Peter Sarsgaard (Garden State, The Lost Daughter, Blue Jasmine, Jarhead, Jackie, Shattered Glass) won Best Actor at this year’s Venice Film Festival for his performance in Memory, the new film from the director Michel Franco, starring Sarsgaard and Jessica Chastain. In his acceptance speech, sanctioned by an interim agreement from his union, Sarsgaard poignantly captures […]

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The patient sits in a worn, upholstered armchair. She’s been having a tough go lately—doubting herself at work, wondering whether her friends truly like her, spending increasing amounts of time in bed, taking fewer showers, and eating less. The thoughts and feelings are familiar to her: she was diagnosed with a mental illness in her […]

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The Ratio Club was an informal dining meet-up founded in 1949 and attended by prominent British academics to discuss cybernetics—Alan Turing was a member. During the first meeting, it was explicitly noted that no sociologist was among their ranks. Omissions such as this have informed my research into the absence of sociological thinking in the […]

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Reading about artificial intelligence, one will sooner or later encounter the Turing test. It’s become a popular shorthand to measure whether AI can be said to think like humans. Computer scientist Alan Turing proposed this test—what he called the imitation game—in 1950 as a thought problem. In his proposal he sought to avoid the philosophical […]

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