Better Read Than Dead: Literature From A Left Perspective podcast

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Understanding the Elegant Math Behind Modern Machine Learning 1:14:43

6 days ago1:14:43

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1:14:43

Artificial intelligence is evolving at an unprecedented pace—what does that mean for the future of technology, venture capital, business, and even our understanding of ourselves? Award-winning journalist and writer Anil Ananthaswamy joins us for our latest episode to discuss his latest book Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI . Anil helps us explore the journey and many breakthroughs that have propelled machine learning from simple perceptrons to the sophisticated algorithms shaping today’s AI revolution, powering GPT and other models. The discussion aims to demystify some of the underlying math that powers modern machine learning to help everyone grasp this technology impacting our lives, even if your last math class was in high school. Anil walks us through the power of scaling laws, the shift from training to inference optimization, and the debate among AI’s pioneers about the road to AGI—should we be concerned, or are we still missing key pieces of the puzzle? The conversation also delves into AI’s philosophical implications—could understanding how machines learn help us better understand ourselves? And what challenges remain before AI systems can truly operate with agency? If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for exclusive insights and updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits. Links: Read Why Machines Learn, Anil’s latest book on the math behind AI https://www.amazon.com/Why-Machines-Learn-Elegant-Behind/dp/0593185749 Learn more about Anil Ananthaswamy’s work and writing https://anilananthaswamy.com/ Watch Anil Ananthaswamy’s TED Talk on AI and intelligence https://www.ted.com/speakers/anil_ananthaswamy Discover the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship that shaped Anil’s AI research https://ksj.mit.edu/ Understand the Perceptron, the foundation of neural networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron Read about the Perceptron Convergence Theorem and its significance https://www.nature.com/articles/323533a0…

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective explicit

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Three jerky socialists talk about books you've probably heard of. With Megan Tusler, Tristan Schweiger, and Katie K.

109 episod

#Books #Arts #Better Reading

Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective explicit

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updated about a year ago

Kongsi

Laman utama siri•Feed

Three jerky socialists talk about books you've probably heard of. With Megan Tusler, Tristan Schweiger, and Katie K.

109 episod

#Books #Arts #Better Reading

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Episode 109: Babel-17 1:17:34

1 year ago1:17:34

1:17:34

We embark on a cosmic journey through Samuel Delany's 1966 sci-fi gem, Babel-17 . This novel by the brilliant self-described “boring old Marxist” (the best kind of person!) has it all: a telepathic poet captaining a star ship, naked space parties, a 10-foot-tall cat-man pilot, and a cosmic throuple guiding the way. And let's not forget the discorporate entities—because we all need some more space ghosts in our lives. We get into linguistic philosophy, the category of the human, and what the whole Babel thing is about. We read the Vintage edition that includes the in-universe short story “Empire Star” and recommend getting your hands on Delaney’s other works like his novel Nova and his 1999 critical work/memoir, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue on New York’s porn theaters of the 1960s and 70s. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.…

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Episode 108: The Monk 1:32:06

1 year ago1:32:06

1:32:06

For Halloween 2023, we bring you one of the craziest novels of all time (or certainly of the eighteenth century). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is a tale of horny Catholics – men and women, in the clergy and not – sexy nuns, ultraviolence, and, as Katie puts it, “dinosaurism.” See, Satan turns into a pterodactyl to open up a can of whoop-ass on the Monk. Based. Another extremely based thing that happens, this smokin’ lady monk named Matilda turns out to be a wizard, does a full-on black mass, AND DOMMES THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS HIMSELF. It’s trashy as hell, it’s metal af, and we’re talking all the classic gothic themes – sex, desire, critiques of power and patriarchy, and how eighteenth-century Britons are constitutionally incapable of being even slightly normal about the “Romish religion.” We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by Nick Groom, but we kinda recommend the Penguin for the cover art alone, which really gets at the dinosaurism in question (it also has full frontal, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of The Monk ). For more on the gothic and Lewis’s place within it, we highly recommend friend-of-the-pod Michael Gamer’s Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation , as well as Angela Wright’s chapter on Lewis and Ann Radcliffe in The Cambridge History of the Gothic , Vol. I. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.…

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Episode 107: Brave New World 1:30:12

1 year ago1:30:12

1:30:12

Hi again, nerds: we’re back after a long hiatus with more high school English class reads and some Jungianism on the side! JK about that last one, we would never. We’re talking about Aldous Huxley’s 1932 “science fiction” novel Brave New World , which is about how Fordism is bad (yes) but so is being slutty (what? Why?). Shakespeare is Good. Drinking alcohol is Bad. We sure hope you’re onboard for blanket moral judgments that don’t seem to add up to much in the way of world-building, because this novel is crammed with them. We discuss politics of gender and sexuality, what a leftist critique might amount to here, and why mysticism is tiresome. We read the 2006 Harper Perennial reprint with Huxley’s intro to the 1958 edition called “Brave New World Revisited.” We consulted Raymond Williams’s “Utopia and Science Fiction” from Science Fiction Studies (1978) and recommend it. Honestly, Science Fiction Studies is generally pretty cool. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus; we all have the same handles on BlueSky.…

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Episode 106: CROSSOVER SPECIAL: The Last of the Mohicans (the movie) 2:13:54

2 years ago2:13:54

2:13:54

Friends, it's the crossover event of the century - we join our comrades at You're Tall but I'm Standing in Front of You (if you don't know their podcast, it's amazing, hilarious, brilliant, and you should subscribe immediately) for a discussion of Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992). It's a film that dares to ask the question, "What if the book didn't totally suck ass?" *Note to listeners -- we've been on a bit of an unplanned hiatus due to various things beyond our control, but we're recording new content now and will back with new episodes for you in the spring. Follow You're Tall but I'm Standing in Front of You on Twitter @youretallpod or email them at youretallpod@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @betterreadpod , Tristan at @tjschweiger , Megan @tuslersaurus , and Katie @katiekrywo . You can also find us on Instagram and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com.…

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Episode 105: The Body 1:28:06

2 years ago1:28:06

1:28:06

There is still plenty of spookiness left in the season! To celebrate, this week we are bringing you Stephen King’s The Body from his 1982 collection Different Seasons , also containing Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil . We talk about poverty and violence in rural America, masculinity, class, epic, and the classic Philadelphia tradition Wing Bowl. We get into the 1986 film adaptation Stand By Me , starring Wil Wheaton, who is also the star of Star Trek: The Next Generation . It’s not that bald guy, it’s the kid. We read the Signet edition. Check out King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) or one of his 65 other novels (seriously) or hundreds of short stories (also seriously) if you are interested in haunted cars, scary sewer clowns, or the various terrors of New England. *Note to listeners: Megan is off this week. She’ll be back with us next time for The Monk! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 104: The Stepford Wives 1:23:23

2 years ago1:23:23

1:23:23

Happy Halloween, book jerks! Starting our fourth annual spookfest, we’re reading The Stepford Wives , which should actually be called The Stepford Husbands (they’re the scary ones, after all, and credit to Amanda Davis for the appellation). We discuss Ira Levin’s 1972 horror-satire to return to some familiar questions: what are husbands for? Why are neighbors such creeps? If you could make a robot wife, how big would you make her boobs? We reflect on genre, bourgeoisification, liberal feminism, and Sir Mix-a-Lot. We read the 2002 William Morrow reprint with introduction by Peter Straub. Check out Jennifer Rhee’s The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor for more on bots bots bots! Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 103: The Man Who Lived Underground 1:26:59

2 years ago1:26:59

1:26:59

We couldn’t wait to read the new novel-length version of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground , and it absolutely did not disappoint. Published as a short story in 1944, collected in Eight Men in 1961, and finally published as the novel version last year, the book serves as a major touchstone in Wright’s work, negotiating the space between his naturalist “early” work and his philosophical “late” work. We discuss race, religion, space, and style. We read the 2021 Library of America version with Wright’s essay “Memories of my Grandmother” and afterward by Wright’s grandson Malcolm Wright. We also consulted the Harper Perennial 1996 reprinting of Eight Men with introduction by Paul Gilroy. We recommend Lauren Michele Jackson’s New Yorker article “What We Want From Richard Wright,” from May 2021 and Bill Mullen’s Tempest article “Richard Wright and the Police State,” from October 2021. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 102: The Last of the Mohicans 1:32:50

2 years ago1:32:50

1:32:50

We are back and bringing you The Last of the Mohicans , James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 historical novel about stepping on twigs and tricking your friends by following them around in a bear costume. We chat about race, the novel's politics, and how an adult man could get tricked by a bunch of beavers. And the French and Indian War! We read the Penguin Classics version with introduction by Richard Slotkin. For more on this novel, we highly recommend Sarah Rivett’s chapter in Unscripted America (2017) “Indiginous Metaphors in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.” For some fun, we suggest Mark Twain's 1895 gem, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 101: Middlemarch, Part 2 1:43:25

3 years ago1:43:25

1:43:25

We finish our conversation on George Eliot’s 1871-1872 behemoth Middlemarch with an in-depth discussion of the book as an historical novel and the historical contexts of its setting in the early 1830s. We all have different answers to how much we liked-liked reading this massive thing (Tristan is a big fan, Megan and Katie… less so), but we all loved Dorothea, and we did all legitimately love talking about this novel. AND we all agree that the scene where Mr Brooke gets rotten eggs thrown at him because he had one-too-many glasses of sherry before a campaign speech and went Chuck-Grassley-on-Twitter incoherent is among the finest scenes in 19th-century British literature. All landlords are bastards, folks. To finish, we play a delightful game where we debate which Middlemarch character you want running your mutual fund. We read the Oxford edition, edited by David Carroll with an introduction by Felicia Bonaparte. For an excellent reading of Middlemarch as critical toward mid-19th century liberal ideological assumptions, we highly recommend Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain , which we discuss on the show. *Note to listeners – we’re taking a short mid-season break, but we’ll be back with new episodes in a couple weeks. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 100: Middlemarch, Part 1 1:48:44

3 years ago1:48:44

1:48:44

For our 100th episode (!!!), it’s only fitting we tackle a Big One. And George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) is certainly that – literally (it’s SO MANY PAGES). Middlemarch tells the stories of several intersecting characters all trying in various ways to find meaning amid the alienation of industrial modernity, and we discuss epistemology, philosophy, gender, class and bourgeoisification, marriage, capital-H History, politics. This kind of is a novel about everything. Also, failsons abound! It wouldn’t be Better Read than Dead without failsons. Don’t forget to join us next week for Part Two! We read the Oxford edition, edited by David Carroll with an introduction by Felicia Bonaparte. For more on Eliot’s interest in nineteenth-century science and its bearing on Middlemarch ’s epistemological concerns, we highly recommend Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction , which we discuss on the show. And for another good discussion of Middlemarch and its contexts, check out this 2018 In Our Time episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/middlemarch/id73330895?i=1000409248380 . Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 99: The Mountain Lion 1:24:17

3 years ago1:24:17

1:24:17

It’s a journey Out West with the book jerks–we’re reading Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947)! One of the many under-appreciated women’s novels of the midcentury, this account of Molly and Ralph Fawcett and their bonneted, foofy, bunny rabbit sisters Rachel and Leah moves us into a conversation about childhood, gender, and geography in the US. We also discuss Stafford’s hilariously punchy introduction, in which she apologizes for the book’s ending, as well as embodiment and publication genealogy. We read the reprinted (and beautiful) NYRB version from 2010. We recommend a recent article by Katie Collins in the Journal of Modern Literature called “‘Her Ruined Head’: Defacement and Disability in Jean Stafford's Life and Fiction.” Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 98: Murder on the Orient Express 1:23:48

3 years ago1:23:48

1:23:48

All aboard! This week we are bringing you a one way ticket...to murder! It's Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express . We talk about stabby eye-talians, big ole mustaches and detective fiction, and bust out some top-tier French accents. You'll feel like you're riding a bicycle built for two past the Eiffel Tower with a scarf made of cheese tied around your neck. Oui oui! This is particularly impressive when you consider that our heroic clue collector Hercule Poirot is Belgian. Who knew? We read the Harper Collins edition (1990) and for more on Agatha Christie, film adaptations of her work, and the class politics behind Christie's popularity check out Eileen Jones's 2021 Jacobin article "The Crime of the Century." Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 97: Wuthering Heights 1:31:38

3 years ago1:31:38

1:31:38

It has taken your favorite commie book jerks nearly 100 episodes to answer the much-debated question – what is the horniest novel of the British 19th century? Comrades, it’s Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). We absolutely love this brilliant novel about the torrid love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and the mysterious, often sinister, Gothic villain/anti-hero Heathcliff. (Did we mention he’s her adoptive brother? He’s her adoptive brother. It wouldn’t be a Gothic novel if it wasn’t HAVING THOUGHTS about endogamy and incest.) We talk gender, sexuality, patriarchy, repression that’s kind of not, and racialization, as well as the pressure this novel puts on Victorian “realism.” This is one damp novel, folks. Who knew the Yorkshire moors were so turnt? We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by John Bugg. For a wonderful and concise reading of Wuthering Heights that explores Brontë’s novel as a critique of normative Victorian epistemology, we highly recommend Nathan K. Hensley’s blog post “The Lapwing’s Feather ( Wuthering Heights )”: http://www.nathankhensley.net/blog/the-lapwings-feather-wuthering-heights. There is a ton of great scholarship on Heathcliff as a figure of otherness, but one book we recommend is Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger which discusses many texts but builds part of its analysis by thinking of Wuthering Heights in the context of the Great Famine, ongoing as Wuthering Heights was published. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 96: Naked Lunch 1:36:01

3 years ago1:36:01

1:36:01

You’ve been asking for it (and by “you” we mean “nobody”), so here’s Naked Lunch (1959)! It’s almost unfair to accuse Burroughs of having written this “high,” because there’s really no version of a Burroughs novel that isn’t about being absurdly high and abject. This nightmare account of heroin, orifices, evil doctors, and grime gets us talking about noveliness and what isn’t a novel, the humor of the grotesque, and the question of literary nihilism. We consider if Allen Ginsberg was to Burroughs as Hawthorne was to Melville: helping him keep his sh*t together in order to write a non-insane novel and if he just gave up on this one. We also talk about Olympia Press, which published this along with The Ginger Man and Lolita , and why filthy-minded publishers are necessary. We read the Grove Press 2013 restored edition. We recommend Jennie Skerl’s writings on Burroughs, particularly the collection William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989 . We also recommend Burroughs’s letter collections, published in two volumes by Ecco Press. Check out some of the weird side-projects he did, including collaborations with Kurt Cobain and Laurie Anderson. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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Episode 95: Jews Without Money 1:41:52

3 years ago1:41:52

1:41:52

To kick off Season 6, we are joined by comrade, friend-of-the-pod, and Indiana University South Bend associate professor of English Benjamin Balthaser to talk about Mike Gold’s amazing proletarian lit masterpiece, Jews Without Money (1930). If you haven’t heard of this semi-autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century, it’s because US reactionaries tried very hard to bury the history of 1930s communist literature – and succeeded for a long time. We talk about left efforts to recover that history, plus Gold’s moving, hilarious, sad, and often shocking portrait of life in a Jewish tenement. We read the 1996 Carrol & Graf edition with an introduction by ultra-lib Alfred Kazin. You must read this introduction to, like us, get very mad and so you will understand why we dunk so hard on it. Ah, the end-of-history ‘90s, folks. For more on Gold, you should definitely check out Benjamin’s outstanding essay in Jacobin , “Mike Gold, the Writer Who Believed Workers Could Speak for Themselves” https://jacobin.com/2021/07/mike-gold-literature-jewish-american-proletariat-red-left . And you should also check out Benjamin’s fantastic book, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War from University of Michigan Press. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Benjamin on Twitter @BL_Balthaser, Tristan @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.…

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