Writing

One Couple’s Tireless Crusade to Stop a Genetic Killer Wired She inherited a prion disease with no treatment and no survivors, so she and her husband quit their careers to work on a cure. The Original War Game The Wall Street Journal How a Prussian parlor game became the first simulator. The German board game that changed the face of war The Telegraph Hitler’s generals war-gamed the invasion of Russia. So did Stalin’s—and that’s how Germany failed. ‘SimCity’ Isn’t a Model of Reality. It’s a Libertarian Toy Land Wired The game runs on an MIT modeler’s equations about cities, and those equations had politics baked in. How Games Run Your Life Scientific American Dating apps, social feeds, and stock markets all run on game logic now, but the players don’t set the rules. When Mind Melds With Machine, Who’s in Control? Wired Brain-computer interfaces are getting good enough that “who moved the arm” stops being a rhetorical question. Is the Brain a Useful Model for Artificial Intelligence? Wired AI keeps borrowing the brain’s vocabulary. Whether it has borrowed anything else is less clear. The Strangers in Your Brain The New Yorker Wandering fragments of DNA rewrite each neuron as it forms, making every brain a genetic mosaic that can never exist again. Deus ex Machina Harper’s On the lesser gods of loan assessment and weather prediction. (From the forum “The Minds of Others.”) A Computer to Rival the Brain The New Yorker Neuromorphic engineers are building chips that abandon the logic of conventional computing for the logic of neurons. The Perpetual Quest for a Truth Machine Nautilus Every attempt to mechanize logic has broken down at the same place: the part that requires a human. Millennials Are Killing the Diamond Medium On manufactured scarcity, and the gap between price and worth. Occam’s Dice The Spike Physics rewards the simplest explanation. Evolution doesn’t build things that way. Survival of the Friendliest Nautilus Evolution’s violent metaphors have outlived their usefulness. Cooperation did much of the work. Here’s Why Your Brain Seems Mostly Dormant Nautilus Most of your neurons are quiet most of the time. That silence is a signal. How to Unlearn a Disease Nautilus Some conditions are habits the nervous system has learned—which means they can, in principle, be unlearned. Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos Nautilus The evidence keeps growing that the nervous system operates at the edge of instability, and gains something by it. Nature, the IT Wizard Nautilus Information is the currency of life, and biology spends it more efficiently than any machine we’ve built. Buried in the Sky Nautilus A young astronomer goes looking for answers overhead and finds them underfoot. Who Are Not, But Could Be Massachusetts Review In Central Asia, women protest by immolation, but don’t call it protest.