Understanding humanoid robots

From TechCrunch:

Robots made their stage debut the day after New Year’s 1921. More than half-a-century before the world caught its first glimpse of George Lucas’ droids, a small army of silvery humanoids took to the stages of the First Czechoslovak Republic. They were, for all intents and purposes, humanoids: two arms, two legs, a head — the whole shebang.

Karel Čapek’s play, R.U.R (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti), was a hit. It was translated into dozens of languages and played across Europe and North America. The work’s lasting legacy, however, was its introduction of the word “robot.” The meaning of the term has evolved a good bit in the intervening century, as Čapek’s robots were more organic than machine.

Decades of science fiction have, however, ensured that the public image of robots hasn’t strayed too far from its origins. For many, the humanoid form is still the platonic robot ideal — it’s just that the state of technology hasn’t caught up to that vision. Earlier this week, Nvidia held its own on-stage robot parade at its GTC developer conference, as CEO Jensen Huang was flanked by images of a half-dozen humanoids.

While the notion of the concept of the general-purpose humanoid has, in essence, been around longer than the word “robot,” until recently, the realization of the concept has seemed wholly out of grasp. We’re very much not there yet, but for the first time, the concept has appeared over the horizon.

What is a “general-purpose humanoid?”

Before we dive any deeper, let’s get two key definitions out of the way. When we talk about “general-purpose humanoids,” the fact is that both terms mean different things to different people. In conversations, most people take a Justice Potter “I know it when I see it” approach to both in conversation.

For the sake of this article, I’m going to define a general-purpose robot as one that can quickly pick up skills and essentially do any task a human can do. One of the big sticking points here is that multi-purpose robots don’t suddenly go general-purpose overnight.

Because it’s a gradual process, it’s difficult to say precisely when a system has crossed that threshold. There’s a temptation to go down a bit of a philosophical rabbit hole with that latter bit, but for the sake of keeping this article under book length, I’m going to go ahead and move on to the other term.

I received a bit of (largely good-natured) flack when I referred to Reflex Robotics’ system as a humanoid. People pointed out the plainly obvious fact that the robot doesn’t have legs. Putting aside for a moment that not all humans have legs, I’m fine calling the system a “humanoid” or more specifically a “wheeled humanoid.” In my estimation, it resembles the human form closely enough to fit the bill.

A while back, someone at Agility took issue when I called Digit “arguably a humanoid,” suggesting that there was nothing arguable about it. What’s clear is that robot isn’t as faithful an attempt to recreate the human form as some of the competition. I will admit, however, that I may be somewhat biased having tracked the robot’s evolution from its precursor Cassie, which more closely resembled a headless ostrich (listen, we all went through an awkward period).

Another element I tend to consider is the degree to which the humanlike form is used to perform humanlike tasks. This element isn’t absolutely necessary, but it’s an important part of the spirit of humanoid robots. After all, proponents of the form factor will quickly point out the fact that we’ve built our worlds around humans, so it makes sense to build humanlike robots to work in that world.

Adaptability is another key point used to defend the deployment of bipedal humanoids. Robots have had factory jobs for decades now, and the vast majority of them are single-purpose. That is to say, they were built to do a single thing very well a lot of times. This is why automation has been so well-suited for manufacturing — there’s a lot of uniformity and repetition, particularly in the world of assembly lines.

Brownfield vs. Greenfield

The terms “greenfield” and “brownfield” have been in common usage for several decades across various disciplines. The former is the older of two, describing undeveloped land (quite literally, a green field). Developed to contrast the earlier term, brownfield refers to development on existing sites. In the world of warehouses, it’s the difference between building something from scratch or working with something that’s already there.

There are pros and cons of both. Brownfields are generally more time and cost-effective, as they don’t require starting from scratch, while greenfields afford to opportunity to built a site entirely to spec. Given infinite resources, most corporations will opt for a greenfield. Imagine the performance of a space built ground-up with automated systems in mind. That’s a pipedream for most organizers, so when it comes time to automate, a majority of companies seek out brownfield solutions — doubly so when they’re first dipping their toes into the robotic waters.

Given that most warehouses are brownfield, it ought come as no surprise that the same can be said for the robots designed for these spaces. Humanoids fit neatly into this category — in fact, in a number of respects, they are among the brownest of brownfield solutions. This gets back to the earlier point about building humanoid robots for their environments. You can safely assume that most brownfield factories were designed with human workers in mind. That often comes with elements like stairs, which present an obstacle for wheeled robots. How large that obstacle ultimately is depends on a lot of factors, including layout and workflow.

Baby Steps

Call me a wet blanket, but I’m a big fan of setting realistic expectations. I’ve been doing this job for a long time and have survived my share of hype cycles. There’s an extent to which they can be useful, in terms of building investor and customer interest, but it’s entirely too easy to fall prey to overpromises. This includes both stated promises around future functionality and demo videos.

I wrote about the latter last month in a post cheekily titled, “How to fake a robotics demo for fun and profit.” There are a number of ways to do this, including hidden teleoperation and creative editing. I’ve heard whispers that some firms are speeding up videos, without disclosing the information. In fact, that’s the origin of humanoid firm 1X’s name — all of their demos are run in 1X speed.

Most in the space agree that disclosure is important — even necessary — on such products, but there aren’t strict standards in place. One could argue that you’re wading into a legal gray area if such videos play a role in convincing investors to plunk down large sums of money. At the very least, they set wildly unrealistic expectations among the public — particularly those who are inclined to take truth-stretching executives’ words as gospel.

That can only serve to harm those who are putting in the hard work while operating in reality with the rest of us. It’s easy to see how hope quickly diminishes when systems fail to live up to those expectations.

The timeline to real-world deployment contains two primary constraints. The first is mechatronic: i.e. what the hardware is capable of. The second is software and artificial intelligence. Without getting into a philosophical debate around what qualifies as artificial general intelligence (AGI) in robots, one thing we can certainly say is that progress has — and will continue to be gradual.

As Huang noted at GTC the other week, “If we specified AGI to be something very specific, a set of tests where a software program can do very well — or maybe 8% better than most people — I believe we will get there within five years.” That’s on the optimistic end of the timeline I’ve heard from most experts in the field. A range of five to 10 years seems common.

Before hitting anything resembling AGI, humanoids will start as single-purpose systems, much like their more traditional counterparts. Pilots are designed to prove out that these systems can do one thing well at scale before moving onto the next. Most people are looking at tote moving for that lowest-hanging fruit. Of course, your average Kiva/Locus AMR can move totes around all day, but those systems lack the mobile manipulators required to move payloads on and off themselves. That’s where robot arms and end effectors come in, whether or not they happen to be attached to something that looks human.

. . . .

Two legs to stand on

At this point, the clearest path to AGI should look familiar to anyone with a smartphone. Boston Dynamics’ Spot deployment provides a clear real-world example of how the app store model can work with industrial robots. While there’s a lot of compelling work being done in the world of robot learning, we’re a ways off from systems that can figure out new tasks and correct mistakes on the fly at scale. If only robotics manufacturers could leverage third-party developers in a manner similar to phonemakers.

Interest in the category has increased substantially in recent months, but speaking personally, the needle hasn’t moved too much in either direction for me since late last year. We’ve seen some absolutely killer demos, and generative AI presents a promising future. OpenAI is certainly hedging its bets, first investing in 1X and — more recently — Figure.

A lot of smart people have faith in the form factor and plenty of others remain skeptical. One thing I’m confident saying, however, is that whether or not future factories will be populated with humanoid robots on a meaningful scale, all of this work will amount to something. Even the most skeptical roboticists I’ve spoken to on the subject have pointed to the NASA model, where the race to land humans on the mood led to the invention of products we use on Earth to this day.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch

PG notes that the robot below is using OpenAI, a general-purpose AI program.

Using Beat Sheets to Slant Your Memoir’s Scenes

From Jane Friedman:

Most memoirs involve some kind of loss—a breakup, a displacement, a dismantled dream, the death of someone dearly loved. The more painful the event, the more you’ll want to write about it. But as you revise, you’ll discover that some (or many) of your scenes aren’t needed.

To figure out what’s important, and how to write about it, you need to identify your memoir’s beats. Beats are part of the Beat Sheet tool Blake Snyder created for his book Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. These turning points work together to create a propulsive story that largely follows the hero’s journey—though once you understand the concept, you can apply it to other kinds of stories, like the heroine’s journey.

While it can be easy to spot the beats in a memoir with a clear quest, even nonlinear memoirs have them. Identifying both the beats and their functions can help you slant your material so that your book includes the right details in the right place to tell the right story.

Let’s say your book involves a breakup. Early drafts might include your courtship, the moment when you truly committed, the initial cracks in the relationship, the fights that led to the big eruption that ended everything, and all the post-breakup things your ex did that thoroughly miffed you.

This is a great start, but even when the relationship plays a prominent role, it’s likely you’ll need to trim things down. Before cutting too many darlings, or giving your book a full on weed whack, you’ll need to identify your book’s narrative arc, or the arc of internal transformation that happens within the narrator. Creating a beat sheet populated with your book’s key moments can help you identify how your narrator changes and which scenes illustrate this transformation.

If we continue with the breakup example, a beat sheet might uncover that your book is a harrowing tale of abuse where the breakup is a moment of victory that wraps up your book. But maybe you’ll discover that you’re actually writing about something else, and the breakup is either an unfortunate (or welcome) casualty of the primary story, or maybe the breakup is simply a catalyst that launches your journey.

Once your narrative arc is clear, you can decide how much real estate the relationship deserves, where the breakup belongs, and how to frame it so that it serves a specific function. To help you see what this looks like, let’s explore how breakups are framed in four different memoirs. (Warning: spoilers ahead!)

Breakup as ordinary world

Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, is about what she discovers about life, love, and herself after divorce. Her ordinary world, or the world before the quest begins, is one where a woman realizes she wants out of her marriage. Her divorce is important, because it sets the stage for what comes next, but it’s not the story, nor is it the catalyst inviting her on her journey.

In one of the book’s opening scenes, Elizabeth presses her head to the floor and realizes she doesn’t want to be married any more. Then, within the first 35 pages of her memoir—during which she gets divorced and has an unhealthy relationship with another man—she decides to travel to Indonesia after being invited by a medicine man (the story’s catalyst). Little of Gilbert’s marriage or divorce makes it into the book.

But what if the relationship takes on a larger role? How might that change the location and slant the breakup takes?

Breakup as opening for something new

According to Blake Snyder, your midpoint can either be an up moment where “the hero seemingly peaks” or a “low point where the world collapses around them.”

Suzette Mullen’s new memoir, The Only Way Through Is Out, is about risking it all to become who you truly are. It’s an identity story where one of her primary conflicts is whether to stay in her 30-year marriage. The decision to leave happens around the midpoint. Initially, it seems like a victory that makes room for her to pursue what she hopes will be a more authentic life. Then, a discovery about her ex occurs at the All Is Lost moment, which sends her life into a tailspin.

Breakup as unraveling

Divorce also plays a prominent role in Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas, a memoir about her second husband. Many writers hope to emulate this book because of the rules it breaks around chronology and point of view. But the story works precisely because it includes a whiff of narrative arc around her relationship with Husband Number Two. In fact, the book’s short vignettes largely chronicle their courtship and marriage, divorce, and reconciliation. Because the whiff of arc exists, it’s possible to identify the book’s beats.

The breakup in Safekeeping also takes place around the midpoint, but unlike Suzette’s false victory, it’s a deep low that Abigail briefly, yet specifically, describes. She stops cleaning, caring, or wearing anything other than her nightgown. Her children scatter. On days when she’s supposed to look for work, she smokes cigarettes, drinks coffee, and wanders, feeling completely lost. It’s so lonely, she welcomes back the raccoons she’d once complained about.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

More doctors use ChatGPT to help with busy workloads, but is AI a reliable assistant?

From Fox News:

Dr. AI will see you now.

It might not be that far from the truth, as more and more physicians are turning to artificial intelligence to ease their busy workloads.

Studies have shown that up to 10% of doctors are now using ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) made by OpenAI — but just how accurate are its responses?

A team of researchers from the University of Kansas Medical Center decided to find out.

“Every year, about a million new medical articles are published in scientific journals, but busy doctors don’t have that much time to read them,” Dan Parente, the senior study author and an assistant professor at the university, told Fox News Digital.

“We wondered if large language models — in this case, ChatGPT — could help clinicians review the medical literature more quickly and find articles that might be most relevant for them.”

For a new study published in the Annals of Family Medicine, the researchers used ChatGPT 3.5 to summarize 140 peer-reviewed studies from 14 medical journals.

Seven physicians then independently reviewed the chatbot’s responses, rating them on quality, accuracy and bias.

The AI responses were found to be 70% shorter than real physicians’ responses, but the responses rated high in accuracy (92.5%) and quality (90%) and were not found to have bias.

Serious inaccuracies and hallucinations were “uncommon” — found in only four of 140 summaries.

“One problem with large language models is also that they can sometimes ‘hallucinate,’ which means they make up information that just isn’t true,” Parente noted.

“We were worried that this would be a serious problem, but instead we found that serious inaccuracies and hallucination were very rare.”

Out of the 140 summaries, only two were hallucinated, he said.

Minor inaccuracies were a little more common, however — appearing in 20 of 140 summaries.

Based on these findings, Parente noted that ChatGPT could help busy doctors and scientists decide which new articles in medical journals are most worthwhile for them to read.

. . . .

Dr. Harvey Castro, a Dallas-based board-certified emergency medicine physician and national speaker on artificial intelligence in health care, was not involved in the University of Kansas study but offered his insights on ChatGPT use by physicians.

“AI’s integration into health care, particularly for tasks such as interpreting and summarizing complex medical studies, significantly improves clinical decision-making,” he told Fox News Digital.

“This technological support is critical in environments like the ER, where time is of the essence and the workload can be overwhelming.”

Castro noted, however, that ChatGPT and other AI models have some limitations.

“Despite AI’s potential, the presence of inaccuracies in AI-generated summaries — although minimal — raises concerns about the reliability of using AI as the sole source for clinical decision-making,” Castro said.

Link to the rest at Fox News and thanks to F. for the tip.

In Defense of Imagination

From Public Books:

In his short story “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu makes a case for imagination’s value: for its innate significance and material power. I teach “The Paper Menagerie” every year in my introduction to literary studies course at West Virginia University, and every year, it makes me and most of my students cry. Liu’s story charts the deterioration of a once tender relationship between a Chinese mother and her Chinese American son, figuring their connection through a set of magical paper animals. The creatures that Mom crafts out of recycled wrapping paper using zhezhi, or Chinese papercraft, are imbued with life, and Jack establishes a strong bond with all of the animals, especially Laohu, a tiger. But as a preteen, after a neighborhood child instigates a racist bullying campaign that centers around the menagerie, Jack distances himself from his mother and all that she stands for: her cultural practices; her papercraft; her racial difference. It’s only years after her death, after his girlfriend finds the menagerie in storage and Laohu comes alive once more, that Jack finally values his mom and realizes all that he’s lost.

In its emotional intensity and exquisitely crafted plot, “The Paper Menagerie” is a wonderful vehicle for reaching students, but the feature that really draws me back each time is its rich theory of art. For Liu, art’s power resides simultaneously in its three main elements: the creative process, the work itself, and the act of aesthetic appreciation. Liu registers this flexible and expansive theory of art through the trope of paper—this story’s dominant motif. Paper takes many forms in “The Paper Menagerie”: it’s a reusable resource (like the wrapping paper that Mom uses to craft her animals); a method of facilitating transnational connection (in the printed catalogs that Jack’s dad uses to meet Mom, who was then in Hong Kong); a metonym for immigration documentation (Mom needs papers to move to the US); and a medium for communicating a personal history (Laohu unfurls his body upon his revival, revealing a letter from Mom to her estranged son). It’s through art—through Laohu—that Mom is able to posthumously reconnect with Jack by narrating her life story, expressing her pain at his emotional distance and confirming her abiding love for him. It’s also through art that Jack is finally able to appreciate both his mother and his cultural heritage. Unlike the ineffectual paper tigers of idiom, Liu’s animate paper menagerie signifies art’s vitality: its liveliness and magic; its necessity and power.


Believing in art’s magic—in the power of creativity to bring imagined worlds to life—underpins every aspect of my work as an English professor, and never more so than this year, when both my job and its very purpose were under threat. As a professor at the now infamously beleaguered West Virginia University, a labor organizer with West Virginia Campus Workers, and a faculty senator engaging with a frequently hostile administration, my own reflections on art’s value, and more broadly of the liberal arts, have taken an acute turn.

In March 2023, WVU president E. Gordon Gee made the shock announcement that hundreds of faculty and staff would be subject to a reduction in force (RIF) and dozens of core educational programs would close. Since then, WVU employees have lived in a state of significant anxiety. By June 2023, 135 faculty and staff had lost their jobs. By July, nearly half of the remaining faculty were under review. By August, afflicted programs appealed their fates, defending themselves against drastic cuts that would see entire departments eliminated and others losing nearly half of all professors. By September, the board of governors had cut an additional 143 faculty at all ranks while an additional eight people were unilaterally laid off in the John Chambers College of Business and Economics. By October, faculty who’d been cut had received their notices of termination. By November, RIFed faculty had begun the process of appealing the university’s decisions; only one was successful. They’d also learned that, despite the best efforts of a team of DC and WV employment lawyers, their cases lacked the necessary common ground for a class action suit. By December, more people had learned that they would be let go; 16 people were RIFed in the Libraries and 9 people in the Teaching and Learning Commons. So far, 311 people have lost their jobs, with untold consequences for the university’s reputation, employee morale, the local economy, and the future educational opportunities of young West Virginians.

Narrated this way, the picture is bleak—and the mood in Morgantown is bleak indeed. Too many talented employees have lost their livelihoods because university leadership has seemingly decided that higher education should cater to market needs rather than cultivate independent thought and intellectual passion. President Gee’s insistence that there is no financial crisis, despite a well-publicized $45 million deficit, suggests that these unprecedented cuts are at least as much ideologically fueled as they are caused by taking on an unsustainable debt load and failing to convince Republican legislatures to increase spending on public universities. WVU’s administration continues to spend lavishly on their own comforts, including unnecessary flights on private jets. Meanwhile, more than 300 people and their families have lost their jobs and incomes, harming our local economy and the very fabric of our community.

But what’s happening at WVU is not an anomaly, except in scale. Since WVU announced its unprecedented cuts, administrators have announced layoffs at UNC Greensboro, SUNY Potsdam, the University of New Hampshire, and more. And it’s not just the humanities that are at risk, either; WVU’s sweeping cuts have impacted programs as diverse as math, chemistry, music, languages, public health, soil sciences, and education. Leadership teams across the country are coming for the liberal arts, selling the public an inferior product that’s been packaged by management consultancies, particularly Huron Consulting Group and rpk GROUP. What’s emerging is a radicalized belief that the public university is a place not to acquire deep knowledge but to learn basic job skills. In their commitment to market logics and the whims of a small sector of the right-wing electorate, an increasing number of university presidents have little time for independent thought or creative intellectual inquiry that might not bear immediately practical applications. In West Virginia, the current legislature has cast young people in the state as unworthy of having career aspirations beyond a handful of localized industries. The transformed university that Gee imagines as his legacy, from this, his last presidential post, is built on market logics that valorize skill acquisition and ignore the value of deep learning.

In August 2023, when uncertainty over my own employment and academic future was at its highest, and when all of us on campus were worried about our colleagues and students, teaching “The Paper Menagerie” offered a welcome reprieve. Immersed in an exquisitely crafted and conceptually complex story, I could share with my students the value of studying what you love. Unlike WVU’s leadership or the consultancies that it’s used to legitimize its actions, Liu rejects the oppressive dictates and dull uniformity of market logics. His account of the paper menagerie applauds experimentation and idiosyncrasy, curiosity and imagination—qualities that are not only dismissed by neoliberal advocates of market dominance but that cannot thrive under such conditions. Jack and the animals play together for years, sharing adventures that sometimes produce sheer pleasure and at other times lead to casualties: the water buffalo tries to wallow in soy sauce, only to discover that his paper feet soak up the liquid, damaging his capillaries and leaving him with a permanent limp. Laohu chases sparrows in the backyard but stops after “a cornered bird struck back in desperation and tore his ear.” And a shark drowns after Jack places him in water: the shark “became soggy and translucent, … the folds coming undone.” Yet these methods of failed experimentation also lead to discoveries: the buffalo learns to avoid liquids, Laohu learns to avoid sparrows, and Jack learns that paper sharks are not made for water—but that their tinfoil variant can swim. The process of deep learning, Liu suggests, requires imagination and creativity, experimentation and play, whether or not these activities yield profits or strengthen markets.

Link to the rest at Public Books

Having attended college in a different century, PG is in no position to provide informed commentary on the OP, but will say that shaking up need not be the same as shaking down.

Write Like a Man

From The Wall Street Journal:

Many years ago, at a dinner party attended by some of the ex-radicals turned Cold Warriors known as the New York intellectuals, the table talk turned to denigrating writers reputed to be soft on communism and praising the “hard” anticommunists who were fighting for democracy and freedom. Before the guests could become too complacent, however, the literary critic Diana Trilling stood up and declared: “None of you men are hard enough for me!”

In “Write Like a Man,” Ronnie A. Grinberg recounts this scene to illustrate how members of this “testosterone-driven literary circle,” as she calls it, “came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo” as they reinvented both themselves and liberalism to meet the exigencies of Cold War politics. When old anxieties were magnified by new ideological challenges, Ms. Grinberg writes, “a masculinity centered on strength, toughness, and virility” became a defining feature of New York intellectual life.

Ms. Grinberg, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, briefly takes up American Jewish novelists who were eager to defy stereotypes—of the timid schlemiel or bookish Talmudic scholar—and to overcome what Norman Mailer called “the softness of a man early accustomed to motherlove.” But her real focus is on a group of intellectuals—men and women both—who “prized verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.”

The principal figure here is Diana Trilling, a brilliant essayist and the wife of the celebrated cultural critic Lionel Trilling. Diana, “the more abrasive of the two,” Ms. Grinberg writes, balanced her husband’s checkbook and deftly edited his drafts. But when she offered similar editorial help to various male friends, they took it (as she herself reported) “as an assault on their masculinity.” According to the novelist and memoirist Ann Birstein, many men in this milieu “feared losing their manhood to literary women.” She noted that “reviews of my books still referred to me in parenthesis as Mrs. Alfred Kazin, as if that were a career in itself.”

Like other “literary wives”—Zelda Fitzgerald, Veza Canetti and, in this book, the essayist Pearl Kazin Bell come to mind—Diana struggled to emerge from the shadow of her husband’s reputation and establish herself in her own right. “I wanted as much for him as he wanted for himself,” she said of Lionel, the first Jew granted tenure at Columbia University’s English department, “and more than I wanted for myself.”

By the time of his death in 1975, she had published a single collection of essays. But along with other doyennes who held their own in this crowd—including the political theorist Hannah Arendt and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb—Diana showed herself to be a vigorous and productive thinker. She earned a place at the table with her devotion to what she called “the life of significant contention” and to what Ms. Grinberg calls the determination to “write like a man.”

In her criticism and cultural portraiture, Diana Trilling delivered sharp polemical thrusts aimed at all sorts of targets, including male writers from her own milieu. She said that Saul Bellow’s debut novel, “Dangling Man” (1944), was among the “small novels of sterility.” She boasted that “a Viennese novelist, a refugee from Nazi Austria, was said to have remarked that he had lost his country, his home, his language, but that he had at least one good fortune: he has not been reviewed by me.” Such sharpness could cut both ways. On reading her attack on the student takeover of Columbia in 1968, the poet Robert Lowell (a fan of the students, to say the least) dismissed her as “some housekeeping goddess of reason.”

The agitation of the 1960s brought other intellectual polemicists to the fore, not least Norman Podhoretz (longtime editor of Commentary) and Midge Decter, who argued that the left needed to do some housekeeping of its own—by rejecting a political outlook that favored appeasement and opposed the muscular exercise of American power. Together the couple helped define what came to be called “neoconservatism.” Decter in particular found herself at odds with the ascendant women’s liberation movement and the ways it undermined traditional standards—moral and aesthetic both. In a chapter called “the first lady of neoconservatism,” Ms. Grinberg argues that this antipathy was at the very heart of a sensibility Decter shared with other women in this group, including Arendt, Himmelfarb and Susan Sontag. “Despite the sexism they encountered,” Ms. Grinberg writes, they “disparaged feminists.” They expected real writers to address “serious topics with masculine drive and ruthlessness. . . . In their view, feminists did not meet this standard.”

Ms. Grinberg rounds out the group portrait with Irving Howe, the anthologizer of Yiddish literature, author of the magisterial “World of Our Fathers” (1976), and presiding sage of Dissent, the magazine he launched in 1954. Unlike others in this cohort who found themselves “mugged by reality” and moving from left to right, Howe kept his socialist allegiances. But like the neoconservatives, he had little patience for either the strident “desperadoes” of the New Left or the grievances of the feminists. In a piece Decter commissioned him to write for Harper’s, Howe skewered the feminist Kate Millett as a “figment of the Zeitgeist” and scorned her bestseller, “Sexual Politics” (1970), as “intellectual goulash.”

In his essays “The Lost Young Intellectual” and “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique,” Howe recognized that, despite the internecine quarrels carried out in the pages of Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent, these Americanized writers striving to “make it” shared two states of mind. First, profound guilt over the helplessness that they or their families felt as they watched, from safe perches on the banks of the Hudson, the destruction of Europe’s Jews during the Shoah. Second, filial impiety: They often saw their immigrant fathers as failed breadwinners, as men who were, Ms. Grinberg writes, “in their own sons’ eyes, emasculated.” Howe’s father, an immigrant to the Bronx from the Russian Pale of Settlement, had gone bankrupt during the Depression. For others, the failure might be less literal, but the judgment seemed broadly to apply.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Gun violence killed them. Now, their voices will lobby Congress to do more using AI

From National Public Radio

“It’s been six years, and you’ve done nothing,” Joaquin Oliver’s voice echoed across the U.S. Capitol grounds Wednesday. “Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have continued to happen since.”

On Feb. 14, 2018, Oliver started another day as a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. By the end, he was one of 17 people murdered at the school in a mass shooting that sparked a worldwide, youth-led movement on gun violence.

Now, people can hear his voice again.

Oliver’s audio is one of six messages generated by artificial intelligence meant to resemble different voices of individuals killed by guns in incidents over the past decade. It’s part of an initiative led by March For Our Lives, the gun control organization borne out of the Parkland shooting, and Change The Ref, a group started by Oliver’s parents, vocal advocates Manny and Patricia Oliver.

The messages will appear on the Shotline, a new online platform that the groups created, where users can individually send the AI-generated audio directly to the offices of members of Congress, demanding further action on gun violence prevention. The initiative was announced in front of the Capitol Wednesday, the sixth anniversary of the Parkland shooting.

Link to the rest at National Public Radio

PG says this is over the top, beyond the pale, etc.

Perplexity Talks About Self-Publishing

PG spent a little time with Perplexity an AI writing assistant. You can decide how useful it was. He used the free version, which he found to be quite powerful.

Note: Perplexity responses includes links to online sources it found and, presumably, used in formatting its responses. PG has left the live links in place at the end of each of the bullet points at the end of the bullet points. He’s not certain whether extensive use will break the links or not.

PG was disappointed about the limited number of sources Perplexity apparently relied upon. He speculates that the professional version, which requires a subscription fee of $20 per month or $200 per year, will provide information from a wider range of sources.

You will want to check out the links to get a sense of the types of sources Perplexity uses in crafting its response. PG will need to do some more research into the question of how the program assesses the reliability of the information it uses.

Prompt: What are the tradeoffs between self-publishing and traditional publishing?

Response: Based on the search results provided, here is a summary of the key tradeoffs between self-publishing and traditional publishing:

Self-Publishing Pros

  • Full control over the creative process, including content, cover design, pricing, and release timeline123
  • Higher royalty rates, allowing authors to keep a larger share of book sales revenue123
  • Faster time to market, with books potentially published within 6 months12
  • Ability to publish niche or specialized books that may not appeal to traditional publishers12

Self-Publishing Cons

  • Responsibility for all publishing tasks like editing, marketing, and distribution, which can be time-consuming and expensive123
  • Difficulty in getting self-published books into physical bookstores and achieving wide distribution123
  • Potential perception of lower quality or credibility compared to traditionally published books123
  • Challenges in effective book marketing without the support of a publishing house’s marketing team123

Traditional Publishing Pros

  • Access to industry expertise and resources for editing, design, printing, distribution, and marketing123
  • Potential for higher visibility and credibility through established publisher relationships123
  • Possibility of receiving an advance payment prior to publication23
  • Wider distribution through publisher’s channels, including bookstores123

Traditional Publishing Cons

  • Highly competitive selection process, with low acceptance rates for unsolicited manuscripts123
  • Longer timeline to publication, often taking 2+ years123
  • Less creative control, as publishers make key decisions about the book123
  • Lower royalty rates compared to self-publishing123

In summary, self-publishing offers more control and potentially higher royalties, while traditional publishing provides industry expertise, credibility, and wider distribution, but with less creative control and a longer timeline. The best option depends on the author’s goals, resources, and target audience

A new generation of music-making algorithms is here

From The Economist:

IN THE dystopia of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, Big Brother numbs the masses with the help of a “versificator”, a machine designed to automatically generate the lyrics to popular tunes, thereby ridding society of human creativity. Today, numerous artificial-intelligence (AI) models churn out, some free of charge, the music itself. Unsurprisingly, many fear a world flooded with generic and emotionally barren tunes, with human musicians edged out in the process. Yet there are brighter signs, too, that AI may well drive a boom in musical creativity.

AI music-making is nothing new. The first, so-called “rules-based”, models date to the 1950s. These were built by painstakingly translating principles of music theory into algorithmic instructions and probability tables to determine note and chord progressions. The outputs were musically sound but creatively limited. Ed Newton-Rex, an industry veteran who designed one such model for Jukedeck, a London firm he founded in 2012, describes that approach as good for the day but irrelevant now.

The clearest demonstration that times have changed came in August 2023. That is when Meta, a social-media giant, released the source code for AudioCraft, a suite of large “generative” music models built using machine learning. AI outfits worldwide promptly set about using Meta’s software to train new music generators, many with additional code folded in. One AudioCraft model, MusicGen, analysed patterns in some 400,000 recordings with a collective duration of almost 28 months to come up with 3.3bn “parameters”, or variables, that enables the algorithm to generate patterns of sounds in response to prompts. The space this creates for genuinely new AI compositions is unprecedented.

Such models are also getting easier to use. In September Stability AI, a firm based in London at which Mr Newton-Rex worked until recently, released a model, Stable Audio, trained on some 800,000 tracks. Users guide it by entering text and audio clips. This makes it easy to upload, say, a guitar solo and have it recomposed in jazzy piano, perhaps with a vinyl playback feel. Audio prompts are a big deal for two reasons, says Oliver Bown of Australia’s University of New South Wales. First, even skilled musicians struggle to put music into words. Second, because most musical training data are only cursorily tagged, even a large model may not understand a request for, say, a four-bar bridge in ragtime progression (the style familiar from Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”).

The potential, clearly, is vast. But many in the industry remain sceptical. One widespread sentiment is that AI will never produce true music. That’s because, as a musician friend recently told Yossef Adi, an engineer at Meta’s AI lab in Tel Aviv, “no one broke its heart”. That may be true, but some AI firms reckon that they have found a way to retain and reproduce the “unique musical fingerprint” of their musician users, as LifeScore, a company founded near London, puts it. LifeScore’s AI limits itself to recomposing the elements of a user’s original recordings in ways that maintain the music’s feel, rather than turning them into something radically new.

It takes about a day to plug into LifeScore’s model the dozens of individually recorded vocal and instrumental microphone tracks, or stems, that go into producing an original song. Once that’s done, however, the software, developed at a cost of some $10m, can rework each stem into a new tempo, key or genre within a couple of seconds. The song’s artists, present during the process, choose which remixes to keep. Manually remixing a hit track has traditionally taken one or more highly paid specialists weeks.

LifeScore, says Tom Gruber, a co-founder, is “literally swamped with requests” from clients including Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. An original release is typically turned into anywhere from a handful to a dozen remixes. But one client aims to release a dizzying 6,000 or so AI versions of an original track, each targeting a different market. Artists including Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Tom Gaebel, a German pop singer, use LifeScore’s AI to power websites that allow fans to generate, with a few clicks, new remixes adapted to personal tastes.

The beat of a different drum

If this seems like dizzying progress, it’s worth noting that AI’s impact on music is still in its early days. Legal uncertainties over the use of copyrighted recordings to train models have slowed development. Outfits that have coughed up for licensing fees note that this can get expensive. To save on that cost, MusicGen’s training set mostly sidestepped hits, says Dr Adi. Though output is pretty good, he adds, the model is not yet “artistic enough” to generate narratively complete songs. Harmonic misalignments are common. OpenAI, a San Francisco firm, for its part, says its MuseNet model struggles to pull off “odd pairings”, such as a Chopin style that incorporates bass and drums.

In time, bigger training sets of better music will largely overcome such shortcomings, developers reckon. A Stability AI spokesperson says that while Stable Audio’s top duration for coherently structured music—“intro, development and outro”—is now about 90 seconds, upgrades will produce longer pieces with “full musicality”. But judging music AI by its ability to crank out polished tracks mostly misses the point. The technology’s greatest promise, for now at least, lies elsewhere.

Part of it is the empowerment of amateurs. AI handles technical tasks beyond many people’s capabilities and means. As a result, AI is drawing legions of newbies into music-making. This is a boon for experimentation by what Simon Cross, head of products at Native Instruments, a firm based in Berlin, calls “bedroom producers”.

. . . .

AI serves professionals, too. The soundtracks to “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were cleaned up in post-production with RX, for example. Another application area is “style transfer”, in which models transform music recorded with one instrument into sounds that seem to come from a different one, often with a twist or two requested by the user. Style transfers are also used for voice. A model developed by a startup in London called Voice-Swap slices up sounds sung by (remunerated) professional singers and rearranges the slivers into lyrics written by the service’s users, who pay licensing fees for the rights to sell the resulting tracks. And AI tools already exist to recreate singers’ voices in other languages. Vocaloid, a voice-synthesising tool from Yamaha, a Japanese instrument manufacturer, is one of many that can use a translation sung by a native speaker as a template for an AI to imitate as it rearranges, modifies and stitches together tiny snippets of the original singer’s voice.

Link to the rest at The Economist

A Love That Endured Life’s March Madness

From The Wall Street Journal:

In 1956 the Ohio State University basketball team moved out of the drafty old Ohio Fairgrounds Coliseum and into the newly constructed St. John Arena. As a 9-year-old, I was excited to get a ticket to one of the daytime games.

I have no memory of who Ohio State was playing that afternoon, but there is one thing I have never forgotten.

The captain of the Buckeyes, Gene Millard, would bring the ball down the court and for the whole game there was a pretty young woman sitting in the stands near my elementary-school buddies and me, shouting enthusiastically. “Geno!” “Geno!” “Geno!” She never stopped. He was the entire focus of her attention.

I thought at the time that it must be so great to be out on the court and have someone like you so much.

I didn’t know it that day, but she was his wife. Gene Millard and Sally Settle had met while in eighth grade in Dayton, Ohio, and married while college sophomores.

After Mr. Millard’s senior season it was five years before I had reason to think about him again—when he arrived at our town’s high school as the new history teacher and basketball coach.

We could tell immediately what a good guy he was—unfailingly friendly, thoroughly unfull of himself, available to talk with anyone, athlete or not. From the moment he and Sally came to our community—Bexley, Ohio—they were a solid part of it. They raised their children there, regularly attended neighborhood events, were devoted members of the Bexley United Methodist Church.

The one constant was that they were always Sally and Gene. They came as a package deal—you couldn’t think about one without thinking about the other. Years and then generations passed, and they were no longer the young hotshot on the Ohio State hardwood and the adoring young wife in the stands. They had become something more important: the soul of the community, its quintessence. That kind of thing can happen in a small American town. You could move away, but every time you thought of home, you thought of Sally and Gene.

Gene finally retired as the new century began, but the Millards remained in town. Speaking about Sally, Lee Caryer—one of the students who was there when she and Gene first arrived—said: “No matter how you met her, she remembered your name and cared about your life.”

In the wider world of basketball, March Madness is under way. When the college tournament ends the CBS television network will, as always, play the song “One Shining Moment” to celebrate the new national champions.

Yet there are championships in this life, and then there are championships. Gene and Sally Millard had decades of shining moments together—68 years of marriage. She died in January at 88. Gene, 89 and without Sally for the first time since eighth grade, is living with one of his sons.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Pay Attention to the Obsessive Workings of Your Mind

From Jane Friedman:

On New Year’s Day, during my senior year of college, a gruesome double murder took place in my hometown. The couple stabbed to death in their sleep lived across the street from my aunt and uncle, around the corner from my childhood best friend, doors down from where another old friend grew up.

Like everyone else in the town, I was shocked and frightened by the news. Although fingerprints were left all over the house, no match for them was found. Time passed but the case remained unsolved. The theory: it was a drug crime. The victims were doctors, so someone in search of drugs followed them home on the commuter train, and something went terribly wrong.

Four years later, when a suspect was finally arrested, my connection to the murders became even closer: the young man indicted was the quiet boy from the back row of my fourth-grade class. I was shocked all over again.

The case was big news, not only for those of us with connections to the town, but for the courts as well: the defendant confessed within the supposed guarantee of confidentiality of an AA meeting. He had been drunk; the murder took place in his childhood home; he thought he was killing his parents.

I couldn’t stop thinking about his childhood—what went on in that home that would drive him, in a drunken rage years later, to murder his own parents. And also what it was like for his parents, defending the son who the world knows tried to … meant to … did! kill them. And was he one of the boys I briefly crushed on in fourth grade?

I encourage my writing students to take their obsessions seriously, to follow them, delve into them. What we obsess about is our material. The story of the murders obsessed me. Because it took place in my hometown. Because I grew up with the man who committed the murders. Because the victims were not the intended victims. Because the intended victims were the parents of the man who killed them. The story of the murders, though, had already been told in countless news articles. Even in an episode of Law and Order. My task, then, was to find a way to tell my fiction about the facts.

So I went back to what the story did to me. It destabilized me. I could relate to everyone in the story—the dead, the convicted, the relatives of the dead, the intended dead. Then I asked myself: what else destabilizes me? Contemporary art—its rawness and its familiarity; secrecy—its power to protect and its certainty to betray; #metoo stories—their ubiquity and their endless ability to enrage.

Through the expanded field of these other concerns, I found my way into my own telling of the story: in “The Audio Guide,” a young, female museum intern takes revenge on the museum director (an older married man who seduced her and ditched her) by recording an explicit, tell-all narration for visitors to a disturbing art exhibit inspired by the double murders.

While headlines may inspire stories, ideas need not arrive as made-for-television crime dramas. With a properly tuned antenna there’s enough everyday strangeness to power an observant writer for the rest of their days: At the end of a yoga class one day, I had the distinct impression that we’d been left in savasana a bit too long. I opened my eyes to check the clock and noticed that the teacher was lying awfully still. For a moment I imagined she’d stopped breathing. Sleeping Beauty came to mind. (The yoga teacher was, as central casting and life in a 21st-century yoga studio will have it, a fairy-tale beauty—lithe body, perfect skin, waist-length hair.)

By the time I made it home, the idea of a story had hatched—Sleeping Beauty as told today, in her own words. I am obsessed with fairy tales, especially the original ones that are darker and stranger than their commonly known, sanitized versions. A little research led me to, “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” Giambattista Basile’s early 17th-century precursor to Sleeping Beauty replete with death, rape, birth, and betrayal.

But to allow for the story to explore something meaningful to me I needed more. Something to rub up against, a question to vex. When my students feel stuck, I tell them to think of a story as a braid—what three strands might wind themselves around one another to create a denser texture to their fiction?

So here we are, back to our obsessions. Keep track of them, note them down. I have obsessions enough to weave into a goddess head of plaits. “Corpse Pose” is a braid of Sleeping Beauty, a yoga studio, and a mother-daughter relationship. In my version of the fairy tale, Beauty works for her mother and is laid out on the dais of the studio she owns.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

How to Write a Book Right Now

From Vulture:

What I really liked about reading this book was — well, my writing advice is like yours. You have to write a lot. Sure, be nice to yourself, but go. But then other people had other kinds of advice. J. Courtney Sullivan’s thing was so brilliant. She had a really young kid. She didn’t have child care. And so every night she would send herself an email with the same subject line. And when she came back later, she called these emails her bread crumbs waiting for her to come and write them through. That’s a brilliant technique. 

I could write this book because these people all told me I could.

You said recently you’ve been thinking a lot about aging, as one does at our age. Are you leaving yourself bread crumbs about aging?

I think so. I started this other little newsletter about it. It has to do with aging as a woman, menopause, the culture. It’s very small, personal stuff, building a little community out of it. But it’s not the big thing that I do — well! I always say it’s not the thing that I do and then it’ll always become something more. I think I’m using this thinking for a character. If you’ve been writing professionally for a long time, nothing you do is a waste of time. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah!

It’s the same thing as the vibe of the book. It’s not a waste of time. People worry too much about that. Why don’t you be playful? Why don’t you enjoy what you’re doing and not worry, not compare yourself to other people or say, Oh, I’m not this. I’m not that. Just sit down and try it.

All of our lives show that if you follow interests, they take you somewhere worthwhile. This book is really interesting about — this is really ’90s — but about declaring, “Well, I’m an artist. I’m living an artist’s life. Where I live and how I live reflect these choices.” It’s refreshing to hear.

I was thinking about the very first time I met you, I think you had a party for bloggers? It was on the Lower East Side, and maybe it was even that bar that looked like an airplane. [Idlewild, on Houston Street, opened in 1998 and there is not a single picture of it online that I can find! The staff wore “stewardess outfits”!]

That is so funny. Co-hosted by writer and writing teacher Blaise Allysen Kearsley, I believe.

We didn’t really know what blogging meant or if it would do anything for us or if it would take us anywhere. We were like, “This seems kind of interesting and cool.” It felt experimental. Your imagination never really steers you wrong. Your curiosity doesn’t steer you wrong.

Had you published your first book yet?

No, I just had a blog. And I was making zines. I miss it. I really do. I like having things you can touch, because so much of what we do is ephemeral on the internet. I still have them. They’re like precious little objects to me. And they don’t take two years, too.

Books are so long, and that’s what stops so many of us, or traps so many of us. 

Now that I’ve crossed over the 50 threshold. I’m really seeing, Okay, this is the second half of my life. I figured out what I like to do, but there’s more to learn, more to try. I just want to keep doing as much cool stuff as I can for the rest of my time.

I was thinking about bad habits — habits that have stayed too long at the fair. That’s drinking, eating, smoking. When you quit smoking, were you afraid that you would never write again? 

Oh, I did love smoking. It was definitely how I took a break. If I write a couple hundred words, then I can have a cigarette. And it was part of going out. The conversation was better outside than it was inside. Or so we believed. I don’t know if it’s true, but it is fun to hang out with the smokers. I’m okay without it.

. . . .

You write about the sounds in your house in the front and how that soundscape is different from the sounds in the back. The environment of the place is part of what you’re making.

Everything I do is centered around being creative in one way or another. At this point I have to have my long walks and I have to read and I have to write in my journal. And I know a lot of people who are creative or interesting or open to creative conversations. That’s really helpful. It’s having people you can surround yourself with. The book is so much about community, and I really believe in that. Finding your people is half the battle.

People have asked you since forever: How do I write a novel? Has your answer now changed, cemented? Now that you have a big answer in a book form, do you have a set answer that you give them? 

There are no shortcuts. The most important thing is that the best part of it is the writing. The best part of it is making something cool. We should really enjoy that process and not worry about the book deal or if you’re going to get an agent or if you should build your social-media presence now. Which is a question that people ask: “How much should I be focusing on social media?” And I’m like, “You should be focusing on getting 65,000 words down on the page.” And enjoying it. Why do you want to be here? What kind of writer do you want to be? What kind of stories do you want to tell? Those are the real questions you need to be asking. The answers are going to fill you up. The answers are going to help you grow as a person. Do I sound self-help-y?

Link to the rest at Vulture

The Wound of Individuality and the Literary Experience

From The Center for Lit:

I was recently troubled by a conversation that occurred in a book club meeting I attend. We’d read The Five Wounds, a contemporary novel by Kirstin Valdez Quade about a dysfunctional, multi-generational Hispanic family. A participant expressed doubt about his ability to read Quade’s novel with proper understanding and “sensitivity,” because he doesn’t share the author’s heritage or gender.

Before I could stop myself, I’d uttered the startled, single word reply: “Why?” To be honest, I had to bite my tongue so hard it bled to stop myself from launching into a lengthy treatise about the act and purpose of reading, which is, as you know, a bit of a soap box issue for me. But I consider it bad taste to commandeer a book club I’m not leading; so, I held my peace in the moment. Only, I can’t seem to stop thinking about the implications of this conversation regarding the nature and purpose of reading because, if it’s really necessary to share a common gender and heritage with an author, then why even try to discuss works outside of one’s own tribe? And doesn’t this conclusion obviate one of the most fundamental benefits of the reading experience?

Beyond the pure enjoyment of reading, we read to encounter the Other and to enlarge our understanding of what it is to be a human being in this world. In fiction, authors contribute to what Mortimer Adler and his friend Robert Hutchins termed The Great Conversation about what it is to be human. We read to listen in on this conversation about the universal things of human experience.

 I’m reminded particularly of C.S. Lewis’s comment in his treatise on reading, An Experiment in Criticism

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise (sic) the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented… In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. 

When we read, Lewis explains, we entertain absent authors, inviting them to pull up a chair in the living room of our minds and share with us their thoughts regarding the Permanent Things of this world. If we read and listen carefully, we might come to understand the author’s perspective regarding those universals. If we are affected by what they have to say, if we are moved by their art, we might even agree to rearrange our own intellectual furniture – to redecorate, as it were.

 The “guide” my friend from my book club sought — the Hispanic woman who would lead him into a greater sensitivity and understanding of the novel from her unique perspective —was with us all along in the person of our author. By the time he made his comment, in fact, most of us had entertained her for the better part of a month, taking her on as a virtual, long-term house guest in our interior thoughts as we read. We didn’t need additional Hispanic women to interpret her words for us. She wrote in English, and she wrote well. If we pay her the compliment of our serious attention — that is, if we read carefully — we can certainly come to terms with her.

Although I won’t recommend Ms. Quade’s book, due to some graphic sexual imagery and stock characterizations, I’m thankful that it isn’t necessary for me to agree with her or to share her national or biological history in order to understand her. We are certainly influenced by our own experiences in the world, but we can make progress toward understanding the experiences of others by means of literature. When we read, we peer through the eyes of the Other without losing our individuality. Again, Lewis explains: “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.” I am not, like Quade or her characters, a person of Hispanic descent. I am not a 15-year-old single mom like her character Angel, nor a deadbeat father like her invention Amado. Yet, I can enter imaginatively into the experiences of such by means of the art of fiction. I can learn, perhaps, a little something of their cultural issues, their sorrows, and their sins (at least as the author herself perceives them) by borrowing, as Lewis suggests, Quade’s “spectacles.”

The value in reading seems self-evident. It is at least the discovery that, in spite of gender and cultural divides, human nature remains a common denominator. This commonality likewise betrays the universal experience of suffering and the ubiquitous need for grace. If this isn’t a balm to the sinful racism and social divisions that continue to plague mankind, I don’t know what is.

This is ultimately why the issue is such a big deal to me: the idea that you must be a Hispanic reader to understand a Hispanic author is the kiss of death to the enlarging and communal experience of reading. Do I have to be an 8th c. BC Greek man to read The Odyssey with understanding? Or a Regency-era white woman to understand and enjoy Jane Austen’s satires? Or a Victorian orphan in London to understand Dickens? If so, then the enlarging ability Lewis finds in literature, the vicarious experience and wisdom available through story, is a fiction.

If we allow it to be a fiction, we put ourselves in a precarious position regarding that Great, True Story that is the New Testament. Need I be a first century Jew to understand the Nativity Story, or a Pharisee like Paul to embrace the gospel he preaches? If so, I’m truly alone, imprisoned in the echo-chamber of my own mind. Conversely, does being of common descent with an author promise that I will encounter the author’s story with understanding, never mind sensitivity? The history of the rejection of the gospel by the first century Jews suggests otherwise. Common language and common cultural experiences offer no guarantee of understanding, nor agreement between authors and readers. 

Link to the rest at The Center for Lit

PG stumbled across the OP a long time ago, lost it, but recently recovered it.

He agrees with the author’s premise. Despite all the various ethnic, sexual, national, sub-national groups into which much of society is fracturing, our humanity unites us.

I’ve never met a person who was not a person like myself in more ways than she/he differed from me.

Emotion and the Art of Negotiation

From The Harvard Business Review:

Summary.   

Negotiations can be fraught with emotion, but it’s only recently that researchers have examined how particular feelings influence what happens during deal making. Here the author shares some key findings and advice.

Anxiety leads to poor outcomes.

You will be less nervous about negotiating, however, if you repeatedly practice and rehearse. You can also avoid anxiety by asking an outside expert to represent you at the bargaining table.

Anger is a double-edged sword.

In some cases, it intimidates the other parties and helps you strike a better deal, but in other situations, particularly those involving long-term relationships, it damages trust and goodwill and makes an impasse more likely. To avoid or defuse anger, take a break to cool off, or try expressing sadness and a desire to compromise.

Disappointment can be channeled to reach a more satisfactory outcome.

Before disappointment becomes regret, ask plenty of questions to assure yourself that you’ve explored all options. And don’t close the deal too early; you might find ways to sweeten it if you keep talking.

Excitement isn’t always a good thing.

Getting excited too early can lead you to act rashly, and gloating about the final terms can alienate your counterparts. But if feelings of excitement, like other emotions, are well managed, everyone can feel like a winner.

. . . .

It is, without question, my favorite day of the semester—the day when I teach my MBA students a negotiation exercise called “Honoring the Contract.”

I assign students to partners, and each reads a different account of a (fictitious) troubled relationship between a supplier (a manufacturer of computer components) and a client (a search engine start-up). They learn that the two parties signed a detailed contract eight months earlier, but now they’re at odds over several of the terms (sales volume, pricing, product reliability, and energy efficiency specs). Each student assumes the role of either client or supplier and receives confidential information about company finances and politics. Then each pair is tasked with renegotiating—a process that could lead to an amended deal, termination of the contract, or expensive litigation.

What makes this simulation interesting, however, lies not in the details of the case but in the top-secret instructions given to one side of each pairing before the exercise begins: “Please start the negotiation with a display of anger. You must display anger for a minimum of 10 minutes at the beginning.” The instructions go on to give specific tips for showing anger: Interrupt the other party. Call her “unfair” or “unreasonable.” Blame her personally for the disagreement. Raise your voice.

Before the negotiations begin, I spread the pairs all over the building so that the students can’t see how others are behaving. Then, as the pairs negotiate, I walk around and observe. Although some students struggle, many are spectacularly good at feigning anger. They wag a finger in their partner’s face. They pace around. I’ve never seen the exercise result in a physical confrontation—but it has come close. Some of the negotiators who did not get the secret instructions react by trying to defuse the other person’s anger. But some react angrily themselves—and it’s amazing how quickly the emotional responses escalate. When I bring everyone back into the classroom after 30 minutes, there are always students still yelling at each other or shaking their heads in disbelief.

During the debriefing, we survey the pairs to see how angry they felt and how they fared in resolving the problem. Often, the more anger the parties showed, the more likely it was that the negotiation ended poorly—for example, in litigation or an impasse (no deal). Once I’ve clued the entire class in on the setup, discussion invariably makes its way to this key insight: Bringing anger to a negotiation is like throwing a bomb into the process, and it’s apt to have a profound effect on the outcome.

Until 20 years ago, few researchers paid much attention to the role of emotions in negotiating—how feelings can influence the way people overcome conflict, reach agreement, and create value when dealing with another party. Instead, negotiation scholars focused primarily on strategy and tactics—particularly the ways in which parties can identify and consider alternatives, use leverage, and execute the choreography of offers and counteroffers. Scientific understanding of negotiation also tended to home in on the transactional nature of working out a deal: how to get the most money or profit from the process. Even when experts started looking at psychological influences on negotiations, they focused on diffuse and nonspecific moods—such as whether negotiators felt generally positive or negative, and how that affected their behavior.

Bringing anger to a negotiation is like throwing a bomb into the process.

Over the past decade, however, researchers have begun examining how specific emotions—anger, sadness, disappointment, anxiety, envy, excitement, and regret—can affect the behavior of negotiators. They’ve studied the differences between what happens when people simply feel these emotions and what happens when they also express them to the other party through words or actions. In negotiations that are less transactional and involve parties in long-term relationships, understanding the role of emotions is even more important than it is in transactional deal making.

This new branch of research is proving extremely useful. We all have the ability to regulate how we experience emotions, and specific strategies can help us improve tremendously in that regard. We also have some control over the extent to which we express our feelings—and again, there are specific ways to cloak (or emphasize) an expression of emotion when doing so may be advantageous. For instance, research shows that feeling or looking anxious results in suboptimal negotiation outcomes. So individuals who are prone to anxiety when brokering a deal can take certain steps both to limit their nervousness and to make it less obvious to their negotiation opponent. The same is true for other emotions.

In the pages that follow, I discuss—and share coping strategies for—many of the emotions people typically feel over the course of a negotiation. Anxiety is most likely to crop up before the process begins or during its early stages. We’re prone to experience anger or excitement in the heat of the discussions. And we’re most likely to feel disappointment, sadness, or regret in the aftermath.

Avoiding Anxiety

Anxiety is a state of distress in reaction to threatening stimuli, particularly novel situations that have the potential for undesirable outcomes. In contrast to anger, which motivates people to escalate conflict (the “fight” part of the fight-or-flight response), anxiety trips the “flight” switch and makes people want to exit the scene.

Because patience and persistence are often desirable when negotiating, the urge to exit quickly is counterproductive. But the negative effects of feeling anxious while negotiating may go further. In my recent research, I wondered if anxious negotiators also develop low aspirations and expectations, which could lead them to make timid first offers—a behavior that directly predicts poor negotiating outcomes.

In work with Maurice Schweitzer in 2011, I explored how anxiety influences negotiations. First we surveyed 185 professionals about the emotions they expected to feel before negotiating with a stranger, negotiating to buy a car, and negotiating to increase their salary. When dealing with a stranger or asking for a higher salary, anxiety was the dominant emotional expectation; when negotiating for the car, anxiety was second only to excitement.

To understand how anxiety can affect negotiators, we then asked a separate group of 136 participants to negotiate a cell phone contract that required agreeing on a purchase price, a warranty period, and the length of the contract. We induced anxiety in half the participants by having them listen to continuous three-minute clips of the menacing theme music from the film Psycho, while the other half listened to pleasant music by Handel. (Researchers call this “incidental” emotional manipulation, and it’s quite powerful. Listening to the Psycho music is genuinely uncomfortable: People’s palms get sweaty, and some listeners become jumpy.)

Link to the rest at The Harvard Business Review

A long time ago, PG mentioned one of the best continuing legal education programs he ever attended featured a presentation on what was then called something like The Harvard Negotiating Studies Program. The program was a joint activity involving both the Law School and the Business School.

A lot of businesspeople and lawyers back then believed that negotiation skills were mostly a talent that someone either possessed or didn’t. Various negotiation strategies were thought to be optimum – Take it or Leave it – Always start with a higher price than you are willing to accept. Nobody should pay list price for anything.

There were a few business and law professors who had conducted studies and written papers and books about negotiation. PG remembers that a couple of professors at The University of Minnesota were writing about the subject.

The Harvard Program posited that negotiation skills could be learned. The first stage involved a series of experiments involving students and, in some cases, professors. Each participant played the role of a business executive negotiating the price and terms of an agreement with a third-party supplier of an important component needed by the business executive for her/his business.

Both the buyer and the seller were tasked with getting the best deal for their business—the seller wanted a higher price/better terms, and the buyer sought a lower price/better terms.

If the parties were not able to come to an agreement, the negotiation was regarded as a failure.

A large number of these negotiations were held and videotaped, using law and business students as negotiators. The videotapes were carefully analyzed and a variety of new ideas about effective negotiations and negotiation strategies were developed.

One of the main discoveries was that preparation in advance for a negotiation was very important for success. One of the preparation tasks involved determining the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement – BATNA.

BATNA allowed a negotiator to avoid being trapped into a mindset that she/he absolutely had to get a deal from the negotiation. BATNA meant that there was always an alternative to coming to an agreement in this particular negotiation.

Between when PG first discovered negotiation science and now, it appears to PG that the Harvard Project has grown into a full-blown permanent organization involving both the Harvard Law School and the Business School.

Here’s how the Law School describes it:

The Harvard Negotiation Project seeks to improve the theory and practice of conflict resolution and negotiation using real-world conflict intervention, theory building, and education and training.

The Harvard Negotiation Project was created in 1979 and was one of the founding organizations of the Program on Negotiation consortium. The work of faculty, staff, and students associated with the Harvard Negotiation Project routinely moves back and forth between the worlds of theory and practice to develop ideas that practitioners find useful and scholars sound.

As the world’s first teaching and research center dedicated to negotiation, its founders are among the true pioneers in the field. As part of their commitment to helping other teachers, the Harvard Negotiation Project staff have developed a wealth of negotiation exercises, teaching notes, videotaped demonstrations, and interactive video and electronic lessons and made them available through the Program on Negotiation and Harvard Business School Publishing.

Along with the many classes and teaching materials, the Harvard Negotiation Project is famous for its development of “principled negotiation” as described in Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton’s groundbreaking work, Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In.

Getting to YES has helped negotiators claim value and create value at the bargaining table ever since its first publication in 1981 and continues to do so today. Getting to YES has shown negotiators how to create value for mutual benefit and avoid acrimonious disputes at the bargaining table and, in doing so, has changed the negotiation landscape.

PG immediately started using these principles in negotiations he was involved with as a rural attorney. They worked very well and his clients benefitted.

PG apologizes for wandering deep into Yarn Country, but he was triggered by the OP.

From Lead to Gold: The Alchemy of Character Arc With Carl Jung

From Helping Writers Become Authors:

Storytelling is a mystical crucible. Just as the ancient alchemists sought the transformation of base metals into gold, writers strive for the metamorphosis of their characters’ inner selves throughout the story. Alchemy, as explored through the lens of Carl Jung’s insights, can elevate your characters from the leaden weight of initial flaws to the gleaming brilliance of transformation.

Last fall, I spent part of my month-long writing retreat in the Berkshires auditing a series of online lectures from the Centre of Applied Jungian Studies. These lectures from leading Jungian experts, collected under the heading “The Mystery School,” explored revolutionary depth psychologist C.G. Jung’s writings and theories about how ancient alchemy stands as a metaphor for psychological transformation. Throughout, my excitement grew as I recognized that the four intrinsic parts of the alchemical/analytical process are also reflected in (surprise!) story structure.

. . . .

So what is alchemy, and why should writers care? For me, one of the most delightful mysteries of life is how, when you start paying attention, the theories of story structure and character arc show up everywhere. Not only is this interesting in applying the wisdom of story to life, it also creates opportunities to learn how to tell better stories by examining systems that, at first glance, seem to have nothing to do with fiction.

The series of lectures I watched focused on Jung’s recognition that the four parts of alchemy naturally aligned with his own four tenets of analysis and personal transformation. Even though I teach a Three Act structure, this structure divides story into four equal parts. Particularly when examined from the perspective of character arc, these four parts align naturally and perfectly with the four parts of alchemy/Jungian analysis. The pattern deepens!

I’ve written before about how writers can apply various theoretical models (such as the Karpman Drama Triangle and the Enneagram) to storytelling. Alchemy is yet another window through which to view story. It offers a tool to help us shape our stories into greater verisimilitude. Plus, if you’re a pattern hunter, as I am, it’s just cool!

Link to the rest at Helping Writers Become Authors

Book Publishing Contracts – Checklist of Deal Terms

From Morse:

The path to publication generally requires authors to sign a “publishing contract” that covers such topics as: manuscript delivery and acceptance, copyright ownership and grants; royalty advances, rates and payment; author warranties and indemnities; contract duration and rights reversion (out-of-print); options on new works; and limitations on competing works. But if you’re an author who can’t find, wait for, or afford a lawyer, how do you know what terms are standard, reasonable or fair?

The following is not meant as legal advice, but rather as a checklist and guide to the issues typically covered, and the terms publishers typically offer, so you can identify issues to consider and possibly address and thereby make the time spent with your lawyer or other advisor more efficient. 

1. Rights granted (Form, Language, Market, Time):

A. Copyright ownership: Who will own and control the bundle of copyrights, in what media, and in what geographic regions (see below)?

  • Author should own the copyright (though academic publishers often demand an assignment of the copyright); ideally it should state that rights not specifically granted are reserved to Author.
  • If you can’t avoid “work made for hire” or express assignment to Publisher, be sure to address the termination of the grant/contract and reversion of rights to Author (see “out of print” below at 9.F and 15.E).
  • Publisher ideally should agree to register copyright in Author’s name (or at least allow the Author to do so – avoid registering copyright in Publisher’s name).

B. Territories (EC & Australia considerations): Where can the rights be exercised? Some publishers will seek worldwide rights; but industry customs favor a more nuanced approach, given that translation rights are implicated. So, consider which territories it makes sense for your publisher to control and start from there.

C. Subsidiary rights: first serial (exclusive right to be first periodical to print story, article, excerpt, etc.), second serial (nonexclusive right to publish after first publication by another periodical), reprint (essentially same as second serial), British Commonwealth (publication in any of over 50 countries, mostly former British colonies), other foreign territories, translation, motion picture, TV, dramatic, audio, electronic, multimedia, podcast, commercial and merchandising – which of these rights are reserved or granted? Consider: how well placed is Publisher to sell such rights, and how successful historically? Here are other issues to address:

  • Proportion in which proceeds shared (standard: 90% first serial, 75/80% UK and foreign, 50-66% other). 
  • Author or agent approval of sub rights licenses controlled by Publisher.
  • Pass-through (after advance is repaid, ideally the royalties owed for sub rights – typically ½ of what Publisher receives – should flow through to Author 30-60 days after receipt).
  • Hard/soft deal vs. Hard/soft separate.
  • Author ideally retains dramatic, film, TV, radio, merchandising (today’s standard publishing agreement often retains these for Publisher; but consider arguing that these should remain with Author unless Publisher has affiliates, proven success or special expertise to do these things).
  • Author ideally retains rights to characters, settings, title (if fiction with series prospects).
  • Preserving and allocating electronic, audio, and video rights and rights in new technologies (ideally no right to add music or sound effects without Author approval).
  • Book club rights – be sure royalties are fair (don’t become a free or low-cost giveaway).
  • If Publisher takes subsidiary rights you care about, press to have any rights that Publisher has failed to exploit within a reasonable period (e.g., 2 –3 years after book published) revert to Author.
  • Include general reservation of rights clause: any rights not expressly granted to Publisher remain with Author.

2. Advance and Royalties: Amount and Schedule

A. Advances – Ideally these should be nonrefundable; at worst, if manuscript rejected, Publisher may only recover from “first proceeds” under next contract for the same work

  • Ideal: 1/2 on signing, 1/4 on delivery of half MS, 1/4 on final acceptance.
  • Avoid “payment on publication” (though that’s what many Publishers offer).

B. Royalty Rate (but (i) understand base against which rate applied: ideally it would be cover or list price, but it may be net of freight pass-through (“invoice” price), or simply – and less favorably – net receipts, and (ii) if based on net receipts, ask what discount applies to their normal channels and what percent of their sales is at a deeper discount)

  • Hard cover: 5,000 – 10%; 10,000 – 12 1/2%; 15,000 – 15%
  • Mass market paper: 6/8% (on first 50-150,000), increasing to 10%
  • Trade paperback: 6/7 1/2% (on first 25,000), increasing to 9/10% (often on “net price” or “amount received,” which is typically 1/3 – 1/4 off list)
  • E-books: highest print rate; 20-50% net (35% increasingly common)
  • Audiobooks: 10-25% net for physical copies, 25-50% for digital copies
  • Academic and scholarly texts, including textbooks: 6-15% net

C. Bonus payments or increased payments in the event of:

  • Book club sales
  • Bestseller list appearance (identify which lists count, e.g., New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Amazon Charts)
  • Award winner: Pulitzer, NBA, etc.
  • Motion picture or TV development
  • Earn-out advance

D. Discount Schedule: consider distinguishing premium sales to business from bulk sales to specialty stores, and request sharing “costs” of deep discounts.

E. Royalty reductions may be proposed for: deep discounts, special sales, mail order, premium sales, small print runs (typically 50% of standard rates or a flat low rate, e.g., 5%).

  • If the royalty is lower for deeper discounts, learn what percentage of their books are sold at what discount levels.

F. If the book includes advertising or other third-party content (other than excerpts from other works published by Publisher), Author gets 50% of fees paid to Publisher.

G. Authors and Illustrators of children’s books generally share revenue 50/50, unless either hires other to do work.

H. Grants: Authors of textbooks and nonfiction may require grant funds to cover extra expenses, such as travel, research assistance or special artwork.

Link to the rest at Morse

A new book rebukes the “luxury beliefs” of America’s upper class

From The Economist:

While applying to Yale University (pictured) in 2014, Rob Henderson visited New Haven for the first time. He stayed with a friend of a friend, whose cat was called Learned Claw (an obscure, pretentious allusion to an American judge of the mid-20th century who went by the name of Learned Hand). Mr Henderson did not get the reference. When he arrived at Yale more cultural mysteries awaited. Everyone raved about “The West Wing”, a television show he had never watched, and “Hamilton”, a musical he could not afford to see.

More Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%. Mr Henderson was among the less-affluent minority. He had been removed from his drug-addicted mother when he was three years old and lived with nine different foster families before his eighth birthday. Scared, insecure and angry, he soon began to drink, take drugs and get into fights.

At the age of 17, as his peers started going to prison, he signed up to the armed forces on a whim. Mr Henderson thrived in the structured, disciplined system and spent seven years in the us Air Force. It became clear he was highly intelligent, so he was encouraged to apply to college through the GI Bill. (He has recently finished a doctorate at Cambridge University.)

Troubled” is the compelling story of his chaotic childhood, his time at Yale and what it all made him think about divisions in America. As a result of his experience, Mr Henderson has coined the concept of “luxury beliefs”, which he describes as “a set of beliefs that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while inflicting costs upon the lower classes”.

In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class either by doing things “like golf or beagling” that no working person would have time to do, or through their material accoutrements. But today, leisure time and luxury goods are more accessible to everyone, so it has become harder for the elites to separate themselves from the hoi polloi. Their solution? “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”

Mr Henderson gives the example of support for defunding the police. The idea gained traction in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and has been championed by many affluent people. However, it is an unpopular policy among poor people—exactly those who the well-meaning college kids say they are trying to help—and leads to higher homicide rates.

“Troubled” is more than a fascinating memoir, as it analyses the controversial belief systems that have gripped American universities. But it does so without being an angry culture-war screed. Mr Henderson makes no statement of political affiliation. Lots of what he writes is simply common sense. It is what much of middle America believes.

Mr Henderson exposes the stupidity of what now passes for orthodoxy, such as the way the luxury-belief class claims that the unhappiness associated with substance abuse or obesity, for instance, “primarily stems from the negative social judgments they elicit, rather than the behaviours and choices themselves”. The well-off “validate and affirm the behaviours, decisions, and attitudes of marginalised and deprived kids” in a way “that they would never accept for themselves or their own children”. One classmate argues that monogamy is “outdated” but admits that she was raised by two parents and intends to have a monogamous marriage herself.

Link to the rest at The Economist

These changes to his way of experiencing reality were so strange

These changes to his way of experiencing reality were so strange that he didn’t say anything about them at first. All he knew was he was experiencing highly-structured geometric hallucinations on regular basis, and while he knew what he saw was real, he wasn’t sure anyone would believe him if he tried to explain it

Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master

Romantasy, AI and Palestinian voices: publishing trends emerge at London book fair

From The Guardian:

Palestine, artificial intelligence and romantasy were high on the agenda at this week’s London book fair. More than 30,000 agents, authors, translators, publishers and other book industry professionals flocked to Olympia London to secure deals and discuss publishing trends, challenges and rising genres. Here is our round-up of the main takeaways, and a flavour of what we can expect to see in bookshops in the next year or so.


Palestinian voices

On the first day of the fair, Book Workers for a Free Palestine held a vigil outside to “mark the death of Palestinian writers, poets, academics and journalists killed by Israel”, wrote Ailah Ahmed, a publishing director at Penguin. English PEN ran two seminars focused on Palestine and freedom of expression, featuring writers including Isabella Hammad, who was recently longlisted for the Women’s prize.

“It has been remarkably difficult in the face of the violence that we are seeing to make room for poetry,” Rafeef Ziadah told the fair. “Many people have written to me saying, ‘Why haven’t you written poems, like We Teach Life?’ Poetry doesn’t work that way. It’s not on call when there’s a war.” On the deals side, Profile Books acquired the rights to publish What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? by Raja Shehadeh, which explores opportunities for peace that have been “rejected by Israel” since its formation in 1948. Shehadeh explores “what went wrong again and again, and why”.


Neurodiversity

Books featuring neurodivergent protagonists were celebrated in a conversation including the author Marina Magdalena, whose Antigone Kingsley series is about a girl who has ADHD — one of a number of new books with neurodiverse main characters. A talk by Pamela Aculey focused on how augmented reality technologies can enrich reading experiences for neurodivergent children. “Great minds do not all think alike,” said Aculey. These discussions come after Fern Brady won the inaugural Nero non-fiction prize with Strong Female Character, her memoir about growing up as an autistic person without a diagnosis.


The impact of AI

“A writer is a very peculiar thing, it’s not going to be replaced by a machine,” Bill Thompson of BBC Research & Development told the fair at one of many talks about AI and publishing. “[But the] publishing industry? Woah it’s going to be chaos. The whole industry is going to be transformed.” The way publishers deal with copyright, marketing, distribution, e-books and translation will be changed by AI, he added.

Panellists highlighted that AI models such as ChatGPT could be used as a collaborative tool for writers. “It’s not going to write the book for you, but it’s going to be the thing sitting on your shoulder” when “your family have got fed up with you”, when “your children won’t talk about character development”, AI “will always be there, it will not get tired, it will not stop”. Kate Devlin, a reader in AI and society at King’s College London, added that she had used AI “adversarially” – she went through a “really bad bout of writer’s block” so she asked ChatGPT to give her an opening to a chapter. She “absolutely disagreed” with what it came up with, and was “so angry” at the response that it removed her writer’s block.

BookTok and romantasy

Romance and romantasy – a portmanteau of romance and fantasy – were also in focus this year, with discussions on BookTok and the genres it has helped to skyrocket. Love stories were also popular with publishers, and there was high demand for romantasy according to Lucy Hale, managing director of publisher Pan, reported The Bookseller. Penguin imprints Del Rey UK and US acquired rights to Silvercloak by Laura Steven, described as a romantic fantasy set in a world “riddled with crime, where magic is fuelled by pain and pleasure, mafia groups lurk in every alley”.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

Two Decades in, the Queen of Faerie Fantasy Is Doing Just Fine

From Slate:

Fairies are having a moment, thanks to the overwhelming popularity of books like Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses. But longtime YA fantasy readers will remember that Holly Black is one of the OGs of gritty novels about the mercurial inhabitants of faerie lands. The author of Tithe, the Curse Workers trilogy, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and other books—which have collectively sold more than 26 million copies—is no stranger to the otherworldly appeal of magic, romance, and dangerous court intrigue. Now, 20-plus years into her career, Black is still ruling the genre, with her Folk of the Air trilogy’s The Cruel Prince a staple of the book-obsessed subset of TikTok known as “BookTok.” Black’s latest work, The Prisoner’s Throne—a conclusion to her The Stolen Heir duology, about the young rulers of two rival faerie courts navigating political treachery, self-acceptance, and the cost of power—was released in early March, and she is at work on a card game based on The Folk of the Air. I chatted with the author about her long career, her thoughts on the booming genre and BookTok, and why hooves are sexy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: It’s been nearly 22 years since the publication of your first book, Tithe, which was a young adult fantasy book. The genre is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. If you look at the bestseller list, a lot of them are fantasy romance books. How do you feel about this popular resurgence of faerie fantasy?

Holly Black: I tell this story a lot: Between when Tithe came out and when the first Spiderwick book came out—2002 to 2003—I went to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference, which I had never been to before, and I didn’t know a lot of people who were working writers. I guess people had been told to network wherever, so there’s a long bathroom line, and the woman in front of me asked me, “What do you write?” I said, “Oh, young adult.” And she turned around to talk to somebody else. Young adult—nobody wanted to write it, it was an extremely tiny part of the children’s market, it really didn’t have the cachet. It was a time when picture books and middle grade were where you wanted to be.

There was a huge shift; I think it started with Barnes and Noble moving the YA section outside of the kids’ section so that you no longer had to go through that gateway, and for the first time it became discoverable by people who no longer considered themselves children. So you had teenagers much more willing to approach it, but also adults. Probably the first series that really blew up was Gossip Girlthat brought adults to the YA section but had teens really reading it, and just changed the genre. I just watched it blow up in this way where it became much bigger and attracted many more writers, having these huge hits.

. . . .

The majority of your work is YA. What draws you, as a writer, to that age range?

I sort of stumbled into it. I had written Tithe, and it has a 16-year-old as its protagonist because it is a story of someone who’s discovering that they’re a faerie changeling. A 30-year-old figuring out they’re a faerie changeling seemed late, or maybe like they’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer; it just seemed like the wrong time for self-discovery like that.

So you never set out to write YA specifically?

I just set out to write a fantasy novel. There were lots of fantasy novels with 16-year-old protagonists. I had a friend who was a children’s librarian, and she said, “I think you should consider YA,” and I thought, I don’t know, there’s lots of swearing in this book! There’s a lot of stuff in this book. She gave me Tamora Pierce and Garth Nix—some of the most beautifully built magic systems of any books that I’ve read, just super elegant. I went into this space at such a great time because it was growing and because, when people are coming into YA, they’re not used to reading extremely specific genres, so you can mash up things. You can try things. You can be more experimental because readers don’t realize you’re being experimental—they’re reading this stuff for the first time. So it was a really fun place to write in.

What does it feel like now to be surrounded by all these other faerie fantasy books and, consequently, readers who potentially read only fantasy, who are not coming into the genre for the first time?

As a person who writes and reads a lot of fantasy, it’s been extremely gratifying to see fantasy move into a mainstream place. There are a lot of people who’ve grown up watching Lord of the Rings at a young enough age that it’s become part of their vocabulary of how the fantasy world works. Game of Thrones too. I think, for a lot of people, that barrier to entry is much lower than it was when there wasn’t so much exposure to fantasy.

I think the rise of romantasy is certainly in part because people do have the vocabulary of fantasy. Romance is one of the biggest genres in the world, so of course people want to see, or are able to read, fantasy romances in a way that might not have been true before. Romantasy is really two different genres kind of mushed together, probably in the same way that urban fantasy was. You have two streams: the romance-forward fantasy, where it’s really a romance novel with fantasy, and then you have fantasy that has romance. They’re paced really differently, and they have different focuses, but they live in the same genre. Then you had urban fantasy that came out of fantasy, and often those were the faerie books; for a long time urban fantasy was faerie, in the late ’80s.

Link to the rest at Slate

Writing Dreams Do Come True: What Happens After you Get “That Call”

Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:

THE OFFER

I’m writing this guest post from behind two boxes of books just delivered from the publisher. When I pried one open, the cover of the novel I’ve labored over for so long was revealed, and I laughed out loud, like a schoolgirl. I couldn’t stop. The flood of emotion was a culmination of years of writing dreams and an arduous journey, one that started on September 20th, 2021.

On that warm September morning, I was sitting at my desk with a cup of coffee and the windows open to check my email.  I set my cup down and stared at the message in my inbox. (I’m sure my mouth dropped.) I had an email from the Production Editor at Unsolicited Press, the independent publisher I had sent my manuscript to over nine months earlier.  In part it read:

After reviewing thousands of submissions this summer, we narrowed it down to less than 40 projects to fill out 2023 and 2024. Your book was one of them. If the book is still available, contact us at your earliest convenience to discuss the details. This offer expires in two weeks.

I nearly fell off my chair. I was so used to the industry wide no response means no, I had assumed this submission had also fallen into that black hole. Was my book still available? Does my Hemingway cat have polydactyl thumbs?

THE BEGINNING

The true beginning of this journey dates back to September of 2017. That was when I finally let go of my writing dreams for Novel #1 and #2 and started to write the first draft of Novel #3, Let Evening Come.

After the first draft was complete, I gave it a short rest. But I was eager to get back into it and printed off a bunch of pages so I could mark it up with pencil. Somehow, seeing my story on paper helps me see what I want to say. After another edit and then another — falling in love a third time with a third book — I let my daughter, the editor, read it.

With her suggestions in mind I tightened the narrative, fixed my dialogue tags, added more character interiority — I tend to hold my reader at arm’s length — and nixed some unnecessary secondary character POV. After a couple more rounds with a sister or two who consented to reading another one of “Yvonne’s missives”, I thought I was in a good place to begin querying agents.

THE QUERY

I spent a great deal of time on that letter, until I had the most perfect query letter (swallow) imaginable. I had done my research and targeted my ideal agents, widening the circle as one by one they rejected me.

The responses (when there was one) were sadly the same: Publishing is a subjective business and other agents may feel differently.

I dearly wish I’d kept some of the handwritten rejection notes I got when I started querying my first novel, a Vietnam Era love story, which has since turned historical. (Every time I pen that word, I think hysterical. Kinda like the first time I wrote a blog post about bookstores and referred to B&N as B&E) 🙂 

Those rejection notes carried a hint of personality. They were mine! And as dissimilar from today’s canned rejections as my floppy discs were from the Cloud. Who wants to print out impersonal, canned rejections to hang on the wall? And here I wanted to be like Stephen King, saving and bragging about his rejections.

I wasn’t comfortable with trying to self-publish, but I wasn’t giving up. There are many small independent publishers who accept manuscripts directly from writers, and I decided to give them a try. I winnowed that list down to the five I liked best — a considerably shorter list than my ideal agent list — and queried Unsolicited Press on 12/02/20. So, nearly nine months had passed before they responded via email on September 20, 2021, the morning I nearly fell off my chair.

THE “CALL”, THE CONTRACT & EDITORIAL CALENDAR

So, long story short, whereas it used to be “The Call” writers yearned for, now it’s as likely to be “The Email.”

Production Editor Esme gave me two weeks to respond, but I didn’t need two weeks. In fact, I didn’t need two days. I reckon I sent back a breathless YES that same morning.

The next step was signing the contract, a standard industry-wide document, but Esme wisely told me to take the weekend and write down any questions I had. Of course, I had questions but nothing they couldn’t answer to my satisfaction. 

I then had several months to get my final copy to them. The manuscript was 110,000 words, so I needed all of that to go over it once again. Then came the editorial calendar with copy edits dates, cover development, proofreading dates and deadlines. We fell behind that calendar but finally the galley was out — I had a galley! — and my manuscript began to take the shape of a book. Writing dreams were coming true.

The press pulled it all together to get back on track to meet the original publishing date of April 2, 2024. They sent me one printed ARC to read, and I had my last and final chance to catch any errors. I only found one! My editor, Summer, told me that was the first time that had ever happened. Of course, I still fear there’s one lurking in the margins that everyone missed.

In the meantime, they set me up with a Universal Book Link through Books2Read. It’s the platform by which shoppers can access their digital store of choice with one click. It’s a great tool for self-published authors too.

PREORDERS – THE FINAL LAP

Preorders seed excitement.

If you like an author and want that person to keep writing books, then supporting them during a book launch isn’t such a bad idea. All preorders count towards the first week of sales so they help an author get all to a good start. When you preorder a book, it tells bookstores people want this book, which typically makes them stock more copies of the book, which of course means more people see it and buy it.  So, if there is a book coming out from one of your writerly friends via traditional publishing that you plan to purchase anyway, the best way to support them is to preorder.

With ten days to go, my fear that it won’t be well received looms like a thunderhead.

The self-doubt that plagues all writers (our own worst enemy) keeps me up at night. But from first draft to planning a launch party, the long slog is worth it. (You have to have a party!!) In the end, we have to trust ourselves, our publishers, and all the people working on our behalf behind the scenes.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris

PG would have passed the OP by, except for the author’s description of a “standard industry-wide” publishing contract she received from her publisher, Unsolicited Press.

THERE IS NO STANDARD INDUSTRY-WIDE PUBLISHING CONTRACT. SUCH A DOCUMENT DOES NOT EXIST.

“This is our standard contract” always causes to immediatly automatic direction for shields to be raised on the Starship PG. Adding “industry-wide” causes the reserve shields to deploy and extend long, nasty horns that shoot fire.

The term, “standard contract,” may, in fact, be true for a publisher, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a fair contract or a contract that contains no nasty surprises.

PG has examined several trillion contracts from publishers large, medium and small and he can say with certainty that no two publishers have identical publishing contracts.

PG understands that large literary agencies have copies of publishing contracts from major publishers that are already marked up. “Standard Contract” = “Standard Mark up”

PG had never heard of Unsolicited Press, so he looked it up on Amazon. Then he had Zon order the press’s books by sales rank.

This exercise resulted in Dark Roux appearing as Unsolicited Press’s top-ranked book. When PG looked, that book had a ranking of 2,016,017 in Kindle Store (it did have 18 rankings for a five-star average). He then checked the trade paperback ranking and found a sales rank of 500,377 in Books. The audiobook for Dark Roux was ranked 483,444 when PG checked today.

PG checked out several other Unsolicited Press listings on Amazon and found rankings quite similar to the Dark Roux rankings above.

He then checked on Barnes & Noble and discovered no sales rank for Dark Roux (per BN practice), but found no reader reviews for the book, which may be an indicator of something.

PG is going to stop now because he doesn’t want to pile on a new author and a very small press.

But he warns one and all to read and understand every publishing contract and every non-publishing contract before signing it.

If you want to get warmed up prior to seeing an attorney about a proposed publishing contract, The Authors Guild website has an excellent Model Trade Book Contract available online at no charge PG could discern. It’s worth your time to work your way through it. If you do so, you’ll know more about publishing contracts than all authors who haven’t read it plus any number of literary agents.

PG notes that the Authors Guild Model Contract may not provide reliable guidance for publishing contracts with publishers located outside of the U.S.

For example, British publishers are operating under British law, not generally-common principles of US contract and publishing law. British and US laws are similar because the US borrowed British legal principles way back when. However, although similarities persist in many different areas of the law, significant differences have arisen during the almost 250 years since the American Revolution commenced.

The Fantastical in the Everyday: What Is Fabulism?

From Book Riot:

In a world of devastation, it’s necessary to seek the magic in the mundane. Speculative fiction, and everything beneath its wide umbrella, allows us as readers to find magic in various ways. Whether escaping into another world entirely (epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, space opera, etc.) or to something more familiar (urban fantasy), I am a fervent believer that there is a genre of speculative fiction for everyone. I’ve explored many genres and subgenres in the past, navigating blurred lines and intricacies, from slipstream to subgenres of science fiction. Of all of these beautiful genres, one of my favorites is the fabulism subgenre.

What Is Fabulism?

An excellent question, my dears, and one that may have a different answer depending on who you ask and what you like to read. If you look up the definition of fabulist in a dictionary — we’ll use Merriam-Webster for this — its most boiled-down description is “a creator or writer of fables.” Fables are stories with fantastical elements that convey a moral or teach a lesson. Believe it or not, the first use of the word “fabulism” or “fabulist” can be traced back to 1593.

So it’s by no means a new term, but the fabulist literature we read today is quite different from the fables of the past centuries. It’s even been argued that fabulism, as we know it today, is one of the “newer” speculative genres, though I’d take this with a grain of salt.

The most common definition I’ve found for fabulism in contemporary literature is this: writing in which fantastical elements are entwined with the everyday. Kathryn Harlan expands on this definition more eloquently in her 2022 Publishers Weekly article “10 Essential Works of Fabulist Fiction:”

“What defines fabulism in my mind, though, is the use of fantastical elements to explore personal, human themes. Fabulist fiction tends to privilege internal and interpersonal conflict over large-scale, action-heavy plots; its elements of unreality follow a kind of magical thinking. When something strange occurs, the story is less interested in why it’s happening — its origin or mechanism — than in what it means, in a symbolic or emotional logic.”

Kathryn Harlan in Publishers Weekly

Fabulism: Resisting the Why

An interesting factor of fabulism — similar to slipstream — is that it’s a genre that resists a concrete, longstanding definition. Indeed, the genre itself fights against being placed in a neatly wrapped box. When fabulism is at play in a work, it often resists the why. Fabulism does not explain the magic system or fantastical elements. It doesn’t go into why a character suddenly sprouts branches as limbs, or why a character is back from the dead. It — the fantastical, the magical, the weird — just is.

Therefore, many writers labeled as “fabulists” often create work that is indefinable, even paradoxical. Many fabulists create work that is either deemed too literary to be genre, or too genre to be literary. These writers sit on the fence, the in-between, constantly reinventing themselves, and by proxy, reinventing the genre. Honestly, that’s why I love fabulists so damn much.

Several authors come to mind when thinking of the above definitions and explorations, though it’s possible these authors may not describe their own work as such. Kelly Link has been called the high priestess of fabulism. Another titan of the genre, for me at least, is Helen Oyeyemi, and her March 2024 novel, Parasol Against the Axe, sounds like it hits fabulism on the nail. 

It’s also important to note that fabulism is found in more than just fiction. Poets can fabulists. Many visual artists are considered fabulist or even neo fabulist. It’s a genre that can be expressed across all art mediums.

. . . .

Fabulism vs. Magical Realism: Similar Yet Separate

One of the genres that is often rolled together with fabulism is magical realism. They both use fantastical elements, especially in everyday life. They both also utilize these fantastical elements without explaining why; weird, fantastical, and magical things happen in the world, and you, as a reader, are meant to accept it and roll with it. The lines are certainly blurred between the two, but one way to distinguish between them is to look at the origins.

As I noted in my fantasy subgenre primer, magical realism originated and belongs to Latine authors, and we owe them that distinction and respect. Authors in Latin America used magical realism in literature and art to reflect and portray the political turmoil that occurred around and between the 1940s to 1970s, especially regarding colonialism and oppression. It is still used today by Latine authors to extrapolate similar issues. As such, magical realism is a genre of resistance, political commentary, and activism. So keep that in mind as you read and differentiate between the two.

. . . .

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

One cannot discuss fabulism without discussing the incomparable Kelly Link. Link is one of my favorite writers of all time. Her collection Get in Trouble, continues to be foundational for me as a reader and writer. The Book of Love, Link’s debut novel, is another testament to her talent and breadth of imagination. It follows three friends who find themselves back in a high school classroom after being missing, and possibly quite dead, for a year.

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

There are so many brilliant Oyeyemi works to choose from, but this one is probably my favorite. Oyeyemi is another queen of fabulism, threading together the fantastical with the every day in a way that also mirrors societal issues. White is For Witching is about a house in Dover, England, and the four generations of Silver women that have lived within it. When Miranda’s mother, Lily, passes away while abroad, Miranda’s grief and connection to the house begin to manifest in mysterious ailments. This is such a powerful book about about family legacies, race, and nationality.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night review – the Uyghurs’ fight for survival in a society where repression is routine

From The Guardian:

A group of Uyghur friends are having a late-night chat. “I wish the Chinese would just conquer the world,” one says suddenly. “Why do you say that?” another asks, surprised. “The world doesn’t care what happens to us,” the first man replies. “Since we can’t have freedom anyway, let the whole world taste subjugation. Then we would all be the same. We wouldn’t be alone in our suffering.”

It is an understandable outburst of bitterness. The Uyghurs are a Muslim minority who live mainly in China’s north-western Xinjiang region. They have long faced discrimination and persecution. Since 2016, the repression has greatly intensified, with mass detention, forced sterilisation and abortion, the separation of thousands of children from their parents, and the razing of thousands of mosques. Yet support for Uyghurs has been equivocal, not least from Muslim-majority countries, many of which are outraged by the burning of a Qur’an in Sweden but remain silent about the detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, for fear of upsetting Beijing.

Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, which recounts that conversation, is not, however, a bitter book. It is suffused, rather, by a deep sense of sadness, and of despondency even amid hope. “Yet our words could undo nothing here,/even the things we brought to be”, as one of Izgil’s poems laments.

A poet and film-maker, Izgil is famed for bringing a modernist sensibility to Uyghur poetry. He did not set out to be a political activist. The very fact of being a Uyghur, though, in a country that seeks to erase Uyghur existence, both culturally and physically, turns everyday life into a political act. And for a poet living in a culture within which “verse is woven into daily life”, writing is necessarily also an act of witness and of resistance.

Despite the subtitle of the book – “A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide” – there are no depictions here of genocide, or of torture, or even of violence. We know all these things are happening, but off-page. Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book’s restraint is also its strength. The tension in the narrative flows from the dread captured in the title – the dread of waiting to be arrested, to be vanished into detention, a dread no Uyghur can escape.

Beijing’s strategy has been, over the past decade, to cut Uyghurs off from the rest of the world and from one another, too. When censorship and surveillance made it impossible to link to the internet beyond the Chinese firewall, many Uyghurs took to keeping in touch with the outside world through shortwave radios. Until, that is, the government banned the sale of such radios and organised mass raids into people’s homes to confiscate them. “We suddenly found ourselves living like frogs at the bottom of a well,” Izgil observes.

Beijing seeks to cut off Uyghurs from their past and their traditions, too. Qur’ans are seized and history books banned, including many previously authorised by the state. Even personal names become part of the assault on Uyghur culture. Beijing’s list of prohibited names tells Uyghurs what they cannot call their children. Some names are apparently too “Muslim” – Aisha, Fatima, Saifuddin; others, such as Arafat, too political. When the list was first introduced, newspapers carried announcements such as: “My son’s birth name was Arafat Ablikim. From now on he will be known as Bekhtiyar Ablikim.”

The greatest dread is of the physical repression wreaked upon Uyghurs: mass detentions, torture, violence. We get a glimpse of the horror when Izgil and his wife, Marhaba, attend a police station to have their biometric details collected – fingerprints, blood samples, facial scans. Along a basement corridor, `they see a cell fitted out with iron restraints and a notorious “tiger chair”, used to force detainees into agonising stress positions. On the floor are bloodstains.

People start disappearing, first in small numbers, eventually up to 1 million. They are taken to “study centres” – the code for mass detention camps – though nobody knows which one. “They simply vanished,” Izgil writes.

The police knocked on the door when “your name was on the list”. There was, though, “no way to know if or when your name would show up on the list. We all lived within this frightening uncertainty.” It spawned a climate in which people feared one another as much as they feared the authorities.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

PRH, Hachette, S&S Flag ‘Trashed Books’ in New York

From Publishing Perspectives:

Overnight (March 18), Kiara Alfonseca has confirmed for ABC News in New York City that the city’s department of education has opened an investigation into reports that hundreds of new books, “many that were about people of color and LGBTQ identities—were thrown into the trash at a Staten Island school after the news outlet The Gothamist first reported the discovery,” as Alfonseca writes.

The school in question is Public School (PS) 55, known as the Henry M. Boehm School, an elementary school. Staten Island is the southernmost of the five boroughs that make up New York City.

And the reports circulating on the discovery of books apparently being discarded looks to many in the US book market to be a new instance of censorious action against books.

. . . .

Some of the books reportedly discovered being discarded had what appeared to be review notes attached to them, according to Gould’s report. She writes, “A note on My Two Border Towns, about a boy’s life on the United States-Mexico border, read, ‘Our country has no room and it’s not fair.’

“A note on The Derby Daredevils,” Gould goes on, “about a girls’ roller derby team, read, ‘Not approved. Discusses dad being transgender. Teenage girls having a crush on another girl in class.’ And a note on We Are Still Here! Native American Truths Everyone Should Know reads, ‘Negative slant on white people.’”

ABC’s Alfonseca writes that the city’s department of education has asserted that its schools “do not shy away from books that teach students about the diverse people and communities that make up the fabric of our society,” adding that the department does not condone the messages reported to be found on the books.

A group of major US publishers and others have written to the chancellor of the New York City public schools system, David C. Banks, to express their concern, calling for a return of the books that appear to have been discarded, and to ask for a meeting.A group of major US publishers and others have written to the chancellor of the New York City public schools system, David C. Banks, to express their concern, calling for a return of the books that appear to have been discarded, and to ask for a meeting.

. . . .

Dear Chancellor David C. Banks, 

On March 11, 2024, Gothamist reported that PS 55 in Staten Island has trashed hundreds of books on  ideological grounds. If true, such action amounts to unlawful censorship and violates authors’ and students’ First Amendment rights.  

“The images of the discarded books shared by Gothamist are deeply troubling, particularly the sticky notes on many titles that appear to state the reason they have been removed. On one book, My Two Border Towns, there is a note stating ‘Our country has no room and it’s not fair’ as the rationale for throwing  the book into the garbage. On another title, The Derby Daredevils, the note says the book is ‘not approved’  because it ‘discusses dad being transgender’ and includes ‘teenage girls having crushes on another girl  in class.’

“We Are Still Here! Native American Truths Everyone Should Know was flagged as having a ‘negative slant on white people.’ And on the picture book Nina: A Story of Nina Simone there is a note saying it is not approved because ‘This is about how black people were treated poorly but overcame it. (Can go both ways.).

“Such comments clearly reflect private bias that cannot be effectuated by a public school that is obligated to serve everyone in the community.  

“We recognize the outstanding work the department has done to expand literacy and access to books  across the city. Censorship threatens these efforts by diminishing our collective constitutional rights.  Students and parents have the right to make their own reading decisions for their families. Book bans  infringe on their ability to access the titles of their choosing and ultimately deprive children of the opportunity to learn from new perspectives and see themselves represented. Because school libraries play a crucial role in providing families with access to books, removing titles makes it difficult or even impossible for students to encounter information and ideas that are necessary to their intellectual development.  

“Based on the report, we are deeply concerned that silent or unacknowledged censorship may be going  on in New York City schools. We are heartened that the NYC DOE [department of education] is conducting an investigation into this incident. We hope you are able to act quickly to ensure the discarded books are returned to the shelves and respectfully request a meeting to explore ways in which we can work together to protect the First Amendment rights of NYC students in the future.  

“We firmly stand in support of educators, librarians, parents, students, and authors protecting the freedom to read here in NYC and in the rest of America.  

“Thank you for your attention to and consideration of this critical issue. We look forward to your response.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG says it’s inspiring to see what wonderful protectors of free speech major New York publishers are and how selflessly they defend the right of everybody to buy and read anything the publishers might have put on sale.

PG wonders whether any of the concerned parents of children in the New York public schools will remember which publishers brushed aside their concerns for their children’s welfare because it was bad for business.

25 Years Later, We’re All Trapped in The Matrix

From The Wall Street Journal:

It is a cinematic scene familiar to millions: A man named Morpheus sits across from another man named Neo and informs him that his entire notion of reality is a lie. If Neo wishes to know the truth of human existence, Morpheus says, all he has to do is choose one of two pills. “You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill…and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

This scene is the turning point in “The Matrix,” the sci-fi classic that was released 25 years ago this month. Of course, Neo chooses the red pill and learns the terrible truth that the advent of artificial intelligence allowed machines to take over the Earth. He believes it is 1999, but in fact it is 2199, and all human beings are perpetually asleep in vats, exploited by their AI masters as a source of energy. The world they think they experience is actually a virtual reality known as “The Matrix.”

Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, has devoted himself to freeing individuals from the Matrix and leading them to a refuge called Zion. He believes that Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is “the One” destined to liberate humanity.

Directed by the sibling team the Wachowskis, “The Matrix” was a box office hit in 1999 and spawned two sequels in 2003 and another in 2021. It also became an important cultural influence. The term “red-pilled” is now widely used online to describe someone who has grown skeptical of the way political reality is usually depicted.

The power of the film lies in the way it adapts one of the oldest allegories in the history of philosophy. In Plato’s “Republic,” the Athenian philosopher Socrates describes prisoners who have spent their entire lives manacled in a cave. A fire behind them casts the shadows of objects on a wall in front of them, and because shadows are all they have ever seen, they assume that what appears before their eyes is reality.

One prisoner breaks free, however, and makes his way to the surface of the Earth, where he beholds the sun and the real world. Ultimately he returns to the cave, seeking to convince his fellows that reality is out there to be discovered. Plato argues that the philosopher is like this escaped prisoner. It is his job to free humanity from illusion and teach us what is truly real.

The allegory of the cave is one of the indelible images in the history of Western thought, a metaphor for the capacity of human beings to break free from falsehood. Morpheus and Neo have been widely recognized as Plato’s heirs, philosopher-kings for the digital age.

But Plato also warns that the prisoners in the cave will resist being freed and that they will hate the philosopher who tries to teach them unfamiliar truths: “If any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

A Well-Contained Life

From The Paris Review:

What can’t be contained? Not much. We are given the resources, mental or physical, to contain our emotions and our belongings. Failing to do so often registers as weakness. 

The smallest container you can buy at the Container Store is a rectangular crystal-clear plastic box available in orange, purple, and green. It can contain one AA or two AAA batteries, half a handful of Tic Tacs, or a folded-up tissue. The largest container you can buy at the Container Store is a four-tiered metal shelving unit. It can contain other containers.

Containers mediate us and our stuff. They create boundaries and allow our items to exist multiple feet above the ground. Most spaces are divided by containers. These containers might then be divided by additional containers. Containers form a scaffold, or an architecture. They make walls scalable and underbeds reachable. They allow you to put something down and know where it is the next time you want to pick it up. 

One of the best ways to understand containers is to imagine a world without them. We would have piles. Bracelets, creams, stick-shaped kitchen items, fruit. Small things would get lost under big ones. Or, an alternative: a line of items that snakes through an apartment or house, up and down stairs and spiraling into the center of the room. When you want to find something, you simply walk along the line of items, confronting each individual thing. 

We use containers to solve the problem of stuff. At the Container Store, containers solve other problems, too—problems we didn’t know we had. A Parking Guide provides you with a mat on which to park. A RollDown Egg Dispenser rolls your eggs. A Stackable Sweater Drawer creates a sweater-only space for sweaters. A Cheese Keeper keeps your cheese, and a Small Cube Sleeve serves as a sleeve for your cube. 

There are plenty of analogies to choose from when describing a body, but one rather insufficient one is a container for our organs, blood, souls. The problem with this analogy is that our bodies are more than just containers. We can’t untangle our bodily experience from the feeling of existing in the world. In this case, the container is not a neutral scaffold. 

Is this true at the Container Store, too? Many containers certainly try to be as neutral as possible, made from clear, thin acrylic, or a neutral-tone rattan. They sell a promise: Once you use me to sort your trouser socks, you won’t even know I’m there. The Container Store refers to their products as “organizational solutions”—a way of dealing with something rather than a thing to deal with. The thing itself is little more than the solution it offers.

And then you come to the hampers and think, If the hamper was simply a solution to the problem of storing dirty laundry, why must I choose whether I want it in plastic, canvas, or bamboo? And then you spot the Small Scalloped Edge Faux Rattan Bin and think, What’s keeping me from buying the Small Scalloped Edge Faux Rattan Bin, even if I didn’t have anything to put in it? After spending a certain amount of time in the Container Store, the containers that are meant to organize, divide, and store look less like solutions and more like stuff. Following this line of thinking is a great way to leave empty-handed. 

The Container Store isn’t safe for the problem-less and adequately organized. The Container Store is better suited for the overflowing, the misplaced, and those lacking sectioned parts. Most of us do have a problem that the Small Scalloped Edge Faux Rattan Bin could fix. Only the bravest would buy it, place it on the table, and wait for it to find the problem for itself. 

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

As any visitor who has spent much time on TPV knows, PG includes excerpts with links back to the original piece/post. The only exception to this rule is when he posts poems. For PG, a well-written poem is a lovely whole from start to finish.

PG found the OP to be such an excellent short essay that he couldn’t bring himself to excise any portion of it. So The Paris Review doesn’t suffer a dearth of page views as a result of PG’s violation of TPV protocols, click HERE to check it out. If you haven’t visited The Paris Review based on PG’s previous links, you’ll find lots of interesting writing about subjects you’re not likely to encounter elsewhere.

One additional location that will interest many visitors to TPV is the publication’s Back Issues Section. The Paris Review was first published in. While you can purchase back issues, you can also browse online tables of content and see excerpts from the issue without becoming a subscriber. The first issue – Spring 1953 – included E. M. Forster on the Art of Fiction. William Styron’s Letter to an Editor. Stories by Peter Matthiessen, Terry Southern, and Eugene Walter. Poems by Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and George Steiner.

The Back Issues Section also includes an Author Index that lists the authors and, in some instances, the subjects of every interview, story, poem, essay, and portfolio published – over 5,000 – with a hyperlink to a short synopsis of the work written. Examples are Reel to Reel about Louis Armstrong:

In a typical year, Louis Armstrong spent more than three hundred days on the road, bringing his music to audiences around the world. He always traveled with a steamer trunk designed to house two reel-to-reel tape decks and a turntable, and he carried a stash of music for his own listening pleasure, to while away the hours he spent in hotels and dressing rooms before and after each gig. Tapes being less fragile than LPs, and possessing longer recording capacity, he ultimately transferred much of his collection to seven-inch reels. He also made mix tapes of his favorite tunes. He liked musicians who prized melody, and his selections range from Glenn Miller to Jelly Roll Morton to Tchaikovsky. Occasionally he added commentary over the music or played along, and he made copies of his own recordings, to which (unlike many musicians) he enjoyed listening. But often he would just turn on the recorder to capture everyday conversations, whether he was hanging out at home in his living room with his wife Lucille, telling jokes backstage with band members, being interviewed by reporters, or entertaining fans.

Here’s another excerpt from Backyard Bird Diary written by Amy Tan:

September 16, 2017
While watching hummingbirds buzz around me, I recalled a fantasy every child has: that I could win the trust of wild animals and they would willingly come to me. I imagined tiny avian helicopters dining on my palm. To lure them, I bought Lilliputian hummingbird feeders, four for $10. Hope came cheap enough, but I was also realistic. It might take months to gain a hummingbird’s interest in the feeder and for it to lose its fear of me.
Yesterday, I set a little feeder on the rail near the regular hummingbird feeders on the patio and then sat at a table about ten feet away. Within minutes, a hummingbird came to inspect, a male with a flashing red head. He hovered, gave a cursory glance, and then left. At least he noticed it. A good beginning. Then he returned, inspected it again from different angles, and left. The third time, he did a little dance around the feeder, approached, and stuck his bill in the hole and drank. I was astonished. That was fast. Other hummingbirds came, and they did their usual territorial display of chasing each other off before the victor returned. Throughout the day, I noticed that the hummingbirds seemed to prefer the little feeder over the larger one. Why was that? Because it was new and they had to take turns in claiming it?
Today, at 1:30 P.M., I sat at the patio table again. It was quiet. I called the songbirds. Each day I pair my own whistled birdsong with tidbits of food to encourage them to come. In about two minutes, I heard the raspy chitter and squeak of the titmouse and chickadee. They sounded excited to find peanuts.

Resistance is Futile

From studiomcah:

Yes, it’s true: after much gnashing of teeth and a token resistance to the inevitable, I decided it was time to do serious experimentation with AI, especially after hearing multiple reports, all good, about Anthropic’s Claude. To be clear, I continue to think the legal repercussions of the training of AI models on unlicensed intellectual property (whether that’s visual art, fiction or nonfiction, music, etc) need to be hashed out… and we need to decide now who owns a person’s voice, face, and personality to protect against the use of deepfakes to defame people or defraud their loved ones.

            None of that, however, changes that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and LLMs (Large Language Models) are not going anywhere, and are already changing things. I would rather not be drowned by the tidal wave of revolution, so for once I’m trying to surf the initial waves. “What can AI possibly do for me, if I don’t want it to write my books or draw my pictures?” I wondered, and my loved ones said, “Why don’t you find out instead of guessing?” (I am surrounded by smart people.)

            This ended up being a perfect time to experiment because (by accident!) I had a problem that needed solving: I want to set up a sales website so people can shop from me directly instead of buying from Etsy or Bandcamp or Amazon. I’d just read a book that broke down the tiers of products you want to offer, from freebies to lure in new readers, all the way to premium purchases that will only be attractive to superfans. Since my book catalog alone is over 70 titles, brainstorming what things to put in what categories sounded less like fun and more like shoveling the Augean stables. I had just signed up for Claude, so I figured: why not see if it can figure these things out for me?

            Its initial suggestions were generic based on the information I gave it—that I was an author, of 70 books, mostly science fiction, but some fantasy, children’s, romance, and nonfiction. I was also a painter. I was intrigued by the fact that it knew that ebooks made good low tier products based on price, and that premium offerings should involve autographs, special editions, or bundling with themed art or merchandise… but it was too non-specific for me.

            Which is when I fell down the rabbit hole. I discovered I could feed it my list of published works. Then my book catalog with all the covers and descriptions and tags. I gave it all-time sales data from my retailers… and then bandcamp… and then etsy… and then all my kickstarter data. I even gave it website traffic information, patreon and locals stats, and social media follower counts. With every file I fed it, I asked it to refine its ideas on how I should be positioning, bundling, and marketing my products. I asked it what underperforming books might be promising if presented to some new audience. I even asked it to find recurring themes across all my books and use that information to create marketing copy for new readers.

            Every so often I’d stop to ask it ancillary business questions, like “My large backlist can be intimidating to new readers. How do I attract them despite that?” or “I write in diverse genres, which makes my work difficult to market. How can my broad writing range be used as a strength, instead of a weakness, and how can I make new readers interested in all my offerings?” And it continued to give me sensible ideas, many of which I had already thought of, along with a few I hadn’t.

            Already I had to stop and marvel at how bizarre it was that a computer was just spouting off all this stuff in response to questions. Where does it get these answers? How does it construct them? How does it know what words mean?? It is completely inscrutable, but the interaction feels so normal that you keep going. So I did.

            By the end of that conversation, Claude knew not only which of my books and settings were bestsellers, it gave me excellent guesses on which of my themes or tropes were doing best in the market, and had used that information to craft a set of offerings for my (as yet unrealized) shop that would not only attract people with the tried-and-true series, like Dreamhealers and Her Instruments, but also tempt people with the promising but underselling ones, like Thief of Songs. “Narrow that down to ten initial offerings,” I told it, “because I want to launch my store with a limited number of items to get my feet wet.” Which it did, and they were all reasonable ideas. And I went to sleep (or tried), feeling like I’d completely underestimated the utility of LLMs. I had started the day with a tedious task I hadn’t wanted to do that required knowledge of my entire product catalog and how my art and writing interacted over the 25+ years I’d been making things, and Claude had learned enough to do it for me.

Link to the rest at studiomcah

Studiomicah is the home of author M.C.A. Hogarth, whom PG met a very long time ago. (Maggie was probably a child at the time.)

She writes science fiction, fantasy, and anthropomorphic animal genres and struck PG as a very nice woman. He expects she hasn’t changed.

Here’s a link to Maggie’s books on Amazon. If you like to read books written by nice people, check out Maggie’s work. If you would like to read books by nice people who are talented authors, Maggie will deliver you a twofer.

Take Yourself Out of It

From Writer Unboxed:

When Emma Stone told director Yorgos Lanthimos that she was nervous about possibly winning an Oscar for her performance in Poor Things and having to give a speech, Yorgos said, “Take yourself out of it.” It comes at a time in our contemporary culture where so many of us are supposed to be cultivating a brand, engaging in self-promotional campaigns—not just around an event, but constantly racking up views and followers, as if we’re all jockeying for Biggest Cult Leader, and not coincidentally, anxiety rates are spiking.

We’re told, in so many ways, to put ourselves into it.

Yorgos’ advice is counter-cultural and, I believe, primal, and may be the smartest antidote to anxiety I’ve ever heard.

It’s also great writing advice—for creatives and entrepreneurs.

First of all, Emma Stone has talked about her relationship with anxiety openly. She panics. She even mentions panic in her Oscar speech, which is where she tells the story with Yorgos’ advice. From previous things she’s said, I take it that she realizes anxiety is powerful and instead of trying to erase it, she works with it. That’s also my take. I can’t make a team of horses disappear, but I can try to guide them in a direction. Fuel is fuel, even anxious fuel is precious.

But what does it mean to “take yourself out of it.” I’ve found that one of the best ways to feel less anxious—when I approach the page as a writer or touring or all the other stuff that comes with it—is to tell myself: Just be of use. Be helpful to someone else. In this way, I take the pressure off of myself to be someone and to perform. Instead, I’m there to help solve a greater problem. I’m there for the small moment when I connect with another human being. It’s no longer about me. It’s about others. That grounds me.

It also, I think, makes people want to work with me. I’m here to help. How can I help?

Does this sound like internalized sexism?

Because I think there’s a case to be made that, as a woman, I’ve absorbed the notion that my selfhood is more comfortable being erased and then replaced with something like servitude. And, raised Catholic, I always have to check myself against dogma and patriarchy. Last thing I want is to do the patriarchy’s work for them.

If I’m to absorb wisdom from the best life coaches out there, I should be stepping into my power, not hiding my light under a bushel, and shining—brightly and publicly—because in doing so I can inspire others.

Got it. Absolutely. I’m checking myself.

But at the same time, I’m also doing a gut-check, and self-promotion—which has been a big part of my job as a writer—still feels awful.

And what if that’s not just me or the patriarchy or sexism but something imprinted on my DNA? What if, hear me out, Look at me! feels awful because, on an evolutionary level, it separates you from the herd? And that separation makes you vulnerable and that vulnerability means you’re more likely to be killed.

Now, this is when, in my head, I cue Orna from Couples Therapy who wants to know about my childhood. I tell her it was a happy childhood. She leans in. “Tell me more,” Orna says.

Well, I was the youngest of four after a notable five-year gap. I was adorable and charming and, just by the function of my birth, I stole the spotlight a little. And I learned that stealing the spotlight was an act of theft and wouldn’t go unpunished. In high school, I had three close friends, all of us were youngests. In my neighborhood growing up, I had three close friends, all youngests. By chance and design, I found other thieves to hang out with and we passed the spotlight around.

My family was a herd. I needed to be inside of the herd to be protected and I was careful not to do too much Look at me!

I went into a career that promised solitude and then I succeeded into the publishing industry and learned to turn that public self-promotional part on and then, mercifully, off—because I needed to reserve my focus for the work itself.

Everything changed. And just as the internet and social media democratized so many aspects of our lives, it also effectively blurred everything seasonal about self-promotion. It no longer required a costly multi-city tour, which was great in many ways. It could be done anywhere, anytime, which could mean: all the time. The way the invention of the washing machine did away with hand-washing, which was a huge reduction of labor, and went from being done once a week on a single day to a never-ending demand with no sense of completion; I should nod here to Marxist Alienation of Labor.

Now, writers are supposed to be putting themselves into the public eye, showing readers more of the lives of the writers behind the books. We can see what poets had for lunch and know when our favorite novelist’s dog has gotten back from the groomers.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

Legal Vineyards: Cultivating Rich Connections For A Bountiful Harvest

PG Trigger Warning: The following post appears because PG thought it suitably over the top to be a subject of derision.

From Above the Law:

In the intricate world of law, the strength of your professional network can be likened to a well-cultivated vineyard.

Just as the finest wines are the product of time, care, and the gentle nurturing of grapevines, so too are the most fruitful professional connections grown from the seeds of past associations.

Reconnecting with old law school friends, past clients, and former colleagues is not just a walk down memory lane; it’s an investment in your career’s future bounty.

This article explores the art of networking on how to nurture these connections for a harvest rich in opportunities and referrals.

Planting the Seeds

For attorneys, each connection — whether an old classmate, a former client, or a professional peer — represents a potential avenue for growth, a seed sown in the rich soil of your career path.

In the legal field, where opportunities and referrals can significantly impact success, nurturing these seeds is not just beneficial — it’s strategic.

Recognizing and cultivating your existing network goes beyond simple relationship maintenance.

It’s about building a robust foundation for future opportunities, enhancing your reputation, and opening doors to new avenues for collaboration and client acquisition.

By investing in these relationships, you’re effectively laying the groundwork for a professional ecosystem that can yield an abundant harvest of success, setting you apart in a competitive legal landscape.

Watering With Interactions

In the same way that vines require consistent watering to flourish, your professional relationships thrive on regular, impactful interactions.

However, this doesn’t entail overwhelming your contacts with messages. Instead, focus on the quality of your engagements.

Leveraging commonalities can significantly deepen these connections. Whether it’s a shared interest, a mutual alma mater, or a common professional challenge, touching base on these shared experiences or values can forge stronger bonds.

Additionally, blending professional courtesies with personal touches — such as congratulating them on personal milestones, or sharing insights on mutual interests — can seamlessly intertwine the professional with the personal.

This approach not only keeps your “relationship vine” vigorous and growing but also cultivates an environment where professional and personal spheres enrich one another, creating a network that’s both robust and genuinely connected.

Fertilizing With Value-Added Exchanges

Link to the rest at Above the Law

PG had to cut this off before the fertilizer covered everything else.

If he were still making presentations to other lawyers, PG would include excerpts from the OP as laugh lines. Here are a couple of illustration for PG’s Powerpoint via OpenArtAI

What is Suno? The ‘ChatGPT for music’ generates songs in seconds

From ZD Net:

Several text-to-music generators are now on the market, including offerings from Meta and Google. However, the Suno AI music generator is becoming increasingly popular — likely because it creates original lyrics and vocals, and because it leverages the power of ChatGPT.

So, what is Suno and how does it work?

Suno is an AI music generator that generates a song with original lyrics and beats from a text prompt. The tool can be accessed via its free standalone website or via Microsoft Copilot by enabling Suno’s third-party plug-in.

What makes Suno stand out from other music-generating models? In addition to creating the music, which you can do with Meta’s AudioCraft and Google’s MusicFX, Suno also produces original lyrics and vocals. This is a reflection of the company’s mission to help everyone create music, regardless of background or musical knowledge.

“Whether you’re a shower singer or a charting artist, we break barriers between you and the song you dream of making,” Suno says on its website. Suno’s intuitive interface makes it easy to use, and the only requirement is you need to create a free account.

In Rolling Stone’s deep dive into Suno and its potential impact on the music business, the AI startup explained that Suno uses its own AI models to generate the music and then relies on ChatGPT to create the song’s title and lyrics.

If you have ever used ChatGPT, you know it’s capable of generating great text outputs, such as essays, thanks to its advanced natural language processing. The fact that Suno uses ChatGPT should tell you all you need to know about its text quality output.

. . . .

Who owns songs made with Suno?

The emergence of AI music generators has alarmed music labels and artists because of how easy it is to create music that uses artists’ voices without their consent. How is Suno navigating this copyright issue?

According to the Rolling Stone report, Suno refuses to generate any music in the style of real artists’ voices. 

Since all the music generated is original and not lifted from other artists’ work, paying subscribers own the songs generated by Suno, as well as the artwork that accompanies the songs. However, Suno retains all ownership of songs created by free users, as well as the artwork.

As a result, if you are a paying subscriber, you can use the music you generate for commercial use, including posting the songs on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Music. Free users can only post on social media with attribution and are not allowed to use the songs commercially. Regardless of which version you use, if you input your own lyrics, you retain ownership of those.

Are the songs subject to copyright protection? Here’s what Suno says on its website:

“The availability and scope of copyright protection for content generated (in whole or in part) using artificial intelligence is a complex and dynamic area of law, which is rapidly evolving and varies among countries. We encourage you to consult a qualified attorney to advise you about the latest development and the degree of copyright protection available for the output you generate using Suno.”

Link to the rest at ZD Net

PG decided to see how Suno could help people to remember that they should read and understand a contract before they sign it. So he headed over to the site and entered his prompt about reading contracts.

He chose Synthpop Upbeat for the song style. The song was created very quickly, far faster than AI text generators he’s tried.

From Suno

In the Fine Print

Lyrics (generated by Suno):

[Verse]
Every time before I put my name on that line
I gotta make sure it's all clear, no hidden design (design)
They say it's just a formality, nothing to fear
But baby, I've learned the hard way, gotta be sincere

[Verse 2]
Pages and pages of words that they want me to agree
But I won't be caught in a trap, I gotta be free (be free)
They may try to rush me, put pressure on my soul
But I won't be fooled, gotta maintain control

[Chorus]
In the fine print, secrets lie
Gotta read between the lines, oh, oh (oh, oh)
In the fine print, don't be blind
Take your time, don't let them blow your mind (oh, oh)

Here’s a link to PG’s Song on Suno- In the Fine Print

A new generation of music-making algorithms is here

From The Economist:

IN THE dystopia of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, Big Brother numbs the masses with the help of a “versificator”, a machine designed to automatically generate the lyrics to popular tunes, thereby ridding society of human creativity. Today, numerous artificial-intelligence (AI) models churn out, some free of charge, the music itself. Unsurprisingly, many fear a world flooded with generic and emotionally barren tunes, with human musicians edged out in the process. Yet there are brighter signs, too, that AI may well drive a boom in musical creativity.

AI music-making is nothing new. The first, so-called “rules-based”, models date to the 1950s. These were built by painstakingly translating principles of music theory into algorithmic instructions and probability tables to determine note and chord progressions. The outputs were musically sound but creatively limited. Ed Newton-Rex, an industry veteran who designed one such model for Jukedeck, a London firm he founded in 2012, describes that approach as good for the day but irrelevant now.

The clearest demonstration that times have changed came in August 2023. That is when Meta, a social-media giant, released the source code for AudioCraft, a suite of large “generative” music models built using machine learning. AI outfits worldwide promptly set about using Meta’s software to train new music generators, many with additional code folded in. One AudioCraft model, MusicGen, analysed patterns in some 400,000 recordings with a collective duration of almost 28 months to come up with 3.3bn “parameters”, or variables, that enables the algorithm to generate patterns of sounds in response to prompts. The space this creates for genuinely new AI compositions is unprecedented.

Such models are also getting easier to use. In September Stability AI, a firm based in London at which Mr Newton-Rex worked until recently, released a model, Stable Audio, trained on some 800,000 tracks. Users guide it by entering text and audio clips. This makes it easy to upload, say, a guitar solo and have it recomposed in jazzy piano, perhaps with a vinyl playback feel. Audio prompts are a big deal for two reasons, says Oliver Bown of Australia’s University of New South Wales. First, even skilled musicians struggle to put music into words. Second, because most musical training data are only cursorily tagged, even a large model may not understand a request for, say, a four-bar bridge in ragtime progression (the style familiar from Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”).

The potential, clearly, is vast. But many in the industry remain sceptical. One widespread sentiment is that AI will never produce true music. That’s because, as a musician friend recently told Yossef Adi, an engineer at Meta’s AI lab in Tel Aviv, “no one broke its heart”. That may be true, but some AI firms reckon that they have found a way to retain and reproduce the “unique musical fingerprint” of their musician users, as LifeScore, a company founded near London, puts it. LifeScore’s AI limits itself to recomposing the elements of a user’s original recordings in ways that maintain the music’s feel, rather than turning them into something radically new.

It takes about a day to plug into LifeScore’s model the dozens of individually recorded vocal and instrumental microphone tracks, or stems, that go into producing an original song. Once that’s done, however, the software, developed at a cost of some $10m, can rework each stem into a new tempo, key or genre within a couple of seconds. The song’s artists, present during the process, choose which remixes to keep. Manually remixing a hit track has traditionally taken one or more highly paid specialists weeks.

LifeScore, says Tom Gruber, a co-founder, is “literally swamped with requests” from clients including Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. An original release is typically turned into anywhere from a handful to a dozen remixes. But one client aims to release a dizzying 6,000 or so AI versions of an original track, each targeting a different market. Artists including Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Tom Gaebel, a German pop singer, use LifeScore’s AI to power websites that allow fans to generate, with a few clicks, new remixes adapted to personal tastes.

The beat of a different drum

If this seems like dizzying progress, it’s worth noting that AI’s impact on music is still in its early days. Legal uncertainties over the use of copyrighted recordings to train models have slowed development. Outfits that have coughed up for licensing fees note that this can get expensive. To save on that cost, MusicGen’s training set mostly sidestepped hits, says Dr Adi. Though output is pretty good, he adds, the model is not yet “artistic enough” to generate narratively complete songs. Harmonic misalignments are common. OpenAI, a San Francisco firm, for its part, says its MuseNet model struggles to pull off “odd pairings”, such as a Chopin style that incorporates bass and drums.

In time, bigger training sets of better music will largely overcome such shortcomings, developers reckon. A Stability AI spokesperson says that while Stable Audio’s top duration for coherently structured music—“intro, development and outro”—is now about 90 seconds, upgrades will produce longer pieces with “full musicality”. But judging music AI by its ability to crank out polished tracks mostly misses the point. The technology’s greatest promise, for now at least, lies elsewhere.

Part of it is the empowerment of amateurs. AI handles technical tasks beyond many people’s capabilities and means. As a result, AI is drawing legions of newbies into music-making. This is a boon for experimentation by what Simon Cross, head of products at Native Instruments, a firm based in Berlin, calls “bedroom producers”.

Consider RX, a Native Instruments AI “assistant” that corrects errors in things like pitch and timing. For the latter, software time-shifts notes by cutting out or inserting slivers of sound with matching timbre, a process called “dynamic time-warping”. The company’s AI also determines what mixing and mastering processes were performed on a song of a user’s choosing. It then replicates, or at least approximates, the same expensive processing on the user’s own creations. Boomy, an online “music automation” platform for what Alex Mitchell, its ceo, describes as “low-friction” song production with text prompts, has more than 2m users. The company, based in Berkeley, California, uploads users’ (vetted) creations to streaming services and collects a cut of revenues.

AI serves professionals, too. The soundtracks to “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were cleaned up in post-production with RX, for example. Another application area is “style transfer”, in which models transform music recorded with one instrument into sounds that seem to come from a different one, often with a twist or two requested by the user. Style transfers are also used for voice. A model developed by a startup in London called Voice-Swap slices up sounds sung by (remunerated) professional singers and rearranges the slivers into lyrics written by the service’s users, who pay licensing fees for the rights to sell the resulting tracks. And AI tools already exist to recreate singers’ voices in other languages. Vocaloid, a voice-synthesising tool from Yamaha, a Japanese instrument manufacturer, is one of many that can use a translation sung by a native speaker as a template for an AI to imitate as it rearranges, modifies and stitches together tiny snippets of the original singer’s voice.

Link to the rest at The Economist

The world’s most misunderstood novel

From BBC:

The Great Gatsby is synonymous with parties, glitz and glamour – but this is just one of many misunderstandings about the book that began from its first publication.

Few characters in literature or indeed life embody an era quite so tenaciously as Jay Gatsby does the Jazz Age. Almost a century after he was written into being, F Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed romantic has become shorthand for decadent flappers, champagne fountains and never-ending parties. Cut loose by pop culture from the text into which he was born, his name adorns everything from condominiums to hair wax and a limited-edition cologne (it contains notes of vetiver, pink pepper and Sicilian lime). It’s now possible to lounge on a Gatsby sofa, check in at the Gatsby hotel, even chow down on a Gatsby sandwich – essentially a supersize, souped-up chip butty.

Incongruous though that last item sounds, naming anything after the man formerly known as James Gatz seems more than a touch problematic. After all, flamboyant host is just one part of his complicated identity. He’s also a bootlegger, up to his neck in criminal enterprise, not to mention a delusional stalker whose showmanship comes to seem downright tacky. If he embodies the potential of the American Dream, then he also illustrates its limitations: here is a man, let’s not forget, whose end is destined to be as pointless as it is violent.

Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.

F Scott Fitzgerald

Misunderstanding has been a part of The Great Gatsby’s story from the very start. Grumbling to his friend Edmund Wilson shortly after publication in 1925, Fitzgerald declared that “of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.” Fellow writers like Edith Wharton admired it plenty, but as the critic Maureen Corrigan relates in her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, popular reviewers read it as crime fiction, and were decidedly underwhelmed by it at that. Fitzgerald’s Latest A Dud, ran a headline in the New York World. The novel achieved only so-so sales, and by the time of the author’s death in 1940, copies of a very modest second print run had long since been remaindered.

Gatsby’s luck began to change when it was selected as a giveaway by the US military. With World War Two drawing to a close, almost 155,000 copies were distributed in a special Armed Services Edition, creating a new readership overnight. As the 1950s dawned, the flourishing of the American Dream quickened the novel’s topicality, and by the 1960s, it was enshrined as a set text. It’s since become such a potent force in pop culture that even those who’ve never read it feel as if they have, helped along, of course, by Hollywood. It was in 1977, just a few short years after Robert Redford starred in the title role of an adaptation scripted by Francis Ford Coppola, that the word Gatsbyesque was first recorded.

Along with Baz Luhrmann’s divisive 2013 movie extravaganza, the book has in the past decade alone spawned graphic novels, a musical, and an immersive theatrical experience. From now on, we’re likely to be seeing even more such adaptations and homages because at the start of this year, the novel’s copyright expired, enabling anyone to adapt it without permission from its estate . Early calls for a Muppets adaptation may have come to nothing (never say never), but a big-budget TV miniseries is already in the works, and author Min Jin Lee and cultural critic Wesley Morris are both writing fresh introductions to new editions.

If this all leaves Fitzgerald purists twiddling their pearls like worry beads, it’s quite possible that while some such projects may further perpetuate the myth that throwing a Gatsby-themed party could be anything other than sublimely clueless, others may yield fresh insights into a text whose very familiarity often leads us to skate over its complexities. Take, for instance, Michael Farris Smith’s new novel, Nick. The title refers, of course, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, who here gets his own fully formed backstory. It’s the tale of a Midwesterner who goes off to Europe to fight in World War One and comes back changed, as much by a whirlwind love affair in Paris as by trench warfare. There’s room for an impulsive sojourn in the New Orleans underworld before he heads off to Long Island’s West Egg.

. . . .

Like many, Smith first encountered the novel in high school. “I just completely didn’t get it”, he tells BBC Culture, from his home in Oxford, Mississippi. “They seemed like a lot of people complaining about things they really shouldn’t be complaining about.” It was only when he picked it up again while living abroad in his late twenties that he began to understand the novel’s power. “It was a very surreal reading experience for me. It seemed like something on almost every page was speaking to me in a way I had not expected,” he recalls.

Reaching the scene in which Carraway suddenly remembers it’s his thirtieth birthday, Smith was filled with questions about what kind of a person Gatsby’s narrator really was. “It seemed to me that there had been some real trauma that had made him so detached, even from his own self. The thought crossed my mind that it would be really interesting if someone were to write Nick’s story,” he says. In 2014, by then a published author in his forties, he sat down to do just that, telling neither his agent nor his editor. It was only when he delivered the manuscript 10 months later that he learned copyright law meant he’d have to wait until 2021 to publish it.

Maybe it’s not the champagne and the dancing, maybe it is those feelings of wondering where we are, the sense that anything can crumble at any moment, that keep Gatsby meaningful – Michael Farris Smith

Smith points to a quote from one of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries as having provided the key to understanding Carraway. “Ernest Hemingway says in [his memoir] A Moveable Feast that we didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t in the war, and to me that felt like a natural beginning for Nick.” Smith imagines Carraway, coping with PTSD and shellshock, returning home to a nation that he no longer recognises. It’s a far cry from the riotous razzmatazz of all that partying, yet Carraway is, Smith suggests, the reason Fitzgerald’s novel remains read. “Maybe it’s not the champagne and the dancing, maybe it is those feelings of wondering where we are, the sense that anything can crumble at any moment, that keep Gatsby meaningful from one generation to the next.”

William Cain, an expert in American literature and the Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, agrees that Nick is crucial to understanding the novel’s richness. “Fitzgerald gave some thought to structuring it in the third person but ultimately he chose Nick Carraway, a first-person narrator who would tell Gatsby’s story, and who would be an intermediary between us and Gatsby. We have to respond to and understand Gatsby and, as we do so, remain aware that we’re approaching him through Nick’s very particular perspective, and through Nick’s very ambivalent relationship to Gatsby, which is simultaneously full of praise and full of severe criticism, even at some moments contempt,” he says.

Like Smith, Cain first encountered the novel as a student. It was a different era – the 1960s – but even so, little attention was paid to Nick. Cain recalls instead talk of symbolism – the legendary green light, for example, and Gatsby’s fabled automobile. It’s a reminder that, in a way, the education system is as much to blame as pop culture for our limited readings of this seminal text. It may be a Great American Novel but, at fewer than 200 pages, its sublimely economical storytelling makes its study points very easy to access. Ironically, given that this is a novel of illusion and delusion, in which surfaces are crucial, we all too often overlook the texture of its prose. As Cain puts it, “I think when we consider The Great Gatsby, we need to think about it not just as a novel that is an occasion or a point of departure for us to talk about big American themes and questions, but we have to really enter into the richness of Fitzgerald’s actual page-to-page writing. We have to come to Gatsby, yes, aware of its social and cultural significance, but also we need to return to it as a literary experience.”

Cain re-reads the novel every two or three years but frequently finds himself thinking about it in between – last summer, for instance, when US President Biden, accepting the Democratic nomination at the DNC, spoke of the right to pursue dreams of a better future. The American Dream is, of course, another of Gatsby’s Big Themes, and one that continues to be misunderstood. “Fitzgerald shows that that dream is very powerful, but that it is indeed a very hard one for most Americans to realise. It feeds them great hopes, great desires, and it’s extraordinary, the efforts that so many of them make to fulfil those dreams and those desires, but that dream is beyond the reach of many, and many, they give up all too much to try to achieve that great success,” Cain points out. Among the obstacles, Fitzgerald seems to suggest, are hard-and-fast class lines that no amount of money will enable Gatsby to cross. It’s a view that resonates with a mood that Cain says he’s been picking up on among his students – a certain “melancholy” for the American Dream, the feeling fanned by racial and economic inequalities that the pandemic has only deepened.

. . . .

To an impressive degree, however, the renewed attention brought by the change in law shows not just how relevant and seductive the text of Fitzgerald’s novel remains, but how very alive it’s always been. Pick it up at 27, and you’ll find a different novel to the one you read as a teenager. Revisit it again at 45, and it’ll feel like another book altogether. Copyright has never had any bearing on the impact of the words it governs.

Link to the rest at BBC

Another “buy” button lawsuit over digital licenses continues

From Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log:

This putative class action alleged that Amazon overcharged and “[d]eceived consumers by misrepresenting that it was selling them Digital Content when, in fact, it was really only licensing it to them[.]” Plaintiffs brought claims under California, New York, and Washington consumer protection law, and common law claims for unjust enrichment.

Plaintiffs alleged that Amazon offers cheaper “rent” options for some of its content, but more expensive “buy” options as well. When consumers “buy” digital content, it’s stored in a folder called “Video Purchases & Rentals.”

But, in fact, Amazon does not cannot pass title of any of this content to consumers. “If the licensing agreement for any of the Digital Content is terminated, Amazon has to pull the Digital Content from not only its site but from all consumers’ purchased folders, ‘which it does without prior warning, and without providing any type of refund or remuneration to consumers.’”

Amazon argued that Article III standing was absent because plaintiffs haven’t lost access to their digital content, and that their claims of overpayment also rested on the mere threat of future unavailability. The court disagreed: there’s a plausible difference in value between owning outright versus purchasing a revocable license.

“Buy” was also plausibly deceptive. Amazon argued that “buy” didn’t mean perpetual ownership, and that it sufficiently disclosed the risk of losing access. Plaintiffs pointed out that Amazon also allows real, non-repossessable purchases with the “Buy” button for tangible goods.  Again, the court agreed with plaintiffs: it was plausible that “buy” could be materially misleading. The court hypothesized a consumer who paid nearly $40 for Barbie and Oppenheimer, but whose Barbenheimer (first judicial appearance?) weekend was ruined because Amazon suddenly lost one license. “Understandably, this consumer ‘might feel a little miffed [or go nuclear] if she were told that she received exactly what she paid for.’”

Link to the rest at Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log and thanks to C. for the tip.

In former days, PG had the occasion to deal with Amazon’s in-house attorneys regarding various matters relating to his clients. He found these lawyers to be intelligent, competent and reasonable (a trifecta that not all lawyers/legal departments can pull off).

PG speculates that the mess described in the OP originated with the marketing department’s decision to proceed on a path contrary to the legal department’s strong recommendations.

In most businesses with which PG has dealt, in such battles, the marketing department often wins. After all, marketing and sales are how a company makes money, and legal is always a cost item that invariably slows down the release of new products and services (often deeply resented within corporate middle management).

Intellectual property in digital form is always licensed, not sold. One of the primary reasons for this legal/practical decision is that digital property is almost always easily duplicated—bits can multiply extremely rapidly in a digital device and thereafter be sent digitally anywhere in the world at the speed of light.

Yes, physical books can be duplicated and shipped anywhere in the world, but a printing press and lots of paper is required to do so. Therefore, you own the single printed copy of a book you purchased at Barnes & Noble (or Amazon), but you license the ebook you receive from Amazon or Barnes & Noble because they are operating under the terms of a license they have received from the indie author or a publisher which has the author’s consent to print, publish, license or sell the book.

But Marketing said, “Customers will be confused if we have, ‘License now with 1-Click®‘”

End of license v. sale discourse.

Hachette gender and ethnicity pay gaps widen despite some progress

From The Bookseller:

Hachette has reported a rise across both its mean and median gender pay gaps for the whole company group between 2022 and 2023, while the bonus pay gap for ethnicity has also deepened, though progress in other areas has been made.

The group – which encompasses Hachette UK Ltd (staff in publishing divisions and central departments) and its distribution workforce – has published its latest Ethnicity Pay Gap and Gender Pay Gap reports as part of “Changing the Story”, its programme to improve diversity and inclusion. Kim Kidd, diversity and inclusion manager at Hachette UK, conceded that “the whole picture is not a reflection of our ambition”.

The company reports on three entities: Hachette UK Ltd, which comprises staff in publishing roles; Hachette Distribution; and the whole group, which includes those in Hachette UK Ltd and Hachette distribution.  

The whole group’s mean and median gender pay gap increased compared with 2022’s figures. The mean is now 17% (compared to 14.5% previously) and the median is 8% (up from 6%). This continues the trend from last year’s figures (the 2021 figures were about 13% and 5.6% respectively)  

The publisher said: “One of the reasons for this shift in the whole group’s results is that the distribution team is comparatively small, so minor changes in the number of employees can affect the pay gap significantly. In addition, at Hachette UK Ltd there has been a drop in the number of men in the lower quartile, where 15.6% of the workforce is male.” 

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

‘Copyright, Not Infringement, Serves the Public Interest’

From Publishing Perspectives:

On Friday . . . four major publishers—Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Wiley—filed a brief that opposes the Internet Archive‘s appeal of its loss on March 24, 2023, in the copyright case Hachette Book Group, et al, v. Internet Archive.

The original lawsuit was filed by the publishers in June 2020 and argued that the Internet Archive had digitized “millions of print books and [distributed] the resulting bootleg ebooks free of charge from its site, without the consent of the publishers and their authors or the payment of any license fee.”

In his grand of summary judgment of almost a year ago, the judge, John G. Koeltl of the United States district court in the Southern District of New York, wrote, “The publishers have established a prima facie case of copyright infringement,” and his opinion included a firm rebuke to the controversial concept of “controlled digital lending.”

Nevertheless, the Internet Archive made good on its promise to appeal, arguing that Judge Koeltl didn’t understand the facts of the case and was wrong in his decision.

. . . .

The United States’ publishers’ association has announced the filing of the new brief, highlighting these points from the new brief:

  • “Controlled digital lending is a frontal assault on the foundational copyright principle that rights holders exclusively control the terms of sale for every different format of their work—a principle that has spawned the broad diversity in formats of books, movies, television, and music that consumers enjoy today. “…
  • There is no resemblance between the Internet Archive’s conversion of millions of print books into ebooks and the historical practice of lending print books.  Nor does the Internet Archive’s distribution of ebooks without paying authors and their publishers a dime conform with the modern practices of libraries, which acquire licenses to lend ebooks to their local communities and enjoy the benefits of digital distribution lawfully.
  • The Internet Archive operates a mass-digitization enterprise in which it copies millions of complete, in-copyright print books and distributes the resulting bootleg ebooks from its site to anyone in the world free. Granting summary judgment, the district court properly held that the Internet Archive’s infringement is not saved by fair use as each of the four factors weighs against the Internet Archive under longstanding case law.
  • “In sum, the Internet Archive distributes the publishers’ copyrighted material in a market that the publishers, as the copyright owners, are exclusively entitled to exploit, and the Internet Archive looks to replace the publishers as the supplier of ebooks to its customers.  ‘This is precisely the kind of harm the fourth factor aims to prevent.’
  • “’There is nothing transformative about the Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending practices because it does nothing ‘more than repackage or republish’ the works. ‘The Internet Archive does not reproduce the works in suit to provide criticism, commentary, or information about them.’  Rather, the Internet Archive admits that controlled digital lending serves a ‘similar’ purpose to licensed library ebooks—i.e., to make books available to be read—which precludes transformativeness ‘even if the two were not perfect substitutes.’
  • “The Internet Archive’s flawed policy argument is that the law must change to ‘ensure that technological innovation allows libraries to improve access to books…’ But public libraries practicing ‘traditional library lending’ across the country have already implemented this ‘technological innovation’ via the publishers’ authorized library ebooks—which serve ‘people of diverse geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds,’ ‘individuals with disabilities,’ and ‘residents of rural and urban areas,’ as well as facilitating research.  In other words, the publishers have realized the innovation [that] the Internet Archive belatedly champions; the Internet Archive is merely usurping it.
  • “The authorized library ebook market is thriving—readers have never had more access to free, licensed ebooks than they do today…  The number of ebooks and audiobooks checked out via OverDrive in 2020 was 430 million, a more than 500-percent increase from 2012.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Shelf Life Books in Richmond Unionizes

From Publishers Weekly:

Workers at Shelf Life Books in Richmond, Va., have joined the United Food & Commercial Workers Local (UFCW) 400 Union, making them the first booksellers in the city to unionize.

All five eligible workers at the at the store, located at 2913 W. Cary Street, signed union authorization cards in support of the effort, according to the UFCW, and the store’s owners, Chris and Berkley McDaniel, voluntarily recognized the union. Contract negotiations, the union added, will begin later this week.

“We’re proud to be the first booksellers in Richmond to unionize,” the Shelf Life organizing committee said in a statement. “As we look forward to negotiating our first union contract, we won’t be starting from scratch thanks to the work of our union siblings at Politics and Prose and Solid State Books, who have negotiated groundbreaking contracts that inspired us to unionize in the first place.”

The shop is the latest to organize in a series of labor efforts across many sectors of the book business in recent years, but especially in bookselling.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Making sense of the gulf between young men and women

From The Economist:

Men and women have different experiences, so you would expect them to have different worldviews. Nonetheless, the growing gulf between young men and women in developed countries is striking. Polling data from 20 such countries shows that, whereas two decades ago there was little difference between the share of men and women aged 18-29 who described themselves as liberal rather than conservative, the gap has grown to 25 percentage points. Young men also seem more anti-feminist than older men, bucking the trend for each generation to be more liberal than its predecessor. Polls from 27 European countries found that men under 30 were more likely than those over 65 to agree that “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far because it threatens men’s and boys’ opportunities”. Similar results can be found in Britain, South Korea and China. Young women were likely to believe the opposite.

Unpicking what is going on is not simple. A good place to start is to note that young women are soaring ahead of their male peers academically. In the European Union fully 46% of them earn degrees, versus 35% of young men, a gap that has doubled since 2002. One consequence is that young women are more likely than men to spend their early adulthood in a cocoon of campus liberalism. Meanwhile, boys outnumber girls at the bottom end of the scholastic scale. Across rich countries, 28% of them fail to learn to read to a basic level. That is true of only 18% of girls.

Another big change is that, to varying degrees across the developed world, immense progress has been made in reducing the barriers to women having successful careers. College-educated men are still thriving, too—often as one half of a double-high-income heterosexual couple. Many men welcome these advances and argue for more. However, those among their less-educated brothers who are struggling in the workplace and the dating market are more likely to be resentful, and to blame women for their loss of relative status. And young women, by and large, are glad of past progress but are keenly aware that real threats and unfairness remain, from male violence to the difficulty of juggling careers and children. In short, most young women and worryingly large numbers of young men complain that society is biased against their own sex.

. . . .

There is no easy solution to any of this. But clearly, more should be done to help boys lagging behind at school to do better. Some policies that might work without harming their female classmates include hiring more male teachers (who are exceptionally scarce at primary schools in rich countries), and allowing boys to start school a year later than girls, to reflect the fact that they mature later.

Link to the rest at The Economist

YouTube now requires creators to disclose when realistic content was made with AI

From TechCrunch:

YouTube is now requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content was made with AI, the company announced on Monday. The platform is introducing a new tool in Creator Studio that will require creators to disclose when content that viewers could mistake for a real person, place or event was created with altered or synthetic media, including generative AI.

The new disclosures are meant to prevent users from being duped into believing that a synthetically-created video is real, as new generative AI tools are making it harder to differentiate between what’s real and what’s fake. The launch comes as experts have warned that AI and deepfakes will pose a notable risk during the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Today’s announcement comes as YouTube announced back in November that it was going to roll out the update as part of a larger introduction of new AI policies.

YouTube says the new policy doesn’t require creators to disclose content that is clearly unrealistic or animated, such as someone riding a unicorn through a fantastical world. It also isn’t requiring creators to disclose content that used generative AI for production assistance, like generating scripts or automatic captions.

Instead, YouTube is targeting videos that use the likeness of a realistic person. For instance, creators will have to disclose when they have digitally altered content to “replace the face of one individual with another’s or synthetically generating a person’s voice to narrate a video,” YouTube says.

They will also have to disclose content that alters the footage of real events or places, such as making it seem as though a real building caught on fire. Creators will also have to disclose when they have generated realistic scenes of fictional major events, like a tornado moving toward a real town.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch

‘Authors Against Book Bans’ Mobilizes

From Publishers Weekly:

A group of children’s authors is rallying against the rising number of book bans and challenges nationwide, speaking out about the erasure of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ voices. Under the leadership of Samira Ahmed, Joanna Ho, Gayle Forman, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Alan Gratz, David Levithan, Sarah MacLean, Ellen Oh, Christina Soontornvat, and Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Authors Against Book Bans has already made an impact in the ongoing battle for the freedom to read.

Levithan told PW that the coalition evolved organically from a shared sense of urgency. “Over the past couple years, whenever I would talk to other authors, a number of us expressed extreme frustration and concern about what was going on. And it was always a conversation about ‘what can we do?’ The side that was banning books was organized—both on a national and state level. So it became really apparent that we, as authors, could be the spine to the body that was organizing to fight book bans.” Discussions began in earnest at the end of 2023, and AABB launched this past January.

Levithan had previously been working with PEN America on its lawsuit in Escambia County, Fla., along with other advocacy groups, and thought, “Now is the time for it all to come together. It’s a single-issue group. Our name is not very subtle: we are authors against book bans. And we can do a lot of things because we’re so micro-focused.” The ball got rolling quickly, he said. “In terms of the leadership group, I basically contacted a lot of my friends or other authors whom I’d had conversations with about this issue, including Maggie, and said, ‘Let’s all get together and solve this in a very organized fashion.’ ”

For her part, Tokuda-Hall said, “I came to this the way a lot of us do, by watching with horror as the news unfolds constantly and the number of book bans rises exponentially every year.” She recalled the eye-opening moment when she knew she had to get involved. “I visited Idaho in conjunction with the Idaho Library Association, and I gave a keynote there about the dangers of censorship and book banning. During that trip, I got a really intimate and terrifying view of what it looks like on the state level, where these conversations are being had and where this fight is happening.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

“Dune” is a warning about political heroes and their tribes

From The Economist:

Frank Herbert, the author of the science-fiction novel “Dune” on which a new blockbuster film is based, would have been amused to learn that ecologists along the Oregon shore are ripping invasive European beachgrass out of the ground. As a young journalist in the late 1950s, Herbert derived his inspiration for a tale about a desert planet from watching ecologists plant the grass to control encroaching sand dunes. The scheme worked, maybe too well: residents of the coastal towns that the grass helped prosper now long for the beauty of the dunes and regret the unintended consequences for native flora and fauna.

“They stopped the moving sands” was the title of the article Herbert never wound up publishing about the Oregon dunes. He admired the ecologists and their project. But as much as he prized human intelligence he feared human hubris, credulousness and other frailties. One character in “Dune” is a planetary ecologist, who, for complicated reasons—the novel has no other kind—finds himself overcome by natural processes he has been trying to manipulate, to help the native population by changing the climate. “As his planet killed him,” Herbert writes, the ecologist reflects that scientists have it all wrong, and “that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”

The persistence of “Dune” itself is a marvel. Some 20 publishers turned the manuscript down before a company known for auto-repair manuals, Chilton, released it in 1965. The editor who took the risk was fired because sales were slow at first. But popular and critical acclaim began to build, eventually making “Dune” among the best-selling and most influential of science-fiction novels, some of its imaginings, with their edges filed down, surfacing in “Star Wars”.

No doubt the novel’s endurance owes in part to Herbert’s success, like Tolkien’s, in wrapping an epic yarn within a spectacular vision given substance by countless interlocking details. He published appendices to his novel: a glossary, a guide to the feudal houses that jostle over his imperium, a study of the galactic religions and, of course, a paper on the ecology of his desert planet, Arrakis, known as Dune. That ecology yields a substance called spice that prolongs life and also supplies psychic powers, enabling navigators to guide ships among the stars: think potable petrol with the properties of Adderall and Ozempic. It is the most precious stuff in the universe.

The young hero, Paul Atreides, arrives on Arrakis when his father, a duke, is awarded control there. It is a trap set by the emperor and a rival house. His father dead and his surviving allies scattered, Paul flees with his mother into the desert and finds haven among its fierce people, the Fremen. As the spice unlocks latent mental powers in Paul, the natives recognise him as their messiah and—spoilers!—he leads them not just to avenge his father but, via control of the spice, to seize the imperial throne. Then comes a bit of a bummer, galactic jihad. More on that in a moment.

Herbert was thinking partly of T.E. Lawrence, oil, colonial predation and Islam, and the success of the novel may owe also to those echoes (along with the giant sandworms). But the novel’s enduring popularity suggests more timeless resonances. There are nifty gizmos in Herbert’s galaxy, but clever conceits keep them from stealing the show and making his future either too alien or, like other decades-old visions of the future, amusingly outdated. Personal force-fields have rendered projectile weapons harmless. Soldiers and nobles alike fight with swords, knives and fists.

A more provocative gambit by Herbert was to set his tale thousands of years after the “Butlerian Jihad” or “Great Revolt”, in which humans destroyed all forms of artificial intelligence. (Herbert once worried to an interviewer that “our society has a tiger by the tail in technology.”) “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind,” has become a core injunction, resulting in a race to develop the mind’s potential. Paul’s mother is a member of a female sect, the Bene Gesserit, whose own hubristic enterprise is to manipulate the imperium’s politics, and who for scores of generations have conducted a breeding programme to engender a superhuman intelligence—which, to their consternation, arrives in the form of Paul, whom they cannot control.

The new Dune movie is the second of two in which the director, Denis Villeneuve, has told the story with breathtaking imagery and, for the most part, with fidelity to the novel. The films deal elliptically with Herbert’s themes of technological, economic and ecological change to zero in on his main matter, the dangers of political and religious power and of faith itself, secular or spiritual.

Link to the rest at The Economist

Why “Show Don’t Tell” Can be Dangerous Advice for New Writers

From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:

It’s been said that if writing advice were classic rock, “Show Don’t Tell” would be “Stairway to Heaven. But is it always good advice?

Of course nobody wants to read a novel that tells a series of incidents. That can sound like a four-year-old recapping his day. “I had Froot Loops and then Dad took me to preschool and I played with blocks and ate a bologna sandwich and then I went to the bathroom and did number two…”

You want to show us the action in a series of scenes not tell us what happened. (Well, maybe we really don’t need the author to show the bathroom scene. )We know a “telling” sentence like “Veronica was beautiful,” is bland. It’s better to say something more like “Veronica’s flowing auburn hair and voluptuous figure had a powerful effect on Nigel and Clive.” That way we can show what she looks like and let the reader in on the emotional reactions of the other characters.

But a whole lot of writers, especially newbies (and the dreaded “writing rules police” ) take the “Show Don’t Tell” thing way too far and turn it into an unbreakable rule. That can make for some murky, slow, and downright boring fiction.

Here are some ways that following the Show Don’t Tell rule to the letter can interfere with good storytelling.

Too Much “Show Don’t Tell” Slows the Pace.

If you spend ten pages describing the shabby apartment of the murder witness, and we hear the screaming children and the blaring TV and smell the unemptied cat litter box and overflowing garbage can, you have a vivid description, but no story.

A writer should only dwell on the key scenes where important action is occurring. It’s perfectly okay to tell the reader your detective can see the witness is a harried single mom who is barely able to cope so her testimony may be useless. Then he can move on with the investigation and the story the reader cares about.

Some newbie writers confuse descriptions of violence with conflict. If you describe every blow and scream of pain in a fight scene, your story is not moving forward. The story stops until we know how the characters react to what’s going on and how the fight alters the trajectory of the plot. The carnage needs to do something to the characters and contribute to the plot, or it’s no more interesting than a description of the sofa cushions.

“Camera’s Eye” Showing Skimps on Information

When we write as if we’re a camera simply recording the physical events of the story, we are showing, but we’re also cheating the reader. This is when we simply say, ‘She winced’, ‘He smiled’, or ‘He took her hand,’ but we don’t say how the characters feel about this action.

When we fall into this pattern, we ignore the fact that the reader has no idea what the wincing, smiling, or handholding means. Writers who use this style may refuse to tell the reader what the actions mean, because they are convinced it will violate “Show Don’t Tell.”

This happens partly because most of us have been brought up on television. We have the conventions of the screenplay hardwired to our brains, because we saw TV shows before we could read. But what we see on the screen isn’t a screenplay. It’s the interpretation of the script by actors, directors, cinematographers, composers, and a whole host of other creative people.

When a screenwriter says a character clenches his fist, this clench will be interpreted by a director and actor to show a whole spectrum of emotion. Lighting and music and camera angle will enhance them.

But when a novelist tells us a character clenches his fist, he is not letting us in on much.

Is the character angry and about to punch somebody? Trying to keep from crying?  Suffering from a painful intestinal ailment? We’ll never know if the author won’t tell us.

You’re not a camera. You’re a novelist. And it’s your job to give us as much information as possible to tell your story.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris