Rebecca Solnit: In the Shadow of Silicon Vall...

According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many loser ...  Show more

Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and ...  Show more

Historian and urbanist Richard Walker, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about his latest book, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this episode: How California has historically been a ...  Show more

Sean Illing speaks with Malcolm Harris, a journalist, critic, and author of the new book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Together, they discuss the weird history of the city that's birthed Stanford University, Hewlett Packard, Theranos, and the mode ...  Show more

The US economy may not be in a recession, but Silicon Valley, which had a mega-boom throughout the 2010s, is in a downturn. Tech stocks have tanked and almost every day there are new reports about industry layoffs. So what happens next? What happens to its unique corporate cultur ...  Show more