Being reviewed:
Atlas of AI Power: Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
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At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month.
Nicholas Dames
Editor in Chief
Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini, What Is Cultural Criticism?
For a certain demographic—admittedly a very small one, but still—Raymond Williams’s 1979 Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review is a landmark of postwar intellectual life in the Anglosphere. There’s a terrifyingly intimate quality to it, with Williams facing off before a stern tribunal, sometimes cornered into a Confiteor, sometimes defiantly bursting out with a creed, an entire career being held strenuously to account. Mulhern and Collini’s debate here—a reprinting of responses to each other that span more than two decades, with a new postscript from Collini—is different in tone, and the historical moment in which it takes place brings its own differences as well. But the acuity and energy of debate is similar, and the basic questions are the same as when Williams faced his interrogators: what is the political value of the amorphous and rarified activity we call “criticism”? What should criticism’s relation to politics be? (What is “politics,” and what is “criticism”?) Mulhern and Collini are just close enough in their practice, and just distant enough in their political temperaments, to be fascinating antagonists: sharp but not sadistic, keenly partisan but self-aware, Mulhern speaking (broadly put) for a more politically committed procedure, Collini for the partial autonomy of criticism’s modes. The surprise is how, in the final exchange which takes us to recent times, their alignment gets closer, even as their disagreements remain in place. It’s not an entirely pleasant surprise. If anything, it suggests how much more dire a moment they—and we—are now facing.
Benjamin R. Cohen
Public Thinker Series Editor
Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
Atlas of AI, from way back in 2021, may be a nice reference to show the uptake of the awareness that the cloud is physical, that the comfort of delivery apps has material consequences, that algorithms have to be processed and that takes energy and water and rare earth minerals. Crawford writes with clarity and poise to chart the environmental destruction being wrought by AI and digital systems more broadly. She also excavates the Taylorist labor abuses of the industry; charts the wholesale redefinition of all human activity as data to be harvested, scraped, mined, or pillaged (you pick the metaphor); and explores the insidious relationship between private AI corporate actors and the military and governments deploying AI systems for state power, warfare, and control of the populace. It’s a lot. Atlas of AI does a remarkable job exploring it all, far more clearly than my own summary lines here.
Megan Cummins
Managing Editor
Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists
Ayşegül Savaş’s newest novel, The Anthropologists, begins with a decision. “In a moment of panic, we decided to look for a home,” declares the book’s narrator, Asya. Asya is a documentarian; her husband, Manu, works for a nonprofit. They grew up in different countries; now they live together in an unnamed foreign city.
The Anthropologists perfectly captures the anxiety of a certain time in life, when one is still young but no longer quite young enough, an anxiety exacerbated by the fact Asya and Manu are far from their homes and families; with each new part of their life they build, there’s something else they miss.
Rarely have I seen the panic of forging a life told with so much charm. There’s tenderness in all of Asya’s searching, woven with love for her home and her new city, for her husband and friends, for the strangers she interviews in the park, where she desires to film “the slow and leisurely rot of a day.” As Asya and Manu drift through apartment showings—stopping after for vodka tonics and a discussion of the beautiful floors, all the while knowing those particular floors aren’t right for them—I was eager to see them land in their perfect apartment (or home, dare I say) because I would very much like to visit.
John Plotz
B-Sides Series Editor
Edith Wharton, The Reef
I was delighted to learn that a new imprint from Unnamed Press, edited by the novelist Brandon Taylor, plans to republish Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep. I’d love to see her comprehensively revived: so many of her novels float obscurely behind House of Mirth and Age of Innocence—even Custom of the Country is probably best remembered for the name of its protagonist, Undine Spragg. Add one more to the list of those undeservedly consigned to the shadows: The Reef (1912). As people often say admiringly or accusingly about Wharton, the prose is certainly Jamesian (“he was more and more aware of his inability to test the moral atmosphere about him: he was like a man in fever testing another’s temperature by the touch”). But James himself declared it “Racinian”—presumably referring to its young and old menage-a-quatre architecture: two mature lovers—George Darrow and his long-ago beloved Anna Leath—seem to be finally tiptoeing towards marriage until their way is hindered by their complex (ok fine Jamesian) relations with Anna’s stepson Owen and his fiancée, the beautiful young Sophy, with whom George once “dallied” in a Paris hotel.
James and Racine notwithstanding, its unsparing portrayal of “careless people … [who] smashed up things and creatures and then … let other people clean up the mess they had made” reminds me of no novel as much as The Great Gasby. With an astonishing difference: a Gatsby told to readers (narrated and “focalized” as the narratologists say) through the eyes of the Tom and Daisy Buchanan figures, who do everything with their privilege but check it. That The Reef is reputed to be a roman-a-clef of Wharton’s own difficult marriage makes the decision to tell the story from the vantage of the unscathed Anna and the triumphantly fatuous George all the more remarkable.
Leah Price
Screen/Print Section Editor
Karl Berglund, Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age
Karl Berglund’s Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age, out from Bloomsbury this month, draws on a treasure-trove. Improbably, Sweden’s biggest audiobook streaming company granted him access to data about who listens to which books, when and where. The resulting empirical account of the country that streams the most audiobooks per capita is full of surprises that will make any book historian or media scholar rethink received wisdom generated in the absence of such hard data. Most striking are the dogs that didn’t bark: not only does Berglund find no variation in the times of day at which different genres of audiobook are consumed, but audiobooks—unlike ebooks—turn out not to be read more at night than during the day.
Charlotte Rosen
Assistant Editor
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
My friends know I am a big defender of Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, ready at the drop of a hat to talk about the film’s gratifying presentation of communist and antifascist actors as morally upright actors and its depiction of history as propelled not only by large structural forces, but also by the singular, contingent, emotional decision-making of powerful individuals who are themselves egotistical and flawed. (Yes, everyone is sick of me). So I’ve begun listening to American Prometheus, the biography the film was based upon, on audiobook. The book does what all great biographies do: uses a single person’s life to articulate broader historiographical insights into the politics and culture of the moment, offering a sort of mini-course on the grand conflicts, shifts, and dilemmas of the 20th century. In particular, though Oppenheimer obviously does not maintain his more youthful radicalism, the book’s description of his participation in the left/communist scene in 1930s California (Oppenheimer was in Berkeley and Pasadena during this era) is truly fascinating and energizing, giving incredible texture to the range of organizations, ideologies, and intellectual synergies of the moment. At one point, Oppie was annually donating $1,000 (then a hefty sum) for Spanish relief work through the Communist Party, giving speeches on behalf of the Local 349 of the East Bay Teachers’ Union, and hanging out with Harry Bridges, the iconic Oakland longshoreman union leader. His students were budding radicals too, and Oppie encouraged them to be so. One student recounted Oppie inviting them to come along with him to a longshoremen’s rally in a large San Francisco auditorium. “We were sitting up high in a balcony,” he recalls, “and by the end we were caught up in the enthusiasm of the strikers, shouting with them, ‘Strike! Strike! Strike!’”
Of course, Oppie would go on to distance himself from this work and era in his life—but even this process is historically interesting: like many American Jewish leftists during this time, he became disillusioned with Stalin’s Soviet Union (especially the Stalin-Hitler pact) and was panicked by the spread of Nazism (especially the fall of France). While his rejection of his once fervent leftism is worthy of critique, the biography makes clear that Oppie’s decision to do so was premised on his desire to make himself amenable to the government so that he could “work on a project that he believed might be necessary to defeat Nazi Germany.” How the bomb was actually used, and Oppenheimer’s later regrets about his role in shepherding the atomic bomb’s entrance into the world, is an epic tragedy that even the best novelists couldn’t dream up, and a painful lesson in the ethical stain of entwining scientific research with the infrastructure of US imperialism. 
