Lauren Kane

“The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might create monsters.” This is, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues in our June 25, 2026, issue, a distinctly parental anxiety, a primordial kind of maternal metaphor that appears over and over again in writing and interviews about AI development.

Earlier this spring, Lauren Kane journeyed up to the Cloisters—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s outpost on the northern tip of Manhattan, which houses European art inside a complex of buildings cobbled together from the ruins of several medieval cloisters brought over from France and Catalonia in the early twentieth century—to visit “Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages.” As Kane writes in the NYR Online, the exhibition was rife with “transgressive delight”: “saddles...

Around the year 1400 a young woman in Central Europe was given a saddle made of bone, likely for her wedding day. As she rode from her parents’ home to that of her new husband, she sat upon carved scenes of lovers embracing and men banging drums or clutching their belts. In France, at about the same time, a young bride might have been given the (less suggestive) gift of a coin purse held by a finely woven metal handle and embroidered in delicate green, pink, and yellow silk.