New at PB, we share the inaugural episode of “Proust Curious,” a podcast where Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver read and unpack the whole of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu.” You can listen to the first episode and read the transcript here: buff.ly/4d8tfJm

“Hindu nationalists learned from the experiences of the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany. They essentially transposed the Jewish problem in Europe to the Muslim problem in India. In this framing, Muslims are the racial other of Hindu.” buff.ly/47k9ddU

Published between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust's “A la recherche du temps perdu” is a cultural touchstone. It’s also intimidating. A new podcast “Proust Curious” takes listeners through the whole volume, parsing through its themes, meaning, & impact. buff.ly/4d7LgYo

Hindutvites in India have used their domestic disinformation campaign for a Zionist defense of Israel, most recently by deploying an online troll army after October 7. What should we make of these global connections between far-right nationalisms? buff.ly/4dYLi61

“I said to myself, I'm never going to get people to shut up about Roth, about Bellow. So, I'm going to have to outlive them.” From the archive: buff.ly/3XkKSA0

“I think it bothers Russia that we show a different way of life in a country whose population was once part of the ‘Great Soviet People.” From the archive: buff.ly/3ToMCXX

“Whether you’re talking about Black people in the US post–Reconstruction South, or Kashmiris, from their vantage point, the US and India have been fascist states for a very long time.” buff.ly/3XGC1dq

“I think of unreliability as a goyishe concept. It's not unreliability, it’s self-sabotage.” From the archive: buff.ly/47uagba

New at PB, Alexander Aviña reviews John Washington “The Case for Open Borders” (Haymarket Books), which makes clear both the morality and political possibility of abolishing borders as they actually exist. buff.ly/47xlH1D

Read this brilliant (and humbling) essay on borders (and on my latest book), The Case for Open Borders. Deep thanks to Alexander Aviña and Public Books for the deep dive.

“This is the setup for his tendency to hook on to a single word, interrupt the conversation, and send it down a total dead end byway with what seems to be both an utter lack of self-consciousness and an extreme self-consciousness of his provincialism.” buff.ly/4gk6oxo

Modern state borders are not immutable lines of separation that have existed since time immemorial. They have a history—usually a violent one, at times with imperialist or settler colonial origin stories—and they can be undone. buff.ly/47vH1Vq

“Will there be a reckoning for a leader, a party, and a movement that are, in fact, presiding over deepening immiseration?” From the archive: buff.ly/4gulTCY

New at PB, Kim Gallon considers the dangers of the promise to feed the next generation of AIs on “synthetic” data, despite claims that synthetic data will diversify training data and fix algorithmic bias. buff.ly/4e9scu4

Proud of this piece I wrote on synthetic data & AI. Thank you to Dr. Mona Sloane Dr. Mona Sloane for immediately seeing the value of my work. 👇🏾

Simply bring down the walls and open the gates. This is what John Washington calls for in “The Case for Open Borders.” Read Alexander Aviña’s review, new at PB: buff.ly/3TybpsF

“Everyone thinks he's a loser.” New at PB, listen to the first episode of our new partner podcast, “Proust Curious”: buff.ly/3zt7ciQ

Tech industry leaders often extol the benefits of synthetic data, suggesting it has the benefits of real-world data without issues of risk, privacy, and bias. But it’s not a magical elixir for fixing algorithmic discrimination, Kim Gallon argues. buff.ly/4ethCOp

In the first episode of “Proust Curious,” Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver discuss “Swann’s Way” by Marcel Proust. We meet the narrator as a child in Combray who dreams of becoming a writer and about a love affair his neighbor Swann had before he was born. buff.ly/4goqeaT

New at PB, Simon Reader reviews two new books of writing exercises and considers the writing prompt’s complicated role in the era of ChatGPT. buff.ly/3BjM5jv