A.I. that can create and comprehend language carries the shock of a category violation; it allows machines to do what we thought only people could. To a great degree, the researchers at Google experienced that shock as much as anybody else. The period leading up to the creation of the transformer was like an accidental Manhattan Project. Conversations with its inventors suggest that, seven years later, we remain uncertain about why it’s as effective as it’s turned out to be.
Reading Toni Morrison as a Black girl, a Black teen, or a young Black woman is a literary rite of passage. For me, as I dog-eared pages of Sula and Beloved in high school, I was given a depiction of Black womanhood and Black life that made me feel seen and reflected on every page. Growing up, I watched my mother cook and took mental notes. The kitchen became my own world, with a certain peace I reached for. Morrison’s masterly approach to prominently featuring and writing lovingly about food—tapping into the sense of taste, so often underutilized in literary fiction—was like a mirror.
That’s precisely what Hong has done in this novel. She brings together the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the experience of her depression and trauma, the stories of her family, and her later struggle of grief. She lets them sit beside each other, the vignettes of conversations, memories, past and present. Separate, they are nice. But together, in the reader’s mind, they become something totally different and new—something bold, and sad, and special.
If you were under the impression that the opposite of a cynic is an easily hoodwinked person of low mental horsepower, then Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology and director of Stanford’s Social Neuroscience Lab, has news for you. The idea that cynics are somehow more astute is the first of many notions demolished in this succinct, uplifting book.
“Gray Matters” is not quite a memoir, not quite a history, not quite a medical thriller, not quite an anatomy text, but at different points it seems to aspire to each of these things.
Virtually everything that can harm the human brain is contained in the book’s more than 500 pages, from tumors and gunshot wounds to sports injuries, shaken baby syndrome, aneurysms, and psychosurgery.