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Aug 26, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Richard Schiffman |Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic
HalfwayHalfway to Heaven, the heavens—not too high, mind you, but a rung above the quotidian sky—at that heady altitude where cobalt blue blushes to blue-black and the earth curves away from itself like a gigantic tonguelapping at the glitter-dust of stars. Not at some dizzying height, that is, because it’s grace that one is after, not the icy certitudes of space.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic |Kate Lucky
Our technologies, especially emerging ones, hold up a mirror to ourselves. Plato famously critiqued writing because he believed it would impoverish humans’ capacity for memory. And while our innovations have accelerated over the millennia, our questions about who we are have remained mostly the same. Joseph Vukov’sStaying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence demonstrates how contemporary discourse about AI reflects perennial accounts of what it means to be human.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic |Kate Lucky
So Much Left UnsaidI read with dismay Viva Hammer’s recent article, “Antisemitism in Paradise” (June).
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Elizabeth Poreba |Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic
There I am nursing grievances, washing the dishes,calculating my steps, my pulse, my innermost thoughts,writing checks, poems, petitions, buying wine by the box—while humble, slimy, not discernibly dissatisfied,and carbon negative, they are aerating,feeding, defecating, through muck and drought—…contributing to the world’s grain harvest as much as Russia.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Griffin Oleynick |Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic
After losing the closely watched July 28 presidential election to opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia in a landslide, Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro falsely declared himself the winner. He seems to have no plans to relinquish his grip on power. Things were already bad in Venezuela before the election.
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Aug 22, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch |Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic
On August 5, a federal judge ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly and that it used anti-competitive practices to dominate the search market and charge inflated prices for advertising. The case brought by the Justice Department targeted Google’s practice of paying enormous sums to companies like Apple and Samsung to set Google as the default search engine on their devices. In 2020, 90 percent of U.S. internet searches, including 95 percent of those on mobile devices, used Google.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic |Kate Lucky
July 24 may come to be remembered as one of the most shameful days in recent American history. That was the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, a man who has authorized atrocities to save his own political skin, was permitted to address a joint meeting of Congress at the invitation of the four top congressional leaders, two of them Democrats. But there have been many shameful days since the war in Gaza began almost a year ago.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic
Spencer Reece’s third book of poetry is his first in ten years. This new collection’s title, Acts, suggests a rough continuity with 2014’s The Road to Emmaus, especially since both allude to a single author, Luke. And like the Luke-Acts sequence, Reece’s second and third books form two distinct parts of a single, formally unified work. With The Road to Emmaus, Reece left behind the precise imagery and tight lines that had marked his debut, The Clerk’s Tale (2004).
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Aug 15, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic
At the start of the 1990s the United States had won a convincing, if not exactly stainless, victory over the Soviet Union, its chief geopolitical rival on the political Left. With fascism on the Far Right crushed by an unholy alliance of liberal democracies and Communist states decades earlier, American liberalism was the only game left in town. U.S. officials now had the chance to prove they could assume leadership of a unipolar world and guide it safely into the new millennium.
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Aug 15, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Alexander Stern |Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic
The internet is a problem; on this point many critics and users seem to agree. It enervates, isolates, and distracts; it makes our children anxious and unhappy; it divides us socially and politically. But what kind of problem is it exactly, and what kinds of solutions does it admit of? Is it a policy problem requiring regulatory overhaul?
