This is a selective archive of reviews, features, and essays I’ve published in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, Esquire, Arena, etc. You can browse below in reverse-chronological order or read by category: general book reviews (e.g., DeLillo, Murakami, Mailer, Gibson, Saramago), heterogeneous essays, or reviews and other pieces on technology, language, music, or philosophy; and some interviews.

In The Matrix, one of the machines’ sharp-suited kung-fu enforcers, Agent Jones, is standing over Neo on a rooftop, about to kill him. Jones looks down and sneers: “Only human.” Arguably it is something like this contempt for the merely human — or a kind of embarrassment at it — that has driven humans themselves, over the millennia, to pursue self-enhancement. For a long time now, indeed, few of us have been “only human” in the sense of getting through life solely on what biology has given us. Spectacles, contact lenses, dental crowns and implants, pacemakers, running shoes — all these are technological improvements to the capacities of a human body, and thus enhancements. Even clothes, adopted according to the Bible after a moment of Edenic shame at what is “only human”, are enhancements, enabling us to live in hostile climates. Now, improvements in cognitive pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering and hi-tech prostheses enable some to dream of a future of accelerating species enhancement, reaching a point where we will have become — what? Übermenschen; cyborgs; post-humans? Or just better versions of ourselves?

Late one Friday evening, my phone played the codec-out sound from Metal Gear Solid, and an email arrived. My stolen laptop had been taken online, and now — like a resourceful kidnap victim — it was phoning home, unknown to its captor. The laptop was beaming back all the information needed to rescue it. And so began one of the strangest episodes so far of my life with technology. Continued →

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism — aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash — and it’s everywhere. Continued →

Denim is both malleable and obstreperous. Jeans have long had legs as a metaphor in pop, for a kind of dissident eccentricity (Bowie’s “The Jean Genie”, 1972), or dissident sex appeal (Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Jeans”, 2012). But now, two anthropologists argue that jeans’ capacity for meaning is fading fast: that some jeans now signify nothing at all except ordinariness. Continued →

The fatwa against Salman Rushdie has now gone virtual. A nasty-sounding new videogame announced this week by Iran’s Islamic Association of Students aims to show the writer’s “sin”, under the menacing title The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of his Verdict.

Videogames’ use as political propaganda is not new, and neither is their engagement with the world of literature, but this news could spark a topical trend. Continued →

A small but fitting tribute to the late science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury has been suggested by the tech world: a new website error code. You’ve probably clicked a broken link and seen the error code “404 Not found”. Or you might see “403 Forbidden”, which means “Private: keep out”.

But the “403 Forbidden” code is now being abused by British internet-service providers. Continued →

Moog is such an evocative name — the “moo” of placid, bovine friendliness, darkly laced with the stylised, ultramodern violence of “Droog” — that it’s hard to believe Bob Moog, inventor of the synthesizer, was actually christened thus. And in one way, indeed, his hideously successful progeny have rendered him the phonetic impostor: his surname is pronounced to rhyme with “vogue”, but a Moog synthesizer sounds resolutely like a cow. Continued →

How did Bob Dylan write “Like a Rolling Stone”? The pop-science writer Jonah Lehrer wasn’t there, but he pretends to know anyway. Inspired by Dylan’s own description of “vomiting” forth the song’s lyrics, Lehrer peers inside the singer’s 1965 skull and announces confidently that the “right hemisphere” of Dylan’s brain was combining “scraps” or “fragments” of existing songs and poetry in a “mental blender”, before spitting out a set of “lyrics that make little literal sense”.

Strange, because “How does it feel / To be without a home” and so forth makes a fair amount of literal sense to me. Continued →

The fastest-selling cultural product in history was created by people you’ve probably never heard of. While this year’s Oscars honoured films in which the movie business sweetly congratulates itself on its own birth — The Artist, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo — the most rapidly dollar-hoovering entertainment release ever is not a film, still less an album; it’s a videogame. Continued →

1. An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian‘s Weekend magazine on March 10, 2012. ↩

Don DeLillo makes some people’s brains ache. They hurry to consign his novels — from Americana and Ratner’s Star to the great Underworld — to curiously inappropriate categories, whether readymade (“postmodernism”) or jerry-rigged for the purpose (“hysterical realism”). Minds skid on the glacial beauty of his fictive thought. Perhaps a slower pace, encouraged by the short-story form, will facilitate a better grip. Continued →

Haruki Murakami has always been a cult writer, if one can say that about a novelist who regularly sells millions, both in his native Japan and in translation. Well, 1Q84 — an epic romance in three “books” and two volumes — is his cult novel. In Underground (2000), Murakami interviewed former members of the Aum sect and survivors of its 1995 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway. In that book, he implicitly promised a fictional engagement with the subject of cults; now he has delivered. Continued →

In Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel Microserfs, the twentysomethings who work at Microsoft are so cossetted by perks and freebies that they barely have lives outside the office “campus”. Reading this book’s picture of the early days at Google, one is tempted to suppose that the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, pored over Microserfs very carefully indeed: “Google encased us in a cocoon of essential services — on-site haircuts, on-site car washes, on-site dentist and doctor, free massages, free snacks, free lunch, free dinner, gaming groups, movie nights, wine and beer clubs,” and so on. If you worked at Google, Google was your life. Continued →

“First I treated you as not an idiot just out of politeness. Now I see you are really not an idiot!” Thus the philosopher Slavoj Žižek to Julian Assange, frontman of Wikileaks, last weekend. The two were on stage with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, in a beautiful 1930s cinema in East London. Two thousand seats at £25 each had been sold. Pouring out of Limehouse station an hour earlier, crowds of young hipsters had held iPhones up to the sky, in supplication to the gods of GPS. Continued →

Having resolved to exercise your brain and refresh your literary palate you decide to read this newly translated 1968 text by the deceased experimental french writer georges perec who is celebrated for once having written a long novel without using the letter “e” so having forked over your ten quid for this short story or at a stretch novella but a book is not any the better for being cheaper by the word you remind yourself in any case having forked over ten pounds you begin to read and either you find the looping style immediately so rebarbative that you cast the book to the floor and feyly lament your wasted cash or you find the style intriguing and continue reading Continued →