The creators of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel leap from stand-up comedy to world-class ballet in this promising new series about desperate dance companies in New York City and Paris whose leaders hatch a scheme to boost interest by swapping their forever demanding star performers. Expect the witty, rapid-fire dialogue that co-creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino have become known for. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Luke Kirby lead the cast. Thursday, April 24, Prime.

by Stephen Witt

The Thinking Machine is the biography of a tech titan, but it’s also “something more interesting and revealing,” said James Surowiecki in The Atlantic. Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang has been the outfit’s CEO from 1993 through its explosive rise to its current standing as the world’s third most valuable company, and “to be sure, Huang himself was central to Nvidia’s success.” But author Stephen Witt makes clear that Nvidia wouldn’t be building the chips that are powering the AI revolution absent the culture and economy established in Silicon Valley decades ago. Nvidia’s breakthroughs have been built on the free movement of labor within the industry, the talent of immigrants, research funded by universities and the federal government, and a board willing to forego instant rewards for a long-term payoff. Finally, when opportunities have crossed Huang’s sights, “he’s made the bold moves.”

“Huang’s biography, at this point, is well-known,” said Marc Levinson in The Wall Street Journal. Born in Taiwan in 1963, he arrived in the U.S. at 10, at first landing at a reform school in Kentucky that a family member mistook for an elite prep school. He spent most of the rest of his youth in Oregon, moving to Silicon Valley after college and, after picking up a master’s degree, co-founding Nvidia to build chips for PC gaming. “One virtue of The Thinking Machine is that it is not entirely admiring of Huang,” detailing how some early bets went disastrously wrong and how quick Huang has been to blame others. But Huang gambled wisely on parallel processing, giving his gaming chips an edge, said The Economist. And in 2013, he went all in on the idea of neural networks before anyone knew that they’d be crucial to AI’s leap. His famed temper, meanwhile, “co-exists with a tenderness recalled by current and former subordinates.” As a boss, he’s both liked and admired. 

Because the book’s narrative ends in mid-2024, it misses some key developments, said Katie Notopoulos in The New York Times. In late January, Nvidia’s stock price plummeted on news that DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, had developed a potent new AI reasoning model using a fraction of the Nvidia chips required by rival systems. But Nvidia remains the market leader, and The Thinking Machine remains “a lively biography” that makes the technology of AI understandable and does “a decent job” of wringing drama from the efforts of Nvidia’s engineers to achieve their market-changing breakthroughs. Late in the book, when Witt asks Huang to discuss the dangers of AI, Huang doesn’t just refuse, he explodes in anger. To some extent, this pioneer’s lack of worry about runaway AI “should be comforting.” Mostly, though, it’s not.

The novelist who lectured Latin America

Fact and fiction circled each other in the works of Mario Vargas Llosa. Through realism, erotica, and even crude slang, the Peruvian novelist wove tales of political corruption and moral compromise. As part of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s—alongside Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez and Argentina’s Julio Cortázar—he reached international fame, winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2010. But unlike most other regional giants, he never embraced leftist politics. While his fictional works appeared to support revolution and speaking truth to power, his expository essays tended toward conservatism. He even unsuccessfully ran for president of Peru in 1990 as a right-winger, proposing to privatize state enterprises and lay off public-­sector workers. “If you’re a writer in a country like Peru or Mexico, you’re a privileged person because you know how to read and write,” he said. “It is a moral obligation of a writer in Latin America to be involved in civic activities.” 

Born in Peru, Vargas Llosa grew up in Bolivia, where his mother told him his father was dead. In fact, his parents had divorced before his birth; they reunited when he was 10 and soon packed him off to military school in Lima. He retaliated by writing a novel, 1963’s The Time of the Hero, a scathing account of life in a military academy that portrayed officers as abusive and corrupt. Scandalized generals denounced the book, which only turned it into a sensation. At 19, Vargas Llosa eloped with his uncle’s 29-year-old sister-in-law, inspiring his novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. “His distaste for the norms of polite society in Peru gave him abundant inspiration,” said The New York Times, but he refused to live there. Instead, he spent decades in Europe, feted as an international literary star. 

“His fame and swelling ambition fueled his run for president,” said The Washington Post. But he came across as an elitist and failed to win over Peru’s largely impoverished indigenous electorate. Chastened, he returned to Europe and became a columnist for Spain’s El País, espousing his love of free markets to a global readership. “His combative defense of this position earned him enemies” among Latin America’s left, said The Guardian. Yet he maintained his dedication to his craft. Writing “is a way of living with illusion and joy and a fire throwing out sparks in your head,” he said. “This is an experience that continues to bewitch me as it did the first time.”