Ideas

Mrs. Eddy Builds Her Empire

“Virtually every twentieth-century book or sect that promotes healing through the power of mind is in some ways a repackaging of the work of one woman, Mary Baker Eddy, the self-proclaimed ‘Discoverer and Founder’ of Christian Science.”

July 11, 1996 issue

Pioneers of Paranoia

“When Republicans founded ‘Democratic Societies,’ to protect civil liberties, Federalists saw them as the work of Jacobins sent to bring the reign of terror to America. Indeed the whole world was to be brought to its knees by a secret society known as the Bavarian Illuminati, dedicated to atheism and anarchy, an organization that existed only in the minds of fanatical Federalists.”

October 6, 1994 issue

The Fear of the Occult

“There was always a strong undercurrent of fear in the occultists, fear of the forces they might be invoking, anxiety to keep on the safe side in dealing with them.”

November 22, 1979 issue

Greetings from Far Away

“In 1967, Spiritualism began a comeback. It was, of course, part of the big Occult Explosion, but the strongest shove came from three men: the late Bishop James Pike, the later Reverend Arthur Ford, and Allen Spraggett, a Canadian fundamentalist preacher turned occult journalist.”

May 3, 1973 issue

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

Court v. Chatbot

In a recent experiment, chatGPT showed a more developed moral sense than the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority.

December 26, 2022

Frankenstein’s Mother

As Muriel Spark points out in her biography of Mary Shelley, Shelley’s lucid, rational, and straightforward prose makes the surreal horrors of her story much more effective than the inflated rhetoric of her contemporaries’ Gothic tales. 

November 19, 1987 issue

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares figure prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

February 5, 2015 issue

The Edge of Horror

William Sloane might have become a master of the horror genre, or created an entirely new one. Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery.

September 18, 2015

One of America’s Best

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

May 10, 2012 issue