Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Drawing of Gideon Lewis-Kraus by Jason Polan

Reportage, essays, and criticism, chiefly for The New Yorker; earlier for the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Wired, the London Review of Books, and others.

selected work

arranged

Artificial intelligenceeight

  1. Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things We’ve Ever Made New Yorker2026
  2. The Rise of the Scenario (on Annie Jacobsen and existential-risk forecasting) New Yorker2026
  3. Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But Really We All Lost New Yorker2026
  4. How a Congressional Primary Became a Proxy Battle over A.I. (on Alex Bores) New Yorker2026
  5. How Project Maven Put A.I. into the Kill Chain (on Katrina Manson’s Project Maven) New Yorker2026
  6. The Pentagon Went to War with Anthropic. What’s Really at Stake? New Yorker2026
  7. What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either New Yorker2026
  8. The Great A.I. Awakening (on Google Brain) NYT Magazine2016

Who believes what & whyfourteen

  1. The End of Children New Yorker2025
  2. How a Scientific Dispute Spiralled into a Defamation Lawsuit (on Francesca Gino’s lawsuit) New Yorker2024
  3. The Angst and Sorrow of Jewish Currents New Yorker2024
  4. Jewish Identity With and Without Zionism New Yorker2024
  5. They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? (on Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino) New Yorker2023
  6. The Trials of Sam Bankman-Fried New Yorker2023
  7. When Dying Patients Want Unproven Drugs (on Relyvrio and the F.D.A.) New Yorker2023
  8. The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism (profile of Will MacAskill) New Yorker2022
  9. Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism, and the Question of Complicity New Yorker2022
  10. An Extraordinary Account of a Hasidic Enclave New Yorker2022
  11. Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters? (profile of Kathryn Paige Harden) New Yorker2021
  12. How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously New Yorker2021
  13. Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps? NYT Magazine2019
  14. The Trials of Alice Goffman (on Alice Goffman) NYT Magazine2016

Technology & cultureseven

  1. The Bear Minimum (on Alex Davies’s Kobuk the Destroyer) New Yorker2026
  2. Are Flying Cars Finally Here? New Yorker2024
  3. We Know Less About Social Media Than We Think (on Jonathan Haidt) New Yorker2022
  4. Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media New Yorker2020
  5. Inside the Crypto World’s Biggest Scandal (on Tezos) Wired2018
  6. No Exit (on start-up life in San Francisco; also a Kindle Single) Wired2014
  7. In Search of the Heart of the Online Cat-Industrial Complex Wired2012

Performingfive

  1. The Finale of “The Rehearsal” Is Outlandish and Sublime New Yorker2025
  2. Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You Are at 63? (profile of Michael Apted) NYT Magazine2019
  3. Selling Airborne Opulence to the Upper-Upper-Upper Class NYT Magazine2018
  4. Over and Over (on David Levine’s Habit) Threepenny Review2011
  5. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (on Rimini Protokoll’s Call Cutta in a Box) Threepenny Review2008

Reviews & essaystwelve

  1. What Does “Capitalism” Really Mean, Anyway? (on Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History) New Yorker2025
  2. Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers? (on Caroline Fraser’s Murderland) New Yorker2025
  3. Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral (on Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics) New Yorker2025
  4. The Palantir Guide to Saving America’s Soul (on Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic) New Yorker2025
  5. Michael Lewis’s Big Contrarian Bet (on Going Infinite) New Yorker2023
  6. Oh, the Humanities (on Mark Greif’s Against Everything) Bookforum2016
  7. Philip Roth: The Full Arc (on Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound) NYRB2013
  8. On Janet Malcolm TLS2013
  9. It’s Good to Be Alive LRB2012
  10. Viewer Discretion (on David Foster Wallace’s Both Flesh and Not and D. T. Max’s biography) Bookforum2012
  11. Head of the Class (on Neil Gross’s Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher) n+12009
  12. In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower (on the MLA convention) The Believer2004

Elsewherefive

  1. The Man Who Explains Italy (profile of Francesco Costa) New Yorker2022
  2. Welcome to Liberland, the World’s Newest Country (Maybe) NYT Magazine2015
  3. Story A, Story B (on Japanese hole-digging) Harper’s2014
  4. Sleeping Together (on Japanese co-sleeping) Harper’s2013
  5. The Last Book Party (at the Frankfurt Book Fair) Harper’s2009

The complete archive — a hundred and thirty-eight pieces since 2004, juvenilia included — is here.