Maraú Península: The Possible Futures of Virtual Reality

In today’s newsletter, notes from a V.R. pioneer, and then:
• An impressive jobs report
• The deaf artist reinventing conversation
• Molly Manning Walker relives her wasted youth

Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?

Apple’s Vision Pro headset suggests one possible future—but there are others.

By Jaron Lanier

Illustration by Jackie Carlise

Because we in Silicon Valley are newness junkies, it can feel like an act of sabotage to have memories, but, for better or worse, I have them. It’s been more than forty years since I co-founded the first company to make headsets and software for simulated experiences, and came up with familiar terms like virtual and mixed reality. Since then, virtual reality has flooded the public imagination in waves; back in the nineteen-eighties, for instance, it had quite a presence in movies, cartoons, TV shows, the occasional arcade game, and a few early consumer products, like the Nintendo Power Glove. I still love V.R. But, these days, I sense that what I experience of it, what I enjoy in it, is different from what it has come to mean to many enthusiasts.

Keep reading

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From the News Desk

A photo of a person pushing a cart outside of a Lowe’s store, past a sign that reads “Now hiring!” There is a green overlay on the image.

Our Columnists

An Impressive Jobs Report Shows the U.S. Economy Powering Into an Election Year

Strong employment growth and improving consumer sentiment are good news for any Presidential incumbent seeking reëlection.

By John Cassidy

An illustration of a book with a knife sliced through the spine, with fallen paper shavings.

Editor’s Pick

A portrait of Joseph Grigely holding a bust of a head over his own head.

Persons of Interest

The Deaf Artist Reinventing Conversation

For decades, Joseph Grigely has collected the notes that people use to communicate with him. What do they show us?

By Max Norman

Books We Recommend This Week

Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.

The Revolutionary Temper, by Robert Darnton (Norton). In the final forty years of the ancien régime, Paris was gripped by drama, involving, among other things, royal affairs, riots over bread prices and ministerial despotism, and public demonstrations of innovations like the hot-air balloon. Darnton, a historian at Harvard, plumbs diaries, news reports, and popular songs to show how these events, combined with Enlightenment ideals, were digested by the city’s robust media culture to fuel a burgeoning sense of citizen sovereignty. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop.

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Press). This playful “homesteader’s guide” to space settlement presents a bleak view of the pursuit, arguing that “an Earth with climate change and nuclear war . . . is still a way better place than Mars.” The authors examine the increasingly popular dream of a multi-planetary human race with a skepticism informed by ethical, logistical, and legal anxieties. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (New Directions). This novel’s relatively conventional premise—an anthropology student moves to a provincial village to conduct research—belies the bizarre fantasia that unfolds in its pages, in which moments across history occur simultaneously. The student mingles with his new neighbors, has cybersex with his girlfriend back in the city, and dallies on his thesis; meanwhile, around him, the turning of the wheel keeps life and death in a constant churn. Buy on Amazon or Bookshop.

Behind You Is the Sea, by Susan Muaddi Darraj (HarperVia). Composed of linked stories, this novel explores the lives of Palestinian Americans in Baltimore. At a young man’s wedding to a white woman, his father agonizes over the gradual loss of the family’s cultural identity. A student finds that her objections to her high school’s production of “Aladdin” fall on willfully deaf ears. Elsewhere, girls and women are shunned for getting pregnant, or for being unable to bear children. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop.

More recommendations

What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know.

The Critics at Large podcast is doing an episode on “wretched love stories,” just in time for Valentine’s Day—and we need your help. Leave us a voice mail at ‪(347) 464-1476‬ by Sunday, February 4th, telling us your favorite example from the world of movies, music, literature, and more—and what it means to you. Your submission could end up on next week’s show.