Michael Toscano

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 »