Critical Issues in Literature

"ravel-and experiencing other cultures-opens your mind. Nobody knows this better than Bryan Cranston, who spent two consecutive years (at 19 and 20) on a motorcycle with his brother, exploring America and figuring out what it was that he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Needless to say he became a major figure in American acting. With pivotal roles in Breaking Bad and Trumbo that-no exaggeration here-have helped reshape not only American television but American masculinity, it shows just how meaningful being purposefully lost can be. That way: you can truly find yourself."

"Avoiding failure is something that comes from our education system we learn in school. Remember those red indications on your school paper? Frequently we penalize the mistakes of children in school, we cross things out because the answer doesn't fit that box etc. Meaningful learning happens when trials and errors occur naturally and logically. Children should be able to make mistakes as often or as necessary to understand and learn what they are working on and how to understand it better. Punishing only produces frustration and demotivation. No one is born all knowing and in order to get to know stuff, you need to screw up on your own. At some point, you need to expose yourself to failure and avoid sticking only to the thing that you feel you're already good at."

"IT'S A BLIZZARD of bad news out there: an ongoing economic crisis, a burgeoning education crisis, healthcare turmoil, energy poverty, water scarcity - to name but a few of our fears. So pervasive is our sense of doom and gloom, that those telling a different story can rarely be heard. And there's a very different story worth hearing. Currently, thanks to the incredible, exponential rate of growth of technology, combined with three powerful emerging forces, we are teetering on the edge of a much, much better tomorrow. Imagine a world where everyone has access to clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, non-polluting and ubiquitous energy. Imagine a world of abundance. Sound too good to be true?"

"A Smithsonian/Pew poll finds optimism about science and social progress despite worries about the environment and population growth"

"Drugs like Adderall were once only prescribed to help highly distractable children with attention deficit disorders focus on their school work. Then college students found those drugs, amphetamine-like stimulants, could increase their ability to study. Now a growing number of workers use them to help compete, whether or not they have A.D.H.D. What will happen as these drugs are more widely used in the workplace?"

"Last December, parents in Silver Spring, Md., allowed their two children - 6 and 10 years old - to walk home from a park about a mile away. Someone reported seeing unsupervised kids, the police picked them up and then the parents found themselves under investigation for neglect by their local Child Protective Services (CPS) agency. The parents, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, say they believe in "free range" parenting. They want to instill self-reliance and independence in their children. But now they are under investigation again. Earlier this month, police picked up the children as they walked home from a park and took them to the CPS offices. They were returned home hours later. The case has sparked a debate about how much supervision children need and how to balance independence and safety. NPR's Rachel Martin spoke with two mothers with differing views. Katie Arnold, a freelance journalist in Santa Fe, N.M., writes a blog on raising adventurous kids for Outside magazine. Denene Millner is a freelance journalist in Atlanta who writes a parenting blog called My Brown Baby."

"In this short, charming talk, he shows some of his collaborations with musicians including Kanye West and Arcade Fire, and describes his latest, mind-bending experiments with virtual reality."

"Retinal Chips, 'Super Soldiers' and Modified Athletes Feature in Game's Dystopian Vision"

"We review the new science fiction thriller Ex Machina. We talk about how this is one of the better movies we've seen about AI, and how in general movies seem to be getting better at handling these topics. However, we question whether the movie's use of the phrase "Turing Test" really makes sense, and whether the notion of a lone genius unilaterally creating a humanoid robot is very believable. Around the twenty minute mark we give a brief spoiler warning before discussing the plausibility of the movie's ending. While we find numerous things to nitpick about, in the end we highly recommend this movie as a film all science fiction and film fans should see."

"Before some babies can even walk or talk, they know how to use a smartphone, and by year one, one in seven use the device for at least one hour a day, according to a recent study. This fact shouldn't be much of a surprise. We see it all the time; kids at restaurants plopped down at the table and a smartphone put in front of them. It's used as a distraction technique in public and possibly at home. But some parents may not know all the facts, like that the American Academy of Pediatrics discourages use of media devices with children."

"For all of Silicon Valley's talk of changing the world, critics say, Google and Facebook mainly hire armies of coders to figure out how to serve you more relevant ads, while Apple and Amazon just want to keep selling you new stuff. These are crude takes, but they get at the disillusionment with an industry whose recent innovations do not seem to have resulted in measurably more prosperous lives for most Americans. Yes, the phone you carry today is far more powerful than the one you had a decade ago. But if your wages haven't climbed and your job is imperiled because of some of the very technologies in that phone, should you rejoice?"

"One of the more contentious ideas to recently emerge from the culture war is that of "safe spaces." We are said to be at risk of social dangers. Sometimes these dangers are labeled denialism (in which someone's identity isn't recognized) or triggering speech (speech that sets off traumatic responses in unwitting listeners). The way some students at elite colleges combat these social dangers is to create, or demand the creation of, safe spaces. And just as often, students demand that their entire campus become a safe space. Hence the wrong kind of speech is re-labeled as violence. The space only becomes safe when certain ideas (and the people expositing them) are banished. We're trying to build a supportive community, don't you know?"

"A pressing question, said Rudolf Jaenisch, an M.I.T. biology professor, is why anyone would want to edit the genes of human embryos in order to prevent disease. Even in the most severe cases, involving diseases like Huntington's in which a single copy of a mutated gene inherited from either parent is enough to cause the disease with 100 percent certainty, editing poses ethical problems. Because of the way genes are distributed in embryos, when one parent has the gene, only half of the parent's embryos will inherit it. With gene editing, the cutting and pasting has to start immediately, in a fertilized egg, before it is possible to know if an embryo has the Huntington's gene. That means half the embryos that were edited would have been normal - their DNA would have been forever altered for no reason. "It is unacceptable to mutate normal embryos," Dr. Jaenisch said. "For me, that means there is no application." Advertisement Noting the many unresolved questions about gene editing of human embryos, a group of leading American researchers recently published a paper in the journal Science calling for a moratorium on doing such work for clinical purposes. They pointed out that current knowledge about genes and their interactions is limited and that changing a disease gene in an embryo that then develops into a baby could have unintended consequences that would be inherited by all of that person's progeny."

"Now most people would probably agree that whatever is the greatest good for the greatest number of people is the right action. But what if you came in for a routine medical operation and they carved you up and gave your organs to those in need?! It's a problem called the Transplant Surgeon Objection and it demonstrates how tricky our beliefs can be when we're pressed to defend them."

"But computers do not just replace humans in the workplace. They shift the balance of power even more in favor of employers. Our normal response to technological innovation that threatens jobs is to encourage workers to acquire more skills, or to trust that the nuances of the human mind or human attention will always be superior in crucial ways. But when machines of this capacity enter the equation, employers have even more leverage, and our standard response is not sufficient for the looming crisis."

"On the Svalbard island of Spitsbergen, one of the remotest places on Earth, mostly covered with ice and hundreds of miles from mainland Norway to the south and Greenland to the west, a doorway leads into the side of a frozen mountain. Inside, past a long hallway and through an icy chamber, is a minus-18-degrees-Celsius (0 degrees Fahrenheit) room, containing nothing but rows upon rows of containers. Here's where the sci-fi ends: There are no aliens here, and no clones. Instead, the containers are full of humble seeds, frozen and preserved - hopefully forever (or long enough, anyway). Ultimately, there's enough room to store 2.25 billion of them."

An update on the film version of the novel which is in the early planning stages.

A short interview with M.T. Anderson about how the novel relates to today. This interview was published in 2013 over ten years after the book was published.

"By the end of the novel the reader has received not just a comprehensive tour of the themes and issues, but a kit for thinking about them. Is free will illusory? How far can you push the concept of responsibility before it becomes ridiculous? The values of Bo's world are absurd - but safety and stability are actually what society is about."