Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us
Hua Hsu writing a long profile of Richard Powers in The New Yorker. Happy Monday to me. I’ve read a bunch of Powers’ novels, but still didn’t have much of a sense of him, which I sorta liked, honestly. I knew he was a former English (well rhetoric technically) major turned computer programmer, but little else. Which was all the better that I got to enjoy this profile pretty cold. I wonder what would it take for Powers profile to change meaningfully–he sells a ton of books, wins awards, and generally doesn’t come to mind when people think of America’s great novelists. Which he seems just fine with.
Eleven Predictions: Here’s What AI Does Next
Perhaps the most surprising of these surprising predictions is the time horizon: “Most of this drama will have played out within the next 24 months. But it will be a wild ride.” Like Gioia, my greatest concern with AI is not that it is going to replace art or creativity or the human spirit, but that it will (and has) created so much garbage in the system that is going to take on-going and substantial effort to navigate. My kids and I were looking for a new movie trailer on YouTube yesterday, and the ratio of fake-trailers for plausible sounding movies (Spiderman-4, Beetlejuice 3, etc) to actual trailers was about 1:1. As this stuff gets easier and cheaper and faster to make, there is just going to be more and more of it to dodge and triage.
TikTok meets Tolkien: how the Folio Society attracted gen Z readers
I hadn’t connected the SF/F penchant for collectibles to the Folio Society, but it seems like a match made in Eregion (that one is for the Rings of Power-heads out there). The supercharger, though, is the demand for beautiful books to use in BookTok videos. The organic marketing loop of twenty-somethings making videos showing off your books so that other twenty-somethings will buy your books for their videos is about a good business to be in right now as there is.