King of Cannibal Island

John Lanchester: Will the AI bubble burst?, 25 December 2025

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip 
by Stephen Witt.
Bodley Head, 248 pp., £25, April 2025, 978 1 84792 827 6
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The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant 
by Tae Kim.
Norton, 261 pp., £25, December 2024, 978 1 324 08671 0
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Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination 
by Karen Hao.
Allen Lane, 482 pp., £25, May 2025, 978 0 241 67892 3
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Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that Will Change the World 
by Parmy Olson.
Pan Macmillan, 319 pp., £10.99, July 2025, 978 1 0350 3824 4
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... at the local posh school in St Louis, with the distinguishing feature that he came out as gay in his teens and spoke to a school assembly on the subject. He went from there to Stanford and caught the start-up bug, dropping out in his second year to found a location-based social app, Loopt. The name doesn’t mean anything but at that point successful ...

11 September

LRB Contributors, 4 October 2001

... from windows, little bristly plastic ones sticking up from people’s car antennas. I live in a gay neighbourhood (near the Castro) and the dykes and queers turn out to be pretty patriotic. (We’re all proud of Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player from San Francisco who helped crash Flight 93 into the ground.) Every few ...

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

... Colin and Maureen never explained the situation to Mim. On one of my visits to Ladbroke Grove in search of a thought – even the ghost of a thought – about where to look next for Margaret Walsh (she’d given an address there as her place of residence not long after she’d had the baby), I realised I was very close to an old family friend of the sort ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... wife teams: the prolific Valmai Holt, for example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not ...

Crisis in Brazil

Perry Anderson, 21 April 2016

... incarceration without charge, combine inducement and intimidation: blunt instruments in the search for truth and pursuit of justice, but in Brazil within the law. Leakage of information, or mere suspicion, from investigations still supposedly secret to the press is not: it is clearly illegal. In Italy, it was regularly used by the Milan pool, and would ...

You’re with your king

Jeremy Harding: Morocco’s Secret Prisons, 10 February 2022

Tazmamart: Eighteen Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison 
by Aziz BineBine, translated by Lulu Norman.
Haus, £9.99, March 2021, 978 1 913368 13 5
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... in absentia.For the remainder of the decade Hassan tightened the screws as Oufkir went off in search of enemies, real and perceived. In 1964 he tracked down Agouliz in Casablanca. His reputation as an interrogator preceded him and, according to Diouri, Agouliz took his own life rather than give himself up. The following year the rhythm of rigorous ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation Office. Wright, a computer ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... spirals, there are signs that this economic war may redraw geopolitical and geoeconomic maps. A search for alternative sources and fuels to replace the diminishing supply of Russian hydrocarbons has already begun. The sanctions on Russia may result in a softening of sanctions on Iran and Venezuela. Worries about oil have given a new urgency to the effort to ...