“The prison we know today does not really promise reform (and would not be believed if it did) and works to fragment any sense of political community.”
11.03.2026 18:18
👍 0
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
“The prison we know today does not really promise reform (and would not be believed if it did) and works to fragment any sense of political community.”
“It is the violence of the prison that makes this book so timely. The prison is, without any question, one of the preeminent problems for political philosophy in the 21st century.”
Spencer J. Weinreich reviews Jacob Abolafia's The Prison before the Panopticon.
“Although del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein is not merely an allegory about LLM chatbots, the creature is an artificial intelligence. As with the development of the creature, the ethical implications of creating AI in our present moment are an afterthought.”
www.publicbooks.org/victor-frank...
New at PB: Spencer J. Weinreich reviews Jacob Abolafia's The Prison before the Panopticon (@harvardpress.bsky.social), which looks at the genealogy of prisons through political philosophers both ancient and modern.
“Frankenstein—at least, in Mary Shelley’s original novel Frankenstein, first dreamed up 210 years ago this year—is not the genius doctor into whom he has morphed in most adaptations.”
New at PB: We offer two reviews of Frankenstein, one that asks what it means to abandon a sentient being you’ve brought to life; and another that wonders what Victor Frankenstein might have been, if only he’d had the right scientific mentorship.
www.publicbooks.org/section/film/
“This dynamic—male/first/simple, female/second/complicated—echoes trends in biomedical sciences from Shelley’s time to our own.”
Craig Kelley traces the parallels traces the neglect of research into women’s health, from Mary Shelley’s novel to today.
“Gee’s title highlights the tension between an imported tradition of peripatetic nation-making and the realities of life in a Pacific archipelago.”
A new B-Side on Kiwi author Maurice Gee’s “Going West.”
“Short-circuiting the questions about knowledge and responsibility that electrify Shelley’s novel, del Toro decidedly does not offer his audience a film of ideas.”
“What happens to a young scientist whose primary mentor is an artificial intelligence?”
In Mary Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein had no mentor. In del Toro’s adaptation, a bad mentor. In real life, what will happen as students turn to AI for support?
“He was swimming westwards in the end,” Jack concludes. “The whole thing has the arrogance of his best poems, which never fail.”
In a new review of “Frankenstein,” Michael Bérubé & Urmila Seshagiri hope that “someday a film will do justice to [the book].”
What’s your most (or least) favorite adaptation of a beloved book?
“Like Kerouac’s On the Road, Going West is shaped by its protagonist’s frustrated admiration for a man who embodies a seemingly more authentic way of life.”
New at PB: Hamish Dalley on “Going West.”
“Del Toro positions Victor as the victim of an ill-tempered father’s abuse, providing a bog-standard intergenerational-trauma justification for Victor’s violent behavior toward his own offspring.”
“Between Dr. Frankenstein’s antipathy toward academia and Harlander’s obsession with transferring his consciousness from his body in pursuit of immortality, it is difficult to imagine that del Toro did not have certain tech billionaires in mind.”
New at PB: Maurice Gee’s Kiwi characters yearn for the type of “westward” freedom imported from America; on their north-south oriented islands, they find they have nowhere to go.
“Some of the most interesting deviations from the novel regard mentorship, both Victor’s and the creature’s.”
New at PB: Craig Kelley reviews Guillermo del Toro‘s “Frankenstein” through the lens of scientific mentorship.
@michael-berube.bsky.social & Urmila Seshagiri don’t go around saying “The book was so much better than the movie.” Ok, they’re saying it now—but not all the time!
Read their review of “Frankenstein,” new at PB:
New at PB: Craig Kelley pairs Guillermo del Toro‘s adaptation of “Frankenstein” with the book “Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds” to emphasize the importance of good scientific mentorship.
In a new review of “Frankenstein” (2025), @michael-berube.bsky.social & Urmila Seshagiri argue that Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation “abandons the very specific humanity—and the complex morality—of Shelley’s original creature.”
In New Zealand, Maurice Gee captivated readers, won prizes, and was a staple of school reading lists. He died last June, and remains virtually unknown outside of his home country.
New at PB: Hamish Dalley on Gee’s “Going West.”
New at PB: In advance of the Oscars, @michael-berube.bsky.social & Urmila Seshagiri revisit Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Mary Shelley‘s “Frankenstein,” asking, What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world?
“Jack’s story reveals the pitfalls of trying to reenact an Anglophone tradition of nation-making that does not account for its South Pacific placement.”
New at PB: In our latest B-Side, Hamish Dalley revisits Maurice Gee‘s “Going West.”
“The problem with the ‘mind’ evinced by AI is not that it is so brilliant that it renders human intellectual endeavor obsolete.The problem is the opposite.”
Ben Parker on the “slapdash, incurious” writing of ChatGPT.
“The essays ChatGPT produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate.”
Ben Parker examines why AI-written essays might seem passable–but certainly not good.
“These two works of contemplative science fiction—a film and an animated series—use space and technology as metaphors for existential anxiety and metaphysical solitude.”
New at PB: Virginie Tournay on “nothingness.”
“In order to quantify the real intellectual output of AI, I proposed to feed ChatGPT some topics and prompts from the college English courses I teach. In all cases there were grievous misunderstandings for which I would have marked down any student paper.”
“This is why human beings—and by extension, the machines they design—cannot truly think nothingness. At best, people can name it, symbolize it, or treat it as a metaphor for the outer limits of thought.”
“Amusingly enough, while tyrants get a free pass, countries with democratic forms of government that the authors feel are related to our own must be placed on notice.”
New at PB: Jonah Siegel on Trump’s National Security Strategy.