Future Tense Newsletter: A Very Tense Present

This past week, we witnessed wrenching debates over speech--involving protesters on the street, our Twitterer-in-chief, and aspiring New York Times op-ed writers. Some of the best tools we have to inspire and contextualize social movements are books and film, and in the next week, we will host conversations with some of the most interesting leaders in the book industry and Hollywood. We hope you'll join us: After a man is injured in a forklift accident, he takes on a lucrative offer to "raise" a robot. After a jarring first impression (imagine a toddler in the body of a massive robot), the relationship makes the protagonist rethink much of his life. In the response essay, John Frank Weaver, author of Robots Are People Too warns about the manipulative capabilities of all-too-human robots: "A company that records all your interactions raising a child--the stress, the exhaustion, the jubilation, the love--has a treasure trove of information about what makes you tick as a person, even when the child is a robot."