentieth century until now: the two major parties exchange control of the White House every eight years. It wasn’t always this way; in the past, there have been long stretches of one-party dominance.

Jul 19, 2024 | quillette.com | Matt Hanson |Fred Litwin |Jeffrey Herf |Jason Andrew Garshfield

A review of Nick Drake: The Life by Richard Morton Jack; 576 pages; John Murray Press (June 2024)I first heard Nick Drake’s music in a Volkswagen commercial, of all things, during the late 1990s. A couple gazed at each other in a moonlit car while an English voice crooned about a pink moon over a wistfully strummed guitar. The product didn’t interest me, but that commercial sparked my lifelong devotion to Drake’s music.