If we start working with a more philosophically grounded understanding of free will, we realize that only a small subset of our everyday actions is important enough to worry about. We want to feel in control of those decisions, the ones whose outcomes make a difference in our life and whose responsibility we feel on our shoulders. It is in this context—decisions that matter—that the question of free will most naturally applies.
The Shards is a bold attempt to understand how the analog and digital interact. This accounts for the novel’s countless, obsessive descriptions of outmoded forms of analogue tech: the cassette, the Betamax, and, most tellingly, the typewriter. It also explains Ellis’s bravura manipulation of genre (the age of the digital, as we know, is one where once-stable systems of classification tend to collapse).
With his latest, Ellis is, in essence, attempting to refashion and – to crib from the Trawler – remake the (analog) novel in our contemporary (digital) age. I think he succeeds. Others may disagree. Either way, The Shards is a timely reminder this is a writer willing to take risks.
“Please Report Your Bug Here” is not the first — and nowhere near the best — sci-fi thriller to contend with Silicon Valley’s immense power. But it’s a smart and brisk novel that, despite some occasionally leaden prose, speaks the language of a distinct cohort — 20- and 30-somethings who, as one of Riedel’s characters says, were “practically raised” by the internet but have since found it increasingly alienating.
And even if its abundant pathos comes at the somewhat high price of overweening narrative omniscience, this macabre twist on the marriage-portrait novel ultimately invites prudence and humility on the thorny question of how much we can ever know about those closest to us. Hardly a new insight, for sure, but rarely can it have been demonstrated quite so explosively.
Yet mathematics has undergone tremendous changes, especially during the twentieth century, when it pushed ever deeper into the realm of abstraction. This upheaval even involved a redefinition of the definition itself, as Alma Steingart explains in Axiomatics.
A historian of science, Steingart sees this revolution as central to the modernist movements that dominated the mid-twentieth century in the arts and social sciences, particularly in the United States. Mathematicians’ push for abstraction was mirrored by — and often directly triggered — parallel trends in economics, sociology, psychology and political science. Steingart quotes some scientists who saw their liberation from merely explaining the natural world as analogous to how abstract expressionism freed painting from the shackles of reality.
We don’t need to learn the biological mechanics of dying in order to die. But it may help to know them in facing death. If the philosophers haven’t figured out how to do that — at least not to everyone’s satisfaction — might a physician have more luck? Henry Marsh is an author and retired doctor, in whom, said The Economist, “neuroscience has found its Boswell.” In his most recent book, the physician becomes a patient, confronting a diagnosis that will probably end his life.