“Del Toro positions Victor as the victim of an ill-tempered father’s abuse, providing a bog-standard intergenerational-trauma justification for Victor’s violent behavior toward his own offspring.”
“Between Dr. Frankenstein’s antipathy toward academia and Harlander’s obsession with transferring his consciousness from his body in pursuit of immortality, it is difficult to imagine that del Toro did not have certain tech billionaires in mind.”
New at PB: Maurice Gee’s Kiwi characters yearn for the type of “westward” freedom imported from America; on their north-south oriented islands, they find they have nowhere to go.
“Some of the most interesting deviations from the novel regard mentorship, both Victor’s and the creature’s.”
New at PB: Craig Kelley reviews Guillermo del Toro‘s “Frankenstein” through the lens of scientific mentorship.
@michael-berube.bsky.social & Urmila Seshagiri don’t go around saying “The book was so much better than the movie.” Ok, they’re saying it now—but not all the time!
Read their review of “Frankenstein,” new at PB:
New at PB: Craig Kelley pairs Guillermo del Toro‘s adaptation of “Frankenstein” with the book “Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds” to emphasize the importance of good scientific mentorship.
In a new review of “Frankenstein” (2025), @michael-berube.bsky.social & Urmila Seshagiri argue that Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation “abandons the very specific humanity—and the complex morality—of Shelley’s original creature.”
In New Zealand, Maurice Gee captivated readers, won prizes, and was a staple of school reading lists. He died last June, and remains virtually unknown outside of his home country.
New at PB: Hamish Dalley on Gee’s “Going West.”
New at PB: In advance of the Oscars, @michael-berube.bsky.social & Urmila Seshagiri revisit Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Mary Shelley‘s “Frankenstein,” asking, What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world?
“Jack’s story reveals the pitfalls of trying to reenact an Anglophone tradition of nation-making that does not account for its South Pacific placement.”
New at PB: In our latest B-Side, Hamish Dalley revisits Maurice Gee‘s “Going West.”
“The problem with the ‘mind’ evinced by AI is not that it is so brilliant that it renders human intellectual endeavor obsolete.The problem is the opposite.”
Ben Parker on the “slapdash, incurious” writing of ChatGPT.
“The essays ChatGPT produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate.”
Ben Parker examines why AI-written essays might seem passable–but certainly not good.
“These two works of contemplative science fiction—a film and an animated series—use space and technology as metaphors for existential anxiety and metaphysical solitude.”
New at PB: Virginie Tournay on “nothingness.”
“In order to quantify the real intellectual output of AI, I proposed to feed ChatGPT some topics and prompts from the college English courses I teach. In all cases there were grievous misunderstandings for which I would have marked down any student paper.”
“This is why human beings—and by extension, the machines they design—cannot truly think nothingness. At best, people can name it, symbolize it, or treat it as a metaphor for the outer limits of thought.”
“Amusingly enough, while tyrants get a free pass, countries with democratic forms of government that the authors feel are related to our own must be placed on notice.”
New at PB: Jonah Siegel on Trump’s National Security Strategy.
“Last year, there was more than $250 billion in corporate investment in AI. All that money has not been wasted. It could get you a B+ in my class.”
Virginie Tournay adds a new installment to our “No Future” Lexicon, curated by @mw-m.bsky.social. Read the series here:
The “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” is an inane document. But we need to take it seriously, writes Jonah Siegel.
“Lem uses absurd humor here to underscore the unthinkable nature of nothingness and the tension between language, technology, and existence.”
New at PB: Virginie Tournay looks at works of sci-fi that ask how we understand “nothingness.”
“There is always more to say about Hamlet or The Waste Land or the book of Job because that meaning belongs to our own being and is produced out of our own lives.”
Ben Parker on why AI can never write a truly good college essay.
“The Strategy does not bother to distinguish between trivial sentiments and significant policy assertions because it appears to be written by people who are either unable to distinguish the two, or who are accustomed to using the former to justify the latter.”
“Like any bad student at any time, ChatGPT fails because it doesn’t do the reading before it starts to answer.”
New at PB: Ben Parker on the actual quality of college essay writing produced by ChatGPT.
The recent “National Security Strategy of the United States” appears to have little to do with America. Instead, its authors are obsessed with “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”
“Nothingness fractures our relationship to time, exposing its constructed, fragile, and contingent nature.”
New at PB: Virginie Tournay on “nothingness,” part of our No Future Lexicon.
New at PB: English professor Ben Parker asks: How good is ChatGPT at writing, really?
“Beyond the existential and metaphysical anxiety it provokes, nothingness also constitutes an ontological opening: it compels societies to produce symbolic and cultural responses to ward off the fear of chaos.”
