Lee Gutkind in the News

LEE GUTKIND VS. THE ROBOTS

The American Scholar website is featuring an article written by CNF founder and editor Lee Gutkind who "questions both the promise and peril of our increasing use of robotics in society." Gutkind recently published Almost Human: Making Robots Think, based on his experience at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. To check out the article, visit:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/roboticsquestions-gutkind.html

ROBOT EVOLUTION

Listen to Lee Gutkind sound off on the way technology is shaping the evolution of our species through a podcast of Are We Alone?, a radio science magazine broadcast by the SETI Institute. Visit

http://radio.seti.org/past-shows.php

to hear Lee's August 13 interview to learn "how your Blackberry may be changing the brains of future generations," and whether we are "engineering our own successors through robotics."

CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH?

Lee Gutkind makes himself crystal clear in the Poets and Writers article "Editors Who Can Handle the Truth." The feature by Sara Weinman explores the growing creative nonfiction genre: "Telling a story of real-life experiences is a simple enough pursuit. As in fiction, the aim is to compel readers to keep reading, to teach them something new, to open a window on a previously undiscovered world. In the hands of master practitioners like E. B. White, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John McPhee, Nora Ephron, and Anne Fadiman, that's exactly what nonfiction narratives do. And, as three recently published and entirely different collections amply demonstrate, there are growing numbers of quality chroniclers of truth out there. Finding their work is relatively easy. Categorizing it is another matter." Visit

http://www.pw.org/mag/0709/newsweinman.htm

to read the entire article. Also you can even weigh in on what you prefer the genre to be called: creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, or who-cares-as-long-as-it's-true nonfiction (we admit a bias here).

FOR A CAPITOL TIME...

Lee is going to be a DC regular in a couple of weeks. On Tuesday, August 21st at noon he'll be featured on The Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU 88.5 FM American University Radio to talk about "Almost Human" and "The Best Creative Nonfiction." If you're not in the District, you can listen to it through Podcasts on the NPR website. The Kojo Nnamdi Show features two-hours of news, political issues and social trends of the day in a magazine program format. The website is

www.wamu.org/programs/kn/index.php.