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Today in The New York Review of Books: Robert Pogue Harrison confronts the plague of ignorance; Joshua Hammer reckons with America’s horrific firebombing of Tokyo; Ange Mlinko reads Hungarian poetry; James Romm looks at the Elgin Marbles; Doha Kahlout takes the Rafah crossing; and, from the archives, Garry Kasparov on machine intelligence.

Robert Pogue Harrison
Interminable Ignorance

Why has the will to ignorance become so virulent in our time?

Joshua Hammer
A Man-Made Disaster

There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.

Ange Mlinko
Mother Daughter Sister Wife

A new anthology of female Hungarian poets engages with the nation’s often tragic history through various forms of reticence, misdirection, and playfulness.

James Romm
The Marbles & the Muses

A.E. Stallings’s reflections on the Elgin Marbles illustrate how beautiful objects have the power to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition.

Doha Kahlout, translated by Katharine Halls
Elegy for Rafah

For the tens of thousands of Gazans who need to leave the Strip but want the chance to come back home, life revolves around the Rafah crossing.

Free from the Archives

In the 1990s Garry Kasparov’s chess matches against IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue set off anxieties about the encroachment of algorithmic intelligence into the human domain—anxieties surely familiar to anyone who has recently read an essay about artificial intelligence. In the Review’s February 11, 2010, issue, he reflected on his experiences beating and losing to Deep Blue: “It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players.”

Ever a deliberate thinker, Kasparov was, on the one hand, mindful of the effects of the proliferation of chess software—“humans today are starting to play more like computers”—and, on the other, open to the possibilities offered by powerful computers: “What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners?… The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.”

Garry Kasparov
The Chess Master and the Computer

One of the reasons chess is an “unparalleled laboratory” and a “unique nexus” is that it demands high performance from so many of the brain’s functions. Where so many of these investigations fail on a practical level is by not recognizing the importance of the process of learning and playing chess. The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent.

Recently in the Review

Amir Ahmadi Arian
Of Fire and Rain

“Then it rained. First the drops were sporadic, then steady, then a downpour cascading off the shed above us. The storm had a strange, metallic odor. ‘Stay under the roof!’ the principal shrieked into a microphone. ‘It’s not rain!’ It was oil, falling in curtains so thick they veiled us from the world.”

Jonathan Lethem
Frantic Realism

Paul Thomas Anderson fits a generation’s worth of cineplex joys into One Battle After Another, but the revolution refuses to get off the couch.

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