The Latest Breaking News from Plato

Early on in my writing courses, I ask students to define their sense of rhetoric. Responses range from “persuasion” to “manipulation,” but they tend to share a negative connotation. Little wonder: In America today, the word is often used to dismiss a political opponent. Whereas a Democrat may find a…

A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government.

Puthandu or the Tamil New Year is celebrated with great enthusiasm and fervour by Tamilians across the world. Every year, Puthandu is celebrated on the first day in the month of Chitterai, as per the Tamil calendar and it usually falls in mid-April in the Gregorian calendar. And so, this…

The job market has never offered any guarantees. Mechanization wiped out once-secure careers in manufacturing. Now artificial intelligence (AI) is coming for a future generation of jobs that had seemed safe, starting with software coding and back-office work. So what can we do about it?

The impact of disinformation and misinformation has become impossible to ignore. Whether it is denial about climate change, conspiracy theories about elections, or misinformation about vaccines, the pervasiveness of social media has given “alternative facts” an influence previously not possible.

One of the difficult things about working on the philosophy of love is that human relationships change, but our dominant images of love tend to remain the same.

This year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay Photography was published in the New York Review of Books. Slightly edited and renamed In Plato’s Cave, it would become the first essay in her collection On Photography, which has never been out of print.

It is time to take human-AI dialogue seriously again. With the release of sophisticated chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, effective human-AI dialogue has become interesting and accessible to everyone. Even to students writing essays, which has led to some academic concerns.

The star has deposed Oprah Winfrey as queen of the online literary discussion groups – and plenty more A-listers are getting in on the act. Our reporter dives under the covers