Michael Toscano

The promotion and crafting of a distorted virtual reality by tech companies should concern us all.  Continue Reading »

We have no hope that we can raise the next generation to be entirely innocent of Silicon Valley’s tyrannical devices, but if we can teach them to treasure the world of books, we will keep alive in them the world of memory.  Continue Reading »

The sexual revolution began not with the Boomers but with their elders. How would it have been possible, after all, had not biologist Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903–1967), a member of the Greatest Generation, followed the advice of Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) to stop experimenting with rabbits and . . . . Continue Reading »

About ten years ago, I acquired a deep suspicion of smartphones and social media. Riding a late-night L Train back to my Brooklyn apartment, I looked up from my book and observed about a dozen fellow riders, all in their twenties or early thirties, all hunched over, the blue light of their handhelds . . . . Continue Reading »

Workism is a new word, and it’s a good one. It captures the spirit of our elites, who from childhood are raised to be workers for work’s sake. Work is their priority, their imperative, their strategy, their solution, their delight, their governing ­philosophy. Being masters who toil, they . . . . Continue Reading »

Miyazakiworld:  A Life in Art by susan napier yale, 344 pages, $30 Never-Ending Man, a documentary that recently enjoyed a limited release in the United States, shows an exchange between the animator Hayao Miyazaki, seventy-eight, and a group of young programmers from an artificial intelligence . . . . Continue Reading »

An energetic graduate of Wesleyan College, class of 2013, no longer proud of her achievement-packed résumé, cuts off contact with her mother, flies to Hawaii, lives in a hut, and survives on plants from her small garden. She has traded a promising position in the global economy for a reclusive, . . . . Continue Reading »