an excerpt of

         The Agony of Victory*

Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin created a large part of what was called New Journalism when they realized that defeat can make a better story than victory. George Plimpton knew this when he tried to play for the Detroit Lions. He was not really a football player—his take would be a comic one, born of this fact. More recently, writer Jonathan Ames fought in a boxing match to much the same effect. Losing lends itself to narrative.
Writing about winning is far trickier, especially when it is rendered in the first person. An ode by Pindar is one thing, but you can’t sing your own praises that way; the gesture becomes less genuine and usually feels morally suspect, like celebrity journalism. Of course, publishers love the memoir by Lance Armstrong or the Super Bowl quarterback. After all, the accounting mind asks, who is going to buy the book of a loser?
Two talented young writers have just joined the field of success journalism. Both Brian Christian and Joshua Foer entered peculiar contests for literary purposes and ended up winning. Contests are such appealing subjects, with their built-in drama and suspense—i.e., narrative. Beyond that are the subcultures of people with their own lingoes and status signs, their styles and goals and values. A contest brings all the major players in these worlds together in a single place—or at least that is what one would expect.
Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human flirts with the idea of developing this kind of drama. Early in the book, Christian does a good job describing the importance of the Turing test, designed by the pioneer computer scientist Alan Turing to determine whether machines can think. “Each year, the artificial intelligence (AI) community convenes for the field’s most anticipated and controversial annual event,” Christian writes. “A panel of judges poses questions by computer terminal to a pair of unseen correspondents, one a human ‘confederate,’ the other a computer program, and attempts to discern which is which.” The program that is most often mistaken for a human wins the title of the “Most Human Computer”; the person who is most often voted human wins the “Most Human Human” award.

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In Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer begins his journey to the U.S. Memory Championship by confronting the braggadocio of the strongman on a side trip he makes to the Weightlifting Museum in York, Pennsylvania, because “I thought that sounded like something I didn’t want to die without having seen. And I had an hour to kill.” Foer notices that there is a “Strongest Man in the World” title and begins to wonder how one might determine the smartest person in the world. Although he clearly comes from an accomplished family—one of his brothers, Jonathan Safran, is an acclaimed novelist, and another, Franklin, is the editor of the New Republic—he doesn’t have any idea how to go about rating genius. He finds there is no such title but does discover the world of “mental athletes” who compete in tests of memory. . . .

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*An essay-review of

The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive. By Brian Christian. New York: Doubleday, 2011. 320 pp. $27.95.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. By Joshua Foer. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 320 pp. $26.95.