The $2 Million Book That Was Maybe Written (Co-Written) By AI

 WSJ - "The Red-Hot Book at the Center of an AI Mystery"

WSJ - "Author Whose $2 Million Book Deal Was Derailed by AI Concerns Says He’s Innocent"

Publishers Weekly - "After the Cancellation of ‘Call Me, I'll Hide the Body,’ What Comes Next?"

What Makes The Odyssey Difficult to Film

 

New Yorker - "Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers"
By David Denby

Indian Book Festivals

 

New York Times - "The Hot Place to Be Seen for Young Indians: Book Festivals"

Legendary Edit

 

New Yorker - "What Michael Crichton Reveals About Big Tech and A.I."

"In 1968, a young Michael Crichton, still a student at Harvard Medical School, sent a manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, who had just taken over as editor-in-chief at Knopf. The document had a compelling title, “The Andromeda Strain,” and it featured a fast-paced plot: a group of scientists gather in an ultra-secret underground laboratory to study a deadly extraterrestrial organism, brought to Earth on a crashed space probe. Crichton later revealed that he had been inspired by a biology-textbook footnote about the possibility of organisms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. He had struggled with the manuscript for years—“every draft was awful”—but finally found inspiration from NASA. “When I finally learned that a complicated quarantine procedure really existed for the U.S. moon program,” he said in a 1969 interview, “it was a considerable psychological boost, and then I knew I could do the book.”

“The Andromeda Strain” had a strong premise, but Gottlieb, who would later become the editor of The New Yorker, thought it needed work. As he recalled in a joint 1994 interview, he told Crichton that if the young author agreed to “completely rewrite it” he would publish the book. “Somehow, it occurred to me that instead of trying to flesh out the characters further and make the novel more conventional,” Gottlieb said, “we ought to strip that stuff out completely and make it a documentary, a fictional one.” He suggested that Crichton treat the book like a magazine article, reporting on the events as if they actually happened instead of developing each character’s subjective world. “The author of a nonfiction account would not have the access to the characters’ innermost thoughts in the way you assume for fiction,” Crichton said. “So I began to take all that stuff out and make the book colder and more impersonal.”

The changes worked. The Detroit Free Press said that the thriller featured “hideously plausible suspense,” and Life called it “chillingly effective.” The book hit the New York Times best-seller list and caught the attention of Universal Pictures, which paid Crichton a quarter-million dollars (more than two million in today’s dollars) for the movie rights. Crichton ended his medical training early and became a writer and director in California. Gottlieb’s advice, which helped launch Crichton’s career, remains surprisingly relevant today. The story of a new technology needs no hero or villain to drive the action forward; the technology itself often becomes the protagonist, and we all live with the consequences."

Ta-Nehisi Coates Interview

NY Mag - "The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates"

Open AI's Library

 

New York Times - "The Old-Fashioned Library at the Heart of the A.I. Boom"

"Built at Mr. Altman’s request and stocked with titles suggested by his staff, the OpenAI library is an apt metaphor for the world’s hottest tech company, whose success was fueled by language — lots and lots of language. OpenAI’s chatbot was not built like the average internet app. ChatGPT learned its skills by analyzing huge amounts of text that was written, edited and curated by humans, including encyclopedia articles, news stories, poetry and, yes, books.

The library also represents the paradox at the heart of OpenAI’s technology. Authors and publishers, including The New York Times, are suing OpenAI, claiming the company illegally used their copyrighted content to build its A.I. systems. Many authors worry that the technology will ultimately take away their livelihood."

Dune Book Cover Art Over the Years

 Muddy Colors - "BOOK COVER TRENDS THRU TIME (VIA DUNE)"

The Chengdu Science Fiction Museum by Zaha Hadid Architects

CNN - "This massive ‘floating’ museum is straight out of science fiction"

Arch Daily - "Chengdu Science Fiction Museum / Zaha Hadid Architects"

Related,

Esquire - "Inside the Censorship Scandal That Rocked Sci-Fi and Fantasy's Biggest Awards"

3 Body Problem Trailer

Previously,

The Three-Body Problem (Jan. 2023)

How Marvel Took Over Movies

 

New Yorker - "How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood"
By Michael Schulman

David Grann's Roll

 

The Ringer - "Chronicler of the Flower Moon"

"Practically every Grann fan can recall the first time they came across his work. For me, it was my senior year of college. I’d picked up an issue of The New Yorker before my shift at the campus library and began reading what I initially thought was a story about the politics of art authentication. It unfolded like an elegant piece of origami, describing what some say was an elaborate con in which a man allegedly forged the fingerprints of famous painters on so-called newly discovered works of art. When I finished the story, I looked up from the magazine to realize I was 20 minutes late to work. It was years later, when I landed a job at Condé Nast and overheard editors in the elevator discussing Grann’s writing as if it were sport, that I realized I was not alone in my awe of his work.

For Edward Zwick, a longtime writer, director, and producer, the first Grann story that really stuck with him was “To Die For,” a 2001 piece in The New Republic about 1930s celebrity and murder. Zwick clipped it out of the magazine with the thought that it could one day become a movie.

“It was just a really great story,” said Zwick, who has worked on dozens of film and television projects and won an Academy Award in 1998 as a producer on Shakespeare in Love. “I think it revealed even then what has been revealed in so many articles and stories since. That he has this uncanny ability to pull the threads of these strong narratives out of these stories.”"

Previously,
The Wager A TALE OF SHIPWRECK, MUTINY AND MURDER By David Grann (Jul. 2022)

Driving Clicks in the Aughts-10s (BuzzFeed, Gawker, etc.)

 

New Yorker - "BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic Wars"

Obama's Reading Habits

 

Esquire - "Behind the Scenes of Barack Obama’s Reading Lists"

"While Schultz freely admits that staff members contribute to planning the announcements and creating promotional elements like social-media graphics, he said, “these lists come from him. This is not a staff-led exercise, and I think if it was, it wouldn’t pass the smell test. These lists wouldn’t be as salient or get as much traction if it wasn’t coming from him directly.”

According to Schultz, the richness of Obama’s reading recommendations are a reflection of the man himself and his community. You don’t need The New York Times Book Review or Susie from book club to get recommendations when you’re constantly surrounded by some of the most interesting people in the world. As Schultz pointed out, “Being a former president, one of the perks is access to people and communities and stories from every corner of the planet, in every industry, in every sector, in every vector… Whether it’s people in business or sports or his daughter or other friends, these are all people that he hears about books from.”

The titles that Obama selects are incredibly diverse both in subjects and in authors, varying widely from the boring political tomes written by old white men that you might imagine dwelling on the nightstands of former presidents. Of the 13 titles included in Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, there are nine works of fiction and four works of nonfiction, including books by eight women and eight BIPOC authors. There’s a novel about a dystopian school for mothers; a graphic novel about labor and survival in Canada; a journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South; and a beautifully crafted short-story collection. As someone who spent the better part of a decade working in Big Five book publishing (the five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette), I can tell you that the former president has impeccable taste.

...

The question of how the most powerful man on the planet found time to read Fates and Furies amid major world events like the Arab Spring and the killing of Osama bin Laden is a perfectly valid reason for skepticism—the guy was and is busy!—but Schultz says Obama found time to read because he sees reading as necessary, and he makes it a priority on his schedule. “He considered [reading] part of being a good leader, part of being a good president, part of being a good father, a good husband, and a good man,” Schultz said."

Pop Culture Moments from the Pandemic

 

New York Times - "17 Pop Culture Moments That Define the Covid Era"

1. The Getaway to Schadenfreude Island - "The White Lotus"
2. The Eerily Prescient Novel - Ling Ma's "Severance"
3. The Daily Oasis of Sanity - "Lunch Doodles With Mo Willems"
4. Endless Baking Shows
5. The Soundtrack to a Furious Summer - Pop Smoke's "Dior"
6. The Superstar's Voice in Our Ears - Taylor Swift's "Folklore"
7. The Sitcom That Was Just as Anxious as We Were - "Ted Lasso"
8. TikTok Challenges
9. The Paranoia Safe Space - Among Us
10. The Isolation Aphrodisiac - "Love Is Blind"
11. The Flop That Was Gloriously Reborn - "Tenet"
12. Zillow
13. The Videogame That Twisted Time - "Final Fantasy VII Remake"
14. The Must-Have Uniform for Doing NOthing - Kim Kardashian's Skims
15. The Comedy Special That Made Us Laugh on the Inside - Bo Burnham's "Inside"
16. The Slap
17. The Chance to Save the World - Pandemic: The Game

J. Crew's Preppy, Leisurely Uniform

 

New Yorker - "J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep"
By Hua Hsu

Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation

 

Published November 1, 2022.

"The long-awaited first work of nonfiction from the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a deliriously entertaining, wickedly intelligent cinema book as unique and creative as anything by Quentin Tarantino.

In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with Cinema Speculation, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans—and all movie lovers—could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which he first saw as a young moviegoer at the time, this book is as intellectually rigorous and insightful as it is rollicking and entertaining. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT’s and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever. "

Movies as chapters in the book:
Bullitt (1968)
Dirty Harry (1971)
Deliverance (1972)
The Getaway (1972)
The Outfit (1973)
Sisters (1973)
Daisy Miller (1974)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Rolling Tunder (1977)
Paradise Alley (1978)
Escape from Alcatraz (1979)
Hardcore (1979)
The Funhouse (1981)

The Three-Body Problem

 

What's on Netflix - "‘The Three-Body Problem’ Netflix Series: Everything We Know So Far"

"Netflix has wrapped filming on its ambitious new sci-fi adaptation series of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy, led by True Blood‘s Alexander Woo and Game of Thrones writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Here’s everything we know about the series coming in 2023 as of October 2022."

Thankful for Libraries

 

The Guardian - "This year I’m thankful for US public libraries – beautiful icons of a better civic era"

"If the public library did not already exist as a pillar of local civic engagement in American towns and cities, there’s no way we would be able to create it. It seems like a relic of a bygone era of public optimism, a time when governments worked to value and edify their people, rather than punish and extract from them. In America, a country that can often be cruel to its citizens, the public library is a surprising kindness. It is institution that offers grace and sanctuary, and a vision of what our country might one day be.

To the eyes of a modern American, it can be a strange, even disorienting vision. For one thing, public libraries are unusually beautiful places, the kind of buildings that make you feel underdressed. In many American cities, the public library ranks among the most ornate and stately fixtures of downtown. They’re erected in early-20th century high style, like the Egyptian revival building at Los Angeles’ Riordan Central Library, or Boston’s neoclassical McKim building. Or sometimes they’re modern monuments to an ongoing investment in public services, like Seattle’s fantastic main branch, a gleaming structure in glass enmeshed in steel latticing.

...

The majesty of library buildings is matched only by the nobility of their purpose. The public library does not make anyone money; it does not understand its patrons as mere consumers, or as a revenue base. Instead, it aspires to encounter people as minds. The public library exists to grant access to information, to facilitate curiosity, education, and inquiry for their own sake. It is a place where the people can go to pursue their aspirations and their whims, to uncover histories or investigate new scientific discoveries.

And it is available, crucially, to everyone. It costs nothing to enter, nothing to borrow – in New York, and in many other cities, the public library system has even eliminated late fees. All the knowledge and artistry of its collection is available to the public at will, and it is a privilege made available, without prejudice, to rich and poor alike."

Barbie's Dreamhouse

 

New York Times - "A Six-Decade Tour of Barbie’s Dreamhouses"

"In 1962, three years after Barbie was born, Mattel introduced Barbie’s Dreamhouse: a folding ranch house that was the first of many domiciles that evolved with the times.

After beginning modestly in cardboard, the Dreamhouses became plastic, pastel, palatial and electrified, often all at once. They acquired elevators, sun decks, modern European furniture, recycling bins and multiple bedrooms — though Barbie remained perennially single and holding the lease (or mortgage).

To honor this 60-year milestone, Mattel collaborated with the design magazine PIN-UP on a limited-edition art book, “Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey.” The 151-page monograph tracks the evolution of Dreamhouses through six examples, shown with their original furnishings and architectural blueprints.

What readers will not see is Barbie herself, or any of her friends or family. With Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie opening in July and the doll’s hyper-pink aesthetic hitting Instagram like a strawberry milkshake tsunami, feminist revulsion toward the doll is taking a back seat to ironic celebration.

“Camp has become the white noise of our culture,” said Whitney Mallett, a contributing editor of PIN-UP, who edited the book with Felix Burrichter, the magazine’s founder (the design and concept are by Ben Ganz).

The book examines the cultural and architectural forces that shaped the Dreamhouses over the decades, including Queen Anne Victorianism, midcentury modernism and back-to-the-land granola-ism.

It also quotes writers, artists and architects on how Barbitecture shaped their own psyches. “Barbie’s house is infinitely more exciting than Barbie herself,” writes Elvia Wilk, a cultural critic. “The structures we live within — fantasize about living within — say more about our lives and dreams than plastic bodies ever will.”"

Reexamining Native American History

 

New Yorker - "Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward?"