A few weeks ago, I drove down a back road in West Virginia and into a parallel reality. Sometime after I passed Spruce Mountain, my phone lost service — and I knew it would remain comatose for the next few days. When I spun the dial on the car radio, static roared out of every channel. I had entered the National Radio Quiet Zone, 13,000 square miles of mountainous terrain with few cell towers or other transmitters.
I was headed toward Green Bank, a town that adheres to the strictest ban on technology in the United States. The residents do without not only cellphones but also Wi-Fi, microwave ovens and any other devices that generate electromagnetic signals.
The ban exists to protect the Green Bank Observatory, a cluster of radio telescopes in a mountain valley. Conventional telescopes are like superpowered eyes. The instruments at Green Bank are more like superhuman ears — they can tune into frequencies from the lowest to the highest ends of the spectrum. The telescopes are powerful enough to detect the death throes of a star, but also terribly vulnerable to our loud world. Even a short-circuiting electric toothbrush could blot out the whisper of the Big Bang.
This is going to sound like a dream I had, but it’s true: I once travelled 200 miles to taste a “doughnut burger”. Instead of just one patty of ground meat, there were two, with bacon and untold gunk in between. More to the point, instead of a bun, there was a doughnut. The story was that there were as many calories as you ought to eat in a day, in this single burger, so how would you feel at the end of one of those?
The answer is, I felt fine. But the journey of the burger bun mystified me. Every year since the mid-70s, it has got higher, fluffier, more golden – unless it is charcoal, in which case it has got more sinister. Every year it has looked more like a gourmet item in its own right. And this increasing perfection has gone hand in hand with sweetness, so that you end up with a bun that is basically not very bread-like, that you would hesitate to eat at home because you would be thrown into confusion about whether you were having breakfast or high tea.
The handsome investigator that Kate Atkinson introduced in 2004’s “Case Histories,” played by Jason Isaacs on the BBC series, hasn’t appeared in a new book since 2011. If you haven’t met him yet, this is a fine place to start.
The sociologist and law professor Mark Osiel would like to draw your attention to a peculiar, perhaps even paradoxical, aspect of our legal system: We often grant people rights that we hope they will not exercise, or that we trust they will exercise only sparingly, because the behavior that is authorized is at odds with our common morality. Osiel calls these “rights to do wrong.”
Consider the law of personal bankruptcy, which gives you a right to absolve your financial obligations. Exercising this right could help many Americans who are struggling to make ends meet, but relatively few take advantage of it, because declaring bankruptcy is widely thought to be shameful. Indeed, our bankruptcy system implicitly relies on this informal discouragement. If the social stigma were to disappear, Osiel notes, bankruptcy law might “quickly become unsustainable, economically and politically.” Instead, we have a system — part legal, part extralegal — that succeeds in doing what legislation alone could not easily be drafted to do: getting people to declare bankruptcy only when they feel they really need to.
David Eimer, a former South-East Asia correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, tries to capture this quicksilver place in “A Savage Dreamland”. He is an intrepid reporter. He takes the reader down dirt-track roads, on the back of motorbikes or in a shaky bus on which his neighbour vomits up his curry; into rat-infested cinemas in Yangon; and around dilapidated colonial buildings and the bombastic military museums of Naypyidaw (the soulless capital built by the armed forces in 2005).
All publishing houses have archives, but for anyone interested in 20th-century literature the archive of Faber & Faber is a fabled treasure house. This is the firm that was, as Toby Faber puts it, “midwife at the birth of modernism”. In 1924 Faber’s grandfather, Geoffrey Faber, aspiring poet and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had been installed as chairman of the Scientific Press, recently inherited by another All Souls fellow, Maurice Gwyer. It published mostly books and journals for nurses. Geoffrey Faber renamed it and started making it into a literary publisher. Within his first year he had installed TS Eliot as a fellow director and acquired his backlist.
Webb’s book at times reads like a thriller in which the ending looks bleak. But she affords us a clear, jargon-free view of the power and potential of AI — and how we as citizens should seek to influence its development — before a coming superintelligence shapes human lives in ways we cannot yet imagine.