In this edition of ADD’s summer series, Helene Ratner shares her recommendations for a film, podcast, and book to dive into when the holidays begin.
Seen: I Lost My Body
I recently watched the critically acclaimed French animated film where the main character is, quite unusually, a severed hand trying to find its body. Through the hand’s search across Paris, we learn about its “owner”—Naoufel, a Moroccan orphan working as a pizza delivery boy who falls in love with a woman he only knows from a brief intercom conversation. It’s an original and beautifully animated story about love and loss. But even aside from that narrative, the animation alone is stunning—it’s a grand, cinematic experience to follow the hand as it crosses busy roads and escapes hungry rats.
Heard: The Good Whale
As a child, I loved Free Willy—the story of Jesse, the boy who saves the orca Willy from captivity. This podcast is about Willy, whose real name was Keiko. It begins with activists’ shock at finding Keiko living sick and weakened in a theme park in Mexico City. How could the world’s most famous orca—the one who was saved in the movie—be surviving in such miserable conditions in a tiny pool? From there, we follow a wild, expensive, and ambitious scientific project to “re-wild” Keiko and return him to the ocean. The podcast doesn’t just trace the complex logistics of moving an orca across the globe and teaching it to catch fish again—it also dives into the conflicts and disagreements over how best to save Keiko. Can he even relearn how to live in the wild? It’s a compelling piece of storytelling that reveals both the wonder of the scientific mission and the many tensions it stirred up.
Read: Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI
If you Google “artificial intelligence,” you’ll likely see a stream of stereotypical blue-toned images of a brain made of ones and zeroes. That imagery reinforces the idea of AI as a kind of human-like intelligence made from code. Crawford’s book offers an entirely different view. It provides excellent insight into the material and human resources behind AI—and who bears the social and environmental costs. The book explores everything from mining rare minerals to the societal impact of data categorization and the use of AI in surveillance and control of labor. It forces us to confront who owns and profits from AI—and who pays the price. A warm recommendation for anyone wanting to understand the power structures behind the technology, and how AI contributes to global inequality. A necessary perspective in a time of immense focus on AI’s potential.
