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A Quantum Life

They called him “The Professor.” By the time he was ten years old, he was reading every book he could get his hands on. In sixth grade, he scored 162 on an I.Q. test. But, by the time he was in his teens, the...

The Power of Language

At the pediatrician’s clinic, a nurse told Viorica Marian, who is a native speaker of Romanian, to use only English with her American-born daughter. Speaking another language would “confuse” the child and hurt her long-term, the woman had said. This was a good decade ago....

The New Breed

BEFORE dawn, a Roomba sweeps the floor in my home in Boston. Suckubus (as we call it) can get tangled up with shoelaces or carpet tassels and need rescuing. At the local grocery store, a robot called Marty patrols looking for spills, summoning employees loudly...

Cat in the Agraharam

The wealth of contemporary Tamil literature has always been just out of reach for readers like me who speak the mother tongue well enough but tend to stumble over the printed word. But you don't need Tamil roots to appreciate this new collection of translated...

Coded Bias

In her first semester at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini faced a peculiar problem: commercial face‑recognition software detected her light‑skinned classmates but couldn’t “see” her. Only when she donned a white plastic mask in frustration did the system recognize her face. Coded Bias is...

Girl, Decoded

As she sat in a taxi headed to Cairo International Airport in September 2001, Rana el Kaliouby remembers thinking, “Am I really going through with this?” A married woman and hijab-wearing Muslim, she would be on her own for the next 3 years, pursuing her...