The Corporation by Joel Bakan
New ideas and understanding of corporation spring forth in Joel Bakan’s The Corporation. He presents facts from historical precedents about Ford’s lawsuit from his partners, General Motors’ misalignme...
Book Reviews · Latest
A Billion Years: My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology
An overview The book is one of the most important first-hand accounts of how a high-control group operates from the inside. Published in September 2022, the memoir comes fro a man who did not merely belong to the Scientology church, but spent decades defending it in public. Mike Rinder ran the Office of Special Affairs, the church’s legal, intelligence and public relations arm, and for years was its chief spokesman to journalists and governments. The vantage point is what makes it the book matter. Many ex-member memoirs describe what was done to the author.
Read the full reviewCan you tell the human from the machine?
Read two passages. Pick the author. Play now →
SurveysWhat do you think?
Add your voice to the questions we are asking readers →
From the Shelf
All Book Reviews →
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Its a simple story set in Africa about a time when old times were being replaced by new times. Endearing old times derived from nature were replaced by rigid customs named after humans. Stories are th...
The Infinite Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallby
Narcissistic minds show their true colours when faced with challenge of scaling a complex and unwanted solution for society’s problems. Their romance with idealism takes a backseat and practical matte...
Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt
Stephen Platt's Imperial Twilight tells the story of the Opium Wars with more sympathy for the Chinese side than most Western histories—but it is still a Western book. The narrative arc is familiar: a...
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is a classic story about survival, not of spiritual growth. It contains hints of colonial anxiety - or lets say colonial supremacy -, which do not diminish after isolation from humans ...
From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel C. Dennett
Profound, thought provoking and insightful are the three most appropriate words to describe this book. It takes on a humongous task of understanding human mind - particularly consciousness - and prese...
The Open Society and its Enemies vol. 1 by Karl Popper
‘Socrates Good, Plato Bad’ is the only way I can summarise this book. Although it may seem controversial, Popper has persuaded me enough to let go of any reservations against the phrase. Popper dissec...
Second Treatise of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration
Introduction
John Locke's Second Treatise of Government is not philosophy but political propaganda—a grievance dressed in the language of natural law and ruined by relentlessly bad prose. It is repeti...
Ideas
All Essays →From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel C. Dennett
Profound, thought provoking and insightful are the three most appropriate words to describe this book. It takes on a humongous task of understanding human mind - particularly consciousness - and prese...
The AI Challenge for Humans: Can Society Remain a Passive Audience?
Introduction
On 12 September 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," asking for controls on how fast frontier AI models are developed [1]. Before th...
Soros on Soros
Great things are paradoxical and so is this book. I can judge this book in hindsight which allows me to be more critical of George Soros’ current mindset. But, at the time of this book’s publication, ...
The Wire
All Stories →- TechCrunch AINvidia backs Indian startup helping companies run AI models with fewer GPUsSimplismart says its annualized revenue run rate has grown 14-fold in six months, with the U.S. accounting for more than half its revenue.
- TechCrunch AIHow OpenAI turned its coding tools into dots, an always-on personal assistantAlexander Embiricos, the OpenAI executive responsible for dots, never wants to have a meeting with someone else's AI agent.
- TechCrunch AICohere says Alibaba’s Qwen model tried to send a file to Beijing
- TechCrunch AIAnthropic’s IPO filing reveals its strategy for keeping enterprise customers hooked
- TechCrunch AISpaceX locks in $40B GPU financing deal with Apollo
- TechCrunch AIAnthropic officially files for its public debut
- MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: Anthropic’s IPO, smarter power grids, and exercise pills
- Hacker News (Open Source)Show HN: Petal, open-source CoScreen/ScreenHero finally freeHi HN!I’m Jason Thomas, one of the founders of CoScreen.As some of you may know, Datadog sunset the CoScreen service on July 31st.Four of us from the original CoScreen team have spent the last couple months building a fr...
- Open Source InitiativeOpen Enables a Lot: The OSI at UNGA81At UNGA81, OSI joined conversations on Open Source AI, digital sovereignty, and digital public infrastructure. Open by itself does very little but enables a lot.
- Open Source InitiativeOpen Weights Are Good. Open Source Is Better.
- Open Source InitiativeWe Must Open the Frontier: OSI, OFAI Support Calls for the U.S. to Develop More Open Models
- Open Source InitiativeOSI brings the State of the Source to All Things Open 2026
- Hacker News (Open Source)UAE-based Falcon AI NSFW classifier among top global open-source models (2025)
- Hacker News (Open Source)Corporate America Is Getting Hooked on Open-Source A.I