Memorandums from Mary

In the 1967 film,  To Sir, With Love, Sidney Poitier played Mark Thackeray, an idealistic high school teacher who guided rowdy teen-agers l...

Panels from “Space Falcon, Pirate of the Stratosphere” written and drawn by Harry Harrison. In these panels, Falcon and Tubby imprison slave...

I wanted to clarify (in my own mind) what it means to be “woke” or “anti-woke,” and how censorship relates to both concepts. While it’s hard...

A scene from one of the first productions of R.U.R. (London, 1921) I recently read Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (first performed in 1921), an...

I recently rewatched the 1977 film Demon Seed —a movie about an artificial entity gaining power over human beings. I had last seen the film ...

In Diane Ackerman’s 2014 book The Human Age, * she discussed AI with roboticist Hod Lipson. Professor Lipson is the director of Columbia’s C...

Malcolm McDowell (as H.G. Wells) reacts to David Warner (as Jack the Ripper) as Jack shows Wells TV footage of contemporary (1970s) violence...

The idea that artificial life is frightening has been a staple in science fiction and fantasy stories from Herman Melville’s “The Bell-Tower...

I’ve had a long career as a production person, working with the printed word from my high school days, through freelancing on magazines, and...