Year: 2025

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Go to Mars, Never Die and Other Big Tech Pipe Dreams

Becker argues that Silicon Valley’s preoccupations have created their own kind of warped ethics. “The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more — to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, to justify nearly any action they might want to take — all in the name of saving humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist, aiming at a utopia that will never come.” Read more

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The Russian Spies Who Lived Among Us — in New Jersey

What Shaun Walker’s fascinating and meticulously researched new book, “The Illegals,” makes clear is that these suburban moles weren’t Cold War leftovers but rather the continuation of a century-long Russian project for infiltrating Western society. The program began in 1922, when Lenin was still pacing the Kremlin corridors, and continues today under Vladimir Putin, who seldom met a Soviet relic he didn’t want to polish up. Walker, a reporter for The Guardian, has done the kind of deep archival spelunking and source-cultivating that makes editors nervous about expense accounts. He’s interviewed former illegals — spies who lived with fabricated identities as beautifully lacquered as a set of matryoshka dolls. These weren’t diplomatic spies with immunity; they were ghosts walking among us with American accents and, presumably, Sam’s Club memberships. Read more

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‘Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life’ by Dan Nadel

Robert Crumb is to comics what Louis Armsrong is to jazz, a revolutionary who pulled a maligned and misunderstood art form out of the shadows. In the forward to his new biography, “Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life,” Dan Nadel provides some context: “There is no ‘Maus,’ no ‘Persepolis,’ no ‘Fun Home,’ without [Crumb’s] taboo–breaking … formally inventive work.” Nadel’s gripping and essential book makes good on this claim; his biography is the story of how one highly flawed and preternaturally gifted man augured a revolution in comic book storytelling with his discomfiting, sexually frank, intensely personal oeuvre. Read more

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George Plimpton’s Former Home (and Paris Review HQ) Is for Sale

An Upper East Side residence steeped in literary lore, once the hub of writer George Plimpton’s social and professional world, is poised to list for $5.25 million, The Post has learned. The sprawling 4,700-square-foot duplex at 541 E. 72nd St. — where Plimpton, the storied co-founder of the Paris Review literary magazine, and his wife, Sarah Dudley Plimpton, lived for nearly six decades — offers a rare chance to own a piece of New York’s cultural history … “The duplex has been the site of legendary parties back in the day, which drew the likes of Truman Capote, Paul McCartney, Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to name a few,” Mogavero said. Read more

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