Helen Phillips
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Articles by Helen Phillips
OpenAI and Anthropic race to develop advanced AI systems
Your browser does not support the audio element. The AI landscape is heating up with various developments. OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to develop advanced artificial intelligence systems, sparking excitement and concerns about the risks and consequences of creating superintelligent machines. Mark Zuckerberg has expressed concerns about who owns the intellectual property rights to these AI systems.
“The Window,” by Helen Phillips
“You’ll be O.K.?” I said. “Of course,” she said. It was dusk when I closed the front door and locked it. I walked down the steps and looked back to check for her head. Whenever I left her with a babysitter, she would climb onto the couch in the living room so that she could watch me go, and I would be able to see the dark shape of her head all the way down the block until I turned at the graveyard. But, tonight, no head.
The Window | Flipboard
1:16 2 days ago Josh Lucas joins Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning in new TV legal drama. StringersHub • 2d Deadline reports the new casting on TV series Discretion, which is based on a short story of the same name by Chandler Baker. It has received an eight-episode order with production slated to begin later this year.
The Yale Review | Helen Phillips: “Loveseat”
Helen Phillips Dick Rudisill, Ruined Couch, 1964. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago I needed to get rid of the loveseat. It had been sitting in the basement for too many years. It had problems. Its light-gray armrests were browned with use. When I sat on its dark-gray seat cushion, I could feel springs poking, threatening to rip through. Someone had thrown up on it. Someone had peed on it. Sweat and pus and tears and blood and cum, at different points in its history. Other liquids too.
View from the Chair: my commitment to you, observations so far, and looking ahead to important decisions and meeting stakeholders
My commitment to you Today is my first day in my new role and I am so pleased to have joined the GDC as Chair. I have huge respect for those who work in healthcare and my role as Chair of NHS Professionals has helped me to build a deep understanding of the value of a skilled, experienced and available workforce. Dental professionals provide vital healthcare for millions of people in the UK, through prevention, education and treatment.
Clima impazzito, robot e Ia: il futuro di Um è già oggi
La metropolitana era a sei isolati di distanza. Servivano tre fermate per raggiungere il botteghino per i biglietti last-minute scontati e mancavano meno di quarantacinque minuti alla chiusura. Poteva prendere un vu. Poteva permetterselo, adesso. Ma considerando la somma che stava per spendere sarebbe stato forse più opportuno andare in metro. Mentre aspettava per attraversare vide un piccione posarsi sul tettuccio di un furgone fermo al semaforo. L’uccello se ne stava lì tranquillo.
M-clean™ System Cleans Fabrics with No Trace of Water
An interview with Werner Raschka, Kadant Nordic AB During his employment as the strategic product manager for dryer fabrics at a clothing manufacturer in Düren, Germany, Werner Raschka was often asked how to clean dryer fabrics as efficiently as possible. As a result, the company began to develop dryer fabrics that became less dirty and cleaned easier. To test the newly developed dryer fabrics, trials were done with manufacturers of traversing cleaners.
CII international: Going global
One of the great positives of being part of the CII is that our network is truly global. We have members and affiliated institutes all over the world. Our qualifications in both insurance and personal finance are recognised as best in class. Thousands of people take them every year, inside and outside the UK, and achieving them has changed lives and outcomes across the globe. It’s something to be really proud of.
Mysterious, uncanny, and absurd: top listens for "Severance" fans
After a revealing and compulsive second season of Severance, we’re faced with another wait for the next—though hopefully it won't be quite as long as we had to wait for Season 2. If you’re not ready to sever ties with the show, fear not. These listens all capture some of the qualities that make Severance so compelling—from the eerie liminality of the office space, to the threat of malicious and mysterious corporate overlords, to the absurdity of modern working culture. Piranesi lives in the House.
BOMB Magazine | The Coat
When I left, I locked the door and put the keys in the pocket of my coat. But when I returned, hours later, my keys were no longer there. I stood before the door, cold and distressed. I had also put in my pocket two dimes—change from the outdoor market, my fingers awkward with cold—and now those two dimes were missing. This was my lentil-colored coat, long and thick, hooded, filled with the feathers of birds, hopefully not harvested when the birds were still alive to feel the pain.
'Hum' Is One of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2024
These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. By Annabel Gutterman November 13, 2024 8:03 AM EST In her latest unsettling thriller, Helen Phillips conjures a terrifying near future crippled by climate change where AI bots called “hums” have infiltrated every aspect of modern life.
Olivia Ho - Face Value
The American novelist Helen Phillips’s speculative thriller The Need (2019) was longlisted for the National Book Award. The technique of mixing ordinary life with futuristic elements proved so successful that Phillips revisits it in Hum, her unnerving third novel. Hum follows May Webb, who proved so good at her job improving AI’s communicative abilities that she rendered herself obsolete.
Hum
Hum by Helen Phillips Once you pick this up, you won’t put it down. With timely themes of technology, surveillance, and climate change, there’s a certain dystopian feel to the story. What grounds the story, though, is the Webb family. How much pressure can a family withstand? Can they trust the technology meant to “help” them? Hum is both a timely warning and a timeless story of family, marriage, and motherhood. Liz, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison
New library books
These thrillers are newly available through the Allen County Public Library. “Shanghai” by Joseph Kanon After escaping the Gestapo, Daniel Lohr arrives in Shanghai, where glamor and squalor exist side by side. As he tries to navigate through his uncle’s world in the city’s fabled nightlife, he tries to stay one step ahead of murder and outrun his own past.
Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, August 9, 2024
Among this week's exceptional titles, we review Shalom Auslander's "outrageously funny second memoir," Feh, about confronting his profound self-loathing with "humor and heart-wrenching detail"; as well as French novelist Adèle Rosenfeld's debut, Jellyfish Have No Ears, "a strange, haunting story of sensory presence and absence, language and loss, relationships and choices." And for younger readers, we spotlight We Are Definitely Human by X.
HUM by Helen Phillips Read by Ariel Blake
Narrator Ariel Blake captures the climate-devastated, AI-driven world of this novel. From the opening scene, Phillips raises the stakes continually as May, a desperate mother, sells her face to be used in an experiment. The city is run by intelligent robots called “hums,” and without her face, May is unrecognizable by them. Blake’s steady voices for the hums add a sense of cool detachment as they solve problems, sell luxuries, and offer platitudes.
“The Penthouse,” by Helen Phillips
This is the fifth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here. She did not like the penthouse, but even more she did not like the idea of people like us staying in the penthouse. So her husband did not tell her. He wrote the passcode on a piece of litter, handed it to us (laden with overstuffed backpacks, bags; desperate) on a street corner at night. He was a kind but self-important man we knew only by chance.
Climate Change, AI, and Technological Surveillance: Reading About the Very Near Future
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Climate Change, AI, and Technological Surveillance: Reading About the Very Near Future
My impetus to write a novel arises in part from my anxieties. My anxieties (and perhaps yours, too?) in recent years include the ever-increasing effects of climate change and ever-increasing advances in technology, specifically in the realms of surveillance and artificial intelligence. These concerns take most concrete form for me as the mother of two children. I’m trying to raise them for the world that lies ahead, but it’s a future I can’t quite envision.
Book Club Picks for August 2024
Amerie’s Book Club The book: Hum by Helen Phillips Our reviewer says: "In this bracing speculative parable from Phillips, set in a near future devastated by climate change, a woman loses her job to the robots she helped build.... Readers won’t be able to look away." Read more.
Helen Phillips on Writing Speculative Fiction in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
May Webb sees her first hum standing at a bus stop, and mistakes it for a sculpture. One year later, in the anxious “now” of Helen Phillips’ new novel Hum, AI-based robots called “hums” have taken over many jobs, or rendered them obsolete (May’s job working on AI communications has been erased). In fact, as the novel opens, a hum is performing facial recognition obscuring surgery on May’s face. May is being paid well to be a guinea pig in this test, a choice she may come to regret.
Hum a book by Helen Phillips
"A transcendent portrayal of artificial intelligence, love, the fate of families, and the emergence of synthetic beings beyond human imagination." --Clifford A. Pickover, author of Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History "An indelible family portrait and a narrative tour de force, Hum generates almost unbearable tension and unease from start to end. Stunning, strangely beautiful, and written from a place of deep compassion but also a clear and analytical eye.
Hum
Reading Group Guide: Hum by Helen Phillips In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.
It Was Supposed to Be a Garden Oasis, but It Led to Unexpected Dangers Original
Imagine a city like New York, but where intelligent robots, known as hums, walk, talk and perform all kinds of jobs. Here, young children universally wear smart watches that track their welfare. Almost everyone is addicted to personal virtual reality pods called wooms. This is the unsettling world of Helen Phillips's intense and propulsive new novel, "Hum." But this list of futuristic details may give the wrong impression.
10 Most Anticipated Sci-Fi Books Coming Out In August 2024
📆 8/1/2024 3:22 AM 📰 screenrant ⏱ Reading Time: 88 sec. here 3 min. at publisher 📊 Quality Score: News: 39% Publisher: 94% United States Headlines News United States Latest News,United States Headlines She Who Knows By Nnedi Okorafor, Key Lime Sky By Al Hess, Hum By Helen Phillips Summary August 2024 is set to be another excellent month for sci-fi books. Although there are not many new science fiction releases, the novels that will arrive this month are nothing short of exceptional.
Shop Local At Choice Pet, Ranger Approved!
Ever since I brought Ranger home from her breeder in Virginia two years ago, one of her favorite activities has always been walking to Choice Pet! What dog or cat wouldn’t love a store just for them with plenty of treats and toys from which to choose? The Greenwich Choice Pet location sits between the Whole Foods and Starbucks on Putnam Ave.
2000 Class Millennium Series and Latitude Series at Carsington Sailing Club Original
Please select your home edition or Edition 2000 Class Millennium Series and Latitude Series at Carsington Sailing Club by Helen Phillips 25 Jul 08:20 BST The Lakes Mortgages' Latitude Series (not to be confused with a festival with a similar name taking place on the same weekend) combined with the West Country Boat Repairs' Millennium Series for a 2000 Class event at Carsington Sailing Club.
2000 Class Welsh Championship at Cardiff Bay Yacht Club Original
Please select your home edition or Edition 2000 Class Welsh Championship at Cardiff Bay Yacht Club by Helen Phillips 2 Nov 16:48 GMT 14 Cardiff-based boats and 7 visitors turned out for the last 2000 Class event of the season. With Penarth Head to the south of the bay, southerly winds can be challenging, with big shifts and convergence zones on either side of the course, and confused conditions in the centre.
Thought-Provoking Fiction About Motherhood and Family
Tor Books (@TorBooks) You are what who you eat. Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of these book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.
April’s Recommended Reads — McIntyre Editorial Services | Book Editor | Writer | Journalist
Note: I receive a small commission for purchases made through links in this post. Ah, May. That month when the flowers begin to sprout, the sun begins to linger and the mud in Vermont (hopefully) begins to dry. I’d argue it’s the best month of the year, but then again, I may be biased — it is my birthday month, after all. I’m hoping to add some new books to my library in honor of this auspicious day, but in the interim, I’ve been ticking quite a few titles off my list.
Spring 2021
The Spring 2021 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats.
Jeff VanderMeer Wants to Show You How the World Ends
Fiction Credit...Ana Miminoshvili April 6, 2021 HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER By Jeff VanderMeer Today’s pace of extinction is hundreds if not thousands of times greater than the natural extinction rate. Humans are, of course, profoundly implicated in this loss of life and biodiversity.
The Best Book Club Books for Winter 2020
If you’re on the hunt for the next juicy read for your book club this winter, then look no further! This list covers all the bases with the best picks for every kind of taste. Whether your group only reads award winning works, loves books they can compare to their movie adaptations, speeds through heart-pounding thrillers or flips through swoon-worthy romances—we’ve got you covered.
Horror Adjacent Reads x LOHF
Okay, so if you’ve made it here, you’re probably here for the scary. The more the scarier, right? But how do you classify “horror”? Does it have to tick the boxes off a certain checklist? Or is it more that you just know it when you see it? One thing I’ve noticed about reading boatloads of horror is that it seems more fluid than other genres—in the best way possible. After all, what scares you is subjective.
What is Cli-Fi? A Beginner's Guide to Climate Fiction
Have you heard people talking about Cli-Fi (or Climate Fiction), but still aren’t sure what that means? Read on to find out. What is climate fiction? Maybe the current president of the United States Donald Trump doesn’t believe global warming is real, but ever since the 1800s scientists have been studying the greenhouse effect. In 1896, a Swedish chemist named Svante Arrheniussome came to the conclusion that man-made innovations and technology were contributing to the warming of the planet.
Science Intersecting Art: Helen Phillips on The Need with Paleobotanist Dr. Sarah E. Allen
When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows. But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement. Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family.
Helen Phillips on our Climate in Crisis
Drought #7 used to be snow here, everything white and firm and ice; then mud came peeking through, and, mesmerized by the novelty, we surrounded it, exclaiming, So this must be spring! for we’d only read about spring; aware of how humans are supposed to feel about spring, we waited eagerly for something green to appear, but instead the mud spread; we retreated to our homes, shamefully longing for snow; later, we noticed our floorboards becoming unstable beneath our feet, and rushing outside...
Read Helen Phillips's Original Short Story About An Enigmatic Game Show, "Money or Mystery"
Author Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” With Sunday Shorts, OprahMag.com invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers.
The 10 best books of 2019
EW book critics David Canfield and Leah Greenblatt break down their top 10 reads of 2019. 10. The Need by Helen Phillips Is it a hothouse domestic drama? Slow-burn science fiction? Straight-up metaphysical horror? All that, and more: Phillips’s spare allegory of a young mother who unearths a series of strange objects in an excavation pit offers a Twilight Zone premise with a jaw-dropping metaphysical twist. —Leah Greenblatt 9. The Yellow House by Sarah M.
EXCERPT | 'HUM: A NOVEL' Helen Phillips
Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum. Her novel The Need was a National Book Award nominee and a New York Times Notable Book. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award.
Novelist Helen Phillips on the Only Item of Clothing She Wore on Her Book Tour
9 items in this article “I pretty much can’t leave the house without a woman trying to buy them off my body.” Photo: Adam Douglas Thompson Helen Phillips is the author of The Need, which came out in July from Simon & Schuster. Since having kids, my attitude toward my clothing has become: the simpler the better. I’ve adopted a basic uniform of black sneakers, black Levi’s jeans, a black T-shirt, a black sweater, and colorful earrings.
Dislocated Realities: A Conversation between Helen Phillips and Laura Van Den Berg
Helen Phillips (left) and Laura Van Den berg (right) When an early copy of Helen Phillips’s new novel, The Need, turned up at my apartment, I had not read a book in two months. I had been unable to read, in fact. My father had died recently and each time I tried to open a book, longing to slide into an alternate present, I instead hit a wall. The Need broke that wall for me.
The Best Book You've Never Read is 'Pieces for the Left Hand' by J. Robert Lennon
Helen Phillips's delivers an unforgettable tour de force that melds nonstop suspense, intriguing speculation, and perfectly crafted prose in The Need, about a mother of two young children facing an intruder in her home. Phillips makes the case for J. Robert Lennon's Pieces for the Left Hand as the best book you've never read.
Helen Phillips: “Living with the awareness of the abyss is probably a good thing.”
When I sat down with Helen Phillips in her Brooklyn apartment, I told her that I related to her latest novel, The Need, not only as a potential mother, but as a human being who has the tendency to interpret minor events as signs of impending disaster. That’s certainly the way Molly, the novel’s protagonist, navigates the world. As she raises her young children, Molly starts to mistake tangled threads for giant bugs, and believes the rumblings of the garbage truck to be the onset of an earthquake.
The Need | Bookreporter.com
French priest Gaspard Mermillod wrote in the 19th century that “[a] mother is she who can take the place of all others but whose place no one else can take.” This idea --- the irreplaceability of a mother and her central and essential role in the life of a child --- has led in the contemporary world to joys balanced with frustrations, and both comfort and stress, as women often are asked to do more and be more in their professional lives while still taking on the bulk of the parenting.
Helen Phillips's 'The Need' Is A Dark, Strange, And Scary Exploration Of Motherhood
Details BY BUST Magazine IN Books Published: 09 July 2019 The Need By Helen Phillips (Simon & Schuster) Award-winning author Helen Phillips’ newest novel, The Need, is a literary fever dream. After a mysterious home intruder interrupts Molly’s mundane life as a mother and scientist, she is drawn into a world that had much darker plans for her family. Molly experiences both the outlandish and the relatable while navigating snack time and parallel universes.
BINDERY: Helen Phillips with Sarah Rich / The Need
Body: The Bindery hosts Helen Phillips for her new novel The Need. She'll be in conversation with Sarah Rich. Please join us! When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows. But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement.
Helen Phillips: Hardcover: 9781982113162: Powell's Books
Staff Pick Maybe it is due to a lack of sleep or perhaps it's the creep of parental anxiety, but Molly sometimes worries she is losing her mind. She has these moments, increasingly frequent and always disorienting, where everything feels slightly off — it is undeniable, but unprovable. It feels like a climax to the weirdness when a masked intruder breaks into her home and hands her a note, but it is only the beginning of a reality-defying ordeal. Like J.
The Need | IndieBound.org
The Need (Hardcover) By Helen Phillips Simon & Schuster, 9781982113162, 272pp. Publication Date: July 9, 2019 Other Editions of This Title: Digital Audiobook (7/8/2019) Compact Disc (7/9/2019) Library Binding, Large Print (9/1/2019) Paperback (7/9/2019) List Price: 26.00* * Individual store prices may vary. July 2019 Indie Next List “I firmly believe I will be hard-pressed to pick up a book in 2019 I love more than The Need, a genre-bending novel that explores motherhood and identity.
Motherhood Is Scary and Crazy and Darkly Comic. So Is This Novel About It.
Fiction Image Helen Phillips’s novel begins as conventional suspense but quickly veers into something more speculative and philosophical, with nods to both horror and sci-fi. July 7, 2019 THE NEED By Helen Phillips As opening chapters go, this one from “The Need” does not mess about: A mother crouches in the corner of a darkened bedroom, straining to listen, holding her small children close and willing them not to make a sound. Molly has heard footsteps in the next room.
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