Sue Halpern

The Coming Tech Autocracy

A functional government, committed to safeguarding its citizens, might be keen to create a regulatory agency for AI or pass comprehensive legislation, but we in the United States do not have such a government.

When the Brain Becomes Data

“Ever since we became ‘the product,’ we’ve been trading vast amounts of personal data for the privilege of engaging online.”

The Bull’s-Eye on Your Thoughts

Today digital privacy exists only at the discretion of the companies that mediate our online engagement. But what happens when those companies, an employer, school administrators, or the government have access to our neural data?

Private Eyes

The surveillance economy has all but eliminated Americans’ ability to be “let alone.”

The Specter of Our Virtual Future

The metaverse opens up a new and seemingly infinite opportunity to extract data and sell ads.

The End of Roe

A symposium of writers on a future without the right to reproductive freedom.

Before the Fall

As evangelicals came into the GOP tent, Republican voters and politicians traded women’s bodies for political power.

The Human Costs of AI

Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.

Weaponizing the Web

Nicole Perlroth’s investigation into the shadowy world of cyberweaponry predicts an unsettling future for global security.

Who Owns Our Voting Machines?

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.

The Drums of Cyberwar

All the critical infrastructure that undergirds much of our lives is at risk of being held hostage or decimated by hackers

In Praise of Public Libraries

A public library stands in stark opposition to the materialism and individualism that otherwise define our culture.

Apologize Later

How Republicans Became Anti-Choice

These days, the litmus test for Republican politicians and judges is opposition to abortion. This was not always the case.

The Known Known

The future of privacy in the era of “surveillance capitalism”

Lost in Robo-Translation

The Pocketalk device uses artificial intelligence to translate what I, or my Japanese counterpart, are saying. That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, as anyone who has used Google Translate knows…

Facebook: A Fake News Fix?

This diminution of news might be a way for Facebook to walk away from the public sphere—or, at least, appear to walk away—at a time when it has been taken to task for its overweening influence there.

Bitcoin Mania

‘Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World’ by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott

Our Hackable Democracy

The recent news that thirty electronic voting machines had been hacked for sport at the Def Con hackers’ conference, some in a matter of minutes, should not have been news at all.