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Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans' techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented--but armed--aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore's life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the "river of time that divides the quick from the dead." Echoing Gore Vidal's United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay--and of history--itself.… (altro)
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This is a doorstop of a book, 640 pages of Jill Lepore's essays on a range of issues from parenting to politics, from literature to libraries and archives, from Covid to Constitutional interpretation. Lepore is brilliant, rigorous and deeply analytical (my God is it ever good to read proper analysis based on rigorous research!!) Most of this is spectacularly good, and the last three essays, The Trump Papers, In Every Dark Hour, and The American Beast, are the clearest smartest look at the end of the (1st) Trump presidency that I have read. I want to give this a 5-star, but I can't because Lepore drops the ball in her essays on technology.
My complaint here is not due to a difference of opinion. Though we appear pretty well politically aligned on most matters, Lepore and I differ significantly on issues of Constitutional interpretation and I do not dock her even a fraction of a point for that. Her opinions on the law are challenging, interesting and well-supported, She added dimension to the way I see several issues, including the invention or recognition (you be the judge) of a right to privacy and relatedly on the reckless use of the Commerce Clause to address all sorts of things. I think it is fair to say Lepore and I are both happy with the results of many of the early cases which identified personal rights in the Commerce Clase, and we also seem to agree that some of them are jurisprudentially unsound and led to decisions that have been very bad for all of us, but we partially disagree on where the errors lay and what the Commerce Clause should do. In any event, as noted, her opinions are well-reasoned and I respect the heck out of them even where I disagree with them. Not so with her writings on tech. She makes some weird arguments against tech qua tech and the ways it is deployed which seem to indicate that we have weakened laws to protect our privacy and that technologists just gotten less responsible and more intent on destroying the world and that in the before times people could have done the things we do now but they reined themselves in. That is crap. In These Four Walls she falsely states that the surveillance of employees through tech would have been illegal before. Not true. There were no such laws, in part because there was nothing yet to legislate. Maybe we should be protecting workers' privacy rights. that is a topic we should be talking about, but we did not do this in the past and she should not hint at an erosion of protection when there is none. Then she cites at one point that the design of systems being used now are substantially similar to things that were around 40 years ago, but now they are being deployed. There are two quite simple and logical reasons that is a specious premise upon which to argue. First, what does substantially similar even mean? The simplest tweak to an algorithm can completely change what it does and how it does it. That is like saying because humans and chimps share 98.8% of their DNA we are the same. Secondly, to the extent the systems she described had been laid out we couldn't do anything with those ideas 40 years ago. We did not have the computing power to generate and utilize needed data or the data storage solutions necessary to do anything with them. It is like saying Ada Lovelace chose not to make a computer though she knew how and Leonard DaVinci chose not to build a helicopter though the sketches of the Aerial Screw show he could have. No. They had the ideas, they were brilliant, but it was not yet possible to build these things. There were steps along the way where other people had to solve the things standing in the way of turning their visions into reality. Same with the things we have now. Technologists have not lost their way, and they were not inherently more ethical 40 years ago, they just have more to work with now. And yes, we might well be mindlessly driving ourselves to extinction, but not because we were good then and now we are not. Lepore's wholesale disdain for technology was also a problem here. Technology does great things, and it is not possible to get to those great things without seeing that same tech used for less great things. Walls shelter us and imprison us, that does not make walls bad. I hope we are able and willing to regulate things well, but that remains to be seen. (Though just today the EU passed sweeping AI regulation which is an interesting start.) This is a tangent though -- my real issue is not with Lepore's clear antipathy for technology, but with the structure of her arguments and her clear lack of research. She is too good, too wise for that. For that reason I am knocking this to a 4.5 rounded to a GR 4, truly excellent, but with a visible flaw. ( )
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One day, the sun's rays as spiky as a coronavirus, I went for a walk through a forest where pine trees poke out of a hill like pins from a pincushion. -Introduction
In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock. -Prodigal Daughter
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Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi.Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans' techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented--but armed--aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore's life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the "river of time that divides the quick from the dead." Echoing Gore Vidal's United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay--and of history--itself.
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(4.31)
1
My complaint here is not due to a difference of opinion. Though we appear pretty well politically aligned on most matters, Lepore and I differ significantly on issues of Constitutional interpretation and I do not dock her even a fraction of a point for that. Her opinions on the law are challenging, interesting and well-supported, She added dimension to the way I see several issues, including the invention or recognition (you be the judge) of a right to privacy and relatedly on the reckless use of the Commerce Clause to address all sorts of things. I think it is fair to say Lepore and I are both happy with the results of many of the early cases which identified personal rights in the Commerce Clase, and we also seem to agree that some of them are jurisprudentially unsound and led to decisions that have been very bad for all of us, but we partially disagree on where the errors lay and what the Commerce Clause should do. In any event, as noted, her opinions are well-reasoned and I respect the heck out of them even where I disagree with them. Not so with her writings on tech. She makes some weird arguments against tech qua tech and the ways it is deployed which seem to indicate that we have weakened laws to protect our privacy and that technologists just gotten less responsible and more intent on destroying the world and that in the before times people could have done the things we do now but they reined themselves in. That is crap. In These Four Walls she falsely states that the surveillance of employees through tech would have been illegal before. Not true. There were no such laws, in part because there was nothing yet to legislate. Maybe we should be protecting workers' privacy rights. that is a topic we should be talking about, but we did not do this in the past and she should not hint at an erosion of protection when there is none. Then she cites at one point that the design of systems being used now are substantially similar to things that were around 40 years ago, but now they are being deployed. There are two quite simple and logical reasons that is a specious premise upon which to argue. First, what does substantially similar even mean? The simplest tweak to an algorithm can completely change what it does and how it does it. That is like saying because humans and chimps share 98.8% of their DNA we are the same. Secondly, to the extent the systems she described had been laid out we couldn't do anything with those ideas 40 years ago. We did not have the computing power to generate and utilize needed data or the data storage solutions necessary to do anything with them. It is like saying Ada Lovelace chose not to make a computer though she knew how and Leonard DaVinci chose not to build a helicopter though the sketches of the Aerial Screw show he could have. No. They had the ideas, they were brilliant, but it was not yet possible to build these things. There were steps along the way where other people had to solve the things standing in the way of turning their visions into reality. Same with the things we have now. Technologists have not lost their way, and they were not inherently more ethical 40 years ago, they just have more to work with now. And yes, we might well be mindlessly driving ourselves to extinction, but not because we were good then and now we are not. Lepore's wholesale disdain for technology was also a problem here. Technology does great things, and it is not possible to get to those great things without seeing that same tech used for less great things. Walls shelter us and imprison us, that does not make walls bad. I hope we are able and willing to regulate things well, but that remains to be seen. (Though just today the EU passed sweeping AI regulation which is an interesting start.) This is a tangent though -- my real issue is not with Lepore's clear antipathy for technology, but with the structure of her arguments and her clear lack of research. She is too good, too wise for that. For that reason I am knocking this to a 4.5 rounded to a GR 4, truly excellent, but with a visible flaw. (